James Snow Triptych
I
Late breaking on the Panasonic console
in the basement of my father’s place —
Mark Dailey live with footage from the skies
above the crash scene — the muffled pulse
of chopper blades. The night the James Snow
Parkway burned we watched in disbelief.
Long used to four-alarmers on the news
reports on ABC — Irv Weinstein’s Yankee
hard sell and the years of warehouse
arson ledes — I stood atop the table
in our yard so I could better see
the glow — a sunset three miles east.
The Buffalo infernos of my childhood
like instructions for catastrophe.
II
Six years before the parkway blaze, a freight
train hauling tanker cars of propane, liquid
sublimates and solvents blew an axle —
jumped the tracks just outside Erindale.
Evacuees from Cooksville and the Credit
Valley watershed escaped the windblown
toxins in their hatchbacks — fled to Halton
Hills and Meadowvale. The folks who came
to stay with us were Scots. Their daughter —
twelve like me — was shy. I loved her more
than hockey cards and sunlight — more than all
the things I prized. Disaster came to represent
desire in my mind. The parkway like a monolith.
Its presence in the distance. Its truth a pack of lies.
III
Described in next day’s paper by a passerby —
the overpass’s underside — pitch-black —
its bearings compromised — pressed down
against the highway like a stove in concrete
sky. When the phone rang at my dad’s place
three years later — I felt like I’d been wakened
from a reoccurring dream. A voice I didn’t
recognize explained you hadn’t lost your life.
That car crash at the entrance to the parkway —
the one we both survived — keeps taking —
like a tithe in kind. Each year it seems
to multiply. And yet you’re here. I help you
fill the time we’ve left. Our lives made small
and circumscribed. Our love a murder-suicide.
A Note on the Text
On the evening of March 24, 1986, near Milton, Ontario, a flat-bed trailer operated by an impaired driver veered across three lanes on the 401 eastbound and stopped. The flat-bed was struck by a motorist who tried to swerve but couldn’t do so in time. A tanker truck containing 51,000 litres of fuel attempted to avoid the initial accident but collided with the flat-bed, overturned, and ruptured. The highway was engulfed in flame, black smoke billowed across the sky, and the James Snow Parkway overpass suffered extensive damage from the explosive heat of the blaze.
The first section of the poem begins as news of the James Snow disaster is broadcast on the television in the rec room of the speaker’s father’s house in Milton’s Timberlea subdivision. The newscast is delivered by Mark Dailey, a former crime reporter who was hired by Toronto’s CITY TV in 1983 to serve as a continuity announcer and to anchor the 11:00pm CityPulse news slot. In the sequence that follows, the speaker recalls the conflagrations so often reported on Buffalo nightly news broadcasts during his childhood. In the 1970s and 80s, Buffalo’s ABC affiliate was available through basic cable in Southern Ontario, and the Eyewitness News team of Irv Weinstein, Rick Azar, and Tom Jolls were famous for their “if it bleeds it leads” live coverage of gun-violence crime scenes and four-alarm blazes in Western New York.
Section two leaps six years into the past as the speaker is reminded of circumstances surrounding a catastrophic train derailment on November 10, 1979 near Dundas Street and Mavis Road in Mississauga. Late that evening, a freight train hauling tanker cars of dangerous chemicals blew an axle and jumped off the tracks. The explosion could be seen from 100 kilometres away, and 200,000 people fled their homes because of the chlorine gas and other toxic fumes released into the atmosphere. Until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the derailment was responsible for the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history.
Section three shifts back to 1986 and begins with a description of the Parkway explosion’s aftermath as reported, the following day, by a passing motorist. The scene then jumps forward three years to the afternoon of June 19, 1989, when a Nissan Micra was struck by a Mercury Marquis as it attempted a left-hand turn at the James Snow Parkway entrance. The Nissan was carrying four young women on their way to Square One for a shopping trip. The Mercury, which was travelling at well over the speed limit, did not attempt to stop. The two passengers seated in the rear of the vehicle were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver and front seat passenger sustained major injuries and were taken to Milton District Hospital for treatment. The police report indicated that the driver of the Mercury had a blood-alcohol level in excess of 0.8 milligrams. He was charged with two counts of criminal negligence causing death, two counts of impaired driving causing death, and multiple other negligence and alcohol-related offences.
When the speaker answers the phone at his father’s house that evening, he learns about the accident from a stranger and is told that his girlfriend, the front seat passenger, has survived. The final lines of the poem take place in the present, 35 years after the 1989 car crash. Here, the speaker talks directly to his beloved, the crash survivor, to whom the poem has been implicitly addressed throughout.
