Jasper: Day One - Clowning Around

I get this call from this Clown I know, asking if I want to go hiking for a couple of days in the moutains. Sure! I says, I gots nothin' to lose.

I drive up to Edmonton for something called a Media Circus which means we performing seals are allowed to hawk our press kits to the unim-press-ed members of the Press. I track down the Clown - not hard to do since he has to drag this giant piano around with him wherever he goes. We have lunch with my friend Trevor, and then we set off for the wilderness, with a trunk full of mountain equipment lent to me by my very lovely, very prepared, very anal neighbour, Mister Tony Eyamie.

This is what I thought I knew about English Clowns:
1. They are refined and gentle, soft and squeamish.
2. They have to stop for tea about 6 times a day.
3. That's actually about all I thought I knew.

None of it was true.

What I learned about this English Clown:

1. He's about as soft and delicate as a series of braided elevator cables.
2. He climbs sheer rock faces with his bare hands.
3. He's a Capricorn - a Mountain Goat - which explains why he always has to get to the top of every mountain.
4. He's a Terminator - a Mountain Goat of indefatiguable energy, who proceeds with endless patience and dogged determination.
5. He has three hundred years of theatrical history in his family tree, including a great great grandmother who was on the stage with Henry Irving! (God, I love Henry Irving - and for a brief while I felt like I was Ellen Terry to the Clown's Henry. Talking about the Theatre and Philosophy and Life and our High Ideals. Henry - clever and sullen and morose and ambitious and highly focussed. And Ellen - light-hearted and charming and happy to be of service, patient with Henry's eccentricities. As we trekked up mountain passes I thought of Henry and Ellen on their summer travels together, boating and sunning and quarelling playfully. Enjoying the scenery. Friends Beyond Words.)
6. He is a terrible, terrible tart. In this way he is not like Henry at all! Henry who was too focussed on his Art to leave much room for Love or Adventure. However, I remain entirely like Ellen - falling in and out of love constantly, and always with the wrong person. Always a disaster. Following her heart gaily down dangerous mountain passes, jumping into raging emotional rivers just for the sheer Experience of it. God forbid that I miss anything along the way - especially anything that might be painful. Pain is such a beautiful luxury sometimes.
7. He is delightfully clever and playful; bright and charming as the rings of Saturn.
8. He is also cold and distant as Pluto. Ah well. A planet cannot help its proximity to the Sun. No use Pluto wanting to be Mercury.
9. He has been to amazing places and seen amazing things: Columbia, the Andes, India, Nepal, Tibet, the Himalyas, South East Asia.
10. He is not in love with me.

This last was perhaps the most shocking discovery of all. It can be so difficult to get one's head around - the fact that someone is not in love with you. I'm not the most beautiful, it's true. And I'm not the most vain, despite how this may sound. But as someone who craves love, affection, and attention and is adept at chameleoning into the shape of another's desire, it is still hard to accept. My pride, my vanity, my too too yellow soft-boiled ego - my self - suffer.

N.