Canadians are a restrained lot. When they get angry, they go to a symphony and stew in the cheap seats. When they get really angry, for instance when they encounter racial intolerance or impure maple syrup, they go to a symphony but decline to buy a programme. Old-timers in Quebec still talk about one infamous sociopath who blew his nose during a Beethoven slow movement; but revisionist historians are insisting that man was the victim of allergies and are campaigning to have his descendants rehabilitated and repatriated to Canada.
Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine made much of Canadians’ unearthly ability to refrain from blowing each other away en masse. Indeed Moore is not alone in punting Canucks as a race wedged firmly between Swedes and Seraphim, a Norman Rockwell painting with polar bears instead of beagles, where rapping is something Daryl and Doris do on the front door when they come over with pecan pie and Pat Boone records.
But morality is being confused with practicality. It’s not that Canadians aren’t trying to waste each other, it’s just fairly difficult to engage in effective gun-play when one’s aim is obscured by clouds of condor-sized mosquitoes; and what with all those pesky noise regulations, you have to wrap your equaliser in a towel, and there’s nothing worse than a perforated bath-towel, so what’s the point?
With all this pent-up rage about, it comes as no surprise that rubbing one’s corduroy trouser-legs together loudly at the philharmonic doesn’t always cut it. Sometimes Canadian men snap. After a long day in the local Greenpeace office, all they want to do is have a quiet tofu snack with their Life Partner, have a long talk about the relationship with him/her/it, before turning in on the futon and drifting off to a CD of Navajo chants. But noooo, he/she/it doesn’t want to talk tonight, he/she/ it has a headache. There are accusations of acting out, counter-accusations of sublimation and passive-aggression. The word ”hermaphrodite” inevitably crops up, and that’s when men go to the woods to play sport.
North American sports broad- casters have given these woodland frolics frenzied names involving grizzly bears and lumberjacks, but it’s tough to make high-speed split-second-timed bark-stripping sound like anything other than what addled beavers get up to. Still, it is nice to know that should the ESPN2 John Deere Bug-B-Gone Extreme Woodsman of 2003 ever get trapped out in the tundra, he will be able to build a double-storey log cabin with escalator, conservatory and ballroom in under four minutes with nothing but a hacksaw and two bungees.
The chainsaw events draw the biggest crowds since there’s always that tiny chance of seeing someone saw off their coach’s head should the grizzled old bloke lean in too close. But there’s plenty to choose from for the thousands of hardy souls who come to watch, babies and puppies strapped to their bodies to prevent them being carried off into the mountains by the mosquitoes. If chainsaw sculpture is not your bag, there’s manual sawing, redwood-climbing, sawdust chewing, everything one could ever want from a day spent in gumboots in an Arctic swamp full of mulch and the desiccated carcasses of elk sucked dry.
Sometimes, just sometimes, one feels that all is not well in the mind of the Extreme Woodsman. Yes, he never broke a sweat as he carved Rodin’s The Kiss out of a 10-foot slab of teak, but consider the axe challenge. It is no coincidence that Jack Nicholson was wearing a checked shirt, lumberjack jacket and work boots when he took a chopper to the bathroom door in The Shining: when the chips are flying and the axe is whooshing about, a nasty gleam appears in the eye of our woodsman. One can only imagine the fantasies of Canadian carnage that he indulges for a wild few minutes: hacking up that ergonomically designed chair his Life Partner makes him sit in at dinner, cleaving tonight’s microscopic portion of sushi before going to the drive-through burger joint, stalking the nine Maltese poodles in the Animal Rescue Haven outside his bedroom window …
After that, why would you want to shoot anyone?