The Geography of Hope

I can't quite fathom the timing, but in any case I've learned that the Montreal Gazette ran a fairly long feature-cum-review of The Geography of Hope a couple weeks back. The money quote:

His address at Concordia, to a small but packed house, was low key. His prose is not. He writes passionately and with clarity as he presents examples of the sustainable: communities, housing, factories, automobiles and public transit, new approaches to economics and progress, design that takes into account its surroundings and works with materials that can be used and re-used without damage to the environment.

I guess the ole Whistle-Stop Tour is still paying media-coverage dividends.

The story also mentions my "clever 2004 bestseller," Planet Simpson, which the very same paper called "the definitive Simpsons study." Trivia buffs will note that the Gazette was one of two publications to bestow that particular honorific on Planet Simpson; the other was Britain's venerable Q Magazine ("Quite simply, the definitive book about The Simpsons" - Nov 04).

Finally, a note for you Turner completists out there, who I understand might number as many as two (not counting my mom): Vintage Canada will release a revised edition of Planet Simpson this October to coincide with the show's 20th anniversary, with a new afterward I should be working on this very afternoon. Excitement, she wrote!

In a flash, three delirious wonderful years have passed since the birth of my daughter. Today is Sloane's third birthday. There are more joys and revelations in those years than I could possibly enumerate here - The Geography of Hope is dedicated to her because without the purpose and perspective she has brought to my life, I never would have written it.

Anyway, I don't want to gush on and on about the wonder of fatherhood, but I do want to share a couple of first-rate Sloaner anecdotes. The first is from last November, and it is I guess about the idea of living deliberately I talk about in the book, and about the way a child can bring you back to that pristine mind Thoreau so cherished:

A Friday morning, cold and uncharacteristically damp, Dada and Sloaner walking up the back lane next to the shed toward the car to head for playschool.

Sloane (stops, turns): Dada, what's that smoke there?

Dada (looking around, back at house): Where?

Sloane: Right there. The smoke, Dada.

Dada (points to prayer flags): These?

Sloane: No, Dada. The smoke.

Dada (still scanning sky): I don't . . .

Sloane: The fire next to my mouth.

Dada (awareness dawning): Oh. That's your breath, dear. You can see your breath when it's cold.

Sloane considers, digests, resumes hike to car.



Sloane Lantau Bristowe Turner, firebreathing toddler, Brooklyn Bridge, October 2007
(photo copyright Ashley Bristowe)

The second anecdote is from just the other evening, and it is, I guess, a parable about how Dada's righteous, self-flagellating hostility toward having to drive as often as he does has maybe taught his daughter some things she'd be better off not knowing yet:

In a car bound for dreaded Ikea, Dada and Mumma in the front, Sloane and her grandmother in the back. Passing a construction site on the hillside below Blackfoot Trail.

Sloane: Oh, look! There's a crane, Dada!

Dada (glances quickly): Hmmm.

Sloane: There's two of them standing there. (thoughtful pause) Like stupid assholes.

(Entire car dissolves into helpless, irresponsible, postively reinforcing laughter)

Oh, and here's a special bonus third anecdote, from later the same evening. We were enduring another Ikea marathon, hunting the self-serve warehouse for Sloane's big-girl bunk beds, when the voice came on the PA saying Ikea would close in 15 minutes. Sloane, in an excited panic, began to urge us all to hurry and started running off ahead. Her stream-of-consciousness invocations went something like this:

"Oh, quick, Mumma, Dadda. That man said Ikea is closing, we don't want to get locked in. We'll be trapped like Dorothy in the Witch's castle! Hurry!"

Needless to say, Sloane's current favourite movie ever is The Wizard of Oz.

Happy birthday, darlin'. May your endlessly curious and boundlessly exuberant spirit be with you always.

The latest installment in my monthly sustainability feature series for the Globe & Mail is now up at the website. I'm particularly pleased with it, in that it's a sort of proflile of Adam Werbach, former Sierra Club wunderkind, whose "Is Environmentalism Dead?" speech was the catalyst for my book. (Before I read Werbach's speech, I was still thinking that the best way to rally the troops around climate change was to write a loving portrait of a drowning Pacific island; after it, I went looking for hope.)

Many fine nuggets often wind up on the cutting-room floor in the daily newspaper biz, but in this case there were two lines in particular that I felt formed the crux of this story - the two-sentence summation of Werbach's challenge to the ranks of traditional environmentalism:

Does the Sierra Club really think it can change the behaviour of a constituency that large faster than Wal-Mart can? If the problem is universal, doesn’t the solution by necessity include the nine in every ten Americans who shop at Wal-Mart? Aren’t we all in this together?

So I've been thinking alot about nukes the last couple days, in advance of a possible magazine assignment on the subject. I'm already convinced there's no pat answer, and I found some of the evidence and arguments in Wil S. Hylton's feature story "Meltdown" in the current issue of GQ particularly revelatory. Hylton has also written a concise cri de coeur on the subject over at the Huffington Post.

His core rationale - that nuclear plants, problematic as they are, are vastly superior to burning coal for another generation - is, to my mind, unassailable. If you need further convincing, seek out any information you can find on the decapitation of the Appalachian Mountains and/or the mercury poisoning of our food supplies (particularly the parts of it that we drag out of the water).

There was a single passage, though, that popped out of Hylton's otherwise reasonable analysis like it'd been cut-and-pasted from the nuclear industry's own yay-nukes press releases. To wit:

Many people, according to polls, not only oppose building new nuclear plants; they oppose the ones we already have. Unfortunately, since nuclear energy currently makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s electrical supply, in order to eliminate it, the rest of the nation’s power suppliers would have to amplify their own production by 25 percent of existing levels. Since that’s not possible for most current renewables—like wind, solar, and hydroelectric farms, which are already maxed out—the real cost of eliminating today’s nuclear-power supply would be an immediate 30 percent increase in the nation’s coal, gas, and oil plants.

The emphasis here is mine. "Maxed out"? Total installed wind-power capacity in the United States grew by 45 percent in 2007. The U.S. solar industry grew by 33 percent in '06, grew a bit more slowly (just under 20 percent) in '07 do to the global silicon shortage caused by excessive global demand, and is projected to return to greater rates of growth this year.

"Maxed out"? I'd never claim that renewables by themselves are ready to carry the full global energy load just yet, and nuclear power might well have a key role to play in the battle against climate change. But "maxed out"? As the kids say these days: WTF?

So we had a provincial election here in Alberta yesterday, and we here at GOH HQ were disappointed (though not exactly surprised) to see the business-as-usual Conservatives returned to power for the 11th straight time with a landslide majority.

I won't bore all you non-Albertans out there with the province's political minutiae, but I will say that I think some of the Conservatives' success came down to a marked preference for the devil you know, who at least felt obliged to run on a "change" platform.

I'll also mention that Premier Ed Stelmach told the CBC he was in fact reading The Geography of Hope during the campaign. (Click on the "Get to know Ed" tab to read the direct quote.) I can only hope that "Change That Works" Ed accepts the basic premise of the book and realizes that his wait-a-generation climate change plan is the closest thing to my book's antithesis this side of an ExxonMobil ad campaign and an insult to the idea of progress. I won't hold out too much hope in the near term, though Alberta's still a folksy enough place that the possibility I might one day get to discuss all this with Ed in person is not out of the question.

Finally, click here to read a fun little riff I wrote for the Globe's Report on Business Magazine, wherein I invented a best-case scenario in which Alberta became the engine of Canada's green economy by 2018. (Scroll down to "Canada's Oil Capital Will Go Green.") Note that one of the first things I suggest is dissolving the provincial Liberal Party (which will wear the stain of Trudeau's hated National Energy Program forever), merging with the Greens, and reclaiming the province's reasonable centre (which I remain convinced is far larger than the current Legislature would lead you to believe).

So the Windsor event was more than a week ago now, but I left before dawn the next morning for Detroit, flew to New York, spent four fun hectic days on US "business development" - in practice, an activity somewhere between schmoozing and begging - and then all this week digging out from under the accumulated mess of too long on the road. But now, finally, the final Tour Recap.

First, Windsor . . .

My hosts in Windsor were the energetic, passionate team behind Scaledown.ca, a blog turned web portal that aims to move the dialogue about the city's future beyond which automaker should receive government money to keep the local auto industry treading water a few years longer. (One of Scaledown's contributors wrote a sort of recap of the event on the blog; the Windsor Star also ran a brief article on my talk.) Windsor's downtown is a gutted mess of decay and white-elephant "redevelopment" - particularly the marquee casino and the massage parlours that feed off it - and I was informed shortly after arrival that the city is cursed with Canada's highest unemployment rate, as the flailing auto giants across the river in Detroit shutter one facility after another.

I often open my talks by describing climate change as "an expiration date on business as usual," and in a sense Windsor's one of the first major Canadian cities to reach its best-before date with no plan whatsoever as to how to reinvent itself. It wasn't climate change per se that brought it to the precipice, but the core issue facing Windsor is undeniably a question of sustainability. Its economic raison d'etre was an industry that literally provided the engines for the age of oil, and that industry is no longer sustainable in its current guise. Leaving Windsor to ask the question we all must one day face: How do you begin to adapt a twentieth-century city to the realities of the twenty-first?

The answer should start, truly, with the Scaledown.ca gang, all of whom are bursting with energy and full of new ideas in a city aching for heavy doses of both. It was an honour to help with the site's launch before a good-sized and diverse crowd, and my tour of the city and post-event chat over pints were both revelations. I was particularly taken with Walkerville, one of North America's first planned cities under the nineteenth-century "garden city" philosophy. It's a cozy neighbourhood of sturdy old brick houses and ridiculously well-appointed green spaces, built by Hiram Walker to house the workers in his whiskey distillery. It'd be as good a place as any to provide the first rough sketches of the model for Windsor's future.



Keep up the great work, Scaledowners. Every city's only as great as the stories it tells itself about what it is, and you're the people telling the most hopeful ones.

Bright and early the day after the Scaledown launch, I was off to New York City . . .

. . . which was its usual endlessly fascinating, pulse-quickening, eye-opening self. I could go on and on - I always feel like a learn something new with every step I take in New York - but this post is long enough without my tales of the Big Apple, so I'll stick to a couple of vaguely GOH-related highlights:

- Grounded, the cafe a couple blocks from my hotel in the West Village, is a perfect example of the intangible added value of a dense, mixed-use neighbourhood. The first morning I walked in, the laptop-tapping "satellite office" crowd outnumbered casual coffee drinkers two-to-one, and the joint's staff clearly relished the idea of being one of those essential "third places" that urban planners love to talk about. I used it as my office for the duration, and though my own neighbourhood recently (finally!) got its own third place, I do already miss Grounded.

- I finally made it to the Met, and coming as it did at the end of the tour, I found myself reading its contents for signs of our current crisis. I think if you watch the certainties of representational art pass through Impressionist diffusion and Cubist disjointedness into the frenetic chaos of Abstract Expressionism (Jackson Pollock in particular), you can see the unraveling pretty clearly. Maybe I'm projecting, but Pollock's always looked to me like the aesthetic manifestation of a society spinning off into fragments; up close and in person, the effect's even more intense. If I wanted to overstretch the metaphor, I might suggest the little flashes of red and yellow beneath the haze of grey and black in his most monumental piece at the Met were like the first rays of hope . . .

- I've been reading Jonathan Lethem's awesome novel The Fortress of Solitude, the first half of which is almost entirely in one four-block patch of Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighbourhood. Turned out I was meeting an editor at a bar nearby, so I went early to walk the book's streets. Early on, Lethem describes these sidewalks made of slate, which I just couldn't picture. Lo and behold I was walking down Dean Street, and there were long stretches of sidewalk where the paving surface was not concrete but these wide uneven slabs of slate.



- Classic New York Moment (among many): Late night at Bleecker Street Pizza, eating a post-pint slice. Sitting across from me is a young couple, and the girl actually has Rosie Perez's Puerto Rican NYC accent, which I think I'd decided had to be at least a bit of an affectation. So I'm sort of eavesdropping, just to hear the cadences, and this slick black dude comes in off the street and starts trying to sell the pizza joint's employees (mostly Latino, I think) these fake Rolexes. They want none of it, but then they shoot the shit for a bit and the guy hauls out some dice. They were still losing greenbacks to the dude when I left.

Be patient, dear reader, for I shall come shortly to an epic tale of sprawl and massive transport system failure and the twangy fascism of “new” country music.

But – first things first – last night in Waterloo was a roaring success: full house in a great venue, my hosts from Words Worth Books the very embodiment of conscientious and dedicated indie bookstore ownership. Plus because said venue was Waterloo’s local indie movie house, I even got treated to some free movie popcorn, which is probably my favourite snack on the planet.

That said, I’d like to address more fully a phenomenon that occurred during the post-slideshow Q&A, a thing I’ve come to think of as The Calgary Question. The Calgary Question is an inevitable final-act sidebar in the Central Canadian version of my talks. It usually arrives in the form of a generalized query from the audience about suburban sprawl and its antidotes, often qualified with something along the lines of “especially in Calgary, where you live.” The subtext, readily apparent in the tone and angle of head and arch of eyebrow and such, goes something like this:

You come from the sprawlingest, oil-boomingest, SUVingest, CO2-emittingest, 5,000-square-foot-McRanch-on-a-two-acre-lottingest city in Canada, the capital city of the unsustainable, overstuffed, hyperconsumerist, head-in-the-sand status quo. So, like, who’re you to talk about hope and change and our sustainable future? And if I loaned you the matches, would you burn your hometown to the ground when you get back? Thanks.

I should note that this subtext is at least as prevalent when the question is asked by a self-identified former Calgarian. Maybe moreso; there seems to be a self-loathing aspect to it, or else the self-righteousness of a reformed addict.

Anyway, I generally answer The Calgary Question by pointing out gently that Calgary’s got a wind-powered LRT, transit ridership per capita about equal to metro Vancouver, and a new alderman who founded the city’s Sierra Club chapter. And so, you know, there is in fact an enlightened counterweight to the well-oiled plutocracy.

But this morning, sitting in the back of a cab bound from Waterloo to Brantford, which cab I was installed in because it is essentially impossible to take any form of public transportation from one city to the other – they are maybe 50 kilometres apart – sitting there, The Calgary Question started to grate on me. It grated on me the way it grates on Calgarians when yet another Toronto journalist is sent out by yet another national publication to file yet another story on the exotic florae and faunae of the boomtown and yet again sets the opening or climactic scene at Cowboys, an enormous yeehaw-themed dance club patronized almost exclusively by Calgarians ferrying around friends from Back East, plus aspiring Playboy models. (Note to any of my old journalist friends in the T-Dot: If you are writing a story about Calgary, and you set a scene at Cowboys, and you presume to use that scene as somehow representative of the city’s pulse, this is roughly equivalent to writing a story about the Toronto “scene” set primarily in the CN Tower’s rotating restaurant. Don’t do it. Not ever again. Please.)

Anyway, so the reason I’m in the back of this cab, to be specific, is that the good folks at Via Rail have been providing my intercity travel gratis, but you can’t take a Via train directly to Windsor from Kitchener-Waterloo (a contiguous multipolar blob of urbanity that also includes the four small towns that united as Cambridge a couple decades back). You also can’t take one directly from K-W to Brantford. Plus there’s no bus service of any kind from K-W to Brantford, which as I mentioned is maybe 50 kilometres away from Waterloo and barely 20 km south of the southern rim of greater K-W’s sprawl. (If you enter the two names Waterloo and Brantford in the Greyhound Canada online search engine, it spits back a nine-hour circuit via Toronto.) I mean, these are cities so fully in the same psychogeographic headspace that Brantford contains a satellite campus of Waterloo’s Wilfred Laurier University. And you can’t, as the saying goes, get there from here.

So this obliged me to book an 8:55am train out of Brantford and shuttle myself to it by taxi, which was costing me more than a train ticket to Toronto and back. I booked the cab for 7:45 this morning, and it arrived at more like 8:00. And the moment I got in, the gruffly good-natured taxi driver informed me that there’s no way you can make it to Brantford in less than an hour this time of day, because your route takes you right through Cambridge, which has significant traffic snarls. Not least because – at least to someone passing through it late for a train – Cambridge comes across like four small towns pooled their resources to buy a big swath of Southwest Calgary’s spare sprawl, thus to guarantee that every single gorgeous old stone building in their respective historic downtowns now houses a tanning salon or dollar store. And this is not even to get into Kitchener’s utter lack of a functional downtown and Waterloo’s undersized excuse for one. (By which I mean Waterloo’s got a great little downtown for a city of 50,000, but not for a regional municipality of half a million.)

So I’m chugging along in my ridiculous taxi through this self-evidently sprawling mess of a regional municipality, and it’s around then that The Calgary Question starts to make me itch like I’m wearing mohair. Because, honestly, the concerned citizen of the Regional Municipality of Kitchener-Waterloo who asked me The Calgary Question last night was apparently under the impression that this strip-malled, trainless, regional-bus-serviceless mess represented some different species of unsustainable urban model than Calgary does. And not to be an asshole about it, but I was in an especially uncharitable mood from the country radio (which I’ll come back to), and she was some kind of wrong. Southern Ontarians (and I used to be one) seem to view Calgary as some kind of aberration, far removed from the vivid green model of Southern Ontario’s urban life. You’re casting the first stones, there, Centre-of-the-Universians, and your glass houses are getting all smashed up in the process. (Is it still wrong to mix metaphors if you do it tidily . . .? Anyway.)

(Another data point: last month I was skiing in Banff, and on the lift I overheard two Ontarians trading impressions of Calgary. The younger of the two was living there to attend university, but she was eager to get back to Southern Ontario as soon as she was done. To a more sustainable place, she said. Yes, she actually said sustainable. Oh, asks the older lady. Where was home for her? The answer: “The Markham-Unionville area.” I hope that even residents of the Greater Toronto Area’s Markham-Unionville mid-outer-belt strip-mall satellite ring [northeast quadrant] find that chuckle-worthy.)

This, then, was my train of thought as the chances of making my train grew ever thinner. At which point I began to sort of fixate on the radio, which was tuned to a “new” country station. The first song once I started listening carefully (mainly to avoid checking the time, which was not on my side) was a twangy country-rock number called “Watching You” by Rodney Atkins. It sounded – as most “new” country does – like Bryan Adams’ mid-80s backing band added a pedal steel simulator and the first Tennessee resident they found who could make his voice crack on command and hit the road. (The song sounded, in other words, like a mediocre Eagles cover band, and I’ll leave it to The Dude to note how lousy that is even in its purest original form.)

So I’m listening to this Atkins fellow twang his way through the first verse, when I realize he’s basically describing a country-fried Southern version of the strip-mall nowheresville out the window. (e.g. Drivin’ through town, just my boy and me / With a “Happy Meal” in his booster seat / Knowin’ that he couldn’t have the toy till his nuggets were gone.) The central tension in the song involves this well-fed youngster’s slavish imitation of his dear ole dad, beginning with the use of a nasty word that begins with “s,” which the kid sputters after he spills his orange pop at the next traffic light. (Atkins was too polite to say, but I’m guessing it was “socialized medicine.”) So in the next verse, Atkins gets down on his knees and prays for guidance, and Junior imitates that as well, and all is right again under the exurban sun. “Watching You” was, I’ve just learned via on-board wifi, the No. 1 country song of 2007.

Now, I’m not saying Rodney Atkins is fascist, nor that “new” country is intrinsically a vehicle for fascist rhetoric. (Though I think its expulsion of Johnny Cash from Nashville in and of itself constitutes a crime against humanity.) What I’m saying, I guess, is that you could certainly put the tone and style of this stuff to the uses of a much more coercive and overtly authoritarian program – make it, for example, actually an ad for McDonald’s – and who, stuck in traffic on the strip-malled boulevard, would even notice? That might, indeed, explain the multiplatinum career of Toby Keith right there.

Anyway, I arrived at Brantford Station five minutes late, but my train was fifteen minutes late. I caught it. And were it not for the fact that I’ve got the cloying chorus of “Watching You” on infinite loop in my head (‘Cause I’ve been watching you, Dad, ain’t that cool? / I’m your buckaroo, I want to be like you . . .) – if not for that, I’d have nothing else to complain about.

See you in Windsor.

(Please Note: Train 85 actually didn't have on-board wifi, and this post is actually being written later in the day, and the post title is really just a sham attempt to maintain some kind of structural continuity. Not that you were wondering . . .)

Anyway . . . the bulk of the GOH Whistle-Stop Tour's now over, and the sleep-deprivation's increasingly fierce, and the best I can muster at the moment is a sort of point-form highlights package.

1) Kingston, Feb 14: Well, you gotta swing and miss at least once, right? Turns out the GOH slideshow was no match for Valentine's Day, and impending Reading Week at the local university (my alma mater), and a broken-telephone thing as regards who was handling the advance publicity that was almost certainly my bad. Which is to say maybe a baker's dozen showed up, and I knew almost all of 'em. The ones I didn't know, though, were lovely people, and I had Henry Rollins' old Black Flag credo in my mind about how it didn't matter how many were in the room, you still had to rock, and so I think I acquitted myself alright.

2) Ottawa, Feb 15-16: Took a side trip to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' Sustainable Communities conference, which sounds dry as toast but actually rocked far harder than Kingston did. In addition to interviewing Adam Werbach - who careful readers of the book will note was probably the single most important influence on my initial thinking as I was conceiving the book - I hooked up with the extraordinarily gregarious and fun-loving CarbonZero crew, hit the town with a gaggle of current and former city councillors who met each other years earlier at FCM conferences when most of 'em were in their early 20s and known in some circles as the "Brat Pack," and even sold a handful of books. Plus also when I arrived on Friday, the first four or five people to see the books on display came over to say they'd already bought copies and/or were already reading the book etc., which is always nice.

3) Toronto, Feb 18: Packed the house at the Gladstone. Saw some of my oldest and dearest friends. Had at least two too many beers with the good people at Travesty Productions afterward, plotting global multimedia domination. Good times, good times.

Two things:

It's been a long time since I've really felt delight at a digital communications advance, but making this post from a high-speed train zipping steadily past the barren snow-dappled forests of eastern Ontario has me gee-whiz grinning. Kudos to Via for its on-board internet! (And for its complementary wine with lunch in Via 1 Class!)

Another thing that's got me gee-whiz grinning: I received word today that The Geography of Hope is officially a national bestseller. It makes its debut at No. 9 this week on the Maclean’s bestseller list. The hunch down Random House way was always that the book would be a slowburner, building by word of mouth and the tenacious touring of its tireless (and alliteratively inclined) author. And, four months on, there it is: A National Bestseller! That’ll look sharp on the cover of the trade paperback, which is out this August, and whose final edits I’m procrastinating typing up just now.

(UPDATE: Turns out, for reasons seeming to have to do with the way my blogging software talks to Via’s wireless network, that I couldn’t post this till I got to Kingston. While I remain a bit gee-whizzed, it’s symptomatic of the whole internet snap-your-fingers-and-the-novelty-is-essential thing that I’m also slightly irritated that this unprecedented level of on-board connectivity isn’t yet flawless . . .)

On a cold and eventually snowy night in Montreal, the TGOH Whistle Stop Extravaganza more or less packed the house at Concordia's lovely new York Amphitheatre. The highlight, at least for me, was hanging out with friends old and new afterward.

One of those was Taras Grescoe, who was kind enough to agree to introduce me at the York. I'd just finished Taras' excellent new book Bottomfeeder earlier in the afternoon, and it was great fun trading tales of global research trials & tribulations. Bottomfeeder is out in April, and I can't recommend it more highly (indeed it may feature a jacket blurb from yours truly). At the risk of sounding overly soundbitey, it does for the global seafood industry what Fast Food Nation did for the fast food biz. A word of warning: it'll ruin you for cheap shrimp, maybe forever.

Another guest in attendance was the ever-gracious Shannon Babcock (currently of Montreal's lovely Babar Books). Shannon got the ball rolling on this event, for which I'm much obliged, and I'm even more grateful that she offered to billet me for this stop on the tour at her cozy apartment in the intriguing St-Henri neighbourhood.

St-Henri is an old working-class district of old brick warehouses and townhouses with second-floor entries fed by those wicked-cool iron front staircases. Walking around the neighbourhood was a reminder yet again of how much better we were at building the urban landscape to human scale prior to the dawn of the automobile age. Even this neighbourhood - which was probably considered pretty hardscrabble and unattractive at the height of its industrial age - provides a genuine sense of enclosure and community, an unmistakable and unique vibe.

So now I'm sitting in a cafe on St-Laurent with a belly full of medium-fat from Schwartz's (the preferred sandwich of Mordecai Richler's ultimate Montrealer, Barney Panofsky), and I have to declare this an auspicious beginning. I said to my wife before departure that this was the closest I might ever come to that teenage dream of being in a band on tour, so it occurs to me I ought to go find a drink somewhere.

Salut, Montreal! Next stop: Kingston.