Carnage/Creation

Today the town of Furubira started construction on the new elementary school. I had known this was coming down the pipe pretty soon, and I’d been told that the location for the new building would be right beside the current elementary. However, I hadn’t realized exactly where the new building was going up until today when I was on my way to class. Just outside the windows of the bathroom wash stations, two large pieces of construction equipment were laying waste to one of my favourite bits of forest (an area that is possibly one of the prettiest views from my elementary). From the windows above the wash stations, I was treated to a perfect, overhead view of the carnage/creation going on outside.

Some of the students who come to the wash station look out on the scene and see only carnage. The stand of evergreen that once served as a vertical canvas for the falling snow now lies in a dense tangle of the green of boughs, the brown of bark, and the raw yellow of living wood. All around it, the unspoiled white has been chewed up by the steel treads of the lumbering machines, leaving tracks vaguely reminiscent of rampaging buffalo or marauding Hollywood indjuns. One of the machines sweeps its mechanical claw out in front of it like an arm, brushing aside the deep snow until it reaches a lone remaining sapling. With a dexterity that might make one mistake it as an extension of his own arm, the operator reaches out with the mechanical claw and closes it around the small tree’s trunk, snapping the thing off instantly with a crack that can be heard from high above. The arm tosses the piece into the knot of fallen trees, and the claw digs in again at the base of the splintered trunk, pulling up the root ball like a dandelion stem. The black of its earth sprays across the snow white as the arm hefts it, too: cart wheeling through the air to land in the pile of slash.

Another student comes to the wash station and can hardly notice the carnage for all the creation going on around it. He sees the tracks of the machines making the land more and more level with each pass, their action on the trees removing the chaos from the soil and instating order. He draws vectors between the construction-capped workers rambling through the disorder. From the rough plans he saw in his parents’ copy of the town newsletter, he already begins constructing the new school in his mind’s creative eye. From out of the snow and dirt and twisted trees rise vertices of potential, and in the empty space in the forest outside he can already picture how he will run the circuit of the new building’s halls, counting the windows and the walls in its many rooms. He can already smell the fresh plastics and the drying wood glue, feel the light plaster dust in his hair.

While a third student stands at the wash station with her back to the windows. She can see only the ancient architecture in this place: this giant, rambling school that was built for a different age of this town—back when there were movieplexes and supermarkets and sprawling herring mansions. In this aging elementary, mere motion is a covert act as you’re more likely to be lost in it than found. In the scene outside, this student sees only the end of the old girl: this vast, often cold, sometimes lonely classroom castle that has been the birthplace of dreams ever since she wandered into it as an ichi nensei. It is a place so empty that it happily allows itself to be filled with anything you like; where past is so very present that it has to be kept in check least the yesterday should muscle out the today.

But on the lowest floor, the wash station windows are still boarded over. Ostensibly, it’s to protect the windows from the mountains of snow and ice that avalanche down from the rooves of buildings in this northern outpost; the vast loads of white piling up in glass-threatening quantities. However, with the melt now begun and winter on its last legs, I wonder if the boards might not have been left up to shield the eyes of our youngest students who make their homes on the first floor: their new minds still too impressionable to make much sense of the carnage or the creation just outside. Instead, they are treated to furtive glimpses through the cracks between two-by-fours, and their fertile imaginations attribute the grinding cries and flashes of orange beyond to dinosaurs just as often as to steam machines.