There is a story behind how I got to know Marie Aucoin well enough for her to ask me to write this article for the Participaper, and though typing it wouldn�t seem the greatest exercise, I thought I would fit it in. My name is Tristan Stei***. I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, and it was there that I signed up for the Katimavik program, which is an intensive seven months of co-operative living and volunteer work coupled with a plethora of workshops on healthy living. Participants travel to three uniquely different communities where they live together in a house for about two and a half months per trimester. Ten days out of each trimester is spent billeting in a local family�s care. Upon being accepted, I learned that the first of my three destinations would be Cheticamp, Nova Scotia. I packed up most of my clothes and essentials, flew out of Pearson International, and landed in Halifax. From Halifax I took a tiny, twin propeller twenty-seater to the Sydney airport where a bus was waiting to take myself and the other traveling participants to our new home in downtown Cheticamp. We are living behind the Pizza Shack/Evangeline in a small blue house. There are twelve of us there including Rebecca, our project leader. I work at the Green Door with Sam and the boys, and Georgina has already taught me how to knit socks. I have finished my first pair, a pair that resembles the Acadian flag, and I am learning to crochet a bag out of green fishing net line. Our week of billeting has come around and I have been chosen to live with Gilles and Marie Aucoin. It only took Marie about a day and a half before she propositioned me into writing this. I do not consider myself fit, or very healthy. I am not an avid exerciser and the sports I have enjoyed include foot bag, a little Frisbee, and just recently, ATVing, but Marie said she wanted a fresh, male perspective on the process of getting fit.
The contrasts between Toronto and the Cheticamp area are stark. Tens of thousands of automobiles clog Toronto�s roadway rivers and tributaries. Everywhere a car can go lays an endless string of billboards and bench ads. Public transit buses are plastered from roof to wheel, inside and out with slogans and smiles. The fumes from all these oil-burning machines create a brown cloud over the cityin the summer months. Walking becomes a chore let alone exercising. The city sprawls out over miles of old watersheds and farmland. Low-level mini malls and endless parking lots now occupy some of the richest soil on the planet, and the lake is a running joke testament to failed cleanups and mutant fish. What all this business brings bountifully is plenty of health clubs and weight rooms and dieting clinics and surgical procedures that presume to capitalize off of the growing number of fit-less people. I have found Cheticamp to be quite different. There are no large-scale highway ads. No endless sea of cars. No public spaces spoiled with commercial displays. No horror show mini mall sprawl. I have seen functioning farmland, frozen in fishing boats, friendly folks, and French fiddlers. The people here have real identities and places in their communities; there is none of the emptiness that comes from overcrowding urbanization. It is true that there are not as many options locally for getting in shape, and it is also true that there is not the screaming need to get in shape as there is in the city, but there are lots of possibilities to be explored.
My own desire to become fit has waned and waxed since early high school. Somewhere between the sheer volume of females in one small building, the way my body and feelings were changing at the time, and the sheer volume of advertisements attesting to the correct way to look in order to attract the opposite sex, I realized that I needed to get fit and be in shape. I was a smoker, and not interested in sports. I did rely on public transit to get home, and thought that to be a step in the right direction, but I really just sat around for longer, and had the free time and hands to snack while I waited for my stop. I was doing a small bit of dancing for the theatre program I was enrolled in, but I usually didn�t volunteer to be in any of the big dance numbers, and instead worked on my singing which was an exercise I could do that didn�t make me sweaty. Basically, I smoked and drank coffee to get my heart going until the summer months. In the summer I would play a little Frisbee in the park near my school, and eventually got into foot bag�a game that is played by keeping a small sack filled with plastic beads up in the air using only your feet. I enjoyed both these games and found them to work in small ways to improve my horrid health, but I was still unsatisfied with my shape. I eventually took a weight training course in grade eleven, but rarely worked out at the club we went to, and actually spent more time writing mediocre poetry in the coffee shop next door. My best friend, Liam, eventually talked me into joining a gym where his father was a personal trainer. I must have gone at least six times during my membership, and enjoyed each visit more and more, but getting fit is more than just going to the gym and working out. It takes a commitment to enjoy the time you spend doing active exercising, and a balanced, nutritive diet that will support your healthy lifestyle.
I quit smoking at the age of nineteen and stopped eating meat shortly after. I started to venture downtown more often and actually enjoyed walking from place to place. I tried to avoid unhealthy foods�these things seemed easier and somewhat more rewarding than jogging on a treadmill for twenty minutes and doing painful pulls on massive machines. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, as it is a difficult task to trace the source of your cuts in Toronto, and factory farming is a harsh life for animals that I wanted to know and respect before digesting. It is important to make sure you make up for the nutrients lacking in a meatless diet, however, which is something I was never too good at doing, and though I lost some weight I neglected to couple my eating with exercising, so I didn�t develop a toned musculature which is key in the appearance of a healthy, urban male. It wasn�t till that summer of splendor, when I hitched out with three friends to go climb Gros Morne that I started to feel I was and could continue living a healthy lifestyle. I was exercising everyday just by walking with my thumb out, and camping out by the TCH, and though I wasn�t necessarily eating very well, I learned that the body responds to more than just the routine of eating and exercising; it responds to your mental state and need to adapt and respond to your immediate environment. Everyday was an adventure. I never knew where I would set up my tent the next night, or what I would choose from the Irving Big Stop menu that was a common drop off site. I kept my bag fairly well stocked with a mixture of nuts and dried fruit, and kept two large bottles full of water. By the time we got to Gros Morne, I was ready to tackle that mountain and did so with my pack on my back. I felt I was in the best shape of my life, and probably was. I kept that shape and glorious feeling for maybe a year or two, and have since had it sucked out of me by the vacuous city.
Now I find myself back out in beauty, and can feel that energized blood start to pump in me again. Cheticamp is a beautiful place which sings to me in ways the cacophonic chorus of Toronto town never will. The beauty of the Katimavik program is that it promotes and involves participants in a healthy lifestyle. I have found myself trying and enjoying sporting activities that I would never have thought I could fit into. I have become a devout badminton player, and try to make it to the two weekly sessions at the local school gym. I cannot imagine that I would ever have found myself at a badminton club in Toronto, though I can imagine what one would be like�young urban professionals perfecting their style and skill for personal victory and everyone with a personal coach to give them on the spot tips to improve their game. I have found the atmosphere very light at the school gym matches, with both sides working to keep the game alive and fun. The characters are friendly and helpful and there to have a good time. It doesn�t matter that it is a good source of exercise as much as it is a great source of fun and feeling. I have found much exercise and peace of mind on the many different hiking trails that encompass and evolve the beautiful parkland and island. I have many wonderful picture memories captured on those long walks that bring fresh air and colour to my body. In Toronto, there are some scattered parks that are lovely to walk through on your way to somewhere else, or sit in and have a picnic, but the bulk of the hike comes from pounding the pavement between the choked street and exclamatory storefronts. To find anything in Toronto as enjoyable or wonderful as what there is in the Cheticamp area requires an increasingly longer drive out of town. I have been horse-back riding through the woods to the beach and back, where not only was I getting a bit of exercise by trying to be an active part of the ride, but my horse, Apollo, was getting fit as well. There is nothing of this sort in Toronto. I have been up the hill on ATV�s with Gilles, and around the club on a skidoo with the clients�both being exciting and invigorating. I have even been ice fishing, which seemed to give my arm and chest a workout, even if I didn�t catch anything. I wouldn�t recommend doing any fishing on the lake in Toronto. The air is so much fresher out here�even if it blows a little too hard some days�whether I am downtown or in the hills, and that goes a long way towards the process of getting fit. Though the air in most fitness clubs and weight rooms is purified and pumped in through fans, I would rather be outside doing something I enjoy to get the exercise my body needs to stay healthy, and I think that is much more important than what some commercial machine will tell you about what you need to get fit.
We are at a space in time where the human body as it relates to its physical environment and the human body as it relates to its social environment are not quite on the same level. Physically we are much less active than we have been since our dawn. This is because of the growing development of salable technologies that allow and promote relaxation and ease. The desire to consume these products does fuel more working time, but with the types of work being what they are these days that does not automatically mean more exercise. Working used to mean using your body to produce something. The focus for work has shifted to the mind, wherein the social aspect of our existence lives. With the emphasis of day to day life shifted to the mental plane, we have become a much less physically active species and more social. Even sitting at the television is a social event in that you are required to empathize with the situations you are witnessing, and between segments of your favourite show is a string of commercials preaching the benefits of a toned and trim body that is unattainable in any other way than unnaturally working out in a gym. Our whole way of life has changed since the industrial, commercial, and information revolutions and we are no longer functioning in a way that naturally promotes a healthy body and mind, so we are tricked and forced to look for alternative ways to achieve an ever present archetype of unattainable physical form. Socially we are much the same animals as we have always been. We still interact with each other in the same old ways of work and play; we still seek healthy mates, only now we are forced to work harder to achieve the appearance on health, and it is hard to keep up with professional actors and entertainers that work full time on their physique.
I have found that I am happier and healthier in situations where I am in constant adventure. I have wanted only to place myself into adventures since I got back from my initial trip east. I have found that my body works harder to be in shape for my mind to use as a tool of adventure, but it is my mind that needs to be stimulated in order for this to happen. If I am endlessly home watching movies or commercials, I am lost mentally and physically. My desire to be fit is defeated by my lethargy. If I am out on my own in a constant string of new situations and scenarios, I am so happy to be there that I will actively seek out trying environments that exercise my mind and body as a team. This is what I need that I find a stark deficiency of in the static chaos of my home town Toronto, and what I see so readily available in my travels from community to community across the country. I�m sure I will eventually settle into a comfortable and satisfying routine, but for now I am restless and demanding of my world to provide constant change and positive growth.
Tristan Stei***
I had a lot of fun writing it and hope she enjoys reading it and feels good about putting it in her paper. moops!
PEACE - Tristan
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