View From Above

It was a cold Sunday evening last fall. I was driving my son back home to his mother's apartment in St. Vital from my place in the North End. As we were crossing the Redwood Bridge, my son glanced off to the passenger side of the car and spotted a shopping cart. There's nothing really odd about that in the North End, an abandoned shopping cart around here is about as unusual as overflowing Autobins, but this particular cart happened to have been carefully placed right in the middle of the Red River!

The river was barely frozen at the time that we happened to spy it, and we wondered who would be so bold as put it there in the first place?

Was it a dare? Some sort of a gang initiation? I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that it hasn't been used as an ersatz moving van for some upwardly mobile homeless guy looking to move to a better life in Elmwood.

I guess we'll never know.

The first time that Harlan spotted the cart was in early November. It had been positioned about sixty feet off the shoreline, and was nearly invisible from the height of the bridge. I remember glancing furtively at it because I was driving, but every other time that we drove across that bridge, he always noticed it, and over the winter it became such a touchstone for our trip back home to his mother's apartment that we never again took Main St. to get back to the south-end of town.

As the snow got deeper, our curiosity piqued, and as the cart quickly became buried in the deep winter's coat, we wondered when it would be resurrected from the melting snow, only to disappear into the swift flow of the dirty spring run-off.

Every second weekend I would journey alone to St. Vital, and then return home by driving down Archibald to Redwood, now accompanied by my son, laughing as he stretched against his seatbelt, trying to catch a glimpse of the strange juxtaposition of a shopping cart in the middle of the vast white expanse of the river.

Sunday nights after our ritual dinner at McDonalds we would repeat the trip in reverse. He had a better view on the way back, and we could again share a little silliness in the awkward moments of our impending separation.

Before the two of us could actually watch that poor stranded shopping cart sink, Harlan suddenly moved away to Saskatchewan with his mother. In the spring I sat on the riverbank and watched alone as it was finally dragged down into the rushing current.

As it disappeared into the frigid, muddy water with the rest of the winter's detritus, I sat there under the warm spring sunshine, thinking of a strange shared moment between a father and his son... and the tears welled up in my eyes as it too drifted away from me.

This is a true story, and the beginnings of my interest in capturing images of shopping carts, recording the journeys of wayward icons of consumerism.