Cryptids of Ottawa by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia
1000 words, ~5 minutes reading time
Issue 4 (Spring 2024)
Not too long ago, on my way to the theatre, I stuck my nose in a Little Free Library and found a goblin. In Ottawa, the Little Free Libraries have flourished of late. They are the kind of community-minded endeavour that is such a ridiculously good idea it seems as if they have always been there. Like mushrooms, the little boxes, with instructions to Take a Book, Leave a Book, have sprung up everywhere. Despite pushback from the City, they have become near ubiquitous. The goblin however was a rarity.
Dubbed ‘Plum’, by her creator, this goblin is the product of Mother Mushroom, an anonymous sculptor who started making fantastic creatures circa 2021 and dropping them off in locations around Ottawa.
Mother Mushroom is not unique among Ottawans for enjoying the whimsical. With its brutalist government buildings and lack of night life, Ottawa has long been dubbed a city that fun forgot. I have been aware for a long time that people who don’t live here don’t like it here. What they are often surprised to find out is that people from here often don’t like it here either. I often feel like I exist in a weird in-between. I am a girl, who became a woman, who simply stayed where I had grown up. Call it Stockholm Syndrome or call it something else, but instead of my residency breeding contempt, I’ve learned to lean into the small moments of the weird and the wild. Like weeds stubbornly pushing through asphalt, there is strangeness afoot in Ottawa.
You just have to know where to look.
The downtown core is populated by large commercial buildings of glass and steel. In front of one in particular, the British High Commission, is a large planter where shrubs and trees should grow. Instead there are three little girls with trees for bodies. Or, three little trees with little girls’ legs in place of a stump. They are huddled close together, as if they are communing, or playing, or part of a coven. Created by Welsh sculptor Laura Ford they have been there for as long as I can remember. Memory is a faulty though; they were placed there in 1998.
There is something so sweet about the trio of tree-girls. What I find the most enchanting is that their bronze shoes are red. Bronze doesn’t turn red, it oxides to a beautiful green, which very much suits the leaves of the little girl-trees bodies. Nevertheless, year after year, the shoes are red. Sometimes a little greener than red, sometimes bright red. What to make of these little girl-trees evolving shoe wear? Someone in Ottawa, maybe several someone’s, see it as their job to paint those shoes. I picture them, with a bottle of nail polish, crouched in the dirt, delicately painting those bronze Mary Janes red making sure that every summer the girls look their best.
Travel further north and you will find Canada’s National Art Gallery. More arresting than the building itself is the giant spider poised in front of it. A person could easily enter the Gallery without stepping through the legs of the spider, but what would be the point?
Maman came to Ottawa in 2004. Though I think of her as our spider, Louise Bourgeois, the French artist who created her, has cast several, and they stand guard in museums around the world. Japan has a Maman, as does Spain, the U.S., the U.K., and Qatar.
While arachnophobia is a common enough fear, Maman feels like the correct name for the spider. I have never felt frighted by her. I have stood under her arching legs and looked up at her spindly body, from which I can see several marble eggs, a symbol of her fertility. But between those legs, what Maman evokes is a feeling of protection, of security. She is a stoic guard standing watch. She is a protector.
If Maman evokes life, a few minutes away, to the West, there is the feeling of death. In the summer of 2023, in a brouhahaha over Twitter, I learned there was a dead crow in a field and people were mad.
The crow was no ordinary beast. It was gigantic, about five metres long. It was also not really dead, having never been alive. It had been made of repurposed old tires by artist Gerard Beaulieu. Even in pictures, I felt the devastating impact of the crow.
It was death in the streets. Death made outsized, the way it feels when it impacts a person on an individual level.
The tires were also a brilliant material coup. Tires are a sort of ubiquitous monstrosity. They wear out but once they do they are near impossible to get rid of. They can’t be burned. They do not degrade organically. They are a source of microplastics now invading our food, our bloodstreams, everything that makes us human. Sometimes it seems the only use of tires, after they are no longer useful for cars, is in this type of art, so we might live in unease with the damage we are inflicting on the climate.
A lot of the grumbles about the crow seemed less focused on the death-aspect than the price tag for renting the crow ($15, 000). To me this seemed a rather reasonable price to pay to look at a thing and be reminded of the collective harm we are inflicting on the planet.
That harm was at the forefront of my mind during the winter of 2023. It was the mildest winter I’ve experienced in my life, more like a slushy long spring than the winter of my childhoods, than the winters of even a few years ago. The Rideau Canal, which never froze enough to open last year, was only skateable for four days.
In February I found a dead finch on my walkway. It too must have been confused by the wild fluctuations in weather, the temperature warming only to fall to freezing all within one 24-hour period. Or maybe it starved to death, resources no longer as plentiful. I picked it up to throw it away, this poor, dead thing.
Then I set off on my habitual walk, on the hunt for more of the strange creatures that lurk in the streets of Ottawa.