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The Current Transcript for December 30, 2021

Host: Paul Hunter

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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Picture a flat, elegant town with piazzas, with cobblestones laid out and round patterns and Romanesque archways and brick and marble. And every corner you turn, it seems, is the storefront of a luthier.

PAUL HUNTER: A luthier is a maker of violins, and that picturesque Italian town is Cremona, tucked away near the mountains of northern Italy in about 30 minutes. We'll take you there and inside a few of those shops to see and hear what a Canadian master craftsman is up to. Also this morning.

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we've been sold the idea that within the vicinity of your home, this is where you are most safe. However, when you're on your deathbed, it's have you really lived a full life?

PH: It might be scary to step outside of the comforts of home, but Duncan McCue will introduce you to two people who tackled their fears of the outdoors and are now living lives they could have only dreamed of. Their stories might inspire you to take a hike. We'll also hear from one of the newest appointees to the Order of Canada. But first checking in on someone who's had a very good 2021. I'm Paul Hunter sitting in for Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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Adaptability is key ahead of Beijing Olympics, says gold medallist Damian Warner

Guest: Damian Warner

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One last 400 metre push. Damian Warner one lap remaining. We'll see what he can do. He needs to run under 70 seconds for this last lap for the 9000 mark, which will be tough, but he really is winding up his name.

PH: It doesn't get much more thrilling than that. The final 400 metres of the final event of the men's decathlon, a gold medal hanging in the balance. The man everyone is watching is Damian Warner, and he's wearing the Maple Leaf.

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Warner kicking with one hundred and fifty metres to go. Moving into the top five down the straight, they come watch the clock for twenty four, twenty five. Warner, gritting his teeth needs for thirty three to get nine thousand and it looks like he's very close. So close in the celebration is on. Damian Warner has won the Olympic Gold Medal in the decathlon for thirty one 08. That's enough to crack nine thousand points for the first time in his career. This is a performance for the history books.

PH: That performance did go down in history this summer. In Tokyo, Damian Warner became the first Canadian to win the Olympic decathlon and the Gold Medal that goes with it earlier this month. He was named Canada's top athlete, and Damian Warner is here to tell us all about it. Good morning and congratulations on the incredible year you've had.

DAMIAN WARNER: Thank you so much, and good morning, Debbie.

PH: Is it is thrilling to you to hear that moment replayed like that, like what's it like when you listen and when you think back to that moment?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah, it kind of brings me back. I mean, as an athlete, I'm I'm only focussing on running on the track, so I don't get to hear all those voices in the commentary of Michael Smith while I'm competing. But like when I got finished the competition, I watch some videos and I could hear it. And yeah, it's it's really exciting and it brings back some, some good memories.

PH: Now that it's all sunk in, what is having won that gold medal mean to you?

DAMIAN WARNER: It'll be very tough to put into words, but it means a lot. You know, it was a dream come true. I think it was one of those things for a really long time, ever since I was in grade six. When I when I wrote down that I wanted to go to the Olympics, that was one of the things that I was chasing for a long time. And to have one of those dreams that you've set out come true. It's it kind of leaves you speechless. And I'm still trying to find the words to this day. But it incredible memories, for sure. And it's just going to be something that I'm going to remember for a really long time. And yeah, this year's just been really, really special for me.

PH: Are you actually thinking at the end when you're heading toward the finish line in that last event? Um, that this is it that this has you've worked everything for this precise moment and just push, push, push. Is that going through your mind or how does that play out when you're actually racing toward the finish line?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah, it's interesting. I was saying not too long ago to to somebody that I was talking to that when I was running the last 200 metres, about fifteen hundred metre race, it's like everything went into slow motion for me, and I started thinking about all the way back when I was in high school and conversations that I had with my coach to the journey of just like training for the decathlon and this past year, dealing with COVID and everything and the birth of our son and our family and just everybody that kind of helped me, you know, and it was like, you're falling in slow motion and you just couldn't help but think of all these things. And crossing the line was just like an incredible moment. And I just remember running up and giving my my coach correlation and my physiotherapist diesel a big hug and just saying thank you. And I just really wish that my family and everybody else that were in those thoughts that I was having in the last 200 metres were there so I can give them a hug as well.

PH: It's funny when people think about the Olympics, I think, you know, there's always so much hype about the 100 metres, but the Olympic decathlon, you know, greatest, you know, world's greatest athlete. That's what it is. And you did it. You know, you talk about your family not being there. There was also the extreme heat in Tokyo, right? And the pandemic. You talk about what was the hardest part of getting there.

DAMIAN WARNER: I had this vision of what I thought was required to win an Olympic Gold Medal. And it turned out that that vision was not even remotely close. We trained in an arena. I thought that we'd have to train in world class facilities. I thought that I'd have to get every ounce of sleep that I could possibly get. We had a newborn crying and keeping us up. So it was like all these things that I thought was required wasn't necessarily there, but I had the team behind me that made all those things possible so that when I showed up to the games that I was able to deal with everything that I needed to. And I think that if I learnt anything in the past years, that adaptability is key. And I went into the games knowing that whatever comes up, I have the tools to deal with it. I just went into that competition and I felt like there was nothing that could stop me. I felt like I just had to go on the track and run, jump and throw as best as I could, and then I would finish with that gold medal around my neck.

PH: You know, I guess I understand the physical part of it, the the athletic training. But what has always kind of perplexed me, in a sense, is the degree of mental training that that must be a part of that. How do you approach that?

DAMIAN WARNER: For the longest point of time, when I first started training for the decathlon, I thought that the most difficult thing would be the physical part. Obviously, training for the decathlon is really tough, but what comes along with that is the mental battles, I guess. So we started working with a sports psychologist. He works with a lot of Canada's top athletes, and we just come up with a whole bunch of strategies over the years to to deal with certain situations. And when I talked about being adaptable in the competition, we worked on that over the years. So probably the most important thing about the decathlon is the mental side. Every single athlete that goes into that competition is very physically prepared and capable of doing tremendous things. But it's the mental things that you'll have to learn to deal with, and I just felt like I was set up really well by the team that I have.

PH: And is that about the mental capacity to push yourself further or is it about the mental ability to focus and to just to sort of cut out the noise?

DAMIAN WARNER: I think it's both, plus a little bit more so. I think that obviously you have to be able to work really hard and you have to be able to deal with tough situations as they arise. But I think one thing with the decathlon, like the only certain thing that we we know going into decathlon is that something is not going to go right. There's going to be little things that come up here and there, and you're going to have to learn to deal with it. And I worked with the mental performance coach to come up with strategies to deal with those ahead of time so that when they do happen, you have the the tools to deal with it instead of kind of being like reactionary to whatever situation. So we're very proactive in what we talk about and think about and and he challenges me to think about certain things that I wouldn't necessarily think about otherwise. So one of the big things was like visualisation. So when we visualise things, oftentimes we we think about the perfect situation. But he challenged me to think about things that weren't necessarily perfect. But if it was rain one day, what if you had a bad event? How are you going to overcome that and go into the next one? So we talked about all these things and and I kind of extrapolated from that and took it to a different direction. And I started thinking about like, OK, like I finished my competition. These are going to be the athletes that finish on the podium with me. This is the situation that's coming down in the 1500, where you have to beat this guy by 10 seconds or five seconds. What kind of mental state of mind are you going to be in at that point? So I feel like I thought about all these different scenarios over the years leading up to this competition that I felt like every tool in my toolbox prepared me to deal with whatever came up. And yeah, it was just very empowering. As I was saying, it was very encouraging and I got the result that I was looking for. And I think it's it's due to the team that I have.

PH: And how does that mental training carry over into the rest of your life outside athletics?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah. So I think the biggest thing about like sports, the one thing that sport has taught me is that all these little experiences that I deal with on a day to day basis or in a competition like that's life, essentially. And I remember when I was first starting out as an athlete, I had to do a talk at one of the companies, and I didn't really know what to talk about. And we came up with this talk called like the decathlon is life, and I broke it down into like 10 different aspects. And I was talking about how life is very similar to these situations that I deal with as a decathlete and how that can just be applied to every single person and every single day. And and I think that it's just like it's just almost like a one in one thing, and I talk to athletes from other sports and what they deal with. And it's like, we all think that everybody's dealing with separate problems, but they're all very similar. And I think that my experience in sport has taught me to deal with some of those things. And I know that being a father now and certain things that we're going to have to deal with as a family, I think that I'll be able to draw on my experience in the sport to deal with some of these situations that I have to go.

PH: Did you say it was grade six that you first dreamed of Olympic gold?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah. So that was the well, that was the first time I wrote it down on paper. Before then, it was talking about it with my mom and watching athletes like [unintelligible] compete at the Olympics. And that's kind of like what sparked my interest.

PH: So what does your mom say? What did your mom when you said that to your mom, what did you say?

DAMIAN WARNER: So that's that's a cool thing, and that's a part of my story that I tell often is that one when we watch athletes compete at the Olympics. When I was younger, I told my mom that I wanted to go to the Olympics, and she says, you could do anything you set your mind to, and that's something that I tried to tell the kids when I go to school because I set my mind on going to the Olympics. And over the years, I changed those goals when I qualified for the Olympics and I wanted to win a gold medal. And it's really cool now to go back to these schools. Some of them which I spoke to like 10 years earlier at the beginning of my career, and to be able to show them that Gold Medal, because that's the thing that I told them that I was setting out to achieve. It's really cool that I have that evidence now when I go back to speak to some of these kids to show them that you can do anything you set your mind to, and if you want to be a doctor or an astronaut or a lawyer. Or an athlete that goes to the Olympics or the NHL, like anything is possible, just just find the right team and work really hard and you get there.

PH: So Gold Medal Lou Marsh Trophy. I'm going to guess being a dad, maybe top that this year. So congrats on that, Theo. So you talk about what your mom said to you. What are you going to tell him when he's old enough to start dreaming those dreams?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah, I'm going to tell him that he can do anything you such as mine too. I think it's it's shown true in my life, and I think that kids are so adaptable and they're so optimistic and they have so many crazy beliefs. And I'm going to encourage them to challenge some of those beliefs. And if he wants to do something that maybe he doesn't think is possible, I'm going to challenge them to try it.

PH: How did Theo coming into the world affect you as you were training for the Tokyo Games?

DAMIAN WARNER: He was probably one of the biggest effects. Obviously, Jon was huge throughout the whole thing, and she's been somebody that I talk to all the time. You know, you talk about mental health and and training and stuff like that. She was an athlete, so she understands that a lot of the same battles that I go through. But when I was training in the arena, there was a lot of times when I was looking online and I was seeing some of my competitors training in these beautiful facilities, and you couldn't help but think that they had something that you didn't and you were kind of falling behind on your goals or because we weren't able to do everything that we set out to do and feel was born right around the time that I was having some of these doubts. So he was born on March 11th, and it seemed like all that stuff that I was dealing with on the track kind of just washed away, and I wasn't focussed on that anymore. I was focussed on being a dad and yeah, it changed my life a lot and it gave me some balance and I started to think about what kind of legacy or what kind of role model I want to be for my son. And that incorporates the how I deal with myself on the track. So whether win, lose or draw, I got to deal with myself and handle myself as like a gentleman or a world class athlete. And yeah, just trying to be the best role model as I could.

PH: As athletes now are getting ready for these upcoming games. You know, pandemic happening again. What advice would you give them? Who you know as they as they prepare for these Olympics?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah. So I think I would just say, like, be adaptable. I think it's a really important thing, especially with these times, because we dealt with similar situations leading up to the games. Are they going to be cancelled or are they going to be postponed again? What's going to happen if this happens? And then obviously you have COVID testing and then you have positive tests and everything that's going on in the village. So just be adaptable to whatever situation comes up because I think the more flexible you are, whatever situation comes up, you'll be able to handle. And I think if you have that ability, that's something else that some of your competitors might not have. And then you can get through any situation.

PH: You know, I'm not here to ask you a political question, but there is the diplomatic boycott going on with the Beijing Games, you know, in a sense. I wonder about focus again. And I wondered, does that add stresses to athletes? Like how do athletes deal with that kind of stuff that is outside the realm of what of what you're doing and what they're doing? How does that play into the psyche of it?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah, it can. It can probably add some stress. But again, I think you have to be adaptable to just kind of move around those types of situations. But I think that once the game starts, everything on the outside world kind of just goes away to a certain extent. I think that so many of these athletes, like I was when I was younger, have focussed their whole lives on going to the Olympics or going there and winning a medal representing their country. So all this other political stuff kind of goes out the window when you're there and your sole focus is on competing as best as you can and enjoying that moment because I think that it's imperative that they go there and they just enjoy the whole competition and not necessarily focus on anything on the outside.

PH: I do want to ask you about Lou Marsh as well. Um uh, again, the honour of being named this year's Athlete of the Year, winning the Lou Marsh Trophy this year, growing calls for the name of that award to be changed. Lou Marsh, as many know as a longtime sports journalist in Toronto who used racial tropes and made racist comments, what do you think about that? Do you think the name of the award should be changed?

DAMIAN WARNER: I do. It's one of those things where I think that for such for an award that has such an incredible honour attached to it, you know, like with with so many great athletes that have won it in the past, I think that it's something that all Canadians should be proud of, and I think it's something that the athletes receiving the award should be proud of. And I think that there shouldn't be any other questions that come along with it, like about the person who's named after it, like what their characters like. And I just said that I don't think that we should villainize the person for what he said in the past, necessarily. But I think as a country, we're all moving forward to like. This better place, and I think that we should have somebody in a ward, this calibre that we can all be proud of, so I got behind the changing it to. Terry Fox, because he's something that somebody that I learnt about when I was a young kid. And I think that he's somebody. If the award was named after him, all Canadians could respect that, and all Canadians that win the award would be proud of that.

PH: And you know, this all comes, you know, this is a time of reckoning and reassessing racism, colonialism in our past. Athletes have this great platform, right? Do you see athletes, you know, in the world of sport doing enough to push for those kinds of things to push for equality and justice?

DAMIAN WARNER: Um, I think a lot of athletes are using their platforms to help out in their communities. And I think that that's to me, that's the most important thing. Like I grew up in some situations where people didn't necessarily have food or clothes or weren't able to pay their rent. So a lot of my focus on what I'm trying to do is to try to find ways or strategies to to mitigate those. And I think that other people who are in situations where they experience racism or they know people that have experienced racism, they're trying to do things to cut that out. You know, I think that people just want a situation where it's better not only for themselves, but other people. And I think that athletes and just everybody around the world these days seems to be standing up and trying to fight for a better place. And and I'm all for that.

PH: You will be back competing again soon. Uh, what are you planning for the new year?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah. So in the new year, we have the World Indoor Championships, which would be around March. We have the World Outdoor Championships that will be in in July, I believe. And then we have a competition in Austria called Goats US. It's a competition that I go to every year and that will be around me. So those are the three big ones that we have this year.

PH: Are you a Winter Olympics fan? Will you be watching from a comfy chair somewhere?

DAMIAN WARNER: I'll be watching from the warmth of my house. Yes. Yeah, I am. I am a fan of the winter sports and it's before I even got involved in in summer sports. It was the winter sports that I watched with my mom. So we watched a lot of like figure skating and we watched a lot of like speed skating. So Let Katrina Let Me Down was one of my big idols as a kid and someone that I looked up to and saw. And over the years I've gotten to do some events. So there's been some crossover with some of the athletes. So I've gotten to know some of them, and I trained out in Calgary for a couple of years, so I got to see how hard some of those speed skaters worked in the bobsledder. So I'm really excited to see what they're what they're able to do at these Olympics.

PH: 2024 is a lifetime away, but what do you think? Are we going to see you at the Olympics in 2024?

DAMIAN WARNER: Oh, for sure. I think it's a lot closer than it seems. We're almost in 2022 and before we know what the Olympics will be here again.

PH: So, you know, so, so you win, you know that you win the gold in the decathlon. How do you top it? Where do you go from there? What are you going to do?

DAMIAN WARNER: Yeah, so I don't know how you could top the feelings from winning your first Olympic Gold Medal. Maybe after 2024, if I'm able to defend my title, we can do another interview and I can give you some more insight on that, hopefully. But it's one of those things where when I set out for for this decathlon thing, we set out some pretty optimistic goals. So one of them was to win an Olympic Gold Medal and then another another one was to be the decathlon world record holder. So I'm still not the decathlon world record holder and it's something that we're working really hard to. So there's still goals that I have, and as time goes on and as you achieve certain goals, you adapt and you change those and you just always trying to be better and seeing what you can improve on and seeing where you can take the sport. So, yeah, I'm just trying to continue to train, work hard and see if I can improve some of my weaknesses to try to put myself in a position to challenge that world record.

PH: Damien, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much. Congratulations again. And uh, we'll see you in 2020 for those games, but we'll see a lot of times before then anyway. Thanks for chatting with us.

DAMIAN WARNER: Yes, thank you very much. Take care, guys.

PH: Damian Warner is the Olympic champion in the decathlon. He's in London, Ontario. The CBC News is next. Then. In six minutes, we head to a small city in Italy to meet the person who made that violin. I'm Paul Hunter and you're listening to The Current.

An inside look at violin making

Guest: Megan Williams

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PH: Hello. I'm Paul Hunter, and you're listening to The Current. Still to come. Facing your fears is never easy. In about 30 minutes, we'll wrap up Duncan McCue series Back to the Land with a documentary about two people who overcame their fear of the outdoors. We'll also take a look at the fresh new appointees to the Order of Canada. But first, a trip to Italy.

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PH: The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, played by Italian violinist Sofia Manicotti at the Violin Museum in Cremona, and it was played on an instrument made three and a half centuries ago in that same northern Italian town on a violin that is now part of the museum's priceless collection of stringed instruments and. I. The violin we're listening to was made by Antonio Stradivari, a name synonymous with masterpiece. To this day in Cremona, violin makers or luthiers, as they're called, are still producing some of the best violins in the world, and amongst them is a Canadian. CBC's Megan Williams travelled from her home in Rome to Cremona to meet the Toronto born Luthier and to learn about the town's violin making history that is still thriving today. Megan, good morning.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Good morning.

PH: So that bit of Tchaikovsky, we just heard the sound of the sound of the actual violin. I mean, holy cow, that was incredible.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing piece of music and beautifully played, and it's also the incredible articulation of the Stradivarius violin. It just gives you the shivers.

PH: Stradivari is the most famous name associated with centuries old violins, but I gather there's a lot more to the history of the instrument there is.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: And most of that early history took place in Cremona, this little town in northern Italy, along the whole river where Stradivari had his workshop in the mid 600s and many others as well. So picture a flat, elegant town with piazzas, with cobblestones laid out and round patterns and Romanesque archways. These rounded portico and brick and marble. And a town where everywhere to this day are signs of classical music. So young people cycling by with cellos strapped to their back and snippets of violin music lifting from open windows. There's a violin museum. There's the Stoffer Centre for Strings, where top young violinist study. There are violin making schools, and every corner you turn, it seems, is the storefront of a loose here or in Italian in luteal, which is a stringed instrument maker.

PH: Lute Yeah, what a great word. How did the violin come to define Cremona?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, it's the birthplace of the violin. It was a town, you know, back in 500 years ago with a lot of craftspeople and not too far from the wonderful spruce and maple forests. And in the early 1800s, a craftsman by the name of Andrea Amati made the violin in the consummate shape. We know today was the first one, and all sorts of other workshops with Master [unintelligilbe] began springing up. [Unintelligible] These are just sort of some of the big names, and they all produced instruments for the royal courts throughout Europe. And of course, Antonio Stradivari, who came along in the mid sixteen hundreds took the craft to really its highest form. He created violins with with astounding clarity and complexity of sound, and this perfect balance between power like projecting that sound while maintaining intimacy.

PH: Wait, so so these workshops have been operating for more than 500 years in Cremona?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, almost not quite. They did kind of peter out in the late 1800s when a lot of the workshops moved to Milan or other places that had bigger concert halls. But then they began popping up again. Around 1937, the town celebrated the bicentennial of study about his death and after World War Two, they really proliferated in part due to a donation of Stradivarius archives to the town. And, you know, a kind of town and municipal policy of supporting violin making and music. And so, you know, today there are more than 100 luthier workshops in Cremona.

PH: and now we find that there is a Canadian amongst them.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: There is. His name is Bernard Neumann. And he and his former mentor, an American named Bruce Carlson, who's now his partner, are actually amongst the world's top luthiers and restorers of these extraordinary older instruments from the 17th and 18th centuries. Here's Bernard as we were walking through the streets of corona and turning the corner towards his workshop.

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This is pretty much the violin. It's become the street of the violin makers. My shop is half way down on the left and my wife's shop, as is five doors further down. And it's very, very nice, intimate place to be making violins.

PH: So how did he end up in Cremona?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, he was studying music in Montreal at Concordia University, and he had this memory that that kind of stuck since childhood of his German grandfather, telling him about visiting Cremona and just being blown away by being in the place where Stradivari made his. First violin. So Bernhard decided to travel there, and he signed up at a violin making school, but it didn't give him access to those magnificent older instruments, hundreds of which are still around. So to get that hands on experience, he applied for a Canada council grant to apprentice with Bruce Carlson, restoring these older instruments and learning from them. That knowledge helped him make his own instruments, eventually.

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The violin being a three dimensional object. You can have all the pictures you want, but unless you have it in your hand and you can turn it around and try and figure out what makes it tick, you can understand the complexity of it in a two dimensional image. It's it's three dimensional, but it's more than three dimensional. It's a cross between architecture and engineering and sculpture and art, but all finalised in producing a voice for the musician and be able to do what the musician wants it to do.

PH: So a lot of different skills that go into it.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, absolutely. Here he is in his workshop with his latest instrument. This one is styled after those by [unintelligible], who Bernard really admires. He was a master luthier who made violins and Cremona in the early 18th century.

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Yeah, this this. This is what garden [unintelligilbe] model violin that I make that I've been making ever since I had the original here in the shop, and I really like the sound of it.

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MEGAN WILLIAMS: Now he played a few more for me, styled after other famous violin makers from Cremona and then worked a bit on the maple scroll. That's the fern like g clef shaped end of the neck of the violin.

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BERNARD: The outside cover has been done, but I have to do the hollowing in the back.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: It's to make it lighter?

BERNARD: It's just aesthetics. It's just to give it a light.

PH: Sounds crunchy, but it must be delicate carving is the whole violin made of maple?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, well, not the whole violin. The front is actually made of spruce and the fingerboard is made of ebony. But the neck and the back and the sides or ribs, as they're called, are all made of maple. And not just any maple or spruce for that matter, but wood that comes from alpine trees that grow at a very high altitude maples that are at least 60 years old as well. And the spruce needs to be at least 100 years old. And that's because you want a really dense wood that's flexible and light.

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BERNARD: IT has to be very strong, but light because it makes the foundation and the walls of the instrument and the neck is to withstand all the the pull and tension of the strings. The belly is more like a drum skin, but arched because it has to be free to vibrate. But at the same time has to resist the downward pressure of the strings on the top.

PH: on the top. So the wood vibrating is what gives it the sound.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, I mean, you obviously you have to the bow has to it has to run against the strings to make the sound, but it's the vibrating quality of the wood. The spruce and the maple. And this little cylindrical piece of wood that connects the front and the back of the violin inside the belly. It's called the sound post, and violin makers actually refer to that as the anima or the soul of the violin, which tells you just how important it is. But it's the particular arching shape that really determines the sound. And that was the big breakthrough really in Cremona centuries ago that if they arched the wooden bellies of the violin, they could create a certain sound in the sound that they were striving for at the time was the sound of Italian opera singers. With these very open vowels, French violins, by contrast, sound much more nasal. They don't have that Italian sound.

PH: So how do musicians who play Bernard's instruments describe their sound?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, I found a couple to ask because I was curious about that as well. Isabelle Fournier is a violinist with Symphony Nova Scotia, who five years ago travelled to Cremona to visit all the luthiers, as she said to to geek out over violins and find a new violin. And she says she tried a few that Bernard had selected for her, and this is what happened when she found hers.

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I picked one and started to play and it was... I still remember the feeling. It was like I was struck by lightning. It like, it's this one. This is my violin. It was. It was love.

PH: It was love. That's a strong reaction. What was so convincing for her?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, she says the sound was friendly, so that was simpatico with her. But she says it's also a violin that allows her to express a full range of emotions. And it had another quality that was really important to her.

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We often say it's a whole voice, meaning that going from the lowest string to the highest string, it felt like he was one person singing some violins. When you change strings, it's as though it's a different person singing. But this one, it was the same person from the lowest note to the highest note. And with time, it has really grown. It keeps improving.

PH: So I don't know. Is it a valid comparison to say good violins are like fine wines?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely. That yeah, that's the exact analogy that Isabel Fournier made with violins when you play them a lot. They vibrate a lot, and that's good for the wood. The wood is obviously an alive material, and that matures them and transforms their voice. That's another instrument Bernard made, it's a cello that belongs to [unintelligible], who's a renowned Italian cellist.

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And as soon as I touched it, I discovered two beautiful things. It was extremely powerful. But at the same time, it was very warm, very intimate. It was not a trumpet like all the instruments. You see, also from before of the instrument, the instrument of burnout, it is like the sculptor, he work on it as a sculptor.

PH: Interesting. There's that concept of a violin as a sculpture again.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely. I mean, Bernard couldn't stress that more. Here he is again.

SOUNDCLIP

BERNARD: The difference is in the voices of the great instruments comes from the shape of the arching, and it's such a complex shape. We do cat scans of the instruments so we can have a complete cross-section of the whole marching arching. Basically, I have to make that that shape to get close to that voice that I'm trying to get.

PH: Wait a second, they use cat scan, so there's science to the art and precision.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. I know it's it's amazing. And it's it's not just sculpting the outside of the violin that gives it its sound, but also the inside, which which Bernard calls the shadow arching. You think of it as sort of two different sides of of a coin with different topographies and thickness in the middle, and all of those sort of combine to to form the voice of the violin.

PH: So I'm I'm curious. He talks about the voice that he wants to give the violin, but I would assume that the musician has a pretty central role in that as well. No.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Well, this is a point that I found really interesting in talking with Bernard and where things got a little kind of sensitive. I think he makes violins for the most part on commission. So with a particular musician in mind, but he also sees his instruments, and he's very clear about this as transcending any one particular musician.

SOUNDCLIP

BERNARD: I know so many musicians and a lot of musicians have instruments that aren't sufficient for them. And so I make a violin thinking about someone, but I make my violin the way I want it because I decide and I want it to be ready to defend itself. Just like like the study bodies that I work on in the garden areas of their minds or what it means is they need to have people look after them because they have a long life and we are transiting through their lives. And I want to give my instrument that burst good DNA genetic structure so that it can also defend itself on its own and be treasured by by a musician to be his or her voice.

PH: Interesting choice of word defend.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Absolutely. I was really struck by that word choice as well. You know what? I didn't know exactly what he meant to have an instrument defend itself. You know, I didn't understand where the attack was coming from, and I ask him and he kind of struggled with the answer. And his 25 year old daughter, Cosima, was there with us. She was sort of hanging out in the workshop while we were chatting, and she stepped in with this explanation.

SOUNDCLIP

There is a stigma dad. New versus the old violin. Making a new instruments are considered to be lesser than. There definitely is a stigma on knew that dad and mom and all the violin makers need to constantly fight against. And the only way to prove it is by your instrument being not only as good as, but, you know, potentially even being better if they can, if it's possible. And that's why I think he chose the word defend. My mom uses it as well, because I think especially my mom, who only does a new, really feels that pressure that judgement within the music world. I would say.

PH: Interesting perspective and from both parents.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. And it was fascinating talking to Cosima because, you know, she's grown up with both her parents, violin makers, so she's deeply steeped in this world. And yet she has some distance from what they do that maybe they don't even have. Bernard was with someone in his workshop, and so Cosima and I got chatting and here we are, just just chatting and some of her observations about her parents as luthiers.

SOUNDCLIP

I think dad just brings a kindness to the community that maybe was missing a little bit before he was in it. And my mom on the other side brings the grit because, you know, I could tell you how many times I've heard people address my dad as maestro. And then they would say, Oh, and you know, this is his wife. And my mom does her own thing. I mean, she has a completely different style. I would say my my mom's violins are much, you know, grittier and just more me. Meanwhile, I don't pick sides, but I find my mom's violins even more interesting. It reflects her character. My mom is a very complex person and her violins are just as complex in sound. And then my dad has this gentle, more nurturing side and his violins reflect that. Which is incredible. I mean, to hear the person within the violin, how scary is that that anyone can hear who you are through the violin or the instrument that you produce like that just bares your soul. You can't hide anything like you. It's going to come through who you are if you're a negative person, if you're a positive person, if you're rigid or if you're flexible, that comes out.

PH: It's interesting the different ways she described the sound of the instruments made by her parents. Did you get to meet Bernard's wife, Alessandra Perrotta?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: I did. I did. And she's a very different kind of violin maker. For one, she doesn't do restoration. She devotes all of her time actually to making instruments for top soloists and lead violinists in orchestras. This is one of her violents.

[Music]

MEGAN WILLIAMS: She makes a kind of violin in in luthier or musician speak that you can lean into, you know, playing the violin is obviously very physical and some players want to really be able to use the force of their body when they play certain passages. And so she makes violins that can really handle that kind of force.

SOUNDCLIP

My instruments have a very strong, distinctive personality. The wood needs to be cut in a certain way and cut well, for example. And especially for the maple parts of the instrument, the wood has to be very dense for me to achieve the sound. I strive for powerful, warm with a wide range of colours.

PH: What does she mean by colours?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: She means a range of harmonic waves with each note. Here's musician Benjamin Juppé playing on a cello that she made for him. Alessandra compares instruments with a range of colours with a painting that uses different hues and colours, and she says it's the colours in the sound that makes listening to music an emotional experience, and the challenge really is to get that quality every time.

SOUNDCLIP

Many, many violins are well-designed and easy to play, but don't have anything personal about them. It's like someone who plays a lot of nice notes that don't add up to music. The sound of my violins needs to move me. When you have such high expectations, you tremble before the task each time.

Speaker 7: Full transparency, Megan I played violin from grade seven to 13. I was never any good and not sure even one of these would have helped. This has been it's fascinating what goes into these things. Thank you so much, Megan. I've loved all of this. Before we go any chance of hearing some more of the Stradivarius?

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Yeah, absolutely. Let's go with some summer from Antonio Vivaldi. Here's the same young Italian violinist from Cremona, Sophia Sofia Vati playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

PH: Thanks again, Megan Williams.

MEGAN WILLIAMS: Thank you. My pleasure.

[Music]

PH: This is Vivaldi's Four Seasons coming up after your regional update, Diane Snowden has already been recognised in B.C. for being an extraordinary Canadian. Now, Rideau Hall has made her national news. I'll speak with the New Order of Canada appointee in 90 seconds. I'm Paul Hunter and you're listening to The Current.

Child advocate Diane Sowden among Order of Canada honourees; and Back to the Land: How nature enthusiasts overcame their fear of the outdoors

Guest: Diane Sowden

PH: I'm Paul Hunter sitting in for Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current. 135 people will end this year with a prestigious honour. Yesterday, they were named to the Order of Canada. The list includes renowned scientists, authors, activists, politicians, athletes and business leaders, some of them quite well known, others less so. Amongst those honoured is Diane Sowden. She's the founder of the Children of the Street Society, a non-profit she created in 1995 after her then 13 year old daughter was sexually exploited and trafficked in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. For decades, the organisation has worked to prevent that from happening to other kids. Hey Diane, good morning and congratulations.

DIANE SOWDEN: Good morning, Paul. Thank you very much.

PH: What does this honour mean to you?

DIANE SOWDEN: Oh, my goodness. It actually overwhelms me and makes me so happy that this fight against sexual exploitation is actually being nationally recognised, and it just makes me feel everything we did was worthwhile and that it will continue.

PH: You became a youth advocate through your own experience with your daughter, Katie. What happened to Katie when she was 13?

DIANE SOWDEN: Well, we lived in the small community in B.C. and she was a regular 13 year old going to school and she connected with a wrong person in town. And he had a lot of skills to manipulate her and unfortunately, he targeted her and we ended up losing her to the streets of Vancouver for several years and. I was, as a parent, very shocked and surprised that there was very little as a parent we could do to intervene and very little the authorities, police child protection could do, and that's where my passion came from so that we could change that so it wouldn't happen to other young people and other families like ours.

PH: It would have been easy to do nothing, wouldn't it, though, to just move on. Deal with your own circumstance and be done with it. What pushed you to go? To do what you did to create a non-profit that I'm going to guess changed your life.

DIANE SOWDEN: Oh, definitely. Previous to that, I owned a market research company, had several employees, which I had built up over the years, and the passion wasn't there for that anymore, and I could see a need. And I guess the thing that drove me is that when I did go public, so many other families reached out to me. And so I realised we weren't the only people. This wasn't an isolated situation. And there was a lot of silent voices out there, and I was willing and able to be able to be the voice for a lot of parents that, for whatever reason, couldn't do that. And then I could see so many barriers through the Criminal Code and through child protection that we could work with politicians and with the community to have those things change. And as things started slowly changing, that gives you even more drive and lettuce to go, working on different issues over 25 years.

PH: I bet it would lead to more. So let's unpack that a little bit. You know, because you were, I think, in the House of Commons, you testified back in 2000 before the Federal Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. What were you pushing for? What were you advocating for on a federal level?

DIANE SOWDEN: Well, at that point, I was talking about the inability for families to step in and keep their kids safe. And the way the system was set up at that time is rather than getting treatment or support for a youth, they ended up in the criminal justice system. And I had officers in our community tell me, Well, if she gets caught doing a crime, maybe we can charge her, then we can hold her and do something. And to me, that just didn't make sense, to criminalise someone that needed social programmes and support. So that was one of the main things I was talking about in Ottawa was how do we give support to families without criminalising their children. That also at the same time I was fighting for to raise the legal age of sexual consent. And so when my daughter was 13, she got on the street and then at 14, she was pregnant and naive. As I was, I thought, OK, she's pregnant. She's with an older fellow. That's statutory rape, someone's going to do something now. And I found out there was no such thing here and that the legal age of such consent in Canada at that point was 14, and she could be sent to having sex even through manipulation to any age adult. And I was absolutely appalled at that. And so I started fighting to have the legal age of such consent raised, which took 14 years, but it did. 2008, they changed it to the age of 16. So those are the things that were barriers for us as a family that I could see could make it easier for parents to support their children and for the child protection to be able to step in and keep children safe.

PH: I'm going to guess that is the change you are most proud of at this from all of them.

DIANE SOWDEN: It's one of the ones the Child Protection Act in B.C. I've been able to be at a lot of roundtable discussions and there's been a lot of changes. And also, as far as the definition of what human trafficking is, has changed over the time. When my daughter was on what we called track on the street level being exploited, she wasn't actually under the Criminal Code to consider human trafficking. And one of the big barriers they had is that she hadn't crossed the border. So that's one of the things that has changed as well. A young person who's been human trafficked falls under the definition even if they haven't crossed the border. And when she was on the street, I was shocked. When a young girl came up from Portland, Oregon, three pimps brought her up and put her on the track, and she was only 11 at the time, and within hours, police social workers were involved. At the same time, my daughter was down on the same street and no one can intervene, and the barrier was that she hadn't been taken across the border. So we weren't able to protect our own children that were being exploited in our own communities. But we could protect someone that was being brought across from another country. So that's another thing that I thought, I think is a huge change to the Criminal Code.

PH: For all the changes you've helped bring Diane, I have such respect for everyone who does things for the benefit of others and. Thank you, and congratulations on the order of Canada.

DIANE SOWDEN: Thank you so much.

PH: Diane Sowden is the founder of the Children of the Street Society in British Columbia. She is amongst this year's appointees to the Order of Canada. She's in Langley, B.C.. I'm Paul Hunter, and you're listening to The Current. If you live in a house apartment condo in a city, nature can feel foreign. You might get a breeze if you open your window or see a patch of green off in the distance. But that separation can sometimes make the outdoors seem intimidating. Scary, even. Outside the comfortable confines of the neighbourhood, after all, there are wild animals, wild landscapes and unpredictable weather, but facing that fear was one of the best things these next two people ever did. Their stories are part of the last episode of CBC journalist Duncan McCue's four part series about reconnecting with nature. This is back to the land.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I've never been to this place before. Only a few people have ever actually been to this exact location in the Turks and Caicos Islands. And there was this one massive channel that was just pitch black darkness. I couldn't see across it. I couldn't even, I couldn't even tell where it ended. I realised that, OK, there are no other better possibilities. I just have to swim across.

VOICE 2: I had gone ice climbing in in the Northern Rockies, in northern B.C. with some friends, and I had never had a picnic of this level before it. I think I just let myself get too cold to hungry, too tired.

VOICE 1: Just before I actually went in the water, it was funny. I saw a turtle's head kind of pop out in front of me and I was like thinking like, wow, this definitely is a channel that animals use for crossing's. And I'm hoping that there aren't any hungry sharks that are, you know, looking to nibble on anything. I decided to switch off the fear and put that aside and then just start to focus on what I always do, which is focus on the present moment, focus on exactly what I need to do, which was go as fast as I possibly can.

VOICE 2: I was in sort of a fragile state generally at that time, about six months after my mom had died and I just had a complete meltdown, what I understood later to be, you know, a pretty serious panic attack. I became convinced that if I moved one single step from where I was standing at the top of this frozen creek, I would die. I couldn't move. I couldn't really breathe. I felt just like certain doom.

VOICE 1: That's actually the first time I ever swam in the ocean at Night-Time. I couldn't see anything at all, I couldn't see the other side, and the only thing that I really saw were the stars in the sky, and you could see essentially the galaxy above you. All you could hear is in some ways and you could hear like the water against the shore. That's how I started to realise that I was getting closer and closer to the other side. This is the kind of listening for the water to hit the shore.

VOICE 2: I told my friends to leave me there and go on without me. I'm sorry I'm staying here. Some sort of comical in retrospect. But at the time, it was, you know, late afternoon in February in the subarctic and it was getting dark and I was soaking wet. And I wouldn't have lived very long. If they had left me there. I wouldn't have lived till Monday, probably. So they had to get me down almost against my will.

VOICE 1: I remember when I made it across and I finally landed on the beach. I went on my knees and I remember I screamed really loud to myself. And it was it was just a euphoric kind of feeling in a moment that brought me to realise that fear is something that you can you can really conquer.

VOICE 2: And that was really what pushed me to say this is not an acceptable level of fear anymore. Either have to give up these passions that I enjoy in the outdoors or I have to figure out how to fix this.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Fear of the outdoors. It's a thing whether it's wild animals, unpredictable weather or treacherous landscapes, nature can be scary. This is a story about two different people who face their fears in the outdoors and how they did it.

EVA: I'm Eva Holland, I'm a freelance writer based in Whitehorse in the Yukon. I mostly write magazine articles, often for Outside magazine, and I'm the author of the book Nerve: A Personal Journey Through the Science of Fear.

MARIO: My name is Mario Rigby and I am an eco-explorer. That means I do adventures in a sustainable way.

DUNCAN MCCUE: They both sound pretty outdoorsy, right? But neither one of them grew up knowing much of anything about nature.

EVA: I was a total city kid. I grew up in Ottawa mostly, and we weren't, you know, a camping family. I, I didn't get out of the city a lot. So I was riding the bus to the mall in the summer to enjoy the air conditioning. And I thought about things like hikes and trips and big adventures, always read adventure books. When I was growing up, I just didn't really have the means to do them. I think I had been camping three or four times in my life when I moved to the Yukon at twenty eight and I kind of jumped in the deep end backpacking in grizzly country and learning how to do creek crossings. And it was terrifying. It was a lot to take in. There's a lot to try to learn and navigate safely.

MARIO: I actually did not grow up doing outdoor activity. This is quite new to me. I only started in my late 20s. I don't really see too many people that are black in the outdoors, particularly men. So it's a rare thing.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Mario's entry point to nature was a crisis in his life. He was no longer happy being a fitness instructor. After grinding it out all day at the gym, he took up walking.

MARIO: I started with small walks, you know, one hour walks through Toronto. I would go back and forth from home to work and I stopped taking the subway. The streetcars, I just ended up walking. And those walks were quite therapeutic to me because I started to really listen to what my mind is telling me. I really started to focus on things that I never focussed on before, like what really matters to me. I was afraid of being stuck in a world without this kind of like global adventure that I've always wanted as a kid.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Something about those walks stirred memories of his childhood inspiration, the superhero Black Panther. The blog is.

MARIO: So when I was a kid, my brother, that we would watch this show called The Black Panther and there was an episode where the child of the king of Wauconda, before he became the king of Wauconda, after his father had died, he decided that he wanted to go on a walkabout around Africa to experience a different kind of life in which he knew that would eventually lead him to become a better leader. And they kind of stuck with me for the rest of my life, like it was always kind of in the back of my mind. But I never realised that this is something that I could also probably do myself. And as I started doing these walks, I was realising that, OK, well, I could probably do something that's a walking adventure.

DUNCAN MCCUE: He hatched a plan to walk across eight countries in Africa over two years, but there was a small problem.

MARIO: I never knew how to camp prior to Africa. I never owned a tent. I never owned a backpack. I never owned any of these things. So this was all quite new to me. I had to learn exponentially right on the spot. When I told people I'm going to walk the length of Africa, 90 percent of my friends just basically laughed it off or were incredibly worried about me. They said, like, what about the lions? And what about, you know, so they always constantly came up with the worst case scenarios.

DUNCAN MCCUE: How did you set about overcoming those fears?

MARIO: By, you know, looking at things step by step.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Eva Hollande also took it step by step. Her Yukon friends kept inviting her on outdoor trips. It was either stay home alone or face her paralysing fear of heights.

EVA: I'm fine with aeroplanes. Bridges generally balcony's as long as they had like a good, sturdy railing. It was all about whether or not I felt like I could fall. So where that ties into my life in the Yukon is it mostly manifested if I was hiking on any kind of steep or exposed slope or when I try to do things like rock climbing.

DUNCAN MCCUE: She set out to change that by trying different therapies for overcoming fear and being a journalist. She documented her experience. First was exposure therapy.

EVA: It was really challenging, especially once I understood a bit more about the science. I understood that the goal isn't to get to the top of the rock climb when you're using climbing as a form of exposure therapy. The goal is to try to stay calm, which is harder in some ways. So I would go only a few, a few steps off the ground, a few moves. I'd be the height of a stepladder off the ground and I'd be starting to feel my chest tighten and my breathing accelerate. It's what has often been called the fight or flight reaction. That's our body readying itself to defend against the threat that you perceive the threat to your safety. And I had to learn to sort of stop there, not try to push through it, not try to force it. I had always been my instinct before was just you suck it up and push through. But the goal with exposure therapy was to get just to the point, get as far as I could without panicking and then try to get one step further next time. It's a very gradual process, a lot of work, but it can be rewarding for people who put the time in. And it did make a difference for me. I was by the end of a season of climbing, I was a lot calmer.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Mario, on the other hand, was jumping in with both feet after his successful trek across Africa, planting more globetrotting eco adventures. Then the pandemic hit.

MARIO: The coronavirus was was widespread. And I think a lot of people were in a very depressive state at that time, including myself. And I felt like I really wanted to explore the outdoors. I wanted to go out on an adventure. And of course, it would have been, you know, incredibly irresponsible to have gone outside of my province. By now. I'm paddling through the waters along the shoreline of Lake Ontario, Toronto. Sitting in a kayak feels like sitting on the clouds.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Yeah, to tell me about his pandemic adventure, Mario took us out to the lake, him in his kayak, me and my canoe.

MARIO: Every time I take a stroke and paddle in the water, it feels like I'm slicing butter, it feels like art, almost like when an artist takes his brush and strokes the canvas. But the paint, it's such a soothing feeling. And instead of creating something, you're exploring something.

DUNCAN MCCUE: It wasn't quite so soothing last year when he decided to paddle the length of Lake Ontario.

MARIO: It was definitely scary at first. You know, I do get scared for a lot of these things, but I also know that, you know, I'm a quick learner. The rollover rate is just so high that any small SETTON movement can cause your kayak to roll over and you're protected by a skirt which is used to prevent water from going inside the cockpit area where where your feet are. And and so when you flip over and if you don't have a handle to pull your your skirt off, then you could be stuck inside that and you could essentially drowned as you're upside down in that kayak.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Was it scary being out in the window when the waves are on Lake Ontario on the

MARIO: way to get high? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there are times where I'm just the whole time, you know, super nervous and trying to figure out what what's the next move? What do I need to do?

DUNCAN MCCUE: He paddled nearly 400 kilometres in three weeks encountering raw physical pain, thunderstorms, high winds, fear aplenty

MARIO: for you, makes you feel alive because all your senses are like maximum level. Everything is heightened. Your sense of smell, touch, sight, everything becomes like extra sensitive. And I feel like if you can manage that, if you can control that in a way, then you can use that almost as a as a weapon.

DUNCAN MCCUE: For him, tackling nature is all about meticulous preparation.

MARIO: Once you have the skills and the knowledge to do that, you have the skills and knowledge to do anything else you want to do in life. The foundation starts with your confidence within yourself, going into nature and being able to conquer it. You'll be able to conquer what's within you.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Is there a danger if people head out into nature and try to conquer it?

MARIO: There absolutely is a lot of danger to that. But this is also not what I expect most people to want to do in their lives. Explorers make up a very small population of humans on the planet.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Eva Holland is no explorer. She just wanted to get over her fear of heights. So she dialled it up a notch. She flew to a clinic in Amsterdam where scientists are working to get rid of phobias with a single pill.

EVA: It is kind of sci fi. There's a psychologist in Amsterdam, Dr. Malkin, who is applying the latest neuroscience into how our memory storage works to try to cure phobias. And when we acquire a memory, put it into long term storage. And then when it's sort of when we're sort of triggered, we bring it out of long term storage again. And there's a protein synthesis reaction that occurs not just when we first put the memory into storage, but also when we sort of open it up and put it away again. And so what the clinic in Amsterdam is doing is using a very common beta blocker, which disrupts protein synthesis. It's called propranolol.

DUNCAN MCCUE: That pill was meant to disrupt her memory. But first her doctor had to deliberately trigger her panic.

EVA: In my case, because Amsterdam is the flattest place in the world to trigger my fear of heights, she put me in the bucket of a fire truck and set it up, a tide that would go, oh, my God, what was that like? It was terrifying. I think I was crying a little bit. She sort of made me sort of ride the panic as fully as possible. And then when she felt that I was kind of good and right, we went down and she gave me the pill. And spoiler alert, 24 hours later, I was back up in that bucket again, taking selfies

DUNCAN MCCUE: and did it work?

EVA: It did, as far as I can tell, it did. I was completely free of panic the next day, and I have since gone ziplining and done some hikes that I never imagined I'd be able to do without sort of crawling on my hands and knees in tears.

DUNCAN MCCUE: There are lots of folks who find the great outdoors scary. If that's what's holding you back. You don't have to go so far as popping a fear pill or tackling an extreme adventure. Both Mario and Eva recommend taking baby steps, maybe sleep in a tent in your backyard, try a short hike close to home.

MARIO: Fear is usually something that comes from the unknown. If you don't know about something, the best thing to do is to stay away from it. And the body has a proper response for that. When we're raised, we're not taught about the outdoors. We're taught about, you know, mathematics, English and biology and all those kinds of things. But we're not taught about the different plants and animals. It's hard to find people that will willingly put themselves in a vulnerable position because we've been taught our entire lives to to shelter ourselves from things that could be a threat to us.

EVA: I came into the project thinking, you know, defeat your fear, overcome your fear, conquer fear. That was sort of my conception of what I was trying to do. And I really moved away from that that understanding of it. I actually was able to really change my relationship to fear. I do tend to think of it now more as a renegotiation or a sort of a changing of the parameters of my relationship with fear rather than overcoming or conquering. What does it mean to succeed on a hiking trip? I hope it means that you had some good conversations around a campfire maybe, or you saw some wildlife from a respectful distance, or you your body felt good while you were moving across whatever terrain you were moving across.

MARIO: We've been sold the idea that within the vicinity of your home, this is where you are most safe. And to a certain extent, you know, you might be physically safer from the possibilities of falling or tripping on a rock or, you know, being bitten by a mosquito with malaria, et cetera, et cetera. However, when you're on your deathbed, it's have you really lived a full life in a very short amount of time? In the last two hundred or so years, we've decided that we're just going to sit and lunch. And I think that's quite harmful to not only our bodies, but to our psyche as well.

EVA: Also, there's so many benefits, you know, as we increasingly know to being outdoors, health benefits, mental health benefit. It feels good to be out there hearing the wind in the trees or seeing wildlife. If we can find a way to see it without scaring us and without risking its safety either. I would just tell people not to expect too much of themselves and not to push it right away. You don't have to go straight to Mount Everest.

DUNCAN MCCUE: Don't be one of those people that needs the search and rescue to come and get.

EVA: Ideally not. That would be if you're coming through.

[Music]

PH: That was the final episode in Duncan McCue series Back to the Land. It first aired on The Current in September. The series was produced by Duncan McCue, along with Jon Weber and Zoe Tennant. That's our programme for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for q. Seth Rogen is a comedy titan known for his film and TV work, his penchant for smoking pot, and his hobby as a ceramicist. Now he can add to that list. Author Seth Jones Tom Power to Talk about Yearbook, a collection of essays that explores his childhood in Vancouver, a near-death experience with a tiger, and why famous people make him uncomfortable. I'm Paul Hunter sitting in for Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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