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The Current Transcript for December 21, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: All sorts of claims are made for the V2s of the future. Apparently the bombardment of New York from Germany would be quite feasible and no doubt that explosion on the target would be atomic.

MATT GALLOWAY: This pandemic has often been compared to a war. Front lines, generals in charge, a unified response required. In his latest novel, the best-selling author Robert Harris reminds us what an actual war looks like. V2 is about the rocket of the same name that changed the Second World War. And in 30 minutes, he's here to explain how. And we'll learn how Farley Mowat, yes, the same Farley Mowat, came to be in possession of a V2 rocket. Plus, your letters on the best thing that happened to you in this miserable year. For one family, that great thing involved looking up.

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VOICE 1: What are we looking at right now?

VOICE 2: Space.

VOICE 1: OK, so.

VOICE 2: And that's Mars. That's Saturn. That's Jupiter.

MG: The power of stargazing to bring a family together. We begin though with a call from some doctors to bring families together in hospitals, as this virus spreads. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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Loved ones have been kept away from hospital patients since the pandemic began – but some doctors are calling for visitor restrictions to ease

Guests: Christina Stewart, Laveena Munshi

MG: There's not much that hasn't been completely changed by COVID. Hospitals, for obvious reasons, have become hyper vigilant around who comes through their doors, and this has meant that visitors are limited if they're allowed in at all. A new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal says restrictions on visitors are too tough and need to be lifted to help both the patients and the medical staff. In a few minutes, I'll speak with one of the authors of that report. But first, Christina Stewart is on the line. Her 19-year-old son, Quinn, was just in hospital. He has refractory epilepsy and a rare chromosome deletion. He's non-verbal and so when he went into hospital in Winnipeg, his mom wanted to be there, but COVID restrictions meant that Quinn was on his own. Christina Stewart, good morning.

CHRISTINA STEWART: Good morning.

MG: Quinn's been home for a few days. How's he doing?

CHRISTINA STEWART: He's doing OK now. When I first got him to the hospital, he wasn't doing all so well.

MG: But he's all right now?

CHRISTINA STEWART: . Yeah. Yeah. He's doing actually great now.

MG: When you first arrived at hospital with Quinn, what happened?

CHRISTINA STEWART: He had 10 straight grand mal seizures in under an hour. So I had to call the ambulance, of course, and we ended up spending 30 hours in the E.R. and then as soon as they were able to admit him, I was told within under an hour that's it, you have to leave. So I had to leave him there.

MG: So when you explained his special needs, did you ask about staying or visiting on a regular basis?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Oh yes. Yes, I made a little bit of the argument with the nurses and doctors, which actually they wanted me there. It was the administration and that was just the worst day of my life, to tell you the truth. I've never left Quinn, never been away from him that long, never anything and that was just terrifying.

MG: So what did they say back to you when you when you explained, you know, obviously what you need to do and how you needed to be there with him? What was their response?

CHRISTINA STEWART: They just kept telling me, no. I didn't give up throughout the whole ordeal. The whole time he was there, I kept making phone calls every morning, every day, all through the evening even. I had conference calls with administration, it was still no. No matter what, contacting MLAs, what have you, it didn't matter what I did.

MG: And when you, in that initial moment, you said they gave you how long until you had to leave?

CHRISTINA STEWART: It was not even an hour.

MG: An hour. How much help do you give Quinn every day?

CHRISTINA STEWART: I'm his primary caregiver. So I have to bathe him, I have to feed him, I have to change his diaper, everything.

MG: And you'd never really been apart from him?

CHRISTINA STEWART: No. Other than getting my normal respite here and there, but during this COVID, normally the respite, my respite worker does it while I'm at home even. So no, I never leave him.

MG: How long was he in hospital without you?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Eight days.

MG: Eight days. And you said, when we started talking, when I asked you how he was, you said that when you initially picked him up, he wasn't doing well. Tell me about that.

CHRISTINA STEWART: No. They had him, they promised me all these FaceTime phone calls, which I got very minimal. They promised me that he was right at the first bed at the nurses station. So I was assuming that they could see him. They were telling me that they could see him from the nurses station. So when I finally got the phone call, which was all of a sudden out of the blue on a Wednesday evening. So I picked him up and then I was allowed on the ward, of course. So I get there and they had him so sedated that it took two to three days after bringing him home for him to even be able to walk. He couldn't do anything. I had to carry him from bed into his wheelchair, which normally we just have a wheelchair because he has a lot of drop seizures and what have you. So that's for when we're out and about, not for just walking around at home or anything like that. So I had to lift him from the bed into the wheelchair. They had him so sedated it wasn't really funny.

MG: And they called you to tell you to come and pick him up?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Yes, just out of the blue. I didn't even know I was getting him that day.

MG: And you were allowed to go into the hospital to pick them up then?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Correct.

MG: So did you find that confusing, given the fact that you weren't allowed to be in the hospital when he was actually in the hospital?

MG: Yes, I even asked about it. They said they have no clue. And I wasn't even allowed to speak to a doctor when I picked him up. It was just the nurses, that was it. And they were actually on my side. They wanted, one neurologist actually even stated to me that he looked at me as a walking EEG with Quinn because there was one point where throughout the night the nurses, the doctor touched base with me in the morning and the nurses had contacted the doctor throughout the night not knowing whether it was seizures Quinn was having or not, which obviously it was seizures. But if I were there, of course, I would have known that it was seizures that he was having throughout the night.

MG: Just to be clear, I mean, what was the reason why you weren't allowed in? What were you told about why you couldn't be there with your son?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Just the code red, that was it.

MG: And that the code red would prevent you, that that's the rule and so there's no visitors allowed?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Correct. And no matter which angle I took, no matter who I called, nothing.

MG: Do you understand the need for hospitals from their perspective to be as careful as they have to be and as cautious as possible about any possible risk that that could spread COVID?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Well, I understand them being careful, but what I don't understand is that they let us be in the E.R. for 30 hours with people that are being tested for COVID all around us when we were tested and we're negative, they'll let me sit in the E.R. with all this COVID around, but yet when we're tested negative, not let me go up to a COVID-free ward with him. And when I got onto that ward to pick him up, there was people walking from room to room. It was just one big kerfuffle. It didn't make any sense to me whatsoever.

MG: So what would you say then to those who run hospitals as they try to balance covid restrictions and the needs of their patients? I mean we're seeing across the country, in many parts cases rise and, you know, other lockdowns are in place or other lockdowns are coming into place, so in the midst of all of that, what would you say to those administrators that you weren't able to speak with in that moment about the situation that you found yourself in?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Well, I mean, it's just ridiculous. Us as caregivers, we need to be there. I mean Quinn, there's no way Quinn could communicate to anybody over there saying that he's thirsty or hungry or anything and them understand what he's trying to motion to. And plus, our health care workers are so overworked, why wouldn't you want to relieve them of apparently being with somebody like Quinn 24/7 as opposed to them being able to be somewhere else where they could be needed? And it's where I could be just right there and do their job.It just doesn't make any sense.

MG: We asked Shared Health Manitoba to speak with us. They declined an interview, but sent a statement that reads in part, "Essential care partner access is restricted, but will be supported in certain circumstances to support patients who require assistance with communication, care, planning and decision making, as well as those who normally have constant care or attendance. Patients and their families are asked to work with their care team and facility to arrange visitation for essential care partners where in-person support is required." It sounds as though that didn't happen for you though.

CHRISTINA STEWART: No, it didn't happen at all. I even brought that up to them and that didn't matter.

MG: What would happen if Quinn were needed to go back to the hospital?

CHRISTINA STEWART: Right now, it's a big fear. If he were to have a big cluster of seizures like he had prior and needed to go into hospital, of course I'm going to have to take him, but it's a big fear because what if I can't be with him again? And going through that again is just, would be just horrifying. And I can only imagine how it was for Quinn. Me being his mom, I've never left his side and going through that and all of a sudden I'm not there and he's just being sedated all that time and what have you and who knows what really went on? I have no clue.

MG: I appreciate you speaking with us this morning, Christina, and I hope Quinn's doing OK. Thanks again for talking to us.

CHRISTINA STEWART: Thank you so much.

MG: Christina Stewart's son, Quinn, was in hospital in Winnipeg. Those rules around hospital visitors vary across the country, but many doctors are calling on hospitals to ease the restrictions. Dr. Laveena Munshi is a critical care physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and she's the lead author of a commentary in the Canadian Medical Association journal, which makes the case for relaxing hospital visitor restrictions. Doctor, good morning.

LAVEENA MUNSHI: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

MG: Thanks for joining us. What were you thinking as you listen to Christina tell her story?

LAVEENA MUNSHI: My heart goes out to Christina and Quinn. And there are many stories, unfortunately, during this pandemic, similar to to what Quinn and Christina experienced and I think as health care providers were really trying to understand the balance and establish the right balance between restrictive visitation policies, as well as bringing family members and essential care partners to the bedside.

MG: Let's talk about that balance, because it's one thing I think to hear from a worried mother. From a medical perspective, what are the effects of keeping all visitors out?

LAVEENA MUNSHI: So my lens here as a critical care physician is in the setting of an acute care institution, being admitted is scary, it can be overwhelming and family presents are not merely perceived as visitors. In many cases, they're essential players in the delivery of patient-centred care. And if anything, some of us perceive us as health care workers as as the visitors in the patient's life and in their health care. There's been ample evidence that shows that family presence is essential to facilitating care needs, feeding, mobility, hygiene and rehabilitation, participating in communication, such as in the setting of language barriers, delirium, acting as a substitute, decision makers or even advocates for their loved ones, and then supporting patients emotionally throughout their illness. And there has been evidence, particularly in the critical care world, where in the setting of acute confusion or delirium, that family presence and family engagement is associated with less delirium, shorter length of stays in hospital and improved psychological recovery after discharge for both the patients as well as the caregiver.

MG: And so if the restrictions were to be eased, what would that practically look like?

LAVEENA MUNSHI: So currently we've already seen after wave one and even restriction from the more stringent policies that were adopted, at least in the area that I work in. So in wave one in the critical care units, for example, we had strict visitation policies. There were certain exceptions that were made at certain institutions, such as at the end of life and in certain circumstances where patients did have high care needs for which a caregiver needed to be present to facilitate care. When we reflect upon the impact of the visitor restrictions during wave one, at least in the critical care units, during wave two, we felt, given the evolving data out there of the risk benefit of visitor restrictions, at our hospital, we've actually liberalized and slightly to now allow visitors to come for critically ill patients. But every second day it has to be one, possibly two visitors that can't come at the same time and they have to be present for a limited amount of time with strict screening at the entrance of the hospital.

MG: The other side of this and I mean, it's not to say there's one side or the other, but if you're looking at it as a balance, the restrictions were imposed for a reason. We're in the midst of a pandemic. The second wave is brutal in many parts of this country. What risk is there of COVID transmission if visitors are allowed in and out of a hospital?

LAVEENA MUNSHI: So so I absolutely see that there definitely is another side to this. And during the first wave of the pandemic, when the strict visitation policies were were adopted, it was because we saw health care systems overwhelmed in different parts of the world, such as New York and Italy. So the intentions of the visitor restrictions definitely made sense as our understanding of COVID-19 and the transmissions evolved. But interestingly, when we look to the data, there actually wasn't a lot of data demonstrating that visitors are major vectors for hospital acquisition or transition of COVID-19. And in fact, we came across two small studies showing that COVID-19 was not necessarily a major problem when it came to visitors bringing it to the hospital. However, we do acknowledge that the absence of evidence does not mean that it's not true and that these are in the settings of well implemented infection and prevention control measures. And visitors have to be honest about their symptoms at screening. So we're still really trying to understand the risk to visitors.

MG: But I was going to say just I mean, help me understand this. If the data isn't there, but there are a number of and we asked to speak with the Manitoba Health Organization, they declined to speak with us about the restrictions, Saskatchewan Health Authority also declined, the Ontario Hospital Association also declined, why are hospitals opting to keep their visitor restrictions in place if, as you say, the data isn't there to show that visitors are necessarily bringing it into the hospital?

LAVEENA MUNSHI: So I think what we have to do is we have to acknowledge that throughout these next few months, we still need to be humble about COVID-19, our understanding of COVID-19, our understanding of transmission is constantly evolving. And I think at every few months of the pandemic, we need to pause and re-evaluate what we know and what is no longer true and then make sure that the policies that we implement reflect this evolving knowledge. So I think after wave one, what we realized is that possibly the risk of the visitor bringing COVID-19 with appropriate screening and infection control measures may not be so high. And then we also realized, after reflecting upon wave one, that there is ample evidence demonstrating that in certain specific scenarios there is a benefit to have family and caregivers at the bedside. So in some jurisdictions, at least where I practice, we actually have seen an evolution in the visitation policies reflecting this evolving knowledge. And so I think we still want to continue to learn and understand and we would hope that as we have a continued understanding of the transmission and the risks, as well as the concentrations in the communities that are visiter policies continue to reflect our knowledge of transmission as well as the risks to families and patients.

MG: Just in the last couple of minutes that we have, what have you seen as a critical care physician in terms of the benefits of being flexible, of understanding the situation that you're in and the situation that families and patients are in and not just rigid around the rules?

LAVEENA MUNSHI: So the first wave was very hard for myself and all of my health care colleagues. And once again, we fully understand the intention of the visitor restrictions. But our patients were scared and it was very difficult and a huge responsibility for us to be placeholders for families when patients are scared, when they were delirious or even at the end of life. So what we've noticed is with the gradual relaxation in specific circumstances, that anxiety is less across patients and caregivers in these specific circumstances. But there still is room for improvement and there are still certain areas in the hospital where the visitor restrictions could potentially be considered to be more liberal for certain patients that are higher risk, such as those with delirium or cognitive impairment.

MG: And less as well, presumably for caregivers like yourself, for physicians like yourself, who are thrust into this position and as you said, end up being a placeholder for family members. Like presumably easing those restrictions would help you as well.

LAVEENA MUNSHI: Oh, absolutely. There's plenty of data out there from wave one, from different countries, as well as from the SARS pandemic about the psychological impact of health care workers having to be placeholders for family members. And the psychological impact of that can last or has been shown to last up to a year following the pandemic during the SARS-1 pandemic in 2003.

MG: Dr. Munshi, I appreciate you speaking with us. Thank you for the work that you're doing and thanks for your time this morning.

LAVEENA MUNSHI: Thank you for having me.

MG: Dr. Laveena Munshi, a critical care physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on this and how you have experienced the health care system as a visitor or a patient. You can email us thecurrent@cbc.ca.

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Listeners write in about ‘joy’

Guests: Karin Marley

MG: I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Last week we dedicated an entire show to moments of joy during this tumultuous year. We asked you to share your moments of joy. What was the best thing that happened to you in 2020? You shared many, many, many moments. Karin Marley, our senior producer, is here to sift through some of them. Karin, good morning.

KARIN MARLEY: Hey, Matt. Do you remember Air Mail, those blue envelopes?

MG: I'm old. I'm 50-years-old, I remember Air Mail.

KARIN MARLEY: I do as well. So Daphne Henselwood from Abbotsford, B.C. wrote, "In October, my husband discovered a shoebox in the furnace room. The box was crammed full of airmail letters from England. Over 50 years old from my mom and dad written to me in Toronto when I lived there in 1968 and 1969. I thought they'd been lost. My mom died shortly afterwards. So these are her very much alive, telling me all the goings on in our tiny village. What a treasure. Every morning since that October day, I get up early and read two letters with a bonus one at the end. Now, when I think of my Mum, instead of getting stuck on the last months of her life with a dreadful cancer, I can remember the vibrant woman that she was.

MG: Janna Adair emailed us to say, "My husband and I celebrated our 50th anniversary on the 27th of November." Congratulations, by the way. "Our plans to take our children and grandchildren away were shelved. Feeling saddened, I had a painting commissioned of our years together, our story, and I surprised my husband with it in a wonderful reveal. Later in the day, we got all dressed up and Zoomed with our family. The children dressed up champagne glasses filled with ginger ale, homemade gifts beyond any expectation, and a slideshow and a song written and sung by our 10 year old granddaughter. This intimate, loving call was a gift we will never forget."

KARIN MARLEY: Here's one from Kate Daniels. "After almost two years in kidney failure and suffering for over twenty years with diabetes, my stepdaughter Jennifer was able to undergo a kidney transplant. My biological daughter Genevieve was the donor. "They are the same age. 32. They are both doing amazingly well today. We are truly blessed."

MG: That's fantastic. Thank you Karin for reading through some of these letters. It's neat to hear that people have found moments of joy and lightness in what has been a pretty bleak year.

KARIN MARLEY: Mhmm. It really is uplifting.

MG: I wanted to end with this one from Karin Rine in Toronto, and it brought joy, I think it's fair to say to The Current. "I found myself crying as I listened to the show," she writes. "I had no idea that I needed this breath of fresh air, but I feel so much lighter now." We're happy, sort of, I guess, to make you cry. But on that point, a lot of people said that they wanted to hear the sort of program more often. We'll try to do that. I mean there's a lot of news and obviously we need to cover the things that are happening around us, but some of the things that are happening around us are good too. And it's good to be reminded of that and reminded that people need to hear that on a regular basis. So thank you very much. We read all the letters that you send to us. A few of them make it on air. So thanks for sending whatever you have to say to us. You can get in touch through the website at cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link or send us an email, thecurrent@cbc.ca. Your CBC News is next. And then before the space race, a different kind of propulsion project captivated the world. In a moment, how the V2 rocket revolutionized warfare and set the groundwork for interstellar exploration. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Back in six minutes. Stick around.

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How author Farley Mowat smuggled a V2 rocket into Canada

Guests: Robert Harris, Harold Skaarup

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, an incredible show of generosity from CBC listeners, and then we look to the stars to escape this dreary year on Earth. But first, keeping with the space theme, a tale of espionage and rockets.

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VOICE: Vivid German films uncovered by allied occupation men tell the story of the V2 rocket through enemy eyes. In a last desperate attempt to escape defeat, german science threw everything it had into the perfection of V2. Hurtling through the stratosphere at 3,000 miles an hour to fall on London, this was the peak of 15 years of German scientific research. The first V2 fell on London in September 1944. Now they are a ghastly memory, but Antwerp, London and Britain's east coast towns will never forget their days of V2 death from the skies.

MG: That's a British newsreel report from 1946. The V2 rockets killed thousands of people in Britain and Belgium during the Second World War. The program also provided the science that would ultimately lead to the moon landing. Robert Harris is a former political journalist and international best selling author whose books include Fatherland and An Officer and a Spy. His new novel is titled V2. Robert Harris, good morning.

ROBERT HARRIS: Good morning, Matt. Nice to talk to you.

MG: It's great to have you on the program. You and I have something in common in that we both like to read the obituaries. And this story for you begins with you reading an obituary. What did you read and what happened then?

ROBERT HARRIS: It was back in September 2016, and in the Times, there was a full page obituary of a woman called Eileen Younghusband, who died a couple of days before at the age of 95. She had been in the women's airforce in the war. And one of the things that had happened to her was that she was sent with seven other women in November 1944 to Belgium, newly liberated little town called Mechelen, where she was billeted on a local family and put in a bank vault in the town with a slide rule and pencil and paper. And her job with the team was to calculate the trajectories of the V2s, which were being launched from the coast of Holland at London, about 70 miles to the north. And if they could make the calculation of its curve in six minutes, then they were able, the R.F. were able to get Spitfire fighter bombers over the launch sites in the woods near The Hague and knock it theory, knock out the German launch sites. And I read this and I just thought it was an incredible story. And I thought she buried, you know, she was worth investigating. And so, you know, over the next couple of years, I read all I could about that particular mission.

MG: I want to talk about her work, but her work was, as you mentioned, meant to try and stop the V2 from raining down on London. What was it about the V2 rocket that was so revolutionary as a weapon of war?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, actually, almost everything about it. It was the first object or the rockets they built were the first to fly at break the sound barrier, they were the first to go into lower space. The V2 itself was about 46 feet high. It was weighed about twelve and a half tons and it was fully fuelled and it had a one ton warhead. It would be launched from a very small platform, no more than five feet across in the woods. It was erected by a trailer and within five minutes it would hit land and it went about 60 miles high, travelled by three and a half thousand miles an hour and plunged down onto London more than twice the speed of sound so that it was impossible to stop. You didn't even hear it coming in if you were underneath it. There was just a slight change in the air pressure and all across London and sometimes there were five or six of these rockets hitting London. Every day you would hear a sonic boom followed by the crash of the explosion. So this was a terrifying weapon. And to come right at the end of the war, this revolutionary device lowered morale enormously, as you can imagine.

MG: And so Eileen Younghusband, who you read about in that obituary as part of this small group from the Women's Auxiliary Air Force who are sent to try to, as you say, figure out where the rocket is being launched from, how did they go about doing this? Talk about the technology that they used.

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, the rocket was ballistic, it would be launched and the actual burning of the rocket fuel, it looks exactly incidentally like a Saturn rocket, of which it was the precursor. It burned, the motor burn for sixty five seconds, then cut out and then the rest of the flight across the English Channel to hit London was ballistic. It felt like a stone flung from a catapult. It meant it obeyed certain rules of physics. If you knew where it hit, which, of course, the British could quickly calculate where it had landed. And we had high looking radars in Belgium looking at the Dutch coast so we could briefly access trajectory before it passed out of sight with those two bits of information. In theory, you could calculate back to the beginning of what is called the parabolic curve and pinpoint the spot in the woods that the missile had been launched from. If that information, which Eileen and her colleagues had six minutes to calculate from the impact in London onwards, if they could do that, then the RAF could scramble jets, not jets sorry spitfires from Norfolk and get them over the Dutch coast. That was the theory.

MG: And technically now, I mean, you could just say, OK, computer, go and do this or speak into your phone. They are using not computers, but analogue computers. The slide rule. There's a whole generation of people who have no idea what a slide rule is. Can you just explain that?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, I'm just of the generation that had to use them at school. So, yes, you use them with a logarithm table and it's you measure out kind of like a plastic ruler. It gives you, it's pretty precise actually. And it was the way that people made these trigonomical calculations before we got calculators and they had to work very fast to do it, up against a high pressure job. And of course they were sending pilots over the Dutch coast where there was heavy artillery, anti aircraft defence. So, you know, a lot depended upon these women. And that's what attracted me about writing the novel about them. What would it have been like to be a young woman in her early twenties sent to this what had been hostile territory only a couple of months before? It was a very hard winter, 1944, very cold, and a lot of the local population was starving. So, you know, it was quite an epic story and it's never really been told, certainly not in any fictional forms.

MG: Did those calculations ever succeed in helping the Royal Air Force knock out any of the V2 launch sites?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, in her obituary, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the novel, it said that at the end of her first shift, the British destroyed two launch sites. So I thought, well, this is marvellous. And in her book, I then discovered Eileen Younghusband had written a book, she said that they knocked out virtually all the German launch sites. I'm afraid neither of these is true it turned out as I researched. The British never managed to hit a German launch site throughout the whole course of the war. I mean, they hurried them, they slowed them up. They hit the railway lines, bringing in the rockets from the factory where they were made. But no, they the work didn't actually result in the hitting of a single German launcher.

MG: As you say, the V2 rockets were the precursor to the Saturn rockets, which were a huge part instrumental in NASA's space exploration. Whatever happened to the German scientists who worked on that V2 rocket?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, half the story is told from the point of view of Eileen or my fictional Eileen in Belgium. The other half, I have an imaginary German engineer working on firing the rockets, and he is based on kind of real characters. And they were kids a lot of them. They started off or they had been started off as teenagers playing around with rockets in Berlin in the 1920s under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, who was himself only a teenager at that time. Then the rockets were successful, they were taken up by the German military and suddenly money was showered on them and they were given the whole Baltic island to play with. Pain along on the Baltic coast. And an enormous amount of money was poured into this project by the Nazis. And at the end of the war, these people had really gone into it, most of them the idealistic idea of space travel. They were recruited by the Americans and taken to White Sands in New Mexico and started building the rockets that would eventually take NASA to the moon.

MG: Was there any conflict of conscience for these German scientists. As you say, their teenagers, barely teenagers at the time, who were working on the visa program, that their scientific work was being used to create mass death.

ROBERT HARRIS: I think there were some. Yes, I think maybe not as much as one might have thought. I don't think they had too many qualms about firing the rockets at civilian centres, chiefly London, also Antwerp, or the cities that were hit. 1300 missiles fired at London. I don't think they had a lot of conscience about that, particularly because bear in mind, the British were bombing German cities night after night with a thousand bomber Lancaster raids. So but I think where they are morally more culpable is the enormous use of slave labour and the building of the V2. It's estimated that 20,000 slave labourers were built, were killed during that process, which is about four or five times as many as the civilians who were actually killed by the rockets.

MG: Where many of the German scientists who benefited from that, I mean, it's a war crime, were they ever charged?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, the war crimes trials for full Nordhausen, the place where the rockets were built, most of the people that died, died building the factory itself, which was tunnelled into a mountain. There were trials in the 1970s and one senior NASA scientist, German, who had been a Nazi called Arthur Rudolph, he had to leave America to avoid being extradited. Basically, they went after the SS who set up the installation and carried out terrible atrocities rather than the scientists. But it's inconceivable that Wernher von Braun, who was head of production of the V2, could not have been aware of the conditions under which the rocket was being mass manufactured. The Germans were building one every 90 minutes at the peak of production, so he must have known. But, you know, in those days it was easier perhaps to turn a blind eye, oddly enough, straight after the war to that kind of behaviour.

MG: You wrote this novel in the midst of this pandemic. What was that like? I mean, doing the research is one thing and you read the obituary a few years ago. But what was it like to be stuck away as we all have been writing a book like this?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, it was pretty hard, to be honest. My normal mode of writing a novel is to start in January and finish at the end of June and then it comes out in the autumn. So I'd written about a quarter of the novel when suddenly what had been just a vague new story in China suddenly hit us here in England, just as in Canada. And we were locked down and for about three weeks it was impossible to work. And I thought, well, I'll never write this novel now and the world will have other things to worry about than the V2. But after about three weeks, I thought, well, if I don't, if I do nothing else, I'll try and come out of this weird period with something to show for it. So I forced myself seven days a week to sit down and write the book and I'm glad I did. In a funny sort of way, I think the book oddly benefited from those conditions under which it was written.

MG: What do you mean?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well I have enormous sympathy for fellow writers or anyone really struggling in lock down to do anything because it was so distracting when people slept so badly and it was hard to concentrate.

MG: What do you mean the book benefited from it? I mean there is a propulsion to it and I'm not talking about the rocket. I mean the book hurtles along. What do you mean that it benefited from the period that you're writing it in?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, it's kind of you just said and I think that possibly it was partly that the book is written in a very tight. It's as precise in its way as the missile, you know it follows its trajectory and flies fast, I hope. And I think that that was a condition of really just having to immerse myself in the world. The other thing, of course, is that it had a slightly wartime feel fear. The death toll is almost exactly the same as that of civilians in the Second World War. The daily casualty figures, the sense of our ordinary lives, our expectations being completely overturned by a huge event beyond our control and a sense of national unity and a sense of fear. I think it was the nearest we've come in this country to what it was like in the war and I think that that permeated the book a bit.

MG: Just before I let you go, can you end with where we started, which is the obituary that you read? One of the things about obituaries is you get perspective in some ways on the time that you're living in, but also the time that others lived through. And it ends up being in some ways, you know, an offer of insight into, you know, the place that you're in through the life of somebody else. What did you take from that in terms of where we are now in the life that that woman lived through?

ROBERT HARRIS: Well, I have actually found it, yes, I would say it is a comfort in a way to say, look, my grandfather's generation, they were living their lives perfectly happily. And then in 1914, along came the First World War and then my parents generation in 1939, along came the Second World War. We've been very fortunate for 75 years in that we've lived a relatively peaceful lives undisturbed. Now, something enormous has come along like the war, and you just have to sort of surrender to it in one sense. Of course, we try and combat the virus be to get rid of it and we will do so, but you just sometimes there are going to be periods in human history where you can't do anything, where you just have to say, that's it, get through it. And also bear in mind that although there's been terrible suffering, we haven't been sent, you know, young men haven't been sent away thousands of miles to fight and be blown up in that we have been able to huddle together. And so I think the great point of history and indeed historical fiction is to put present times in perspective.

MG: Robert Harris, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.

ROBERT HARRIS: Thank you.

MG: Robert Harris's new novel is V2.There is a little known connection between this country and V2 rockets. Here's a hint. If there was a book about this connection, you might call it Rockets in the Family or maybe, Never Cry V2. Any guesses? No? It's a bit obscure. The author, Farley Mowat, who wrote Owls in the Family and Never Cry Wolf, among others, served with Canadian military intelligence after the Second World War. And it was in that role that Captain Farley Mowat pulled off a caper that would stretch the imagination of even the most imaginative novelist. To tell us that story, I'm joined by retired Major Harold Skaarup. He's a former Canadian Army intelligence officer who has written about this operation. Harold Skaarup, good morning to you.

HAROLD SKAARUP: Good morning and I'm honoured to be here.

MG: Tell me about Captain Farley Moat's work with the Canadian intelligence when the Second World War ended. What was, just briefly, what was he doing?

HAROLD SKAARUP: He'd been serving with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment as an infantry officer and was seconded to the Department of the Director of History and Heritage in Ottawa. Technically, the intelligence people. He was given a very straightforward task. With the war over in Germany, go over and find anything and everything of intelligence value that you think would be useful to the Canadian government and the forces and get it back to us. He set out with this with a vengeance and he managed to get back 700 tons of captured material, tanks, guns, artillery, and most interestingly of all, the V2 or a V2.

MG: How did Farley Mowat find a V2 rocket?

HAROLD SKAARUP: It's Complicated, but had to squeeze it down into bits and pieces, he'd been working with the Dutch resistance. They got word to him that there are a bunch of V2s located in central Germany. The British Army, 21st Army group in particular, came out and said no one else is to get these. A specific order. They did not want Canada to have this technology. It hadn't actually gone to print yet and Farley's CO got wind of this and he said, see if you can get us one. He grabbed a young lieutenant, Mike Donovan and Lieutenant Jim Hood, and he set out with a plan. They knew that there was a railway siding with about ten of these rockets on it, most of them being pretty shot up, but at least one was intact. He knew that the British probably wouldn't let him have it, but he came up with this plan. Mike Donovan, he takes a 30 litre demi-john of the Coopers Gin, goes down to the Jeep and he intercepts the British soldiers guarding this trainload. And he manages to get them all singing and drinking, saying, we know we're not going to get a rocket from you, but let's enjoy being comrades together. While he's doing that, Farley's lieutenant, Jim Hood, sneaks around in the dark to the tail end of the railway tracks finds an intact V2. They've got a tractor trailer with them that was used for towing a submarine, they break the chains and they roll this V2 rocket off the doggone railway siding car onto the trailer and then barrel it on back to Holland.

MG: It sounds like something of a Steve McQueen film or something.

HAROLD SKAARUP: On the way they're calling all guards saying we've got unexploded ordnance, we want to get this to the ocean, get out of the way and they open the gates for them. So that's it's on its way back. Now, there's a problem. It doesn't take long for the Brits to realize that of all these shot up V2s, the only one that's intact is suddenly missing. So the hunt is on. Farley sees the thing being wheeled into a hangar where he's based in Holland and he immediately gets down and he orders a bunch of crew to build a wooden conning tower and attach a gigantic propeller to this V2 rocket, and then they begin painting their brains out, slapping blue paint up and down and on the side of this thing there to make it look like a mini submarine. And then they drag it out in the woods and hide it while the Brits are looking for it. Eventually he managed to get it on to a shipping beats and they get it back to Valcartier, they get it to Montreal and take a Valcartier where they begin to take the thing apart. But in the process of all this, everything being done rather quickly, the most interesting he tells me or told me, was when they were taking the V2 apart in Valcartier they started drilling into the nose cone and this white powder fell out and everybody started screaming and jumping around in a circle saying, holy smokes, it's still alive. They managed to get a hole cut into it and use a hose to hose out the explosive, but it made for a rather interesting taking it apart and putting it together session.

MG: What would have happened if this thing had had gone off in Valcartier?

HAROLD SKAARUP: It would have levelled most of that part of Valcartier. As Robert was just saying, you know, it would take out a city block. This is an enormous amount of explosive, just incredible. And I was quite fascinated by some of the material he was talking about. But it really would have been a devastating thing if it had gone off.

MG: What eventually ended up happening to this rocket? I mean, I've seen photos of it that I thought as a kid weren't, I mean it had to be some sort of doctored photo, of it at the CNE, the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. Is that actually that this is the same V2 rocket?

HAROLD SKAARUP: Yes, it is. Basically, they put the thing back together, painted their up and they put it it was on display at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1950. From there, when they took it down, the nose, got a little bit dented, but they hauled it off to several different installations, RCS stations, eventually wound up in Picton, Ontario. A newspaper reporter following up the story, talking to local people, they believe that about 1960, '61, it was buried in a landfill on what used to be a military base. There is a crew that's looking for it. We haven't found it yet, but it might surface again. It's basically a metal shell. It wouldn't be an awful lot left to it, I would suspect there in terms of corrosion. But one never knows. There are so many things like that. We brought back two 262 jet fighters to Canada. You know what we did with them? We burned them up as firefighting tests. Nothing left. They're worth a fortune if you had one intact now, but we didn't think of that as being worth preserving in terms of our history.

MG: Well, I just finally I mean, military intelligence as well. What was the benefit of this V2 rocket coming back for the Canadian military?

HAROLD SKAARUP: Well, I do not know for certain, but I had spoken to people in Valcartier who said, look, look at all the research that went into the blackbrant rocket system and they test fired rockets out of Churchill, Manitoba. It gave us a leg up in terms of rocket research and how to get these things going. There are other things that he brought back, like two Enigma machines that still exist in the Canadian War Museum. It took years of going through all of the material that they had brought back, not just the rockets, but all the documentation. The big thing lacking is we had to reverse engineer. The Americans managed to get most of the engineers, the Brits did not, a handful, and the Russians grabbed a few. But most of them, like people like Robert mentioned von Braun and his team, they went on Operation Paperclip down to Alamogordo, New Mexico, and worked for the Americans and that gave them a leg up.

MG: What an incredible story that I think most Canadians perhaps have not heard of. Harold, thank you very much.

HAROLD SKAARUP: And thank you for having me.

MG: Retired Major Harold Skaarup is a former Canadian Army intelligence officer. It's quite a tale. Coming up after your regional update, we will tag along with a young astronomer to learn why in a year when we were told to limit our lives, lock everything down, keep isolated, some of us have found hope by turning our eyes to the stars and exploring the emptiness of outer space. Today is a very good day for you to do that. And we will tell you why coming up in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current on CBC Radio One.

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CBC Food Bank Day in British Colubmia raises over two and a half million dollars

Guests: Anne Penman

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. Every year around this time, CBC programs across the country fill your airwaves with some special fundraising programming and you, the listener, donate. Mostly to our food banks that happen to be in your community. This year something incredible happened in British Columbia. While so many charities are struggling this year, CBC listeners in B.C. raised a staggering amount of money in support of 103 food banks in that province. Anne Penman leads the project every year. In fact, she started CBC Food Bank Day in British Columbia 34 years ago. Anne Penman is the CBC Network Producer in Vancouver. Anne, good morning.

ANNE PENMAN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: All right, let's not bury the lead. How much money was donated this year?

ANNE PENMAN: All right. I feel like I need a drum roll sound effect here.

[Drum roll]

ANNE PENMAN: Perfect. $2,560,000 so far.

MG: That's amazing.

ANNE PENMAN: It is. It's extraordinary.

MG: How does it compare to years past?

ANNE PENMAN: Well, I won't go through all 34 years, but I'll just say that our very first year that we had a small version of what we have now, we got $462 and we thought we had done very well that year. But it also took us the next 33 years to hit the $10 million total mark. So accumulating the money we raised over those 33 years. Last year even 2019, if anybody remembers 2019, we were shocked when we ended up with the total of 1.26 million. We thought that was amazing. But this year we blew past a million dollars by noon on Food Bank Day.

MG: That's incredible. What do you know about who donated all this money? I mean, I love to say that Canadians are generous and even in difficult times, those who can will figure out a way to spread that generosity. Who was behind these donations?

ANNE PENMAN: Well, you're right. I mean, generous is the first descriptor of the people who made donations. But I think also citizens that were actually horrified that people in their communities had no choice but to go to food banks. And I think it was all heightened because of the pandemic. People were more alert and aware. But the most amazing thing about our event and it's our event almost every year, is that 95 percent of the donations that we had, that 2.5 million and more came from individuals. We had a couple of companies who made donations. We were grateful for those those totals about 40000 dollars only. So it really was individual British Columbians.

MG: And I mean, you've hinted at this, but what do you think was behind that?

ANNE PENMAN: Well, as I said, the pandemic. I think it's the first time that food banks were acknowledged on the federal stage and provincially by governments. The governments never say anything about food banks. They don't give money to support food banks. Charities this year was was different. You know, of course, Matt, that the federal government gave 100 million dollars three times to food banks and related food charities just because of the need. I also think the pandemic gave people more time to reflect. We also had messaging, especially here in this province, around being kind. Dr. Bonnie Henry and Adrian Dix are provincial minister of health, and perhaps that led to more people looking at ways that they could help.

MG: When we see the numbers in terms of food bank usage, the numbers are staggering, but behind those numbers are individuals and there are people with stories who have found themselves in a position where they need to become clients of food banks. And you've been speaking with some of them. What stands out in terms of those conversations?

ANNE PENMAN: Yeah, and in the weeks leading up to our day, I went to three different food banks throughout the Lower Mainland, and I've recorded about 20 interviews with food bank recipients. And people just are very real and are open and honest. And a couple of things stand out. One is this year, unlike any other year and I've been doing that for about three decades, going and talking to clients at food banks. This year, more men than ever agreed to talk. And I think that speaks to some kind of a reduction in the stigma of being at food banks. Always, always. Women were shy but able to talk and willing to be recorded and tell me their stories. This year, three to one, it was men to women who wanted to tell me their stories. There was a man picking up baby formula. He and his family had just arrived from Syria. They've been here for about eight months. He's a medical doctor and he is also a university lecturer. And of course, he needs to make enough money now to upgrade his medical credentials to practise here in Canada so they'll take a couple of years. So he was unapologetically at the food bank. He was grateful. Another young woman that stands out was with two kids at a food bank and her partner works at Walmart. He works as a cart cleaner, which is a very important job in the middle of a pandemic. And they go to the food bank once a month or so just to top up their pantry. And I also have a couple of people I'd like you to hear right now. These two people, Dory and John.

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VOICE 1: My name is Dory. I'm living alone. I used to be a caregiver. Yeah, I'm 70 now with weak knees and weak ankle. Yeah. So this is very convenient for me. I used to donate too when I was working, you know. They're helping. They're receiving in one hand and giving on the other hand. Yeah.

VOICE 2: Hello, my name is John. I work with seafood. I'm only taking home like 15 an hour. I mean I don't make that much. Yeah. So I mean barely above minimum paid job. It is hard. And being in poverty some people feel shy and they feel embarrassed, you know, they feel well you know I'm coming here to the food bank, so it might be a little embarrassing, but I don't feel that way. I don't feel that way.

MG: That stigma is really important to smash through in terms of making sure that people feel comfortable, that they feel dignified in going and getting the help that they need.

ANNE PENMAN: Absolutely. And I think the food banks, certainly the ones that I visited, they do incredible work in reducing any kind of stigma that people that are there in the lineup's might have.

MG: It was 34 years ago in 1986 that you helped put together the first CBC British Columbia Food Bank Day. Why did you think that this was so important that you would dedicate time and energy to it?

ANNE PENMAN: Well, back then, we had just finished off Expo 86 and we had invited the world to Vancouver. And a couple of months after that, there was this growing gap that you could start to feel it on the streets, especially in the downtown area of Vancouver, between the haves and the have nots. And we'd had a food bank in Greater Vancouver for about two years at that point, and the need was just greater. And so we thought, well, we should do something to help. And we started just with a small two hour afternoon show that I was producing at the time with our fundraiser. And that need never went away. And in fact, we always have a theme. And for many years our theme for our food bank day was in the midst of plenty because all these high rises, condo towers, all this wealth coming into our community and this growing number of people needing to go to a food bank just to feed their families. So we started it for that reason, for that one particular year in 1986 and unfortunately, we needed to continue to do it.

MG: Would you have ever imagined that the generosity would grow to the degree that you would have raised through this initiative this year? Two and a half million plus.

ANNE PENMAN: No, I couldn't have imagined that. It's an unfathomable amount of money that will be dispersed to the 103 food banks around the province. None of the people in the food banks that I'm in touch with over the period of our event, nobody can believe it.

MG: So journalists never really want to be the story. They want to be telling the story, but you are a big part of the success of this initiative. And so I say to you, as a journalist, but also as a concerned and an active citizen, thanks for the work that you're doing. It's important.

ANNE PENMAN: Thank you.

MG: Congratulations, Anne to you and to the CBC audience in B.C. Anne Penman, the CBC Radio Network Producer based in Vancouver. This year's CBC British Columbia Food Bank fundraiser is closing in, as you heard, on $2.7 million raised. The online donation site remains open until midnight, December 31st. You'll find it at cbc.ca/foodbankday. And this is a good time, once again to thank all of you who donated in British Columbia, but right across this country, coast to coast to coast as part of the CBC fundraisers this season.

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How astronomy has provided stress relief and a sense of community during pandemic

Guests: Rachel Levy-McLaghlin

MG: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Matt Galloway.

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VOICE 1: OK, Julia, so can you tell me what it is that we're doing right now?

VOICE 2: Being astronomers?

VOICE 1: Yes, we are. So.

VOICE 2: Let's study the planets.

MG: Julia is an astronomer. She's also five-years-old and she is parked in front of her computer with her dad, Lou Vegh. And like she says, they're studying the planets.

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VOICE 1: So which ones are we looking at now? So tell me first, what are we looking at right now?

VOICE 2: Space.

VOICE 1: So.

VOICE 2: And that's Mars, that's Saturn, that's Jupiter.

VOICE 1: Yes. So how do you know all of these even before I pointed to them? Was it because we look at this all the time?

VOICE 2: No, it's because this one looks a bit red and this is smaller than that one.

VOICE 1: OK, you're right. So which one is highest up in the sky?

VOICE 2: Mars.

MG: Julia knows her stuff clearly. In November, The Current's producer, Rachel Levy-McLaghlin spoke with Julia and many others about the exciting events in the sky this year. Those events include something called the Great Conjunction, which you can see if you look up into the sky tonight. We thought that given what's happening high above us tonight, this is a great opportunity to hear this conversation again. So here is my chat with Rachel about what she learned. Why, it was lovely, by the way, but why are we listening to this astronomy lesson?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So, Julia and her dad, are just two of the many people across Canada who are taking up astronomy during the pandemic. So much so, equipment is hard to get and classes are really popular.

MG: So what exactly are Julia and her dad doing?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: They have astronomy lessons every night. He's a science enthusiast himself. They sit together at the computer looking at websites or YouTube, and they'll go outside to see whatever they can in the night sky.

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VOICE 1: So look at what this shape is. It's like this, this, this, this, this, this. So what do we remember that is?

VOICE 2: The Big Dipper.

VOICE 1: Yes. Some of the stars in the Big Dipper are part of a bigger constellation called Ursa Major. Do you know what Ursa Major is?

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 1: Yeah, the big bear.

VOICE 2: Oh, yeah. I remember that story.

VOICE 1: Oh, you remember that one now?

VOICE 2: Yes.

VOICE 1: That's good.

VOICE 2: Daddy.

VOICE 1: Yes?

VOICE 2: Just wait a second. Mommy, you've got to see this. Daddy and I are being astronomers.

VOICE 3: Oh you are?

VOICE 2: Yes, we're searching up everything. Look, that's part of the Big Dipper, and this whole thing is the Big Bear.

MG: Oh, my gosh. She's fantastic.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: I know. I just love her passion for astronomy.

MG: And this is all new for her? This is a new hobby that she's just picked up?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Yeah. So Julia picked up astronomy only a few months ago. Back in the spring when Julia was off for March break, she, her dad and her mom went to visit Lou's mother in Tillsonburg, which is in Western Ontario. That's when things went really sideways with COVID and they ended up being there for about five and a half months.

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VOICE: Naturally, we were on the hunt for new and interesting things to occupy Julia with. So I put astronomy out there to her just to see what would happen, not really expecting much, and she seemed very interested in it. She wanted to keep going when I was ready to stop, and it was just something very intuitive to her.

MG: And it sounds like she's hooked.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Yeah, she's even doing illustrations. We have a picture she drew of the solar system that we'll put on the website. She did it without books or a computer, and she drew the planets in the right order and she labelled them and even coloured them right. So Mars is a bit more red. Earth is blue and green. Neptune is blue. All of this makes her dad pretty proud.

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VOICE: It's just gives you a warm feeling when your child has the same kind of, some of the same interests without being prompted. I'm older than the typical parent of a five-year-old. So a lot of the sort of cartoons and games and stuff that are directed at children now I'm out of touch with. So basically all the time she's teaching me about all the latest characters or whatnot. So this is a situation where I get to kind of teach. It goes the opposite way. I get to teach her about all the characters in the solar system and whatnot.

MG: So Lou and Julia are learning at the computer or are they out in Thornhill kind of seeing what they can see there? Do they have telescopes? Do they have binoculars, all sorts of stuff like that?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: At the moment, they're using their eyes and sticking to the online tools. But even if they wanted to get some gear, it's actually really hard to come by these days.

MG: Telescopes are some sort of hot new commodity now?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Oh, yeah. They're the new bread yeast.

MG: Oh.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So telescopes are selling out. Store owners have been flooded with calls. They're getting emails and orders for astronomy gear. Take Ray Khan, for example. He owns Khan's Scope Centre in Toronto. He actually closed his store when the first lockdowns hit back in the spring. He had assumed that they wouldn't be busy, but he's actually been pretty overwhelmed.

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VOICE: We've been getting probably twice as many orders in the day that we would normally get. And that was just online. The phone was ringing off the hook. Emails were coming in. We really couldn't keep up with it. It was very frustrating and very time consuming and demanding. There were only so many hours in the day.

MG: Has Ray ever seen anything quite like this?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Not since Halley's Comet, which was in 1986, and that was when he first opened his store.

MG: And he was saying the phone's been ringing off the hook. I mean, it sounds like it's difficult for him to keep up.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Yeah, it's not easy. He said he won't always have the gear people are looking for. And because COVID has disrupted manufacturers, he says it can take a really long time to get new inventory, and that's if he's able to get it at all.

MG: So it's hard for Ray to get the equipment that people want, but is there beyond that, any evidence that we're seeing a real growth in astronomy in the midst of this pandemic?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, known as RASC, is seeing a boost in interest in their events. They have chapters across the country and they host events like star parties and lectures.

MG: You'll have to fill me in. What is a star party?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So in normal times, people would get together in person for a night of star gazing. So it's an overnight event where they see what they can in the sky. Obviously, that's not an option this year, so they've been doing star parties online instead. So they get together over Zoom and the organizers or astronomers will link their telescope to the computer so people can see what they're looking at in the sky.

MG: This is the the Zoom shift of 2020.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Exactly. We're all very familiar with it at this point. And normally they get about 30 or 40 people for their in-person events, but their Zoom events have been far more popular. Now it's more like one hundred people and they have stargazers coming from all over the place.

MG: All over the place. So where are they reaching people from for these parties?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So people are coming in to Ottawa's chapter from Iqaluit. There's even an American who's joined. So that's Lisa Ann Fanning. She lives in central New Jersey and she's become pretty involved with the Halifax chapter.

MG: How exactly did that happen?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: She had been dabbling in astronomy for about a year, but once COVID hit, she had this drive to get more serious about it.

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VOICE: You know, here we are, we're all in lockdown looking for things to do. And the situation was not good here in New Jersey. We live about an hour outside of New York City. And, you know, we were looking for more things to do, more ways to stay actively engaged. And I decided to look into whether or not there were any programs that I could put some formal learning in place around astronomy, because I found myself, you know, standing outside at night because the neighbours weren't around. Nobody was walking around the cul de sac. You know, I found myself just looking up into the sky and wanting to know more about what was around me.

MG: I'm still a bit confused here. How does wandering around in suburban New Jersey lead her to a group in Halifax?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Lisa had bought a couple of books by this Canadian astronomer named John Reid, 50 Things To See on the Moon, things like that. You heard her say she wanted some more formal learning. So she reached out to John Reid on Instagram and asked about courses. He said he was doing talks with RASC and was actually about to start a course for amateur astronomers. So she joined.

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VOICE: So I was able to find a lot of these deep sky objects and double stars and things that I never thought that I would see on my own, which really helped me put some structure to learning and really ignited a fire in me as far as a new passion.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: She found craters on the moon. She found lunar mare, which are those dark areas on the moon, constellations, nebulae, all kinds of things in this course.

MG: There's a lot to see up there, apparently.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Oh yeah. Especially in 2020. 2020 overall been pretty terrible, but for astronomy it's been pretty good.

MG: Oh why is that?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: There have been lots of interesting astronomical events this year. There was the NEOWISE Comet in the summer that got a lot of attention. There was the opposition of Mars last month.

MG: What is the opposition of Mars?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So that's when the Earth is right in between Mars and the Sun, so the three of us make a straight line. This is the closest Mars gets to Earth, which makes it a great time to see the planet. Plus the sun is shining directly on it, so it's really bright. And actually, November has been a good month to see all the planets. They've all been visible at different times in the sky.

MG: So beyond these cool astronomical events, what is it that is bringing people to astronomy, do you think, in the midst of a pandemic?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Yeah, I think there are a couple of facets here. One is the science, learning about the sky and about the universe, but there's this other side to it that's a bit more philosophical and spiritual. Listen to how Hilding Nielsen explains it.

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VOICE: People are much more interested right now because it's something we can rely on. We know about the skies. Everything else around us has changed in the last year, but, you know, the sky is the same.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: He's a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto. He's from Newfoundland and is Mi'kmaq. So he brings together Western astronomy and Indigenous knowledge in his work.

MG: What sort of knowledge are we talking about?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Some of that knowledge is the stories in the stars. So these are the legends of Indigenous peoples about the constellations. He says there's a lot we can learn from them. And let's take a moment Matt, I want to hear one of these stories.

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VOICE: Neon is a bear in Mi'kmaq. If you look in the sky around a couple hours before dawn, every night, you'll see in the west we consider this, the Big Dipper, but the four stars of the bull as a bear and the first three stars are the first three bird hunters. And if you continue along the line, you'll see the other four. In the spring, the bow is sort of pointing down. At that point, the bear is waking up from hibernation and is spotted by the birds. First spotted by the robin who grabs his bow and arrow to chase the bear because bears important sustenance for the Indigenous peoples. Following robin is chickadee who carries a bow and so on with other bird hunters. As they chase the bear throughout the spring and into the summer, when the bear is running flat across the land. But eventually the bear gets tired and gets angry and stands on his hind legs in the fall to face the hunters, the robin shoots the bear, striking it in his heart and killing the bear instantly. Blood splatters all over robin. Robin flies into the trees and shakes off as much blood, turning the leaves red, but leaving one stain on his chest. The other birds catch up. They start preparing the bear for a feast. It's community celebration, everybody coming together to celebrate the hunt, to share, to help each other out. And in the fall, the bear's lying on his back. This is the spirit bear at this point, and it's waiting for the spring to start all over again. And in the story we learn, you know, about the motion of the stars throughout the year. We learn about nature and we learn about community and sharing.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So that story plays out over a full year as you watch the constellations move around the sky.

MG: And as he said, I mean, it's a story that has lessons that people can learn as well.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Exactly. And for him personally, that story is a connection to his land and where he's from, but he says it also teaches us that we succeed as a group and will do better if we work together.

MG: Which is something that we hear a lot about. You see the signs around that say we're all in this together. We keep saying that over and over and over again. What about everyone else you spoke with? What are they finding through watching the stars over the course of this year?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: I think everyone is getting something slightly different out of this. Lisa Ann Fanning, she's the one in New Jersey who joined the Halifax group, for her, it's brought a sense of community.

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VOICE: You know, there's just this familiar group of people that get together through these various programs and are there because we all love the same thing. We're all passionate about the same thing, and we're all looking to share the same thing. I think that's what a lot of people are missing right now during the pandemic and astronomy was able to fill that void for me.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: I think that's true for Julia and her dad as well, but in a slightly different way.

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VOICE 1: I love doing astronomy.

VOICE 2: Why is that?

VOICE 1: Because I want to study planets.

VOICE 2: Why do you like the planets so much?

VOICE 1: I don't know.

VOICE 2: You don't know?

VOICE 1: No.

VOICE 2: Well, I'm glad you like it, even if you're not sure exactly why. What has astronomy done for us as a family? I would say it's given us something wholesome and science based that all three of us are interested in, that we can talk about and actually learn together. All three of us are learning and all three of us are getting closer by our interest in astronomy.

MG: As a parent, that's been the best thing that you could have, is this thing that's going to bring you all together, especially in a really difficult time.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Yeah, and I think that was the case for a lot of people. But there are also some deeper questions in this about who we are, why we're here, what our role is. Here's Ray Khan, the owner of the telescope store.

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VOICE: When you look out at the night sky and you look at something as simple as the moon and you look at a crater on it, you start to see a bigger picture of everything. You can start to realize that there's a much bigger picture out there. And sometimes for me personally, what it does is it allows me to put problems in perspective in the sense that everything is so much bigger and vaster out there that when you zoom in on whatever issue or problem you have in the, you know this big issue that we have with COVID-19, if you can look at it at a different light and in the sense of how can I deal with the situation that I have and make the best out of it, I think, if anything, the mental framing of positivity, despite the pandemic situation, has really what has made a difference for me and for many other people I've spoken to. The fact of the matter we're affected by what we see up in the sky. There's a fascination and wonder. And we really originate from, if you think about it, from the concept of the Big Bang, we all originate from that original stardust. So each one of us has a little bit of that stardust within us, I'd like to think.

MG: That idea that we're all stardust, that's a big idea.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: I know. I love it. And that theme of connection, you know, what binds us all together is something I heard from Hilding Nielson too.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: There's so much I love about astronomy. It's the questions. It's the mystery. It's the fact that whenever we see some phenomenon in the night sky that we have to apply science from mathematics to computational sciences to chemistry, biology. We have to sort of understand a little bit of everything and try to probe the extremes of them. Also, I love how astronomy sort of connects us all. It's kind of funny, you know, so many people come from different places, but we all have the same night sky. And so we all have something in common.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So, Matt, have I convinced you to take up astronomy yet?

MG: So I spend some time watching the stars because I grew up in the middle of nowhere and there's dark skies around there, but I don't have a telescope. And so I'm just looking, you know, with my amateur eyes, without the equipment. Do I need to get a telescope?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So it's actually OK without a telescope. You don't really need one to get started. Sure, telescopes and binoculars will help you see more and they'll let you see more detail, but really, all you need is a clear night.

MG: And in that clear night, what should I be looking for?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: So December 21st, mark your calendar. There's this really interesting event happening called the Great Conjunction.

MG: The Great Conjunction sounds very important.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: It is. So it's when Saturn and Jupiter are really close together in the sky. Every 20 years or so, Jupiter seems to pass Saturn, and when it does, they're very close together. But this year it's particularly rare. The planets will be the closest they've been since 1623. Just for a frame of reference, that's just 15 years after Galileo invented the telescope.

MG: That's a long time ago. What does the Great Conjunction look like?

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: I'm told it'll look like a double star in the sky. So two stars really close together. I saw a picture of what it looks like through a telescope, and it's pretty cool. You can see Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings. It's quite amazing.

MG: I will add it to my calendar and I will cross my fingers for clear skies. Rachel, thank you.

RACHEL LEVY-MCLAGHLIN: Thanks, Matt.

MG: Rachel Levy-McLaghlin is a producer on The Current. I spoke with her about this last month. And as Rachel just mentioned, the great conjunction when Jupiter and Saturn align, the closest they've been since 1623 is on the 21st of December, which happens to be today. And so cross your fingers, if the skies are clear, it should be visible across Canada. Take a look at the horizon shortly after the sun has set. That is it for The Current. You have a little bit of homework for this evening, so get out and look at the skies. Coming up next on CBC Radio One, it's Q. Tom Power speaking with Adam Clayton, bass player for U2. It's the 20th anniversary of All You Can Leave Behind, a record that relaunched the band in many ways. And you'll hear Adam talk about that and talk about sobriety and other matters. That's coming up on CBC Radio in just a few moments time. In the meantime, I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Take care and we'll talk to you tomorrow.

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Dec. 21, 2020 episode transcript

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