the journals of alan rhodes

November 5 Friday
Audio recording at Bob's and later the Oval at John Abbott. (Andy and Mike Habel, Joanne (135) and Bob).

Just a note to let you know that I'm here in Revelstoke B.C. probably working by the time you get this. Cut through the mountains, stopped in Banff overnight-not hiring [?] for a couple of weeks so here I am in the Rockies deeper. Staying at friends here until I find accomodations on my own which doesn't look too hard. Our weather is great, little snow but clearing up. Its just fantastic here. I love it-just call me Mountain Mich the mountain maniac. See you at Xmas and keep up your spirits and I'll be keeping up mine. Write you all again in letter form soon.
Lots of talk about but can't fit it in so until whenever, Tally-ho!

Postcard from Michelle Jordan (136) to Ralph, postmarked Revelstoke, 4 PM, Nov 8, 1976, but dated Nov. 5th, 1976

I am here! The Rockies are a most spectacular sight Ralph! If you were here with your camera [stolen, alas, in Greece the previous summer], you'd be camera happy! I'm travelling through to Revelstoke B.C. writing you in the car passing through the Kicking horse pass area. Revelstoke offers good jobs ($800.00 a month). I'll be coming home for Xmas + New Years celebrations. After, coming back to this wonderful mountain air and mystical feeling the Rockies have. No problem living-wise. We are staying with friends from Montreal in Revelstoke. At Xmas I'll give you more of the load-down of this life. Miss you all. Oh, doing my silkscreening out here, skiing + mountain climbing are daily wims [sic]. They will be fulfilled out here! Well must cut it short, lots of love Mich

November 10-13, 15, 17
Film [the last super 8 film I made]. One scene includes a shot of a Parti Québécois poster...

135. Joanne Peterson. At this time she was seeing Bob (Ralph stated in 1997 that she had earlier been seeing Andy. She had been a fixure around the pool tables in the Centenial Center lounge at John Abbott). Ralph worked with her brother c.1997 and he said that Bob "was a control freak" and had violent tendencies.

136. Ralph's note; Michelle seemed always to have a kind of "nature girl" alter-ego. I still have two versions of a sort of meditative prose poem {both undated, but probably from '74-'75} in which she expresses her desire to be in some idyllic and idealized Edenic environment in which she sleeps in beds of daisies, showers in a waterfall, and is dried by the summer breeze before going on to explore mountains and wander seashores where she plucks feelings from the ground. Michelle did come to Montreal at Xmas, but did not go back out west until July '77. In the meantime she lived in the Pardo Apartments and later hung around with/lived part-time with a crowd of people sharing an apartment at Southwest One. The last I heard of her was via her letter dated August 22, 1977, at which time she says she is picking fruit in the Okanagan and planning to move on to Vancouver and Prince Rupert, expecting to visit Montreal for Xmas, and hoping to earn enough money out west to go to Europe with us (?) in '78 and pay off a first year at university. She gives Vancouver General Delivery as her return address, but the envelope is mysteriously and inexplicably postmarked Ste Anne de Bellevue, PQ, 6 IX 1977.