Danesblod on Platform -by

More about Danesblod on Platform -by

The platform hit like a bad idea that had already been approved.

Maja was out there—dead center of a Las Vegas transit system that had somehow drifted north and washed up in western Canada like a neon carcass. No explanation. Just there. Dropped into a town with a -by on the end—Holdenby, Glassby—one of those old Norse afterthoughts where history lingers like a stain.

The word “Vikings” doesn’t hold. They were the Austmatr—the East men. Names matter.

There’s a plant by the station entrance—Danesblod. Not red elder. Not the local species. This is Sambucus nigra, the European elder, growing where it has no business growing. It sits there like a deliberate error in the landscape. A marker. Something imported, planted, or left behind.

Where it appears, something happened twice: once badly, once worse.

Out beyond the glass and steel, the land keeps its own record. In southern BC, it’s Sambucus racemosa—red elderberry, native, correct, part of the system. East of Sacramento, in the dry foothills, it’s Sambucus nigra subsp. caerulea—blue elder, dusted pale, almost black at a distance, but not the same thing. Never the same thing.

Plants don’t lie. They just wait to be noticed.

So what is this place? Canada? Britain? Some hybrid rail hallucination filmed in Selby with BBC money and a Doctor Who hangover?

Maja didn’t care. She just played.

The accordion breathed like a mechanical lung—expansion, collapse, expansion. The sound cut through the steel ribs of the station and hung there, twitching. Not music. More like a structural test of reality.

The station sat beneath towers—seventy floors of vertical compression. Downtown LA density without the optimism. Next door, one of the most expensive cities on the coast, with a district that once convinced itself it was New York and never recovered.

Out in the Lower Mainland—what some call the “greater armpit”—people used to be terrifyingly friendly. The kind of friendliness that leans in close and takes notes.

Now it’s layers. Cultures stacked like bad wiring. Pacific influx meets pseudo–New York residue. Language breaks into fragments. Families compress into 400 square feet of vertical compromise.

And the rats—thousands per acre. Which brings the coyotes—bloated, confident, nearly wolves now.

But here’s the real twist.

At the center of all this pressure is a wilderness. Not metaphorical—real. Cougars, coyotes, bears. A lake clean enough to reflect the sky. Loons. Hooded mergansers. Eagles circling, waiting.

Nobody sees it.

It runs parallel. A second system. No transfers.

The worlds don’t touch.

And Maja—still playing—holding the line between them with that accordion.

So what is the song?

Something reckless. Something precise.

Maybe Wilderness Poka.

Or maybe just the sound of a system trying not to collapse.