Travel Diaries #29 - Vancouver
I arrive in Vancouver, do some walking, make myself comfortable - and promptly leave
Welcome to Travel is Dangerous - a newsletter with essays and stories about travel and what it does to us. Subscribe Now for free regular updates.
I never wrote in those days; the thought had never occurred to me. Writing was for school, I was finally free of it. 2011, post-college, this time was probably the abyss – that is, the furthest point away from home – of a hypothetical journey or cycle between the times when I wrote for fun as a youth and when I resumed writing for fun as an adult.
No photos remain, either, because in the age before common smartphone adoption they never existed.
All I have now to rely on are memories.
***
Once I’d taken the leap of faith to pack my bags and book a one-way ticket to the other side of the world (or a third of the way around it anyway) it seemed that things started to fall into place. At least, they did maybe ten minutes after I got out at the Waterfront train station from the airport, near which I was stopped by an overly helpful stranger as I made my way down the street and sought out the hostel I’d booked for the weekend. A strange looking chap with long grey hair in a ponytail and the sort of wraparound sunglasses people wear when they’re trying a bit too hard to be inconspicuous. He showed me where I was looking for on the map he’d conveniently brought with him, after calmly explaining exactly where and when I needed to be at 5:30am on Monday morning to land a construction job, coldly declaring that “everyone in this city knows me”, more in an attempt to harvest my respect rather than threaten me. “I’ve made my way to the top”, and so on, and now he roamed the streets looking to help people as a way of “paying forward” his success.
Naturally, in my youthful innocence I believed every word he said, and when he insisted on a tip for as compensation for the insider knowledge he’d imparted upon me I gave him a note out of the stack of freshly ordered foreign exchange I’d brought with me from my local bank in the west of Ireland. My life’s savings, sure it looked like I’d loads of them. When recounting the story to someone later that evening I told them it was $5, but was truthfully more like 20, as it was only when they asked through parted fingertips who the guy was that it dawned on me that he had scammed me in a very Canadian way. In Ireland such scams would consist more simply of the threat of getting ‘a box’; this was my first real taste of Canadian culture, distinct from the American way of life by its lack of weaponry.
After failing that remedial test of my street smarts on literally the first street I walked down in this new country, things actually did seemed to go my way. Maybe the confidence trickster had blessed me with good luck; to this day I believe someone certainly did.
***
Shortly after that first weekend in town I got a job at the same Waterfront, just around the corner from the station, in an outlet of a corporate chain of Irish bars. Running food to tables that the hot waitresses – sorry, ‘servers’ – had taken the orders for. After the food was served (not by them but by me) they’d swan through in their uniforms, which consisted (for some reason) of tartan skirts, and black t-shirts which were often tied up behind their backs to expose their perfect midriffs (for obvious reasons) to ‘check in’ on the diners to make sure they were happy with their food, and collect fat tips from sweating men taking clients out for business lunches. Almost all hospitality staff in Vancouver were females, and of this proportion, almost all were drop dead gorgeous. In today’s world it might sound unfair, biased, prejudicial, but I thought it was a good system, and something we were missing a trick on back in Ireland. At the end of the day, every drinker and consumer of food is a lecherous buffoon, even the women, and everyone likes to be waited on hand and foot by beautiful ladies.
The bar’s website proudly stated the backstory of the owners, a team of brothers of some long-immigrated Irish descent, as “deciding on the Irish bar concept some years ago… blah blah blah”. Like the exposed midriffs, it was all just business.
The bars in general were a bit weird. I came to the big city – any big city – looking for pints, craic, rowdy behaviour and mingling amongst the sweating bosoms of inebriated weirdos, creeps, beauties, rockstars, models, bums, hellraisers and whores.
This is what people have been coming to cities for for generations, for centuries, for millenia. This is why cities were founded in ancient Sumerian – so people could groan and heave under the stinking mass of civilisation, the have-nots to be fed and watered from the dripping and trickling-down teat of their betters. There was none of this in Vancouver. Maximum occupancy, seated room only, no standing please.
Not made for mingling, certainly not between the haves and the have-nots.
***
I also managed to find a place to live, off Craigslist, in just a few days, after viewing some interesting choices. On my second day I left my hostel to go view a couple of rooms in various houses and apartments around the city. Only one of them stands out in memory. I met the guy on the end of a street somewhere between the heart of downtown and Stanley Park, somewhere around Denman Street. He’d long flowing grey hair, and, as far as I remember it, was wearing a pair of sunglasses which he never took off. Come to think of it, he might have even been the same guy who scammed me out of $20 on the waterfront the day before. He led me through a garage up to his apartment, which was a tiny one room affair split between a living area and a kitchen. I don’t remember there being a separate bedroom, or even bathroom. Instead, he showed me to what would be my ‘bedroom’. Well, not so much showed me to as allowed me to swivel to look at the four rows of subdivisions he’d made in the bedsit, with plywood walls of sorts dividing four camp-beds in rows along the floor. In each one there was a sleeping bag and a makeshift shelf behind a curtain. “There’s a Korean student in this one, and this here is where you would sleep.
No music or computers or anything like that after 10pm as we’re all trying to sleep. And you can’t have people over.”
“This is my one here” he declared, not so much proudly as aggressively.
“You can store a bike in beside your bed if you want.
You won’t get much cheaper rent than this around the city.”
That’s for sure. Honest to God, for a split second I actually weighed it up, but despite my complete naivety regarding pretty much everything the world could throw at me at this stage of my life, I was pretty certain that accepting this as a place to live for the sake of saving a couple of hundred dollars a month was a bad idea. I told him I’d think about it and let him show me out back through the darkened garage, making sure not to leave my back turned to him, or take my eyes off him for even a second.
I was happy enough to be on my way. After a few underwhelming or overpriced viewings, and unreturned phone calls, I found a place, a room on the ground floor of a Chinese family’s home, just off Main Street at 16th Avenue. I had a room and a small kitchen where the smoke alarm would go off any time I tried to cook food (possibly because at this point in time I didn’t know how to cook), though no living area, which I didn’t mind as I preferred to spend my time in my room, googling the world before heading off out into it on my latest walking adventure. It was simple, probably temporary, but it was in a lovely leafy suburb which was great for walks – and it was a home.
***
My house was just off Main Street, which roughly delineated when the major streets were nominally ‘East’ or ‘West’. The bus would run straight down it before turning on Hastings and arriving at the aforementioned Waterfront; often the starting point for my rambles around downtown.
I took a morbid and overly-enthusiastic fascination with the East Hastings area, arbitrarily separated from West Hastings by barely a city block. I must have read about it before. The largest slum in America. Canada’s Skid Row. A marketplace of street dwellers. Open injecting of hard drugs. Clinically insane or societally outcast and homeless people, hanging onto the cliff edges of society and life by gnawed fingertips pushing shopping trolleys with fingerless mittens. Rats crawling on shoulders, a blurred line between them and the animal kingdom. My bus used to go through it, from 16th right down Main Street and hanging a left to drop me off at the Cambie, the hostel where it all began, my north star in the city.
One time my bus pulled up at a stop just a couple of blocks from the nicer end of the street. Only the central door opened, not the main door by the driver. I leaned up and strained my head to see why – a man with his trousers at the floor masturbating at the stop. I see. Another time my bus broke down and I’d to walk the five or so blocks to Gastown that would take me into the ‘proper’ city. It got sketchy very quickly, or wealthy very quickly, depending on which way you were going, depending on which normal you were coming from. Barely two blocks and you’re out of this hell on earth and into the financial centre of the northwest. Skyscrapers and glass and coffee shops.
Cautiously making my way through the masses, the zombie apocalypse of people muttering, stumbling, pushing, injecting and ambling through what you would have assumed to be the last days of their lives, or everyone’s, were you to happen upon them at a hospital or in a less-contained area, but in which they miraculously lived for months, years, decades even for some poor souls, these hungry ghosts. This was their patch. Not only were they not going to hassle me for change, I realised, or lurch towards me in some psychotic bid for glory to grasp me around my throat, they didn’t even know I was there. It’s like our wavelengths were so far removed from each other that they couldn’t even see me, like we can’t hear what dogs hear, can’t see what bees see. Like walking through a sea of ghosts; the veil lifted between realities. Just don’t make eye contact and they won’t bother you, and your passage through the dead sea will be uninterrupted – the windows to the soul, it’s the last place they’ll know to look.
Some cannabis cafes in the demilitarised zone between the East and West Hastings, though they were probably more for the rich people. The ordinary folk could just buy it on the street. I’d heard it was legal here. I would soon learn that smoking weed for Canadians is about as casual as going for a cup of coffee in Ireland. They’re all at it; when in Rome, etc. It made the long walks a whole lot more of a struggle, more purposeful in a way, and the sun a lot brighter, the possibilities of the world a lot more potent.
I’d walk along the marina with its boats and harbours and curious entrances to apartment blocks I could never afford to be invited into. Concrete and glass and wood and water and trees. The views over to North Vancouver stunning, a wonderful place in the hills, trying to peer over to make out the infamous ski resorts of Cypress, Seymour, Grouse that I was hoping to reach in the impending winter, maybe even work on them. Free snowboarding, how idyllic a life that could be, a professional snowboarder in a sense.
It had been suggested to me by a friend back home prior to me coming that I should go and work in the legendary ski town of Whistler over the winter, as there wouldn’t be much happening in the city over winter, though I had my heart set on the big city, and I would stay there come hell or high water or lack of things to do. I couldn’t imagine there’d be much happening in a little country town, no buzz or nightlife or people to meet, and when I looked up the population of Whistler on Wikipedia – a mere 13,000 permanent residents – I dismissed it as too backwater for my liking, too small for the scale of my ambitions, and took my head out of my screen to gaze back up, up and away at the skyscrapers on the hills on the north shore.
Keep walking and skyscrapers beget more skyscrapers; more commercial premises fizzle out into residential buildings until they suddenly fall off the edge of a cliff – within two blocks of being right in the city you’re in the famous Stanley Park. Metal and glass and concrete giants turn to green ones, your hazy attention still unable to give your neck a rest as your wonder strains upwards to the giant trees which stretch hundreds of feet into the air. Dozens of kilometres of trails criss-cross the forested park, along with the main highway which brings you to the enormous Lion’s Gate suspension bridge which links across to North Vancouver. And as you walk the perimeter along the famous Seawall, the bay opens up onto that lesser-spotted ocean for a young Irishman: the great expanse of the Pacific; next stop Asia, or Australia, or somewhere you could only ever dream of.
I used to just get off the bus on the other side of downtown and walk until I couldn’t walk anymore. On maps of the obnoxious gridded street layouts of the new world everything looks so close. In reality city blocks could take you five minutes to cross. One long street might be a mile, or two. At home roads helpfully meandered left and right, up and down, the contours of the world forming at a human scale that aids comprehension of how far the next leg of your journey is. It didn’t matter; I’d nowhere to be anyway. Just walking as something to do. A means of exploring. I still didn’t even know that I was ‘travelling’ by being here, but it just seemed like the right thing to do with my free time.
Coming from the other side: down Davie to Sunset Beach. English Beach. Second Beach out in the park then Third Beach. Giant dead logs presumably from the park strewn around as handy beaches. Native totems built to honour people who were presumably turfed out of here against their will or better knowledge.
By day I’d walk. On weekends I’d go out to pubs around the city with a group of friends from my home-town in Ireland – friends of friends and acquaintances I’d half-known over the years. The city felt exciting, if a little hard to penetrate. Life was fun, everything was novel, though I didn’t really have any idea of what or where I wanted the year to go. Where did I see myself in a year? Going home, probably. A year-long holiday in the city, rather than an adventure across the world. A year of growing comfort, pleasant times, long walks and nice views.
But something was missing.
***
What do I remember now?
Everything and nothing.
The names of streets.
Burrard. Granville. Nelson. Smithe.
Beautiful servers in ordinary bars with standing room only. Hockey on TV screens. Beef dip and fries.
Weed cafes. People called Todd, or Tyler, or Grayson. Burgers everywhere, pickles with everything. State run liquor stores.
Davie. Bute. Thurlow. Robson.
Eating Subway once a day. The Cambie hostel. Tim Hortons coffee.
Broadway. Main. Hastings. Howe.
Random middle-aged Asian women stopping me in the street to tell me they’d come here “about 10 years ago, with nothing”, before building a business and sending their kids to college and being “very happy here”.
Not being able to cook.
Crazy homeless people.
Crazy rich people.
Gastown.
Vietnamese restaurants, long before I knew what they were.
A lost Irish guy on Day 1 who’d clearly just arrived to the city stopping me in the middle of Downtown and asking if I knew where to find a barber around here, and me trying – and succeeding – to one-up his haplessness by telling him “I just got here”, and asking him if he “knew anywhere to rent a room”, or any jobs going”.
Long walks along long highways under streetlamps.
Pendrell. Robson. Georgia.
Trying to catch a straight line of sight from North Van to False Creek.
Cruise ships gliding on the horizon of the Pacific Ocean.
The music I listened to, forever now taking me back to those long walks and the trees and the water. Metronomy. Cults. Foster the People. Broken Social Scene.
Walking.
Skyscrapers and metal and glass and beaches and trees everywhere you looked.
Always looking up through hazy vision, up to skyscrapers and the hills and low-hanging clouds.
And always looking into the sun.
***
When you answer the call, pack your bags, jump on a flight and commence a journey or trip it’s tempting to think your work is done, and it can be – just answering the call has a profound effect in itself. But there’s a false dawn. It’s tempting to think your work is done. And you must remember the lord’s prayer: lead us not into temptation. You will quickly make yourself at Home on the road, but the road itself becomes a new home, with all the comfort and reinforcement of your old self that that entails. Comfort becomes stagnation becomes death. You must remember that the journey itself is simply a jumping-off point for an infinite well of untapped further adventures. The journey is just beginning. Every moment presents to you a choice. To abandon your Home is one thing, but to abandon the shiny allure of your home away from home – over and over again – is another.
The great journey of life is less a cycle and more a Venn diagram, a spiralling cycle of interwoven smaller cycles and mini-quests that begin and end indefinitely ad finitum til the day you die. And even then, this might all just be a prelude to the real adventure; perhaps this maddening life with its potential for heaven and hell on earth is but the Shire in the grand scheme of things, a warm-up, a test drive, a demo a free trial.
Skyscrapers beget more skyscrapers, and accepting adventure begets more adventure.
Although I’d taken one giant leap already I could sense the familiarity of everything beginning to close in on me already. I knew something was wrong. I’d avoided the entire country of Australia for fear I’d end up drinking in Irish pubs or on beaches with friends from home for a year. How bad. I would have enjoyed it. I would have positively loved it, to be honest. I couldn’t think of anything better.
The last straw was waking up with a raging hangover after getting polluted drunk and céilí dancing at a dinner dance organised by Vancouver GAA club. Life would be good here. Simple. Easy. Familiar.
The game was up.
I knew I had to leave.
***
I happened to have an out.
Despite having previously dismissed the idea of leaving Vancouver to move to a ski town for the winter, the proposition was altogether different when presented to me on the ground, by real people.
I’d met Joel and Booker, two friendly lads from the south of New Zealand, on my second night in Vancouver, as I teetered on the precipice at the edge of the known universe, full of rum and my ears still ringing from seeing Broken Social Scene (my favourite band) in Stanley Park, a transcendent experience amidst trees that stretched to heaven, a more perfect introduction to the new world I couldn’t have written myself, intensely of the new culture and personal. They were also staying in the Cambie, in town for the weekend from some obscure town they were living in up in the mountains. We hit it off over the weekend, particularly when it turned out we’d friends in common, two girls from home whom Joel had worked with in Vancouver the previous year. Even outside of Ireland it turned out I was never going to be more than two degrees of separation from knowing anyone else. What were the odds? This may have been the first synchronicity I’d ever experienced, long before I ever knew what such a thing was.
Over they weekend they slowly convinced me that if snowboarding was what I wanted to do in Canada, then leaving the city and seasonally migrating to the mountains was the only way to do it. They even had a spare room if I wanted it.
By the end of the weekend I was all but convinced to hop in the car and drive back to the mountains with them. What an adventure that would have been? It was a step too far for me though, at that time. I felt attached to Vancouver, like it was my duty to stay there, even if only because I’d arbitrarily chosen it as my home from Ireland based on internet research. I’d managed to find a room to rent and a job over the weekend (in between going to concerts and crawling out the bars of Vancouver). And so I made my excuses and stayed.
The seed was planted though. Slowly but surely over the coming weeks. I knew I had an out. But also an in. Into the world of adventure. A small little town in the mountains, I’d never even heard of it before. I’d come back to Vancouver after the winter, when things were picking up again for the summer, when the snow had melted and the city promised endless life.
After six weeks of increasing comfort and stability, of the kind that any sane person or Asian immigrant would have killed for, I called Joel and Booker and told them I was going to take them up on their offer. I quit my job after just a few short weeks – they wished me well. I moved out of the Chinese family’s basement – the father kindly offered to drop me to the bus station at 5am. I booked a one way ticket on a Greyhound bus, on a route which seemed to follow the Trans-Canada Highway – Highway 1 – in a fairly straightforward manner, a nine hour journey eastward towards Calgary and the Canadian Rockies.
Now that I’d taken the first step, it seemed I’d an insatiable thirst for adventure. I had nothing to lose, and, it would turn out, everything to gain. And I had no idea. I thought I was just moving to a small little country town – much like my own beloved hometown in the west of Ireland – to come back to Vancouver in a few months. But Vancouver was a false done, a safe harbour. Little did I know, I was going on an adventure.
That’s how I ended up in Revelstoke.
If you enjoyed reading, then don’t forget to subscribe for more independent essays and stories about travel and more
And don’t forget to hit like, share or leave a comment.
David was born in Vancouver so loved reading about it from your perspective. Street names brought back memories. Your writing. Is inspirational, Colette
Great read....