Travel Diaries #32 - Going Back
"You can never go back", or so they say - but what if you do?
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The Anticipation of Time Travel
I did go back.
A family holiday a few years ago with my father and brother, Dad had always wanted to see the old Wild West. We drove from Vancouver to Calgary in an automatic Ford Focus, through Beautiful British Columbia and into neighbouring Rich Obnoxious but Ridiculously Big Alberta, a week-long trip with a few stops along the way.
Of course, I made sure we stopped and spent an afternoon and night in Revelstoke.
The whole trip I was preoccupied with the place until we got there. The focal point of the whole journey was not the end destination but somewhere around the apex in the middle. The thing as a whole would be brilliant, I was sure, though I couldn’t really begin to imagine what lay in store for me back there. The build-up like anticipating having your family come to your gig, or read a book that you’ve written. Taking them on a guided tour of your past, the by-now darkened corners of your mind. Imagine if you unexpectedly bumped into someone you’d known way back then, what would be revealed by the first little micro-expression to register on their face, or yours, or startled words out of their mouth, before they remembered you were inhabiting a different moment in time, and the company you were in? Or imagine a crazy old drunk came stumbling up the street, and recognised you, remembered with too-fine a clarity some obscure details about you, long forgotten and buried away, hopefully moved on from. So much could be revealed – even on your own face, the momentary pauses as you breathe when you round corners, things you didn’t think you’d remember but do now, all too clearly – by taking those closest to you around the places you used to live, and lived with such exhilarating, reckless abandon too.
And for myself… I wondered what Revelstoke would be like now. The town itself, how it would have changed and – presumably – grown. Such was the trajectory of the new ski resort’s reputation and renown, seemingly getting ‘big’ the year I was there, I feared if it might have become a sprawling mega-resort town in the intervening years. Transformed, rebuilt and totally destroyed. Overrun by tourists and rich yuppies, its spirit crucified and destined to be forgotten in time.
I wondered if all the old haunts (there’s a reason they’re called that) were still there – The Last Drop and the Regent pubs, the Southside Supermarket and the Denny’s restaurant where I worked. I wondered if my old home at 916 Downie Street was still standing – a hundred-year old townhouse on a huge site, it had always been earmarked to be sold and demolished and rebuilt into several units, as old buildings and towns tend to be.
And the people – were any of the old gang still there? Or even some of the locals frequenting the bars and shops and alleyways around town, no doubt there’s plenty of people in a small town still propping up the counter of the same shops, and will be for another seven years, and seven more years after that. The thought of walking down some aisle in a store, and triggering some vague recognition in a villager minding their own business, just about strong enough to leave them with a jarring resonance of familiarity for the rest of the day, but not quite strong enough to be able to place you, a form of torture for some, that tip-of-the-mind feeling worse than any sneeze caught in the nose, and the remainder of the day spent half a second off the pace of every task, caught between activating their own memories, their drunken recollections, their idle daydreams, their foreign adventures, their shamanic visions, and the worlds of their dreams – for at this point, this far down the line, the memories all come from the same place.
You haven’t travelled in time, you think, but just by going back to a place you can rip a hole between dimensions.
I thought about contacting old friends, but my understanding from the voyeurism of still-existing social media connections was that none of them still lived there. It was a transient place, and transient types tend not to remain somewhere seven years on. What would it be like to meet again, all these years on, a lifetime ago in many ways, or several lifetimes when you’ve made your home in so many different places since then.
You’d hope it’d be a happy reunion. Or it could be like bumping into someone the following afternoon from a drunken night out, the moment is gone and your inhibitions have retreated to their ordinary routine states of guardedness. You remember each other, and are polite, but you no longer share the same state of communion you once did, when you both lived in that same place and inhabited that same spiritual world.
A part of me was afraid that even if an old friend were still there and I did contact them, they mightn’t reply.
***
The Return
The visit itself was wonderfully pleasant. Nice warm overcast summer weather, just how I remembered leaving it. We checked into a motel in the downtown, a couple of friends had worked on its front desk all those years ago. We drove up to Revelstoke Mountain Resort – the Hill – just a couple of miles out of town, to the base of the gondola and the site of the apartments I’d once worked on as a labourer.
I bought a souvenir Revelstoke water bottle in the ski shop, I had no artifacts from before, all my ski gear had been lost and my clothes from then tattered and discarded. I did my best to fixate upwards in awe at the slopes of the mountain which had brought me so much joy that legendary winter, though as with any tourist sight, there’s only so much looking and intentional meditation you can do, especially when you have company, and you leave after a minute or two, in fact thirty seconds is probably pushing it.
We drove to the top of the National Park and rambled around the summer flowers, posing for photos. Cruised around town in the car at the local pace, up and down the perfect grids of streets of the suburbs, and got lunch in a great sandwich shop that’s still going from back in the day, a memory of a meal with two friends competing with the actual presence of my dad and brother in front of me as we ate, the matrix subtly glitching.
We even pulled up outside my old house on Downie Street – I had to – and it’s still there, though it seems a family lives there now, a real one, not the collective of orphan snowboarders who inhabited it in the past. I wondered if the Rusty Nail still existed in the basement, or if it had been pulled down and the space converted into something more family-friendly, the ghosts of all those parties set free. It occurred to me briefly to ring the doorbell to chat with the present owners, though it also occurred to me that I wouldn’t enjoy that if I were them, nor would I enjoy it myself now that I’d thought about it.
I didn’t bother.
When I lived in Revelstoke it was the Next Big Thing in the ski world. Billion dollar plans to make it a bigger ski destination than Whistler. Featured in all the big snowboarding movies, the word had got out, and some said the 2011/2012 season was the ‘first year the Europeans found out about it’. I presumed coming back that the whole town would be transformed, exploded into the stratosphere of development and gentrification by a regular and increasing invasion of seasonal workers and ski bums, many of whom would come to make more permanent homes in paradise.
From the outside, it appeared not. It appeared much the same as it had ever been. We drove around, up and down the old streets. Waves of nostalgia, though something else as well. I took some obligatory photos. I told my dad and brother stories about all the places we drove by, some facts about the town, old stories of Things We Used to Do. We visited the Railway Museum, an impressive representative of the town’s history which existed long before the ski resort was built, it being a relatively recent addition to life in the small logging town in the western Canadian mountains. Although I knew where to find it, I hadn’t actually visited the museum before. Dad loved it. So did I.
As I circled the car around by the old Southside Market I used to work at, I thought about calling in, wondering if Alan and Christina, its Chinese-immigrant owners and my former bosses, were still there. An old neighbour used to manage the place, though his health had been quite bad at the time, bad enough that he probably wouldn’t still be around. Neither would Elsie, our adorable 88 year old next door neighbour who never complained about noise and used to send us over trays of cookies, and told us that summer she’d been diagnosed with cancer. I turned the car back towards town, I didn’t want to be delaying the lads.
Maybe next time.
***
Going Back
There’s a difference between re-visiting somewhere and trying to go back to it, to attempt to recreate the same conditions and spirit as you found there the first time, whether in the same place or some place new.
Because you can never go back.
I’d often thought about moving there again. But I knew by now the time when I might do that had passed. And maybe it was best that I never acted on the urge. To forever crave to return to old times is to be chasing a particular dragon, it is an addiction. The attempt to find the source of your nostalgia, to reach the point where the rainbow hits the earth: it might even be the origin of all addictions.
When you dream of somewhere you’ve been, are you dreaming of a place, or a time? Be wary of the difference. Although you can go back to a place, you can never go back to a time. And if you try to do so, you might be messing with the metaphysics of the world in ways our normal understanding of physics can’t comprehend. We don’t know what effect it could have. To see someone you weren’t meant to see; to hear something you weren’t meant to hear. This is what it means to rip a hole in the space-time continuum; your fate to be sentenced to another few laps of the sun stuck between your Home and Somewhere Else, to be caught in limbo until you assert resolutely in which place you truly stand.
Once you leave, that’s it, the journey’s over, at least this particular one, and there are no do-overs. Take comfort that something real within you, however misguided, urged you to leave when you did, and if that time were too late or too soon, then perhaps that is the lesson that this trip was meant to provide to you, and that sense of longing in your heart you’re stuck with for the rest of your days is something you must – or better: get to – carry with you for the rest of your days. By all means go back for a visit, but be aware that things will never be the same as they once were, you must return on new terms, to a new journey, a blank slate which begins from where you are now.
This wasn’t an attempt to go back. It was a new visit, a holiday. A novel chance to show people from home this fabled place on the other side of the world that meant so much to me; fellow time-travellers brought along for the journey to anchor me to the place I was meant to be at that time.
I was surprised that the town hadn’t been transformed into some kind of mega-resort. In fact, it felt more the same than it ever was, like now it’s fated to never change. Though there remained a barrier between me and it. I no longer lived there, was no longer a part of it. We drove around as tourists, and maybe that was for the best. And maybe that’s why being back in Revelstoke didn’t quite feel real.
It felt like I was on the set of a movie.
***
The First Rule of Time Travel/Collapsing Timelines
After dinner we let Dad go to bed and went to my old local, The Last Drop. It was still the same as it ever was, a strangely windowless building in the middle of downtown with a large inviting interior, somewhat like the foyer of a grand lodge in the Scottish highlands but with all the predictable trappings and menu items of an American bar. We sat at the bar and ordered Guinness for some reason, I think they were on special. The only other customers were two Irish lads stopping off on the way back from the Calgary stampede. We chatted for the night, their stories of life as working-holiday visa-toting emigrants to Vancouver filling me with its own unique form of nostalgia, of that feeling of being young and innocent and wide-eyed as I navigated my first few weeks in Vancouver before moving here. Life in one of the big cities its own sort of New World Rat Race, a life of red tape and job-hunting and constantly looking over your shoulder wondering if you’d be better off at home or ploughing onwards and upwards into the unknown heights of life abroad.
I spent half the night resenting talking to them, and even my brother – anyone who hadn’t been there, who didn’t know. Like I should be trawling the streets and popping my head into every pub in town just to see if I knew anyone, even recognised anyone. Though I knew I probably wouldn’t talk to anyone even if I did. I’d seen Back to The Future too many times. I knew better than to interfere, or so I told myself.
It was only at closing time I dared to talk to the bartender, about anything more than the same-again order of pints. I’d wondered once or twice if his face wasn’t familiar, though at this stage I presumed I was imagining it. Wishing it.
“Anywhere else to go after this?”
Inevitably; I could have stayed drinking in Revelstoke indefinitely.
“Not since the old Empty Hook closed down I’m afraid” came the reply, with a wry laugh.
As it turned out, I did know the bartender. I’d met him once or twice, his brother had ran the same bar during the year I’d spent in town.
“So you knew the Rusty Nail before it?”
He did, and my housemates, and much of the gang who’d stuck around for another winter after I’d left.
All the old people and all the old places.
My last connection to a past life. Maybe I should have spoken to him earlier in the night, instead of half-listening to tourist tales I’d no interest in. But what difference would it have made?
I asked him if any of that gang were still living here.
“Just one, I think”
An old friend, a core part of the Rusty Nail family. I’d had a feeling she would still be around.
It was getting late. Too late. Last minute plans to meet up after all these years on a Wednesday at 1am are rude, offensive even.
I sent her a message anyway. Maybe she’d be around to meet up in the morning, before we left for Banff. I wasn’t even sure if that’s what I wanted.
I woke in the morning to a reply. Returned at 2am.
“Where are you?”
Too late. Already in bed.
“How long are you here for?”
Gone again, we’re already in Golden, next stop Alberta.
Two ships in the night.
The melancholic what-ifs began to go off like fireworks. It’s nearly worse that she did reply.
I sent a picture of the house on Downie Street I’d taken that morning.
“That was a fun time for sure”
That monumental year – my year – just another one in a decade of someone’s life, no doubt there’d been many distinct years and winters, each with their own cast, crew and life events. For me there was only one Revelstoke, one moment in time, that one single year of winter and summer.
We arrived in Canmore in the Rockies that evening, the trip had returned to normal, just a family on holidays to new places again.
And that was it.
The Revelstoke I’d known all those years ago was gone forever, and I would never be going back there again.
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Night travel seems fun and risky at the sa.e time. I love your characters especially the homeless one.
Great article, interesting characters, but my conclusion I would rather enjoy late night in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, etc. (: