The Trip Back

It was time to say goodbye to Miss Wongchong (or something similar, I never asked for clarification). Apart from the cheap rates, clean rooms, interesting surrounds, television and peace and quiet, she was the only reason I stayed the extra few nights. By the third day she had offered me family rates if I ever chose to come back to Vancouver. By the forth day she had offered me a job, if I ever came back. By the fifth, she was telling me all about her life, her thirteen hour non stop days, without holiday. If I had stayed for a fifth night she would have probably let me stay there for free. “Ah, Mr Rich, why you go home so soon?”. It was just as well I wasn’t staying another week. We would have probably been married by then.

I made my last trip by the sky train, apparently it seemed, not a favoured form of transport with the locals. It would appear to busy, too expensive, too slow for most. But the sky train, remains impressive. Built at huge cost, it connects downtown Vancouver with the Eastern Suburbs. Unlike a subway system, it sits above the local traffic, allowing you the advantage to look at the scenery and not the slightly strange looking person opposite. One of the Hastings brigade had tried to become a ticket tout at Stadium station, picking up discarded tickets and forcibly trying to sell them on when people purchased tickets from the machine. I stopped this time, had a discussion, tried to explain I didn’t want his second hand ticket and told to him to stop lying about his false reasons for wanting money. After realising he wasn’t coming around to my way of thinking, and thinking he was getting to persistent, I told him to fuck off back to Hastings. It worked. After all, he was limping, he couldn’t catch me. My sensitive side had long gone.

The leap back into normality was complete when I stepped off the train. Time to say goodbye to a radiant friend, who had shown me around town, shown me their life. There had been a few new experiences on this trip, seeing seals, chipmunks, eagles, the unintentional deep water of wake boarding, people living on lakes, huge mountains, strange cowboys, amazing firework displays, good service, good ideas. Then of course there was the fish, I ate it. And I don’t know why. Simply because I never had.

I wanted to give Hastings Street another go in the daylight, maybe the freakshow I had experienced a couple of nights back was a one off. This time I was more of a target, dragging a large, bulging bag, with a sign saying ‘You could get lots of cups of coffee out of me, take me’. To my surprise, the street, was exactly the same in the day as nightfall. This time however, they were not just zombie shadows. Some lay down, some staggered across the street, ignoring the traffic light signals and chancing their luck, It wasn’t long before I attracted attention.

“Hey, that sure is a heavy bag”, a squinting man had started to follow. Unlike most of the direct ones, he had tried an unsubtle tactic. Act all innocent, wait for the kill. “I need to get to Surrey fast, I need two bucks, man, you have got to help me, I’ve been chased all over town by these guys, please”. Maybe if I had heard this story the first time, I would have been slightly sympathetic. But I hadn’t. It wasn’t a bad story, after all, but not as good as the dying homosexual, the poem speaker, or, the one who had to go and see his ‘sick’ mother (I would have thought she should have been coming to see him). The bit that made my slightly weary was the pace he was walking, if I was ever in the chase by situation by two even more mentally inept people than the one I was speaking two, I will be running, not pigeon stepping.

My pace had been slowed by the number of articles getting stuck between my wheels, there was glass, cigarettes, empty cans, and, more than likely, a couple of discarded needles. Every so often I was pause, clean the obstructions, and walk at a fast pace, to at least pretend to know what direction I was going in. As I entered Gastown for the last time, the pressure eased. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, I picked up a copy of the Vancouver Sun. The headline read “Hastings Drug Baron arrested by US drug officials”. Apparently this had cause anger locally, the pot smoking character was local folklore, taking advantage of Vancouver’s more relaxed cannabis laws. However, with a three million dollar hemp seed selling business, he was no floater. A multi state Investigation in the U.S had concluded that eighty percent of his market was over there, thus, despite the local fury, the Canadian police under forced U.S pressure had gone for the swoop.

The first delay. Apparently a computer didn’t work, causing a check in queue snaking around terminal. By the hour I was thinking of working at the airport, given the amount of “No, this is the Zoom flight” responses I was passing off. After eight hours of children screaming in my ears I finally landed. Like a hastings Zombie, I sat and watched the bags go around, and around , for forty five minutes. Three weeks of enjoyment. It was cloudy outside. What a surprise.