Things are Going South Fast: Part 2

 1 May 2015 @ 9:13AM

I was sitting next to an Indian man (not First Nations, but a man from India). There wasn’t a whole lot of space left on the bus, but I was tired enough where I soon drifted back off into sleep. My eyes fluttered open again to a different scene. Fast moving mountain streams mirrored the colour of the low hanging clouds that hovered at the top of the valley. The sparse tan-green hills were now covered with tall, mostly pine, trees that made up a sea of jagged green spikes punctuated by rivers of grey. This must have been the valley I was told about and it strangely reminded me of Io valley on Maui. I drowsily tried to take a picture with my phone, but the colours weren’t right, and my camera couldn’t capture the outlines of the clouds well enough to do the scene justice. I tried to watch it with my eyes, to take it all in and hold on to it the old fashion way, but my consciousness was like a handful of sand and I could feel the grains slipping through my fingers.

In the end we arrived at Pacific station in Vancouver after the 8:30 bus. I had only about half an hour before my next bus left for Seattle, so I walked into the station and froze. It was almost chilling to stand in the last place I saw her. I deliberated for a long time over if I should take a picture of the uncomfortable wooden bench where we talked about anything but our upcoming five months of separation. In the end, I decided it would be morbid. Vancouver was bright and sunny, budding with life and the essence of spring. But for me, it was haunted by ghosts, and they were all her. I was glad I wasn’t sticking around.

When I walked back through the doors, the man who inspected tickets asked me. “Where are you headed?”

I told him, “Seattle.”

I must have been grinning because the man said, “You look really happy to be going to Seattle.”

And that was when it dawned on me that I was happy to go to Seattle. For the first time in a long time, I was really looking forward to seeing a new city. I was really looking forward to being in the US. I was really looking forward to going home, even if just for a short while. So I grinned wider, in an aggressively American way, and said honestly, “I am.”

He tells me my gate, and I pull my suitcase behind me to gate 14 where I stand behind an Australian couple and in front of three girls speaking Spanish. I end up sitting in front of a woman who was from Oregon, but had lived in Canada for the previous decade. This was the first time she was going home, and her happiness was almost infectious.

Going through customs on the ground is a lot less strenuous than by air. The people are more relaxed, and when they saw my US passport I was told “Welcome Home” as opposed to the “Where were you? Why did [would] you leave? What were you doing abroad for that long?” battery of questions I was used to receiving from US customs. If ever given the choice, I strongly recommend it. Either way, I had a laugh with the Australian couple over the dichotomy.

When I got back to my seat, I noticed the girl sitting across from me had a YES button from the Scottish referendum. I asked her about it. She was from Perthshire, and her voice was a dead ringer for Karen Gillan (she didn’t look anything like Karen Gillan though). As often seems to be the case with me, the conversation soon migrated to the Edinburgh vs. Glasgow discussion. She said she liked Glasgow much better than Edinburgh, that Glasgow was all about the people and that once you got over the whole fairy tale thing, Edinburgh didn’t have a lot to offer. I smiled and shook my head and wondered phocesiously where I had heard this before.

After the next stop, the woman who was returning to the US got off to be reunited with some family. I told her “Welcome home” not realising until after it had left my mouth that I had tacked on an “eh?” at the end of my statement. She smiled at me warmly and gave the most sincere “thank you” I’ve ever received. I nearly hugged her on instinct, but that would probably have been weird so I stayed in my seat.

The bus continued to chug along, and I began to write about my southward journey. The view from my window was nice enough, but nothing compared to the earlier Canadian vistas. Eventually, a woman with an accent that sounded Caribbean sat next to me. She had several bags and it made the end of the trip uncomfortably cramped. Apparently she was at the start of three solid days of Greyhounds on her way to New York City. I really didn’t envy that journey, as dreadful as my own was.

Eventually the bus pulled onto a bridge overlooking Puget Sound. I switched my iPhone to from a podcast to my music player and played Owl City’s Hello Seattle (first the original then the remix). These tunes seemed like the perfect soundtrack for my entrance to the city. The bus station was right next to the light train line that led to the airport. Home was just two flights away.

Things Are Going South Fast: Part 1

30 April 2015 @ 9:00PM

There was a German girl sitting across from me in the Prince George Greyhound bus station. I hadn’t asked her name; she hadn’t asked mine. It didn’t really matter. Her west bound bus was leaving in a half an hour, while I had another two hours before the south bound bus departed. It had been a while since I’d spoken with a backpacker, but it was nice to start the trip off that way. I was leaving Prince George for the first time in 115 days, and having this person to talk to about travel things helped me to get back into the traveller mind-set. Hell, just having someone to talk to was a nice distraction from the battle of emotions churning through my body. I wanted to leave so badly it hurt, but I also didn’t want to leave my new friends or this new place I now called home.

When the girl got on her bus, I turned on my phone and plugged my headphones in. Earlier that day, I had downloaded Cora Carmack’s “Losing It” and right about then, I couldn’t think of a better distraction than the awkward Sexyness that is the hallmark of Carmack’s craft. Awkward people need love too; I should know. Anyway, I was so engrossed that I almost didn’t notice that people had begun to queue up for the south bound bus to Kamloops.

After getting my luggage stowed in the cargo bay beneath the seats, I found a widow seat and snuggled up next to my pillow. It was already half past 11, and I so I told myself that I would just listen to one more chapter. I’ve told myself this lie so often that one would think I’d know better. Needless to say that when we stopped at a Tim Horton’s around half 2, I was still awake.

I considered getting a coffee, but I’m sorry Canadian friends, Timmy’s sucks for coffee. So I bought a sandwich instead and then proceeded to listen to the audio book until its completion. I think I finally nodded off during the epilogue.

My eyes opened to the soft, pale-yellow, glow of the eastern hills gradually blending into the lightest baby blue. Scattered cumulus clouds looked pinkish-purple in the glassy clear water of the numerous ponds and streams strewn about the rugged tan-green hills. This landscape could only have been the illegitimate love-child of Turkish Anatolia and the Scottish Highlands, and when seeing it awash in the predawn light, it was hard to imagine anything more beautiful.

The scene flickered before me, on and off, several times before a consistent shutter sound jarred me into a more stable state of consciousness. It took me a bit to recognise the skeuomorphic noise as a camera phone. It was a good idea so I followed suit.

After about half an hour, the sun rose above the hills and we had arrived in Kamloops. A twinge of sadness ran through me as I stumbled out of the bus and into the bus station. Memories of a black January night, bitter cold, and missing her flooded through my mind, as I took a seat and watched a line of bleary-eyed passengers shuffle into the station with all the grace of a horde of zombies seeking the all illusive grey matter, or maybe just coffee. 
The Kamloops bus station is nothing to write home about, which is probably a poor turn of phrase considering I’m literally doing that. However, my time here wasn’t supposed to be long, and so soon enough, I was back in queue to board the next bus to Vancouver.

I ended up chatting with two older gentlemen about one of those grab the prize with the claw and joystick games. A few days before, I had been listening to NPR’s “How to do Everything” and they explained the trick behind these types of games. So I shared it with my new companions, as I will here: Not surprisingly, the game is rigged to insure you lose the overwhelming majority of the time. So the secret is that not only does the claw have to be positioned exactly right to grab a prize, but also that the actual strength of the claw’s grip changes each time. This works out to where only around 1 in 20 times the claw is actually strong enough to pick up the prize, assuming the claw itself is aligned perfectly. The moral of the story is that those games are not worth yours or anyone’s time.

Our line slowly marched towards the bus, and we began to wonder if there would be enough space for all of us. There wasn’t. As it would turn out, there were two busses to Vancouver in quick succession and some of the passengers from the later bus were on my bus. The first bus was scheduled to leave at 7:00; the second bus (an express bus) was due to leave at 8:30. It took so long to get all the passengers sorted onto their correct busses, that our bus didn’t leave Kamloops until 8:00. No one, and especially not the bus driver, was happy.