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.