JOURNALI hate Vancouver. I always have. Everything bad that has ever happened to me has happened in Vancouver. I have had my throat slit open under a full moon on Hastings Street. My heart has been ripped apart and thrown to the dogs. I was laid out for six months with hepatitis A in this disease-ridden town...
And O brother, I could go on at considerable length venting my spleen...
What can you say about a town that currently has one, maybe two days at the most of sunny weather a week? It's no place for a professional tumbleweed like me to spend my summer. I wanna roam where the sun shines everyday, and the skies aren't sullied by the gloom of clouds. I want summertime.
So, I had decided to take the Western Transcontinental Train, The Canadian, 4,500 kilometres to Toronto with a few stops along the way, such as Saskatoon with a major side trip to my home town of Regina, and my birth place at White Bear Reserve.
But the closest I got to the train was when I went to the Railway Club on my last night in Vancouver.
I made plans to meet Debbie Simpson at the Two Parrots on Granville Street at 7 p.m. Debbie is a beautiful dark-haired woman with a wicked and wonderful laugh, a live life to the fullest laugh. I met her in my innocent and virginal Banff/Lake Louise days shortly after I left University. Debbie was part of the crowd that spent the last summer days in the park strolling along the Bow River, playing frisbee, lazing in the sun, reading comic books or playing chess... and dropping acid, gobbling magic mushrooms, and swilling wine. But not me.
I would later meet Debbie and another Banff friend, Gloria in Dawson City, Yukon. We lived in a big yellow garage that we called THE BEAT HOTEL. (but that's a whole other story...)
Debbie and I decided on the Railway Club as the venue for our evening entertainment because nothing says "rock" like skinny white boys hopped up on cheap drugs and polyester. It was confirmed once again, as the evening wore on, that I am The Flypaper For Freaks... We gathered a strange crew of drunks, addicts, musicians, and even a sixteen year old girl who drank martini's and smoked cigars. Debbie drank her apple cider mixed with hot water while I supped on an imported beer called McEwens.
It doesnt' take much to get Debbie drunk. She made us stand up on our chairs, clink glasses together in a rousing cheer, and shout, "O Captian, My Captain!"
I lost track of everybody's names. My brother, Gill, wandered off the street drunk and drugged, and begged money for drugs, and came back later with broken glasses. At last call our whole gang went our separate ways, sadly. Debbie and I walked down the street arm in arm to meet her bus.
I stayed up all night long and waited for my own bus to take me to the airport.
By this point, I am dog-tired and wonder where I will collapse, in which province, and on what vehicle, on the plane, in the Calgary airport, on the airporter bus, on the greyhound, hmmm... There are too many connections along the way, all too important to miss by errant snoozing. I'm in this for the long haul. No sleep 'til September.
I get stuck at the Vancouver International Airport for several hours because the airline I have scheduled with has a flat tire on their plane. Royal Airlines. Avoid it at all costs. By way of apology, they gave us a tiny morsel of granola bar and a shooter of apple juice.
Later, in Calgary the whole city is in the midst of their annual exhibition, and rodeo days. The smell of barbeque fills the air and I am tempted to stay and hang out with all the cow-gals but I remember Cowboys and Indians just don't mix.
I barely catch a connecting greyhound to Regina by mere seconds. No chance to eat at all. But somewhere along the line I pass out despite all my efforts to stay awake.
I wake up to sprawling rolling fields of rapeseed, broad swathes of bright yellow stretching to the horison where the illimitable skyline was a dark and deep blue. Later, dark fields of flax in full bloom of blue, a great undulating mass of blue reflecting the skies until dusk. It brought a smile to my lips, quickened my heart and made me dream of slim prairie girls at the harvest dance.
It has been a long time since I have been home...
