Vancouver. The rain brings out the gray in the roofs of houses. Every house looks shabbier in the rain—more like a ship, lit against foul weather and riding the swelling hills.
I’ve been to Vancouver four times: once for my brother’s wedding, twice for Christmas, and once (last week, in fact) to babysit my nephew. Seeing as he’s about ten months old and becoming increasingly active, I kept my energy up primarily through frequent doses of espresso. There was one night, however, where my brother and I relieved our stress by dancing to German electronic music from the 70s. The band was called Kraftwerk, and the lyrics ranged the gamut from, “Fun fun fun on the Autobahn,” to, “We are showroom dummies,” to a wistful and lovelorn, “Computer…”
For most of the week, I could only snatch four-minute windows during the day to write anything. On top of that, I received at least one short story rejection letter every single day of that trip, up until the day I left. It is at these moments in life (when you feel sucker-punched by the universe) that it’s particularly wonderful to be surrounded by people who will jig with you to dorky German electronica, or sit in a circle with objects balanced on their heads (stuffed alligators, cookie tins, pumpkins) just to make the baby chuckle.
I also relieved my feelings of frustration by drumming on the toilet seat and singing “Hope that something better comes along” from The Muppet Movie. I’ve got bruises under both my knees from crawling on the tiles.
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Vancouver: mountains disappearing, gradient by gradient, into the fog. The nearest were coal black, the farthest only ghostly gray outlines.
Perched between towering coastal mountains and the Pacific ocean, Vancouver might be my favorite city—and I say this despite the fact that I’ve only visited it in the wintertime, a season, undeniably, of heavy rain.
I’ve only read two books set in Vancouver. In one of them, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling, British Columbia is the last area in North America where people are allowed to choose their own religion. She says it’s because everyone is too exhausted, after fighting the rain, to care about enforcing dogma.
The other book I’ve read (or, more accurately, trilogy) that’s set in Vancouver is Tanya Huff’s Smoke series, which tells the story of a vampire detective whose sidekick works at a TV show about a vampire detective. But that’s another story.
The Vancouver rain falls on conifer forests and coffee shops with “Go Canada!” displayed above their doors. It falls on the dark skyscrapers. It falls on a seemingly endless variety of Indian, Thai, and sushi restaurants. It falls on the store Schlockbuster, which only rents out awful movies, and on a foot-ware chain called The House of Clogs. It falls on the King George Highway. It falls on the Cash Machines (ATMs, to us in the States), The Future Shop (a Canadian version of Radio Shack), and Stanley Park (an area of forest near the downtown where there reputedly resides a hobo named Stanley Park). The rain falls on the Vancouver Art Museum, where I once saw a piece of framed toast. It pummels down on the tiny island community (named, appropriately, Snug Cove) where my brother got married, and whose harbor is more littered with goose turds than any other place I’ve walked.
I’ve always loved rain. Storms are a way that nature invades even the most encapsulated worlds. At one point in my visit, Brett explained to me that one of the reason he prefers Canada over the U.S. is that, in the snowy North Woods, there isn’t nearly as much pressure on the environment as in California. That’s certainly true: I once gallivanted through a pine forest in one of the mountains above Vancouver. Dusk gleamed red through the trees, and eerie white hillocks coated the ground. No two snowflakes fell in the same direction: they flurried like gnats.
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I left Vancouver last Thursday, via bus to the Seattle Airport (in order to avoid the inflated prices of an international flight). Just above the U.S. border, a group of Korean tourists loaded themselves in; unfortunately, these people did not speak English or French, and didn’t understand that they were supposed to declare any perishable items they were bringing into the country. “Food?” one woman repeated blankly at the customs official who was searching her bag. This group had, between them, over ten suitcases—and food (mostly bread products) was squirreled away in various parts of each.
The upshot of that incident was that my bus was an hour late crossing the border. On top of that, Seattle traffic was a nightmare—and the “Quick Shuttle” (Misnomer Alert!) didn’t arrive at the airport until five minutes after my plane left.
Luckily, I made it onto another flight: the last one to Orange County that night. This is all to explain why last week was bereft a blog post, for which I sincerely apologize. When I finally dragged myself into anything resembling home, Thursday night, I felt utterly and honorably, defeated.
In fact, being honorably defeated is the thread that weaves my whole week in Vancouver together. Once, maneuvering my nephew’s stroller around a corner of the wet sidewalk, I was conscious of this: of feeling a piquant mixture of failure and triumph, success and defeat. A pile of rejection letters is certainly a gloomy vision—but it is also evidence that I’m deeply enmeshed in the writing world, that I am (to be blunt) doing what I set out to do.
Cheers to that.
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