Want some crack, eh?
No, thank you.
Ok, no worries. Sooory.
Want some company for the night big guy?
No, I’m ok thank you.
Oh, ok, sooory.
The drug dealers and prostitutes in Vancouver, British Columbia were most cordial.
It was 2002, I was living in San Francisco and primed for adventure. While an undergraduate I attended school full-time, while also working two part-time jobs. The schedule was a tad grueling. I employed my mornings unloading merchandise and stocking shelves at the bougie Williams-Sonoma in the Stonestown Galleria. My afternoons and evenings were spent seated in classrooms, writing term papers in the library, and working as a computer lab monitor on campus. Up at 6am and to bed around midnight. After months of this schedule, I was drained. My mind ached from too much postmodern literature, my hands were nicked up from ripping open too many cardboard boxes, and my eyes were weary from staring at Photoshop.
So, I saved up a little money—still possible when a semester at San Francisco State was had for the paltry sum of $913—and booked a spring break ticket for Vancouver. It was the first time I had traveled alone. I brought a knapsack with a couple changes of clothes and a pair of dusty sneakers. Back then, not even a passport was required for entry into Canada: my California driver’s license sufficed. Save for the lack of legroom in coach, it was a fairly painless two-hour trek.
Some 200 years earlier, the excursion was abundantly more protracted for those of European ancestry. Ready for some claiming and naming, Captain George Vancouver of the Royal British Navy departed England in the spring of 1791. His two ships first sailed to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii. A year later, after navigating north along the waters off Oregon and Washington, he arrived in April 1792 at the British Columbian coast. The voyage was fairly uneventful—Vancouver failed to find the Fraser and Columbia rivers. The Captain made some maps and shot the breeze with Spanish explorers in the area. He returned to Hawaii to winter over.
Captain Vancouver’s outing proved much less miserable than that of the Tonquin two decades later. The Tonquin, owned by fur baron and opium kingpin John Jacob Astor, set out from New York destined for the Columbia River in 1811. The vessel was helmed by the American Captain Jonathan Thorn, who, by all accounts, was a first class asshole. He treated his sailors cruelly, was prone to long bouts of depression, and figured every Pacific Northwest landscape a dreary, fog-laden, soggy, threatening, uncivilized hellhole. After Thorn slapped a tribal elder across the face with an otter pelt during a trade dispute, a wee skirmish broke out. Stabbings, attempted escapes, and general mayhem ensued. In the end, the sole remaining sailor aboard the Tonquin lit the gunpowder magazine and blew the ship to bits as it was being plundered by the Tla-o-qui-aht people. Many died. I presume it is worth mentioning that Thorn oversaw the construction of Fort Astoria—bully for him.
Fast forward back to 2002. I hopped out of my taxi in George Vancouver’s namesake metropolis and began exploring on foot. My first notice was an obvious one: the city was exquisitely clean! Granted, I had spent the last few years along the Pacific Barbary Coast replete with its tent encampments, piss-scented thoroughfares, and flotsam-strewn alleyways. But still, downtown Vancouver beamed sparkling and spotless. People passing by on the street made eye contact and smiled. Shopkeepers swept sidewalks fronting their stores. Vancouver’s bus drivers provided directions and pleasantries rather than the blank stares and sardonic retorts of San Francisco’s municipal transit operators. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Who knew a big city could be so amiable?
I bedded down in a cheap, downtrodden hostel. But my lodgings are hardly worth mentioning. The majority of my time was dispensed wandering the city, poking my nose in here and there. I piloted the perimeter of Stanley Park, marveling at the Pacific Ocean sightlines and snapping photos of totem poles. I listened to bag pipes competently played on a misty street corner. In a minor drizzle a smart-dressed, uninvited woman said hello and shared space under my umbrella at an intersection as we waited for the light to change. I was perplexed when a request for spare change did not follow.
I procured a plastic baggie of more than decent cannabis from a somewhat sketchy fellow who instructed me to linger near a colorful sidewalk umbrella while he procured the herbal accoutrements. Perhaps he was the most obstinate fellow I encountered in Vancouver; it required an additional pinkish bank note for him to let me alone. And, as aforementioned, I politely declined invitations to female companionship and samplings of coca-flavored bits as I tramped through the city’s open-air drug market on its eastside.
The 20-something version of me figured Vancouver an urban Shangri-La resting beyond a lost horizon. Tree-lined, neighborly, elegant, tidy, cosmopolitan. Manners persisted. Conviviality reigned. I am confident I was at least partially deluded. Certainly there existed surly smack salesmen, cranky constables, and laconic locals. Somewhere, I presume, a bus driver grunted at a tourist inquiring on the direction of Robson Square. But, on the whole, it seemed folks got along, the trains ran on time, and generally all was well about the city—Vancouver was doing just fine.