A Travel Narrative, or, Hell really is other people!
Becky, as I mentioned previously, was in Canada most of the week for a Forestry conference. Saturday morning I took the early train up to Vancouver to meet her there in what I described as a 30 hour shore leave.
It was a great deal of fun. Vancouver is a great city to be a tourist in -- I don't know how it is to live in, although the cab drivers I talked to seem to think it's a nice place.
I particularly enjoy the Americans-in-Prague-style sport of looking at great things about Vancouver and bitching about what passes for Seattle's urban "planning" (see, I did it again). It's hard not to, with mixed-use buildings all over the place, great urban density, etc.
Of course we spend all of our time downtown, and don't go out into the burbs, so we get a very narrow view of the city; nevertheless, the expatriate exercise of slamming one's own country is always entertaining.
What I really want to talk about, however, is the trip up. I caught the early train up to Vancouver, 7:45 Saturday morning (which entailed a 5:30 wakeup call so I could make a 6:30 bus). The train station was much more crowded than I expected. As I learned from the number of people I recognized on the trip back the next evening, the "leave Saturday morning, return Sunday evening" trip is a popular one, and if you enjoy the train as much as I do, it's nearly two full days of fun with no driving at all.
Now, most of the time, I'm pretty fond of my fellow human beings. Nancy tells me that my street photos would be more consistently good if I was more selective about "casting" them. The problem is that I find people endlessly fascinating, and I have some sort of automatic affection for most other people that borders on the bizarre. (It's not like I'm some kind of saint in my normal life... believe me.)
But sometimes, some people manage to be so annoying as to pierce through my beatific gaze. Lucky me, on this trip I got two of them.
The first was the woman at the ticket counter in front of me. The agent told her that they needed to see her husband and his ID as well as hers. A reasonable request, I thought. But she decided to argue with him. "But I'm picking up the tickets!"
"Nevertheless, ma'am, before we can issue him a ticket, we need to confirm that it's actually him."
"But I'm here. It's really me. Why do you need to see him?"
Gee, lady, I dunno, maybe because we're presently engaged in whacking a hornet's nest with a stick in the Middle East and these are therefore dangerous times?
"Ma'am, I can't issue him a ticket unless he shows me his ID."
"But he's watching the bags!"
Finally she gave in, waved her husband over (he was only 30 feet away) and they moved on.
The second set of people were right behind me on the train ride up. They were in-the-eye-out-the-mouth people, seemingly unable to perform any action without verbalizing it. And almost entirely in a sort of whiny, fading tone that gave an odd rhythm to their speech.
Riding out of Seattle, for example.
"There's the spaghetti factory... where you were wednesday night... remember... and you met Mrs. Simpson... wasn't she nice... you had a nice conversation with her..."
"uh huh..."
The same people, later, were excited to see that Vancouver had chain restaurants they were familiar with.
"Oh, look... they have an old spaghetti factory... we should go Monday night with your friends... oh and there's a Keg, too... maybe we can have dinner there tonight..."
The real prize, though, was this exchange.
"Huh..."
"yeah...?"
"Well, I have my keys, two lipsticks, and some change in this pocket..."
"You've got a little bit of everything in there, huh?"
"Well, I could put my keys and lipsticks over here... then I wouldn't have so much in this pocket... [pause] Now that pocket's empty..."
I'm afraid I snorted at that last statement. Later, heading towards the restroom, I snuck a glance at them. He was wearing a Wall Drug t-shirt. She had big two-tone glasses with rhinestones at the temples, and a white sweatshirt with a sad kitten airbrushed on it. You, as Margaret Bourke-White said, "have seen their faces". You know who I'm talking about.