Vancouver

I left the farm yesterday, five weeks and one day after I arrived in September. I had originally planned to stay for six weeks, but I suppose it was the weather that did me in. It started raining the last week of September and it never really stopped. And if it wasn't rainy, it was always cloudy. Cloudy and cold and damp all the time. The clouds that hung low around the tops of the mountains and settled down in the valley no longer seemed beautiful and mysterious to me; they were just oppressive. It was time to go.

I wanted to spend some time in Vancouver, too, before I leapt eastward towards Quebec. So at 8:15 AM, I boarded a Greyhound bus in town, after saying goodbye to Arnaud and Sue (Colleen was in Calgary with her boyfriend, Patrick, and it was Sophie's day off, so she opted to say goodbye to me the previous night and sleep in that morning). As we set off down the Trans-Canada Highway, the sky was just as overcast as it had been the past few weeks. I opened up my copy of Middlemarch (well, I suppose it's my mother's copy -- "L. Perry" is written on the upper-right-hand corner of the first page, and when I found it in the basement, it still had a Harvard Bookstore 1974-1975 bookmark calendar wedged halfway in) and began to read, staring out the window every now and again, not making much progress against the long winding paragraphs of intricate sentences.

Autumn in interior British Columbia is a primarily yellow affair. Most of the trees on the mountains are evergreens and hold their deep bluish-green through the cold weather. What deciduous trees there are, are primarily birches (so far as I could tell with my Mountain School tree-identifying skills). The birches were blazing a brilliant golden-yellow against the scrubby quasi-desert landscape. It was beautiful, but I felt that this monochromatic fall wasn't really fall, somehow, without the red- and orange- and purple-turning trees that dot the October landscape in the northeast.

We ascended some mountains, and then descended, and I noticed as we headed westward, the landscape grew damper. There wasn't any rain outside, but the hillsides seemed lusher and the rocks grew moss and lichen coatings as we plunged through a canyon and into the flatlands of the Fraser Valley. The pure golden autumn of the interior had rusted into a moist, mottled orange. The sky began to clear and the sunlight shined through the leaves overhead, yellow and orange and red. Soon enough, the suburbs came into view, and, in the distance, the tall buildings of downtown Vancouver. I had almost forgotten what civilization looked like.

I emerged from the bus into the sunniest afternoon I had seen in weeks. Besides my backpack, I had a large wheeled suitcase and a smaller duffel bag. Not exactly what one would call "travelling light," but when I arrived in BC in September, I had two large suitcases and a duffel bag (I sent some of my t-shirts and shorts home; the rest was accomodated through some very tight packing). Outside the train/bus station, there were taxis waiting, but I figured it would be a more authentic experience (and less expensive) to take mass transit to the youth hostel. After all, the SkyTrain station was across the street. I looked around for an elevator for a while but couldn't find one, and was about to take the stairs, luggage in hand, when a man passing out free newspapers called over to me and pointed me in the direction of the elevator.

I bought a ticket for the SkyTrain, but I didn't have to go through a turnstile or anything. The Vancouver public transit system seems to operate largely on the honor system. Weird.

I emerged from the Sky Train (which by this point had gone underground) on Burrard Street, and wandered a block in the wrong direction before a businessman with an Australian accent directed me towards the nearest bus stop. The first bus driver that came had never heard of Burnaby Street, the street that the hostel was on, but I consulted the somewhat confusing map at the bus stop and figured that the second bus was probably going in the right direction.

It was a rather awkward bus ride, me with my three pieces of luggage. If anyone who knew me had happened to be on the bus with me, they probably would have started laughing as I tripped over myself trying to get my big suitcase through the aisle and off the bus. As it was, everyone around me was a stranger, and I imagine they looked on with a mixture of pity and impatience.

But I managed to get off and find my hostel, check in, deposit my suitcases in my room, and walk down to the waterfront. I sat on the beach and wrote a letter as the sun set over the bay, and then walked in search of dinner. I ate at two different pizza places, neither of them very good.

My first impression of Vancouver: a smaller, cleaner, friendlier version of New York. Decent mass transit system. Terrible pizza.