Archive for travel
Coming home in October
I took a bit of video crossing over the Fraser River yesterday evening, from my seat on the Amtrak, returning home to Vancouver. I love a train the way a child loves trains, so watching other trains from my train was a special delight.
Heading back to my other hometown
Little weekend train trip to Olympia.
Something said on Capitol Way, summer 2017.
home soon & joy now
On March 7 Amtrak started up its Vancouver, BC – Portland line again – the Amtrak Cascades – almost exactly three years after the pandemic shut it down. This filled me with profound joy.
The line gives me to my love & the line brings me home.
Crossing the Fraser River last night, about forty minutes from English Bay.
My train
My friends know I love a good train ride. And more than that, I count on one particular line, the Amtrak Cascades, to bring me to and from loved ones in the States. Discontinued at the start of the pandemic, Amtrak restarted partial service a few months ago, and in March Amtrak is bringing back the second train – early morning southbound to Washington State, night-time return to beautiful Vancouver. They’re hiring, and I could not be more pleased.
Below are photo tributes I made to my home stations, in Vancouver and Seattle, a few years back.
Amtrak
I rejoice at the news the train from Vancouver, BC to Seattle is set to start running again in September. That train has meant the world to me. It brings me to my loved ones in Washington State and then home again to my beguiling paradise.
Here’s a little piece I wrote on that train ten years ago on my iPhone blog:
A morning Amtrak conversation
Old fellow: “Same person’s been in that bathroom for five minutes!”
His wife: “What makes you think it’s the same person?”
Fellow: “It has to be!”
Wife: “No dear, it doesn’t have to be.”
Me: “How long have you two been married?”
Fellow: “60 years!”
Wife: “50 years, dear.”
Car 6 explodes in laughter. It’s going to be a fine trip to Olympia!
Buffalo Seminary
A very fine school. (I hadn’t realized until my trip last week that Tara Vanderveer, the legendary Stanford women’s basketball coach, attended.) I took this photo on Bird Avenue near Elmwood. (Photoshopped.)
Greyhound’s departure from B.C. is bad news
Greyhound Canada says it is ending its passenger bus and freight services in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and cancelling all but one route in B.C. – a U.S.-run service between Vancouver and Seattle.
Without reliable and inexpensive transportation in British Columbia’s rural areas, it’s inevitable that many people’s lives will be less safe, their health will suffer, their economic opportunities will shrink, and their families will fragment. Providing its residents access to transportation services is a vital duty of our government.
Women will be most at risk, particularly indigenous women. Writes Emily Riddle:
We have long known that lack of access to transportation in rural and remote areas in this country is a factor in the murder and disappearance of thousands of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people in Canada. …
I have travelled the Highway of Tears in my work with First Nations communities in British Columbia, past the billboards that read “Girls, Don’t hitchhike on the Highway of Tears: Killer on the Loose!” Of course, those who hitchhike on the Highway of Tears or anywhere else are not to blame for the violence enacted on them, but accessible transportation is an important means of harm reduction. …
Of course, Greyhound’s decision to end operations in Western Canada is a business decision. … A business isn’t responsible for the safety of Indigenous people or for the safety of those who must now hitchhike to their jobs; neither is it responsible for assuring access to medical appointments for people in Northern communities. …
The discontinuation of Greyhound services has made it abundantly clear that we should not rely on private companies to deliver vital, sometimes life-saving services. … As an Albertan living in British Columbia, I’m left wondering: Why can’t Canada nationalize intercity bus service when they have agreed to nationalize a failing pipeline project?
h/t JS
Love
I loved hitch-hiking more than anything. More than sex, more than writing, more even than friendship. I knew that the next person I would see would be a stranger who would be open to communication, and that I would be on my way somewhere.
Vantransient
Retreeting the wacky and wonderful on transit in BC’s Lower Mainland: a fun little project @bfwriter and I started six years ago. That’s a photo of my gymnastic bus-driver at the Scottsdale Station in Surrey, taken a couple years back.
Out and about on public transportation
Do please read vantransient’s twitter-feed. It can be very charming. (The photo above is a view of the Fraser River from the Skytrain as it speeds from New West to Surrey across the beautiful, cable-supported Skybridge.)
Victoria, BC …
… was wonderful. At Munro’s Books I bought a book of translations from Sappho by Willis Barnstone. My favourite lines speak to me because of their (understanding + accepting) disdain: “What farm girl dolled up in a farm dress/ captivates your wits/ not knowing how to pull her rags down to her ankles?”
BC HEAP conference
On Friday I had the honour of meeting a wonderful group of people, the British Columbia Health and Education Administrative Professionals (BC HEAP), giving a presentation on best correspondence practices in the current workplace. I treated the 150 or so attendees to a vivid hitch-hiking story – yet to be written up for basil.CA – so it’s appropriate for any new readers who attended that conference in Victoria to find another tale from the road below, even if the ending is more bittersweet than it was in the one they heard.
God Bless Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple‘s only peer as an illustrator / artist / journalist is the great Joe Sacco. The tone of their work is very different, though. Whereas Sacco’s reporting is dispassionate and ironic, Crabapple’s is emotional and argumentative. Sacco’s art – black and white illustrations – is famously detailed, and everybody, including the artist, has ugly faces. Crabapple works in colour as well as in black and white; all of her portraits and her scenes are exuberant; even pictures that convey mourning or disapproval are done with a Dionysian, fluorescing density. She hasn’t given up on life, anywhere.
This is from her wonderful piece called “We Must Risk Delight After a Summer Full of Monsters,” published by the irreplaceable Vice.com:
Journalism often feels like vampirism. Before Ferguson or Gaza, I’d been reporting from Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria. Before that, Guantanamo. Sources told me about repression and violence. A journalist on the disaster beat told me to be a funnel for this pain. “Let it go through you. Get it down truthfully. Move on.”
I could not.
Writing about others’ trauma bears no relation to living it. Yet I was a ruin more and more. The word “burnout” is dead from overuse. Constant exposure to pain burns in.
Quinn Norton once advised me to write about what I loved. Rage came more easily. I’d make my lines bloody, my words damning. I didn’t know how to write about happiness. What did it mean, the night I danced on the street in New Orleans? A brass band howled. I’d woven flowers into my hair, but they dissolved beneath the Halloween rain. My friends and I danced for hours. …
Power seeks to enclose beauty—to make it scarce, controlled. There is scant beauty in militarized zones or prisons. But beauty keeps breaking out anyway, like the roses on that Ferguson street.
The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us. Jack Gilbert [in “A Brief for the Defense”] is right. “We must risk delight” in the summer of monsters. Beauty is survival, not distraction. Beauty is a way of fighting. Beauty is a reason to fight.
KPU
I was wearing the Kwantlen school colours out at a neighborhood Oympia restaurant last night. As an older couple was leaving the restaurant, the husband came over to me. “We have been trying to determine what KPU might stand for. We thought it might mean ‘kinetic power unit’.” My date thought this was very funny indeed.
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