By Jeremy Lott on 7.9.03 @ 12:03AM
Victoria, B.C. is great, if you don't mind the borders or flashbulbs.
I've never been much for omens, but the early morning before I
left for Victoria it sure felt like something was brewing. A
distant thunderstorm knocked out the power for miles and all the
normal internal noises and distractions of my home went silent --
clocks and fans stopped, the refrigerator ceased its hum, the glow
of CD players and VCRs faded to black. I stumbled through the house
to open the front door onto the wraparound porch, and stepped out.
A rotating beacon of light -- likely advertising a car sale in
nearby Bellingham -- painted the underside of the clouds on this
otherwise starless night. The wind blew steadily. The air was cool
but loaded with humidity, signaling what was likely to be a
scorcher come sun up. It was time to hit the road.
And is it ever, I half-thought, half-muttered as I
eased my '91 Sunbird onto I-5, heading south and then west to
Anacortes. The six day break, including an overnight with my
favorite group of
reformed commies to catch the ferry the following morning, was
one part lark, one part necessary respite. I picked last week
because it was my friend Kevin
Michael Grace's birthday on the 2nd, and after all the
craziness over the collapse of our former mutual employer, I
thought we could both use a night or two on the town.
I must've looked haggard when Grace answered the door. After
playing 20 questions with a border guard in Anacortes and then
having my car searched on the other end in Sidney Harbor, I needed
a drink. We lunched at his favorite pub, where Guinness is served
with a shamrock carved into the foam, and hit several used book
stores. I found the Penguin Lives volume on Joseph Smith and Selina
Hastings' biography of Evelyn Waugh. If there's anything more
cathartic than beer and books, I've yet to discover it.
After the birthday festivities, we alternated between days at
Grace's place -- pecking away at a couple of projects -- and
evenings of frivolity -- movies, mini golf, the wax museum (with a
good Kennedy, a lousy Ford, and, in Grace's words, "that tart Anne
Boleyn"). It was early enough in the tourist season that the
crowding was minimal and the traffic was nothing like Seattle's
soul draining pile-ups. The hotel room was cheap but well serviced.
The weather was obliging. The waitresses were good looking. In
short, Victoria grew on me.
Right up until the last night, that is. Because I was out of the
U.S. on the 4th, I needed my fireworks fix. The only place to
service that was a Saturday show at the internationally renowned
Butchart Gardens. What I didn't realize was that almost every other
tourist on the island would have the same idea (for future
reference: "internationally renowned" = "crowded") .
The literature advertises "55 acres of flowers" but that can
fill up in fairly short order, and it did so as thousands of
American, Chinese, and French tourists packed the paths to
overflowing. The gardens are sold as a family outing, so mothers
wheeled babies through, while young children begged their fathers
for ice cream, hot dogs, and other items sold at the gouging
concession stands. Mostly Chinese and Sikh men operated enough home
video cameras to give George Orwell a heart attack.
Worse, it seemed that nearly all those who weren't filming had a
photo camera and wanted copious documentation that they had, in
fact, visited the Butchart Gardens. The flashbulbs constantly added
to the glare of the sun. People posed for pictures every few steps
and took their sweet time shooting. This created invisible cordons
all over the place which we constantly struggled not to break.
Eventually, it wore us down. We headed for the fireworks area well
over an hour early.
In that long wait, I started waxing philosophical. "You know,
Kevin," I said. "Sartre got it wrong… Or, maybe not so much
wrong as not quite right."
"Hell is other tourists?" he asked.
"Exactly."
topics:
Books, Movies
