Yes, this was a week ago… but I really was in Canada when I wrote it. Editing it and posting, however, is back home, safe and sound.
I am in Canada as I write this. For some, this is an unremarkable event. For me, it is fairly infrequent, but not because I don’t like Canada. I do. I just rarely have reason to go there.
I can count the times I’ve been to our neighbors to the north on one hand since I’ve been an adult. O.K., that’s not quite accurate as I have been to Victoria B.C. many times, but always by boat. 
When I was a kid, my parents would take us there by boat too, the Princess Marguerite. To a kid, she was a wonder, begging to be explored.
To ensure that all their four boys returned to roost, my parents would reserve a stateroom. It was just a little thing, with a pull down bed, a bathroom and a porthole. My mother called it, fittingly, a dayroom. It served as our base station.
We would occasionally check in, mostly to play with the Mexican jumping beans my parent’s had smartly purchased at the Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, and then head back into the passageways of the “luxury” liner. I know, the Marguerite was hardly the epitome of luxury, but to a six year old it was a gateway to adventure.
The last time I took the Marguerite, I was dating Faith. We headed across in very rough seas. I still remember the uneasy conversation, the extremely choppy waves, and the woman behind her tipping over in her chair because of a rogue wave, her head smacking the floor like a ripe watermelon. This particular voyage really summed up the relationship, rough, rocky, and you wanted to bang your head against the floor, for ever saying hello to her in the first place.
Later in life, getting to Victoria meant the car ferry Coho out of Port Angeles. The last time I took it was the time we were almost deported for trying to enter the country as pirates. I guess they were afraid we were trying to take jobs away from Canadian pirates at a time when there weren’t any organized pirate groups in B.C.
Thankfully, that little fiasco worked itself out. We were able to get our passports back, we didn’t have to return on the afternoon sailing of the bare bones Coho, and we got to stay in super swank accommodations and get paid a lot of money to do it. Still, the deportation party was the highlight of that whole adventure into Canadian waters.
I have only driven to Canada twice, this being the second time. The first was back when I was dating Psycho and her parents came from Amarillo. They really wanted to go to Canada. I did too, but only because I knew I could scare the hell out of them on the last couple miles of the journey as you head into the to the border. The winding “mountains” scared them to death, they being from the flatlands. They almost spilled their Miller Lites in the back of Psycho’s car.
That, my friends, is another story entirely.
So, what brought me up to Canada? Alone no less? A speaking engagement. I was asked to come to Canada and speak about storytelling. Yes, these days I am on the circuit more and more to talk about my favorite subject and how we are hardwired for story. Without going into great detail, your brain loves stories and needs stories. Almost two-thirds of our respective lives are spent telling stories – stories to ourselves, stories to others. They give order to our brain, sorting out all the information we take in during a typical day and giving it meaning. We are meaning-making machines.
Back to my travels to Canada. Given that the last trip ended up with our near deportation, I didn’t want to make a big deal about why I was there. For all I know, I could be putting a Canadian storyteller out of work and go through the whole passport seizing fiasco all over again. So I played it cool.
I didn’t play it so cool before I left. I almost forgot to remove the swords from the car and I couldn’t really remember where my passport was and I didn’t have an enhanced driver’s license. When I finally found it, I was relieved to find that it was still valid. I have another year to go.
Kat had a good laugh over the photo where I looked like I had had an allergic reaction to some strawberries. I was a real puffalufagous 10 years ago. I’m glad I get to have a new photo next year, though I will miss all my cool passport stamps to exotic ports of call.
At the border to Canada, they don’t even stamp it. A couple simple questions, a promise that I didn’t receive a package in the mail from any of my Canadian friends and I was on my way.
Well, almost. I got a little tripped up with the directions. It seems that Siri didn’t know that I was in Canada. She thought I was still in the U.S., so all her directions were in miles when all the measurements in Canada are in metric. You’d think that Siri would have been more fully schooled in other highway systems.
I had a bit of a problem reading the kilometer per hour speeds on my VUE. It, like Siri, seems to be a little agnostic about the need to factor in travel in other countries. It didn’t help that I didn’t have my glasses on, so I just guessed at the speed, just like the Canadians seemed to be doing as they weren’t going anywhere near the speeds that were posted.
I would have readily gone kilometer for kilometer with them but a Washington State plated car with PYRATES on the back is just begging for a ticket or even a little jail time in Surrey B.C.
Tomorrow, I make the reverse trip back to the homeland. I hope I remember all the questions the U.S. guys always ask me. I had a really hard time remembering what my mother’s maiden name was and my birthplace, the latter only because I am so embarrassed to admit I was born in Renton. That alone is grounds for denial of entry.
In the Emerald City Vancouver, wondering what the exchange rate is,
– Robb