April 27–30, 2003 — Monuments and steeples

April 27, 2003 — Canmore

On the way to Canmore, Jeff and I saw mountains for the first time. It was difficult to accept the scale of them, and I couldn’t imagine being accustomed to seeing them. It was as though the resolution of the world had increased, and I found it difficult to see an entire mountain without losing the realization that any one of the thousands of trees covering its sides would tower over me.

The scale of cities is different. The buildings are massive, but they are easily conquered, and they were built in much less than a lifetime. It is easier to feel significant in a city, and easy to become lost in the sight of a mountain.

I don’t remember how long it took to drive to Canmore. Not very long.

I’m not sure what I expected of Canmore. I wasn’t surprised to find that the hallways of our hotel reeked of pot, but I didn’t expect so many of Canmore’s visitors and residents to be a strange hybrid of jock and hippie.

With the afternoon and night to ourselves, we went our separate ways: Paul, Jeff and Wayne went for a walk in the mountains and saw elk; Brad did laundry; I found a library with Internet access, checked my email and went back to my room to take a nap. I woke up an hour later and found my arm covered in drool. I was not making much of my trip to Canmore.

Our rooms were above a bar, so we spent the night downstairs watching hockey and cheering for Vancouver. I tried to go to sleep a few hours after the hockey game ended, but it was jam night, so the bar only got louder. When the open mic began, I joined Jeff downstairs. We tried to convince Wayne to play, but he refused. We eventually gave up and fled to our rooms. No one seems to respect personal space in Canmore, and my tolerance for being unnecessarily brushed against or having hands placed on my arm is very low.

I slept on my right ear, leaving my mostly deaf left ear to endure the rest of jam night.

April 28, 2003 — Canmore (as scheduled)

After missing the last two shows, it was a relief to wake up in the city where that night’s show was scheduled. Jeff rallied the troops to go hiking, and we headed for the mountains. At the edge of town we reached a hydroelectric generator, and I realized that nature’s presence in Canmore was less absolute than I’d expected. The scenery improved as we went deeper into the mountains, but it was still difficult to take a picture that didn’t have power lines lurking in the background.

We saw waterfalls and prehistoric trees and a lot of elk shit. I chased chipmunks across a field trying to take their picture, but Canmore’s chipmunk population proved exceedingly skittish. Paul and Brad started to climb a dangerous-looking ladder while Jeff, Wayne and I called for them to stop and promised to have no pity for them if they fell and were injured.

When we returned to the Canmore Hotel, the Sadies had arrived, and the tour seemed back on track. Sean helped me eject some locals from a table we decided would be a good spot for merch, and both bands’ equipment was dragged onto the stage. It was a comforting sight.

Both bands played well that night. A girl with a thick French accent began heckling me while Cuff The Duke was playing; she was trying to convince me to give her a t-shirt in exchange for showing me her breasts, and she yelled at me and called me one of many synonyms for “gay” each time I refused. She eventually convinced two of her friends to join the deal; the proposal was for the three of them to flash me in exchange for one Sadies shirt. Frustrated at having been berated for so long, I leaned forward and said I could offer her no more than a pin for the service she hoped to provide. Suitably offended, she called me some more names and didn’t bother me again.

I was criticized for my unwavering refusal of nudity in exchange for merchandise, but it all seemed far too girls-gone-wild for my liking. Mike told me he wished I’d agreed if only to see the look on my face, and he put on the stunned expression of an animal caught in headlights to show how he thought I would look if faced with three topless girls.

As we left Canmore the next day, Brad put on an ominous-sounding voice and announced, “We are now leaving the mines of Canmoria.” The tour was back on track.

April 29–30, 2003 — Whistler

We stopped for the night in Kamloops on our way to Whistler. The motel we chose advertised $29 rooms and a free adult channel. After checking in, we laughed at how the woman running the motel had used a map to give us directions to our rooms even though they were visible from the motel office.

Five minutes later the same woman hurried over and told us not to party; Wayne assured her that we wouldn’t. She continued, warning us not to damage the rooms or disturb our neighbours. Grumpy after six hours in the van and insulted at having been written off as a teenager out to trash motel rooms on his parents’ credit, Wayne offered to spend the night elsewhere and she took him up on his offer. We went to a motel with no adult channel, much nicer rooms (for $3 more) and Bible quotes on the walls. The second motel seemed happy to have us.

Brad wanted to visit Surplus Herby’s the next day (Israeli Gas Masks! Freight Damage! Fire Salvage!), so we left about an hour earlier than we needed to. The van’s brakes had smoked a bit as we went through the mountains the day before; now they were smoking a lot and on much less intimidating inclines. We found a repair shop and asked them to check the brakes while we went for breakfast.

The news was not good. All four brakes were severely worn and needed to be replaced. They showed us the cracks and extensive wear in all the components of the old brakes, but we elected not to ask if we had risked brake failure the day before in the mountains. It was better not to know.

We left for a park by the water while the van was being repaired. Jeff, Brad and Paul went to skip stones under a bridge while Wayne and I sat in partial shade on a park bench. We both bought books that morning, him a copy of “Life After God” by Douglas Coupland and me a copy of “How To Be Alone” by Jonathan Franzen. He read me passages about Kamloops and other places we’d just been. I read him a part about love not existing and sex being a trap; he didn’t argue, but he didn’t give me the impression that he agreed as wholeheartedly as I did.

I eventually joined the others in throwing rocks into the water. After almost an hour of that, I borrowed Wayne’s cellphone to call IKEA for my schedule. I took great pleasure in making my obligatory phone call to work on a beautiful day while standing on a beach thousands of kilometers from Toronto when my manager thought I needed time off to move. I learned that I had not been fired and that I would have a day to recover before my first shift after arriving home.

The brake repairs were finished early, and we chose to take the shorter, more scenic route. The mechanic told us we wouldn’t be able to drive very fast but that we’d still save time. We spent the drive slowing down so deer could cross the road and marveling at the nonexistent barrier between us and the edge of cliffs. As Critter had told us, all of BC is scenic, so when a route is singled out as a particularly scenic route, it’s for people who feel scenery is not scenery unless death is a sudden swerve away.

We arrived in Whistler to learn that the Sadies had taken the same route and had blown their brakes. Travis grinned when he told the story, asking us what we thought of the one-lane bridges and extreme grades.

Whistler oozes money, and I felt as though I was walking through a theme park. The show was at a bar that looked very expensive. It was sterile and without character, the complete opposite of the Canmore Hotel. All of Whistler made me feel tremendously lonely, and being there made me wonder if part of me could somehow be satisfied with a place like Whistler, a place that felt like a marketing campaign disguised as a city. If it were that easy, I could start working more hours and saving my money and ignoring the day-to-day unhappiness, knowing I could leave it behind for a few weeks each year. Instead, I overheard conversations about segregated residences for Whistler’s service industry employees and felt lost.

Meanwhile, all I remember from the show that night is huddling behind my many boxes of Sadies merchandise and looking forward to the day I’d only have Cuff The Duke to worry about again.

Jeff and I shared a hotel room, and I was able to properly shave and shower before we left the next day. When we were collecting the equipment and loading it into each band’s van or trailer, the sound man from the night before ran into me with a ladder while I was carrying a very expensive amp belonging to Dallas. I couldn’t see the hand he hit, but I tasted something in the back of my throat that makes me think of adrenaline and blood. I gave Critter the amp I was carrying and pulled from my finger a semi-circle of skin about half the size of a nickel. My hatred of Whistler now had pain associated with it.

I read a complementary hotel copy of the Globe and Mail as we drove out of Whistler, but I was too frustrated to concentrate.