Travels With David, pt. V

June 17-18, 2001: Vancouver, BC - Olympia, WA - Portland, OR

Sunday and Monday were relatively short days, covering only some 250 miles from Vancouver to Olympia, Washington, and then on to Portland. Sunday morning started off with a bit of a surprise: as we finished loading up the car and heading away from the Holiday Inn in Vancouver, David reached into his backpack, and pulled out a Father's Day gift, a small box labeled "From boy, to pa." Inside the box was a CD, which I had just heard for the first time two days earlier: Mermaid Avenue, Volume II, by Billy Bragg and Wilco. I thanked him, and reminded him that it was my favorite of the two-album collection that he had played for me; I'm playing it now as I write these notes, and am delighted to be able to read the lyrics to see what Woody Guthrie was saying all those years ago.

And with that, we headed out onto Howe Street, across the Granville Bridge, and south to the Tsawwassen ferry. Within only a few blocks from the downtown complex of office skyscrapers, the landscape changed abruptly to pleasant, clean tree-lined streets sheltering one-story homes and two-story apartment complexes. North of the city is a silhouette of snow-capped mountains; skiing is only half an hour away, and the air is brisk and clean. I can see why people love to live here -- and also why the Vancouverians (Vancuvians? Vancuddlians? Vancoupians? What do these people call themselves?) feel that they live on an entirely different planet from the Canadians back in the eastern provinces.

Our destination was the car ferry to Vancouver Island, and specifically to the old town of Victoria. By sheer luck, we arrived at the ferry a mere three minutes before departure; our little yellow car was the next-to-last one allowed to drive into the huge maw of the huge, six-level ferry. We locked up the car, clambered up the stairs past another whole level of cars, and into the top three passenger levels for the hour-and-a-half ride across the Strait of Georgia. Several hundred "foot passengers" were already spread out across the ferry: families with squalling babies, grim-faced Japanese tourists photographing everything in sight, swarms of teenagers chattering happily in an accent I couldn't place, and fat, gray-haired British retirees reminding one another of every single item they had heard, seen, smelled, eaten, or stepped on during their holiday trip. But there were loners, too: up on the top deck of the ferry, I spotted this young man reading alone, with the stern smokestack looming above him. When I asked him what he was reading, he mumbled something about Proust; I decided to leave him in peace.

The first part of the trip was rather uninteresting; the water was roiled and muddy and the island was hazy in the distance. But suddenly an announcement came over the loudspeaker: killer whales had been spotted in the water, off to starboard, and the passengers were invited to gawk at them. The revenues of Eastman Kodak and Fuji Film instantly skyrocketed by several billion dollars, as thousands of cameras were extracted from pockets and purses, and fingers frantically pressed the buttons. Frankly, I didn't see a thing, not even a dorsal fin breaking above the water; but it was fascinating to see a dozen young daredevils zooming around in their jet-skis, apparently following the beasts. I found the whole thing quite mystifying -- after all, I assume that the term "killer whale" was meant to be an accurate description -- but nobody else seemed to think that zooming around the water in the presence of these beasts might be a form of death-wish.

Shortly after passing by the camera-shy killer whales, we began approaching the shore of the main island, through channels that were deceptively deep: at one point, our enormous ferry passed within 50 feet of the shoreline. The shoreline at this point consisted of small, craggy "outer islands," which looked very much like the shoreline along the coast of Maine; if you click on the thumbnail photo to the left, you can see a larger view of another equal-sized ferry heading back toward Vancouver, through a narrow channel between two of the outer islands.

About 12:30 PM, we landed at the port of Sidney, waited patiently in line for all the other cars, trucks, SUVs, campers, and buses to trundle off ahead of us, and then navigated onto the island for the 20 mile drive down to the town of Victoria at the southern end. All of the photos I've seen portray Victoria as a small, quaint town frozen in time, with everything meticulously preserved from the days that Queen Victoria ruled over the Empire. Well, there were a few such houses and government buildings; and it was a very pleasant, picturesque little town. But it also had a full array of the modern amenities of life: Burger King and McDonalds, car dealers, shopping malls, and traffic jams. The people on the street seemed to be a combination of tourists and retirees -- many of whom were zipping up and down the sidewalks in battery-powered vehicles that look like golf cart.

After an hour of driving, we had seen all we wanted to see; it was time to catch the next ferry, from Victoria to Port Angeles, Washington. This involves clearing immigration and customs with the U.S. authorities, and I'm pretty sure this is where the authorities nabbed a Middle Eastern terrorist at the end of 1999, when he was attempting to bring a car full of explosives into the US in order to add a little excitement to the Millennium Eve celebrations in Seattle. I joked with David that we should tell the customs inspector that we had decided to leave all 5,000 pounds of nitroglycerine with our friends back in the terrorist cell in Baghdad, but we finally decided that the customs inspector might not be blessed with our advanced sense of humor ...

The ferry ride across the Strait of Juan de Fuca was also about an hour and a half long, and it was a brisk and breezy ride indeed: a steady wind blows in from the Pacific Ocean at the far end of the strait, and we spent most of the time inside. Alas, there wasn't much to see in Port Angeles itself, and we decided to forsake the rather scenic drive around the western end of the Olympic Peninsula, and head instead down the eastern side, along the Hood Canal, until we got to Olympia. This involved passing through the small towns of Sequim, Quilcene, Brinnon, Hoodsport, and Shelton -- none of which offered any noteworthy sights or views as we drove through. By 7:30 PM, we were rolling into Olympia, at the south end of Puget Sound; we found a Ramada Inn, and called it a night.

The next day was by far the shortest of our traveling days: we didn't even get started until 11 AM, and we had reached Portland by 1 PM. This entailed driving down Interstate 5, in a sea of traffic, through suburbs and farmland that was pleasant but absent of any distinguishing features. A couple days ago, I made a similar comment to David about a stretch of road near the Colorado-Wyoming border; he responded that Proust would have found something memorable, even if it was a particular leaf or twig or flower alongside the road. But Proust probably wasn't driving at 70 mph; nor was he burdened with the task of accumulating tidbits of memory from 2,000+ miles of driving (we passed the 2,000 mile mark somewhere around Centralia, Washington). David, by the way, is now 86 pages ahead of schedule on his Proust reading regimen; he says that he could even take a break for a couple of days at this point -- but I know him well enough to know that he'll continue getting further and further ahead of schedule by the end of this trip.

Anyway, we crossed over the Columbia River, into the great state of Oregon, and into downtown Portland in the early afternoon. Portland is a very pleasant city, with a nice mixture of tall office buildings and tree-lined streets paved in brick; we drove up and down most of the streets in the "City Center" section of town before picking a Hilton to spend the rest of the day. After checking into our rooms, David accumulated a list of a dozen book stores and record stores that he could explore within walking distance of the hotel; and I spent the afternoon catching up on e-mail from friends, family, colleagues, and clients who generally don't know and don't care whether I'm in Portland or Podunk or Parsippany. As that great New Yorker cartoon put it, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." And no one knows you're in Portland, either. And that's fine with me. ...

We've now finished six days of our trip, and we have another five days to go -- down through the Redwood forests, along the coast line of northern California, into San Francisco, down to the Big Sur scenic drive, into Los Angeles, and then back to Albuquerque. So far, so good. Thank you, David.

Continue with pt. VI of this series ...