The Stories that Define a Place

I started reading the two most quintessentially American travel narratives on my list in Canada. I don’t quite know how this happened. Travels with Charley was just sitting on the book shelf of the woman I was staying with in Toronto, waiting for me when I finished all the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings. Roughing It, by Mark Twain, was recommended to me in Phoenix, bought in San Diego, and sat in my duffel bag through LA, and Oakland, and Portland, waiting patiently to be the book I read next.

It didn’t feel as strange to read Travels with Charley in Toronto as it did to start Roughing It in Victoria, and then continue it in other bits of British Columbia. But then, Toronto felt a lot like the US. Its peculiarities, a library on every corner, the sighing of streetcars, didn’t feel like they belonged in a foreign country, they were just the sort of markers of individualism I’ve found in every city. Victoria, Victoria felt like some place different. With water the deepest, richest blue I’ve ever seen; architecture that’s just slightly off: blockier and smaller; people who don’t just toss a passing comment at you while you stage a Lego Fellowship picture, but actually have entire conversations about it–with or without your involvement, they can talk to the other person who stopped to see what you were doing if need be. There’s a castle, and a house built specially for the queen to stay in when she visits. Basically, it really lives up to the name British Columbia.

I kind of like this distance from the States for reading Roughing It. Not only am I removed from Mark Twain’s narrative in time, but in space as well. Despite our separation there are similarities in the way we experience our journeys though. He’s in Utah when he writes: “there was a fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon. This was fairyland to us, to all intents and purposes–a land of enchantment.” But the statement could just as easily be applied to my sentiment while wandering the streets of Victoria, if you just replaced “Mormon” with “Canadian.” These really were Canadians, that mythical race from “up north.” They really did say “eh” and their buses apologized when they were out of service. (Really, they did. The electronic read out on the front of the buses would alternate between “Out of Service” and “Sorry…”)

It wasn’t until my last day in Victoria, when we went hiking around John Dean Park that I became aware of another reason this place felt like “a land of enchantment.” (Besides the fact that it reminded me so strongly–for all the stated reasons and more–of Ireland.) While getting slightly lost on Mt. Newton I realized I was hiking through the landscape of every alien planet SG-1 had ever visited. Stargate, a mediocre television fixture of my teenage years, shot in British Columbia, and so just about every landscape they visited was populated with Redwoods. (A failure of diversity that Colonel O’Neill lampshaded once by quipping “Trees, trees, and more trees. What a wonderfully green universe we live in,” as the team stepped on to a new planet. I thought it was hilarious at the time.)

Once again, like in Albuquerque, and Pittsburgh, and every other place that felt significant, before it, story was what made Victoria feel so enchanted. The stories I’d seen years ago on a television screen; stories I learned from the people I talked with there; Mark Twain’s story, which although it has nothing to do with the place will forever be inextricably linked with it in my mind; stories yet to be discovered, that lie waiting in those deep blue waters.