West Coast
Report Pt.2

by RAF KATIGBAK

A dream interpreter and a yoga-pilates instructor walked into a café...

I wish this was the start of a really bad West Coast joke, but I actually saw this go down last week. It was an awkward first date; he was an actor/waiter/dream interpreter with sandy blond hair and a penchant for carrying his longboard everywhere he went, she was a yoga-pilates teacher who liked long walks along the Seawall and natural fibre clothing from Tibet, with dreadlocks that looked as if they’d been dipped in a raspberry Slushie. She didn’t ask for a dream analysis, he didn’t make any jokes about wanting to see her downward doggie style. The whole conversation, from what I happened to overhear with my Whisper 2000, was ultimately wholesome, friendly and bland. After 15 minutes of banter, as if some alarm went off in her head, she just up and said, “Okay, well, I gotta go, bye!” and shoved off. He was left to steep in his still-hot soy latte smiling politely at the elderly couple two tables over. I found the exchange an apt metaphor of how outwardly friendly and healthy Vancouver is on the surface, but below, there is something wrong, something at odds that just doesn’t click.

On the surface, Vancouver is perfect: the gorgeous lush mountain ranges to the north with perfect little triangles of white gliding serenely along the surface of the surrounding blue ocean, then a sandy picture of seaside perfection with multi-ethnic couples lazing about on the beaches in organic swimwear, sipping chai and engaging in volleyball and boogie-boarding. There’s only one problem: things in Vancouver are totally fucked. Bubbling just below the surface, something unhealthy, something dangerous, is lurking.

Part of it is an undercurrent of violence, a twisted brutality that fuelled alleged serial killer Robert William Pickton, and that just last week consumed 27-year-old Surrey man Jason Weismiller, who was charged with the fatal stabbing of his identical twin Darryl. It’s violence perhaps bred from confusion.

The polarization of Vancouver’s two worlds is most obvious in the neighbouring ’hoods of the affluent, touristy Gastown and Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside. On the border of these two blocks you can munch on delicious, fresh-from-the-sea tuna sashimi while you watch an addict get her shirt ripped off in an altercation and scamper into an alleyway across the street. With rising crime rates, open-air drug markets and a serious HIV/AIDS problem, it would be an understatement to say that the situation in the DTES is bleak. It’s fucking devastating. But people are so used to it that one friend living nearby said, “At least it’s a heroin problem. If it were crystal meth, it would be way worse. Have you seen 28 Weeks Later? It’s that times 10, plus AIDS.”

It seems that this wouldn’t be as pressing a problem if Vancouver weren’t also expanding by the nanosecond.

When my good friend was growing up in Vancouver, she had heard from her parents that cranes were becoming extinct. Of course, she fretted, and every time she passed a construction site, she would gaze in wonderment at the giant metal structures lifting the beams and cement. “But mom,” she cried, “what would we do without cranes? How would we make all these buildings?”

Right now, there is absolutely no danger of cranes becoming extinct; in fact, the skyline of Vancouver is infested with them. Condos, condos, condos. With the 2010 Olympics on the horizon, developers are going crazy and investors are giving them a hand by buying and selling property at such a rate that sometimes a condo will have been resold three times before anyone actually lives in it. This in a place where the homeless problem is growing exponentially.

Vancouver is a young city, without the same ties to architectural history as Ottawa or Montreal. In the midst of knocking down 1920s buildings, Vancouver developers argue, “At least we still have the mountains, beaches and ocean, and that’s what make Vancouver, right?”

There is something both comforting and unsettling when a place, person or thing lives up to its stereotype. While of course it’s not fair to say that all the West Coast is a free-loving, peaceful, granola-munching bunch of patchouli heads, we can still say that shitloads of those people are, just like not all Germans are methodical and efficient and not all Filipinos are great columnists and devilishly handsome. But many are.

But for all its wholesome appearance, the West Coast also has its twisted, complicated, darker, dingier side. I may just start liking it there after all...

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca