"We struggle and we scrape."

How fabulous for the continuity of this blog that where I left off talking about primitive happiness in Ignorance, the next post I shall write is about the rustic wilderness and beauty of Lasqueti Island B.C. Until I left Calgary and would tell people where I was going, all I got were confused looks complete with raised eyebrows. Lasqueti?  Yeah. I didn’t know either. It’s too small to put on most maps, and B.C. locals rarely know it exists.  I was going for a Contact Improvisation Workshop on the Island that I found out about through my University. This is being posted on the ferry ride back to Calgary from Nanaimo to Vancouver. (How exquisite it is to eat a Nanaimo Bar in Nanaimo!) It was mostly written on my commute to the island.

Sitting on a bus for 23 hours leaves a lot of time for thinking and introspection. It also meant a lot of ogling the mountains while mind-numbingly eating sunflowers seeds. Pop the seed in your mouth, crack the shell, eat the seed, and continue to gaze out the window dreamily. Repeat. As an extrovert, I am energized by other people—even you internet folk! I need other people and I care about them. This is my first solo trip. Enter Courtney the ever wildly mature and evolved human being!  This trip was good for me to spend an extended period of time by myself and relying on my own wits to get around and entertain. 

I brought several things to keep me busy like DVDS:  Blue Valentine, I’m Not There, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the entirety of Flight of the Concords, none of which were watched because I hadn’t an outlet or enough battery life in my Macbook. I brought books: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: short stories written by Sylvia Plath (her widowed husband Ted Hughes introduced the book managing to eloquently state that her stories are not the best and she probably didn’t want them published. Thanks Ted.) and Soul Pancake by Rainn Wilson (yes, that actor who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office. And yes, there will be an entirely separate post on this book soon because it was both invaluable while I was travelling and an ambitious, innovative composition of various art to get a person thinking about our abstract world.). I had my notebook to write in (28 pages filled in the time I was gone!) and I wrote people letters. I played Whirly Word on my phone.

I’m sorry that I didn’t learn how to knit on the bus ride. Melissa, I’ve let you down.

Buses are a bit gloomy: the steady background hum of the engine that I’ve grown so accustomed to. The minute I get off to go to the bathroom or stretch my legs, I am always alarmed that the sound has quieted or depending on how far I walk, has gone away completely. Back on the bus nobody talks to one another, even the people who are travelling together. The first hour of my bus ride was off to an optimistic start! I spent it talking to a Czechoslovakian tourist named Eric who had been in Yellowknife before. But after an hour, he got off at Canmore. After that, there was a lot of silence and a lot of feeling like it was far too many degrees below room temperature in the moving vehicle.

Behind me two people: an elderly woman and a guy about my age bashed Calgary pretty good. “I just hate it. There’s too many people. And they’re all drunk. The Calgary Stampede? Invented for more drinking! My brother died while I was in Calgary. All drunkards.”  I’m not sure how her brother’s death is related to her hatred of the city (or it’s alcohol consumption) but mostly the old woman groaned on and the man repeated such catch-phrases as, ‘I hear ya’, ‘I’m a small town boy myself’ and ‘Yes mam’. Head-nodding was another popular response.

To my left and up a little is a woman, aged around 30, who must be having a fight her her partner because she woke me up from a very brief nap threatening “That is not what I said. It’s not what I said. You’d like it if I did say that but I didn’t. I would never say that.” They hung up on. She calls them back. “I asked you a simple question. I asked you a simple question. I asked you a question.” They hang up. She shrieks and yells “Motherfucker! Ingrateful bastard.” loud enough for the bus to hear. She tries to draw or write, I’m not sure which and she gives up on that too crossing her arms and stares at the window, her phone clutched tightly in her hand, squeezing it to show some sign of life.

Boxed in on this bus overnight surrounded by the woman who was always complaining about something new, the woman who was still finding ways to argue with her partner and by the snoring slightly obese man to my left all made cosmic sense to me when Bob Dylan’s Mississippi played on my iPod.

“Every step of the way we walk the line


Your days are numbered, so are mine


Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape


We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape”

It wouldn’t be long until I was on a remote Island on the West Coast away from the city, its problems and the complications of modern life!

Always as we stopped over: in Banff, Golden, Revelstoke, Salmon Arm, Kelowna and Vacouver, I was feeling down that I wouldn’t be able to actually see these places how I’d want to. I want to climb your mountains! And I want to eat your sushi and ride your Skytrain! Fifteen, twenty, sixty minutes is not nearly enough time to spend in any of these places. 

From French Creek, I would catch the ferry to Lasqueti. And before French Creek was odd Parksville: there’s not much there—it’s a camping destination but in the middle of it is a stripmall that includes a Toyota dealership, an A & W and my personal favourites a Mexican restaurant titled “The Mexican” and the Amish Antique Store. Waiting for the ferry I ate some Pollock (a dollar off on Fridays!) at the Wheelhouse Café (run by one server and one cook) and peeled my eyes for other people going to the workshop. In the restaurant, I was told there’s not much on Lasqueti and I was very gung-ho to live the hippie lifestyle!

The ferry is a small boat carrying 35. In a large ferry you don’t actually feel like you're moving. Motion sickness is pretty much impossible. But on this ferry ride people were ready: clutching plastic bags nervously in their hands. The boat started to rock and sway and I felt I was on an over-enthusiastic tire swing but there was no way to tell my friends to slow down and relinquish some splinter of mercy on me. Staring at the window helped. You saw a wave and you prepared for it. But eventually this motion rocked me to sleep, I returning to the womb awoke up in Lasqueti to a man shaking me, “Are you Courtney?”  I was the only one of the boat. “Yes.” “I’m Mark. Nice to meet you! Let’s grab your stuff and put it in my truck.” I followed him, still dozy, sure that soon I would remember who Mark is and where I am and why I’m putting my bag in his truck.

Introducing Mark Young: organizer and founder of Leviathan Studios: Home of Contact Improvisation, Lasqueti Island, British Columbia.