Repatriating

I spent the morning and early afternoon exploring Grouse Mountain, which, like everywhere else in Vancouver, was under heavy construction that blocked off some of the paths I'd really wanted to walk, but which, also like everywhere else in Vancouver, was a pleasure to walk around. Grouse Mountain is sort of a small mountain Disneyland. You take a skyride -- a hundred-person gondola -- to get up, gazing out the windows at breathtaking vistas of the entire Vancouver metro area, which the mountain overlooks. Or at fog, if it's this morning. There were places where the fog was so thick you could only see two trees at a time in the dense alpine forest outside the carriage. The lack of a view was disappointing, but I was cheered by the prospect that I was going to explore a park located inside a cloud, which would have gone into my wedding story if it had happened earlier in the trip.

The highlight of my time at Grouse Mountain was the chair lift. I got there at a time no one else was there, and took the fifteen-minute lift to the mountain peak without seeing another soul... through the fog... in near-perfect silence. You could be moved without even trying. There was nothing to do at the top for those of us who don't want to spend $70 to ride a zip line, but you could ride the chair lift down again, which was just as fun as riding up. The lift plus the lumberjack show -- watching a couple extremely talented saw operators ham it up for the two-hundred-strong crowd, racing to chop logs and throwing axes at bullseyes thirty feet away with deadly accuracy -- was probably just about worth the price of admission. One of them used a chainsaw to carve a baby chair out of a log in under a minute, and gave it away to a mother in the crowd. Good times in spite of the mist, and when I went back down the skyride some of the fog had burned off and I got some great pictures after all.

And then I drove back to Seattle. Vancouver was a good time! I have to say, though, that it didn't feel very different from a town in America. Apart from the different currency and the unpatriotically starless and nearly stripeless flags, there was nothing quintessentially Canadian about it, nothing that screamed "YOU ARE IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY." Indeed, I caught myself thinking about Vancouver in terms of Seattle geography twice. I didn't hear the word "aboot" once, nor see the glory of socialized medicine in action (though I did get to hear a rant about what a mess the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has made of crossing the border and the ensuing economic downturn), nor see a lot of French signs once I was out of the federally maintained border area. So Vancouver was basically another typical Pacific Northwest city, only with flashing green lights that don't change for cross traffic but do change for pedestrians. Nice enough, but I don't feel that my soul is forever captive to that skyline or that country. I'd go back, though.

I was hoping to post photos tonight, but the Internet is being slow and reluctant, and Blogger's picture uploading tool is sluggish at the best of times. I've been staring at the "uploading" screen for twenty minutes. Photobucket is likewise uncooperative. For my own reference, though, the pictures I want to post are numbered 193, 255, 267, 277, 322, 334, 340, 346, 362, 367, 380, 391, 416, and 428 -- whew, that's a mouthful! One of them will be subtitled "Wildlife Photographer 2: Electric Cockatoo." (I don't know if the bird in question is actually a cockatoo. Maybe one of you can help me!) Perhaps tomorrow I will post the pictures, if I have time? -- when, God willing, this blog will come to you from Missoula, Montana, en route to Yellowstone!