On this day, four years ago, a mob of several thousand swarmed the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. They broke into the Senate and House chambers, clutched the Stars and Stripes and a suite of other colours, and, bearing rifles and makeshift weapons, shouted that first ominous death knell of American democracy.
I saw a post online last night on the Vancouver subreddit. An elder millennial made a post recounting how the city had changed since the early 2000s. I read stories of weekly UBC parties, of campus events run by student organisations where students gathered in these exclusive groups to do great things, like in The Social Network or something like that. None of that stuff happens no more. I read about all the excitement of being in Vancouver in the early-2000s, still a little rough around the edges and yet shaking excitedly at the dawn of a new millennium. Of all that was to come. What it must have been like to be young and in one’s prime in that city, then. What wonders of that world, I could only imagine. But let me tell you, I dreamed of it, longed for it, for my late-night memories captured on shaky MiniDV camcorders, for nights that felt like dinner with Mom and Dad and Avril, and Freddie and Gugu and my Mama and Gong Gong at Downtown East, the Thai food that was just too spicy for my eight-year-old palette, dreaming of all the nights just like this when I was old enough and ready to take on the world, make my own memories in a place that, at the time, felt receptive to them, where it was possible to manifest such pure acts of wonder and joy, before the towers fell, before the hardening of the mind, the soul, the body, before the mobs on Washington’s steps. No, I waited for streetlights shooting by heralding the precipice of a glimmering millennium, crowning the heirs to the glimmering world, hoping that I might inherit a small part of anything, everything. That wild anticipation, that wanton waiting.
On CTV Morning Live this morning we heard the first whispers that Trudeau was resigning. By 9am the CBC said he’d prorogued Parliament until late March. Why do major world events always have to happen while I’m 30,000 feet in the air?
Four days ago, I was huddled up in the corner of the Ship and Anchor pub with Patrick, Jacob, Soren, and Leah. We laughed and yelled and reminisced about high school. I drove Patrick and Soren home on the way back, felt the need to drive a little slower than I usually do, felt that inevitable dropping of the heart at the realisation that it’s the end of the night. Sometimes I feel like I experience these moments from some place outside my body, as though my consciousness is aware of endings and seeks not to avoid them but to prolong the moment, comforted by the certainty and warmness of the now and left ever-so-slightly on edge by the entropy of endings, of beginnings. Three days ago I went right back to that same street and had dinner in a Denny’s with Jacob, Laurence, and Brooke, and I learned Brooke was coming to Vancouver, watched her get ID’ed while I was waved off, laughed as I pointed my MiniDV camcorder as she brushed the snow off her car. And then I flew down Stoney Trail, feeling the rumble of this dark red car through my leather gloves, the piercing, bitter, Alberta cold still lingering through the cabin. How many winters this car has been through. How many drives along icy roads and through sprawling open prairie, flying down the Cowboy Trail bound for golden-white peaks of the Rocky Mountains (or crawling down Macleod, bumping along brown-speckled snowpack, past Chinook and that one view of the city going west on Glenmore, the one I’d pass every day on the way to Bishop Carroll and think ‘Man, wish I could stop here and grab a quick picture, because that’s pretty’ and yet never did.)
The CBP officer today shook his head at me and gave me shit because he mumbled ‘Mobile Passport Control’ and I took just an extra five seconds to clock that he was talking to me and not one of the seven million other passengers waiting in line beside me. Home of the brave.
I woke up early yesterday to drive my mom and sister to 130th. We did our rounds of Walmart, Superstore. I noticed the fruits were mouldy and thought to tell one of the personal shoppers in the aisle behind me, a girl maybe a year or two younger than me in Aussie boots and a black sleeveless vest, pushing her carts and totes picking online orders grocery orders. But then I remembered pushing a similar cart ‘round the Save-On in Seton that first summer back from UBC (we called him Paul McCARTney), my brief stint as an ‘E-Commerce Specialist,’ fancy corporate talk for ‘grocery boy,’ and remembered that if a customer had complained of some mouldy lemon minutes before the end of my shift I honestly couldn’t have been arsed to do anything about it for $15/hour, so I didn’t bother saying anything. I drove out again to get some burgers from the local butcher shop, and was a little disappointed when they were out of those beef tallow fries we had the other day. And then I spent the rest of the day with them in that living room, watching episodes of Chicago P.D., these predictable, serialised true-crime storylines that for whatever reason engaged me for some seven or so episodes. And then I fell asleep in my parents’ bed, like I was a kid again, fully dressed in my knitted sweater and button-up and jeans. My mom didn’t say anything, just let me conk out.
When I landed in Las Vegas and picked up my CES pass from the airport, I stopped and smiled and snapped a picture on my phone. A press pass, with my name on it, my picture. Me, one year ago, atop the North Mountain Lookout in Darrington, Washington, holding a camera smiling, working on my little short film. And somehow, almost half a year later, I’m media, flown into Vegas to cover one of the biggest tech events in the world. It doesn’t feel right, and I have a strange suspicion that it never quite will. I’m nervous for this conference. Lot of videos to shoot, lot of stuff to cover, and I don’t really know if I can pull it off this time. I never do, when I’m doing anything creative. It always feels like I’m past the point of making something great. But seeing that press pass? For a second there, some part of me knew I could do it, that the promise ain’t dead, that there’s always more to come.
This morning, I called an Uber to my house and hugged my mom. I loaded my suitcase and camera equipment into the trunk and watched the lights wrapped around the trees. It’s the first day of school, and I thought for a second about how I’m missing the first week of my second semester. Can’t believe I’m missing my syllabus quizzes. All along the street, I saw kids all wrapped up in scarves and hats and boots and Walmart ski jackets, carrying Roots backpacks and huddling together in the dark morning cold, probably talking about Geometry Dash or what they did over the Christmas break. It was like I could see myself there, eleven-year-old Ansel waiting to be picked up by the school bus and talking with my busmates about going to the lake later to skate a little, and play some puck after school, of course, only if my mom said that your mom said you could. Fifteen-year-old Ansel walked 20 minutes with an old friend every morning to the front of Mahogany by the entrance to the village, past the roundabout at that one stop for the 406, then the 10-minute ride up to McKenzie Towne and the 30-minute wait huddled in the nearby Tim’s, waiting for the 40-minute ride on the 825 to Bishop Carroll High School, where all our friends were. I’d kill to have those mornings on the bus again, sitting on ripped blue vinyl seats at the back of a Calgary Transit bus, blowing coal and roaring its diesel engine, having to yell to hear each other. Making stupid jokes, fooling around, doing stupid shit to pass the time on this nearly hour-and-a-half total commute. Somehow we never complained, just sipped our hot chocolates and laughed. As the years went on, I saw fewer and fewer kids I recognised at these bus stops, and this morning I recognised no one. And yet I could remember being one of those kids, on one of those days when I’d missed the 825 and had to hop on the 302 downtown, alone. I waited at that same stop by Mahogany Gate, watching the cars go by, wondering in my mind where they might be going, what they were getting up today. Could I have imagined that I’d be in one of those cars someday, in an Uber to the airport on a flight to Las Vegas, working as a journalist? Perhaps, but that day it wasn’t even a passing thought. I huddled in my seat at the front of the bus, listening to Manchester Orchestra, watching the blue early-morning light give way to the rising prairie sun, the bitter Alberta cold seeping through the stuck-open windows, and the commuters huddled together as we crept slowly down Barlow, 130th, 52nd, Ogden, Inglewood, north to City Hall, us and the world.
It gets harder and harder to leave Calgary every time I do it. I always thought that I’d get used to living away from home and that those tears that well up in my eyes when I fly along Stoney northbound, bound for the airport, shielded from my Uber driver, the pining would get less and less as the years go on, as the realisation that I’d be home for the next midterm break and the next summer and the next Christmas becomes all the more reinforced. But it’s actually quite the opposite. It gets more and more painful to leave home every time I do it. To leave those white sheets of snow, the kind of bitter air that pulls your face taut and gives you a wind burn. To leave my boys on the edge of a double-black mogul run at Sunshine, to stare down the ledge and all that powder and somehow to say, ‘last one of the day.’ To leave half-filled bottles of MGD unfinished and strewn about the sturdy wooden tables of the Ship. To leave the snacks half-finished on the coffee table and lit by the blue light of Prime Video on pause. To leave my home, the first place that was mine, this middle-of-nowhere Cowtown, that gave me everything.
And yet I do. Because I hope to see another late night on Spanish Banks, staring out at that dark Vancouver skyline, surrounded by the people I grew to love in brick-bound campus residences and dining halls that give me the courage and the strength to let me be me and to create our own kingdoms and do our own great things and to live free in a world—in a city—that’s ours and ours alone, ours for the very first time, as heirs to that glimmering spectacle, in all its change and danger and decline and loss and love and freedom and wonder and death and destruction and hatred and violence and hope—hope, and perhaps gratitude, to know that even in a world where the Capitol falls and its perpetrator bounces right back and where things ain’t quite as rosy as I remembered, that it might still possible for a kid to look out at an airport-bound Uber and think ‘maybe that’d be me, someday, one-day, every day.’
-ansel
las vegas, nevada
6 January 2024
line of best fit 