Last September, what is probably my favourite television show of all time came to an end. After some 25 years of working together, Jeremy Clarkson , Richard Hammond, and, my favourite host, James ‘Captain Slow’ May finally parted ways, first on the BBC’s motoring programme Top Gear, and later on its spiritual successor The Grand Tour. I always remembered seeing the trio around my house. One of my earliest retrievable childhood memories is, strangely, of the famous Top Gear chairs, the TV in the centre, the crowds surrounding it, the big Top Gear flag/decal in the back, and the trio sitting, chatting, laughing about, doing ‘The News’ or talking about their latest challenge. I remember my dad putting them on BBC International every so often, sometimes just as background noise, other times to have a bit of a laugh on a lazy weekend afternoon, when him and I had nothing better to do.
But it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that I really started to build this deep, layered relationship with Clarkson, Hammond, and May, who today I would genuinely consider some of my role models, some of the biggest inspirations to me not just creatively and artistically, but as a man, as a person, as an acting agent in the world. Cooped up in my house for around a year, I took solace in their dry British humour, their endless, meandering, coruscating banter, the cutting sarcasm, and the silly gags and antics that would literally make me belly-laugh every time I’d get to watch them. I found their films so comforting if only for the fact that they were one of the only things at that time able to consistent bring me such joy at what was a decidedly difficult time in my life, if only for the fact that their adventures during the Top Gear and Grand Tour Specials gave me this sense of freedom and hope for just what was out there, what was eventually to come.
God, what I would give to be driving through the mountain roads of Patagonia in a Lotus Esprit, or crossing Vietnam in an old Soviet Minsk motorcycle. Last September, the trio released their last special ‘One for the Road,’ where they drove through the Magadikgadi salt flats in Botswana, just as they did for their first special way back in 2007. The way they sent this off was, to me, just perfect. No big, long speech at the end, nobody getting horribly emotional. Just a shot of Jeremy unplugging his lav mic, and then holding his hand out for a nice, stoic, British handshake. That stoicism is something I’ve long admired, perhaps because I’ve long felt it’s something I lack in myself. I get too sentimental sometimes, too caught up in trying to find the right words to express something, to get down to the finest grains of that feeling. In endless specificity, I seek clarity and reassurance, and when it turns out that I can’t quite find that, I often get frustrated, angry, or sad, and believe me, I’m quite expressive when that happens. I’ve long admired the strength it takes, as a man, to bite one’s tongue, to hold one’s stiff upper lip. There’s incomprehensible beauty in a simple handshake, a drive off into the sunset across the Magadikagi, listening to George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord,’ that celebration of brotherhood, presence, freedom. Somehow, it says so much more than these words can describe, no matter how much I spin it, no matter how long I search for the right terminology, the right approach, the right phrasing.
Yesterday, I spent most of the day out for an Easter picnic on Jericho Beach with some of my closest friends here in Vancouver. We sat out in the sun together sharing some homemade Tiramisu, and I’d just bought a camp stove that morning, so we got to BBQ-ing a couple of hot dogs for lunch, too. I couldn’t get the bloody propane tank open, neither could I light the stove without burning myself on the matches, which kind of shattered this myth of self-reliance I’ve long held myself to, but alas. We sat out there on the beach, sitting in the sun just chatting about life for something like six hours. I felt so happy then, just to be there and present. It was one of the most alive I had felt in a long time, having just pushed through some of the most stressful weeks I’ve had in a long time to close off the school year.
And suddenly, that George Harrison song came on in the background, and I saw that aerial shot of the trio driving in formation down the Magadikagi, saluting each other one last time, and then peeling off in their own directions. And our conversation started to shift towards what we were going to do after university, if we’d stay in Vancouver, if we’d look to move elsewhere, out of the country, what sort of opportunities we’d pursue, what sort of life we want to live. One said she’d like to go backpacking through Europe for a few years. Another told me that she’d like to leave the continent, perhaps to move back in with her family in whatever country they’d be in in a few years. And I talked about New York, about staying here for 3-4 years to work with SoundGuys before trying to pivot over to some other form of journalism, or perhaps the film industry, more than anything, to chase this dream I’ve had forever, to live in New York City, to be part of that, all that incredible energy, that living monument to hope and promise, to renewal and freedom, to life itself, and the continual capacity to create in wondrous ways, ways beyond myself, beyond you and I.
But I recognised in that moment, for the first time, a certain gravity to the stuff we were talking about. I’m sure we’d had conversations like this before, about where we’d go after university, but it was only yesterday that the gravity of that question really sunk in for me. After all, we just finished our third year at UBC. We’ve got just one year left, maybe two. And since then I’ve felt this deep sense of fear, sorrow, and longing, this desire to hold onto this for as long as I can, this sense that I can’t let this go, that I never really want this to end. It feels like just yesterday when I moved out of Calgary for the first time, came out here on my own to attend school, had to deal with all that meant, that shift in identity. Every single day, when I wake up in the morning, I still feel that same sense of guilt, that same unending longing for Calgary, feel this slight sense of regret for leaving my family behind, my friends behind, my city behind, the first place that ever felt like home for me, and I just up and left. Over the past year, I’ve come to discover precisely why I did that. I left my home because I saw things that were worth the struggle, that endless pining. The life I’d built here was worth having to leave a whole other life behind.
At the start of January, I felt, for the first time, that I’d finally made some real progress. That I’d taken a meaningful step. Something felt different. I wrote in a poem around this time that ‘the pining never ceased, but the guilt has passed.’ Everything felt so clear, so hopeful, and I was really content with the kind of person I was, the kind of person I was becoming, the kind of life I got to live, the kind of things I got to create. Talking about leaving this all behind and starting anew is, for that reason, so scary to me. Part of me only feels like I’d just figured things out, finally, after so much time and effort and guilt, only to then be thrown right back into the wringer again, that anticipatory grief, at when I’d inevitably pack up again and move to a brand new city, to start completely fresh.
After the picnic yesterday I went to go get drinks with some friends at Browns on campus. I said to them that I really appreciate that we still keep in touch and make an effort to see each other every once in awhile, even though our lives don’t ordinarily intersect otherwise. I learned, this time around, that one of them was graduating this year and would be leaving Vancouver in a few days to move to London. And then, again, I felt that simultaneous excitement and dread, excitement for the future and dread at losing everything that had taken me so long to find, so long to piece together.
Today was my partner’s birthday, and I drove out to get her a bouquet of flowers and a little cake before surprising her at her house with it. She makes me into someone I want to be, shows me that, above all, I can be me. After dropping off the gifts I stuck around for awhile to hang out with her roommates, and we had a quick chat about whatever little things we were planning, whatever new things were coming up this summer, but all the while I had this longing in the back of my mind, turning it over and over and over again in my brain. Could I really bear to lose this? Is it even fair to say I’m losing anything? Am I prepared to start again?
Will we still be us?
I thought back to last November, that day I spent 24 hours in New York City. I had been awake for some 72 hours at that point, having travelled all six states of New England in two days, and yet the time I spent in the city was some of the most energised I’d ever been. I spent a lot of time in the East Village and Greenwich, on the subways, around the trendy parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg and Dumbo. But midway through the day I also went out of my way to see this residential neighbourhood called Ditmas Park. I took the subway to Beverly Road Station, which I had seen in The National’s documentary Mistaken for Strangers, and I was so struck by the beauty of that moment in the film, as well as how pretty the area was, that I just felt I had to go see it. Matt Berninger’s house was there, and it was there he wrote ‘The Geese of Beverly Road,’ a song about growing up, the wonders of being young, the beauty in being a kid, running down the street, setting off car alarms, being the ‘heirs to the glimmering world.’
But unlike some of these other parts of NYC, which had always been, though exciting and incredible and just beyond my wildest imaginations still, nevertheless, precisely that – an imagination – Ditmas Park felt real, attainable, possible. Walking around this neighbourhood felt a lot like wandering around the Pacific Northwest, like Kitsilano or Kerrisdale or Queen Anne in Seattle – but it was New York City all the same, this place that at once feels unreal, unattainable, completely fantastical to me. More than the excitement of being in New York City or the joy of solo travelling, I felt, then, this flicker in the back of my mind that maybe this was some place I could really live in, that maybe it wasn’t so unattainable after all.
I had that distinct moment with Vancouver, too, when I first settled into my new place in Olympic Village, when I took the Expo Line into the city on those long summer days. It’s both scary and amazing to me that I got to feel that for New York too, and I had this feeling then that maybe, if I could have made it to Vancouver completely on my own, made what once was this crazy dream that I’d written off time and time again literally my everyday, my reality, the place I vacation away from not out of dislike for the place but because it’s my home? The fact that I reached that point for a city that once existed solely as an unattainable dream gives me this faint hope, that maybe New York isn’t so far away after all, and that if I could have found something so worth it, so transcendent in this west coast city having left behind the greatest people, experiences, and places that shaped the entire essence of who I am – if I did it once already, maybe, I could do it again.
Three days ago I went to grab pancakes late at night at a Denny’s with a friend. We talked for hours about life, about living here, about what that really means. Over the past few days I’ve been working on Five Stories, making the last touches on the colour grading, and as I do so I feel all those feelings again from each of these moments, from going back to Calgary, skiing with my boys, sitting around at the Kilt & Caber shooting the shit, sitting in my living room with the fireplace on with my dad in his study and my mom & sister watching a police show. I felt the joy I felt when I went back to Vancouver then after last Christmas, that transcendental awe I felt for the first time, how everything felt so right, so worth it, that it’d finally paid off. And I felt the wonder I felt when I travelled through New England, Washington, Oregon, and NYC over the past year, this feeling of possibility.
In one of his last remarks of ‘One for the Road,’ James May, moved almost to tears, talks about this green bag that he only ever takes on Top Gear and Grand Tour specials:
’22 years. More than a third of my life. This is going to hit me in quite small ways; there’s a green bag; I have a green holdall that I’ve used since the very first special in Botswana. I’ve always used it for specials, but I’ve never taken it anywhere else. So, what will I do with that green bag? One day, I’ll come across it in that cupboard where we keep the bags, and I’ll think “oh yeah.’ And it’ll come back.’
It’s heart-wrenching, growing up, moving away, this endless cycle of leaving everything behind, of starting new again. Often, I wonder if it’s worth that pain. It never gets easier to leave. But in the words of the late Pope Francis, who passed away this morning:
‘At Easter, God finally reveals His glory: He takes away the last veil and astonishes us as never before. We discover, in fact, that God’s glory is all love: pure love, mad and unthinkable, beyond every limit and measure… True glory is the glory of love, because it is the only one that gives life to the world. Certainly, this glory is the opposite of worldly glory, which comes when one is admired, praised, acclaimed. The glory of God, on the other hand, is paradoxical: no applause, no audience. At the centre there is not the ego, but the other.’
All I can do now is be present, be here, with the people I love, living the life we built together, together. Perhaps that’s enough to justify these endings, these goodbyes, implicit and explicit, past and present and future. I can only hope – no, I pray – that when these moments come, I’ll have the strength to reach out my hand, to hold my people close, to unplug my proverbial mic and shake their hand, as if to say thank you, for everything. I owe it to these people, the people that make me me; I owe it to them, at least, to be dignified, to do them justice. Because they didn’t just teach me who I am but who I could be, who I ought to me. They taught me to love myself, to love my life. That’s a greater gift than I could ever ask for.
Jimmy Buffet said it best. It’s both light-hearted and devastating — that soft, wise shrug of someone who’s known joy and sorrow and decided to dance anyway. A perfect companion to the stoicism of that handshake, the quiet finality of Clarkson unplugging his mic, or May’s green bag in the closet. To bite one’s tongue, to ground oneself in strength, to look upon such darkness and see possibility even still, and yet, where the time is right, to waste away in Margaritaville no less:
‘These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands
If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.’
line of best fit 