The road less cycled

Life has slowed to a crawl, just in time for the hot weather to sweep in. If your parents ever sang that song about, “Lazy summer days, with the fish jumping and the cotton being high,” well, that’s what things feel like right now. Replace the cotton with reed canary grass or corn, and the fish jumping with red-tailed hawks soaring, and the songs fits perfectly.

I walk home everyday from the bus stop on Blueridge, from which I span the rural-urban divide, going through the subdivision, around the detention pond under the power-lines, through the barbed-wire fence, along the makeshift pathway through a young alder grove, down the hill as the pathway snakes through a grove of middle-age cottonwoods, and then through a large patch of grass that’s waist high, before I cross the creek and cross the field to my house. All in all, it’s about 10 minutes from the bus stop to my house, 13 if I’m going uphill.

It’s a bus route on which I’m starting to know some of the users. There’s Rick, the laid off reformed gang-member and now born-again Christian who’s using his free time do some serious working out. There’s the girl who goes down to the City Blends with her laptop to do her homework and do some people watching. There’s the red-haired girl who draws faces on balloons to pass the time. There’s the Indo-Canadian security guard, who remains the only one to offer to sign my petition to implement a transit line between Chilliwack and Abbotsford. Everyone else I’ve had to approach. There’s the lady who disagrees vehemently with Tim Felger’s “election” signs downtown which say things like, “Your mom called. She said to bring home a baggie.”

Riding transit so much, you start to love the endless variation among the people on the buses. The quirky bus drivers, the poverty, the young punks who hang out in the back of the bus, the young single mothers who you feel sorry for but admire for their pluck, all the people who don’t jive so well with the rest of society. Who you don’t see are the young professionals, the businessmen, the people who think they’ve got it made, who drive sporty cars around town and still believe the world’s their oyster and shun transit at all costs. Here in Abbotsford, there’s a certain homely feel to using transit, almost a sense of ownership that simply isn’t present when you’re in Vancouver or some other urban metropolis, where the sheer multitude of people makes any sort of group identification based on transportation routes unlikely.

Transit slows things down as well. Countless times I’ve walked the 15 minutes to get to the bus stop, lounged for 20 minutes reading or chatting at a bus stop, or walked the distance that the bus was going to cover because it wasn’t going to arrive for 20 minutes. As I recover from the concussion that I suffered, I’m not working yet, freeing up 35 hours per week or so. I’m still too stubborn to apply for student loans, having paid for everything out of pocket so far and determined to keep doing that as long as I can, so I’m not taking any classes because I just can’t do it financially. That leaves me with a lot of time to myself. Heck, I don’t even have the money to use all the free time getting my entertainment fix. Instead, an independent business opportunity has arisen to which I’m dedicating myself – one to which I see no downside or risk, and the potential for great rewards –  along with some casual, simple work in my garden, and some excellent literature. Ebay, too, has become my second home as I try to liquidate all the un-needed items that  are scattered around the property.

It’s a lifestyle I’m going to miss when I move on, and make no mistake, move on I will. This little 15 hectare patch of land bi-sected by Downes Creek and containing my little garden patch will be places that I will always visit fondly, albeit with mixed memories of a place that sustained me throughout high-school and early university, literally and spiritually, but also saw the accumulation of more sheer stuff than I could ever use or reasonably dispose of, along with the emergence of health challenges about which I’ve been relatively mute and will remain vague.

All my instincts scream at me to simply play it safe, and establish some kind of shelter against what may or may not metamorphose into an international if not a global catastrophe, as our society’s energy supplies start to stagnate, taxes rise, the baby boomers leave the active economy and demand their social security benefits instead, and the extinction crisis driven by a changing climate begins to mount, affecting not just the world’s ecological systems, but the people who are intricately tied to them.

By nature, I remain a cautious person, with an avid dislike for casting preparation to the wind and letting the chips fall where they may.  Yet, there are things to be said for a devil-may-care lifestyle governed more by the changing of the winds and the seasons than the fickle shifting of society’s economic outlook. It’s a hardy, no-expectations and no set plan lifestyle which takes life as it comes and doesn’t focus too much on the future, outside of idle speculation to pass the time. Perhaps most importantly, it relies on natural skill and capability to pull one through when hard times do arise instead of reserves that have been put aside in good times. What I can’t seem to decide is whether the people who lived in that way did so deliberately, knowing that any disruption in the current socio-economic state of things could turn their world upside-down, or whether they were simply too ignorant, lazy, stubborn, or selfish to focus on getting ahead and laying something aside to help them deal with bad times when they did arrive. I’m not mentioning many names, mainly because there are really only a couple of figures who characerize that lifestyle who I know much about, and even my knowledge of them is limited. But I am thinking of the people who characterized the Beat Generation, the free lifestyles of the 60’s, 70’s, and more recent decades as well. What I am coming to realize is that there was no heavenly balm of peace and good times which settled over that post World War period. There was the Cold War, and the ideologically justified combat of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. The threat of the annihilation of a way of life was ever-present, as it is now. As I develop a broader understanding of the way things work, I find it more and more difficult to pronounce anything with certainty.

The idealism that would have seen the proliferation of public transit and bicycles, high density self-sufficient housing, community gardens, and the emergence of a government aware of the complete inadequacies of economics as usual, is fast fading within me. From the time of the first catastrophic detonation of the atomic bomb, groups have called for nuclear disarmament without success. The Kyoto Treaty was first adopted in 1997 and took effect in 2005, and today we are further from its goals than we have ever been. People continue to gradually lose traction against the ceaseless wheel of economics, as more slide into poverty and taxes rise ever higher. We are at the point where prominent British scientist James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia Theory, believes that we have finally passed the point of no return, and that the best expenditure of energy is now in preparation for the inevitable collapse of the world as we know it. Now, that’s easy for him to say – on the one hand, advancing a theory that costs him nothing but casts him into the spotlight even if he is dead wrong. But on the other hand, the science and economics of where we are does look grim. The main point here is that progressively minded activists have been calling for certain changes since many of my friend’s grandparents were teenagers, and as far as I can see, have been stymied by a range of factors, from the military-industrial complex, to fractional reserve banking, to simple human nature and greed.

Yeah, that much vaunted idealism that saw me quietly advocate for the things I believed to be of paramount importance, is giving way to a higher degree of realism that espouses one of my brother’s core beliefs: That if you don’t help yourself, you can’t help anyone else. In the face of escalating financial challenges that make a mockery of the naive, simplistic, and innocent desire to triumph over the power of money, the cogs of ICBC, housing markets, food costs, the price of accredited education, physical limitations, and prohibitive health care expenses,  a lot of the edges that defined my core beliefs about the role of a good citizen are being worn away – as near as I can gather, what happens to all idealists who don’t take jobs with the goverment or in government funded academia.

I have not yet seen or met anyone who meets two conditions: 1) is not constrained by money, and 2) acquired their wealth through means that obey the “do no harm” principle. Willful ignorance, rationalization, forced justification, and turning a blind eye seem to dominate in people’s mindsets, which is certainly not to demonize humanity, but to assign fault and to acknowledge our inherent imperfection and pragmatism.

To fly in the face of established wisdom about conclusions, I’m not writing a proper conclusion here. Rather, I’d simply like to urge you, if you read this, to disagree vehemently or simply play the devil’s advocate. I do hate it when people agree with me. I know I’m right anyway; I just wish people wouldn’t admit that. So come on. Tear my impromptu essay to shreds. Give me a failing grade, and I’ll do the same for you. Tell my why and how I’m wrong, and I will be your friend forever. Just know that I don’t make many enemies.