The Macdonald Bus

diesels along Prior Street (prominent city land-owner and mining engineer, worked for Baron Dunsmuir’s coal empire, till Premier Dunsmuir appointed him as no doubt perfectly neutral mine inspector).  The bus spews the diesel that ended the coal empire.  Full of chatter in Chinese (some perhaps descendants of coal-mining slaves), people shrug, gesture, nod – someone saying in another language what seems to be why Whyy  WHYYY in horror – heading into Chinatown, where a man pushes across the street with a pile of chairs teetering on a tiny dolly.  And the sacks of dried shrimp, nuts, mushrooms, seaweed line the sidewalks outside the shops. Though it spews diesel, and it’s too expensive for the poor, it’s good to have the bus.  Cities without buses suffer even more spewing of CO and NO2.  The 20th C cities came to spew and sprawl, but they came to have buses, an idea that people could move through the streets – people move ideas, too, through streets – and in this case an idea that the City animal should make a way for people to circulate: a heart and arteries.  How much does the blood know of the brain?

The windshield wipers flick flack on the bus’s big square eyes as it passes the Ming Wo pots-and-pans shop and under the new Chinatown gate with giant concrete columns and blue, red, gold dragons.  Flick flack past the Lotus Hotel, and the Wild Rice martini bar John A. Macdonald would have liked to sample.  It is clear there were periods of time of which he later had no recollection, the encyclopedia says of those campaign funds from the railway magnate. 

The Bus started out with Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  Then Rupert’s (a.k.a. Hudson’s Bay) Land got on, Manitoba, BC, PEI, Yukon, NWT, Alberta and Saskatchewan and last of all Newfoundland. Now everyone in Canada’s cities is on the Macdonald Bus, as it roars up to Pappas (the fur trade Canada’s history books are so full of), and lowers itself to let off two ancient ladies thanking the driver in quavering voices. 

It’s still better to have the bus, whatever it has become, is becoming.  Equitable Offices & Apartments, says a sign in chipped paint high on a brick wall from 1910.  Equitable to who? when? how?  We do flat-tops, says Prestige Barber Shop.  Wildflower Aroma Therapy – another sign – of what blind hedonism?  Development Application, a white board at Pender’s street – 1860s, he mapped it out on the Hudson Bay Co’s Hecate.  At Dunsmuir’s street someone’s saving a heritage facade: steel buttresses bracing gray stones of an old bank around empty space.  Then on to Burrard Street in search of the 20th Century City Burrard and Vancouver, old sea captains and navy pals, never thought of, though King George did.

A mail-man gets on free of charge, heaving bags of paper.  Out on the street, a man heaves his plastic sack of tins.  A woman in black leather jacket with studs and chains may take the seat beside you.  And someone may ask for Davie Street.  Her umbrella is stuck.  In a hail of droplets, it folds.  The riders’ heads yank back as the bus grunts up the hill over potholes – squiggling the writer’s pen.  Hungry?  Looking for something new? asks a poster on a bus-shelter owned by a multimillionaire.  Beside it a woman with back pack stares at a Fare Receipt – fingering it: where am I now in this city-roar?   And who’s running the Ferris wheel in the fair?

On the fifty-something bus, or the forty-something bus, or the thirty-something?  Roaring ahead into the dark – schools of fish riding them since birth.  Flick flack go the wipers.  Some get to make the buses.  Some get to drive them.  Some get to say how much you pay to get on.  Many just ride. 

People at Market Place Bistro, lined up on stools at a window, stare out to the sidewalk and rain.  A woman in rain jacket climbs the steps of the bus, decades of fear and alienship in her eyes, her hair perfectly swirled in a French roll.  NAILS FANTASY NAILS, says hot pink neon.  Used to be you only saw these in big dirty US cities.  Now they perch in clean innocent Canada.  What idea-bus for women carries NAILS or French rolls?  Who’s driving that? Canadians are so innocent, said Reza Baraheni to a Canadian who couldn’t fathom his poems of women in Iranian jail, heavy with child, mothers imprisoned just till their child was born; then shot.  How speak after this?  Yet people must.  Go on.  Making a place.  For grey-haired pensioners in yellow plaid trousers – books under one arm, and a purple umbrella, its handle the head of a duck.  A place to remember the making and driving of buses.  The innocence and shooting of mothers. 

Cartographer At Work

Beside the tax authority, the macro-brewery, the flags and the ever-burning flame in Seaforth Armories Peace Park, Cartographer boards the Knight bus – Robert Knight (1829-1913) claiming fame for owning property in South Vancouver.  The word roars off over the Burrard Bridge, on a route of its own: Harry Knight, a BC photographer, preferred soft-focus pictorial moodiness; John Knight, Captain RN, got his name on the Kwakwaka’wakw inlet where thousands of first nations people fished for Eulachon (he’d served in the American Revolutionary War with Vancouver’s right-hand man, Captain Broughton); The Knights of Labor in the 1880s elected Vancouver’s second mayor, lobbied for a shorter work-day, tried to stop the import of low-paid Asian workers.  The word roars on through the meccano-set girders of the bridge: a feudal tenant trained for mounted combat; a man devoted to the service of a woman; a horse-head chess-piece that moves in L-shaped leaps.  By sea and land we prosper, says the city motto on the bridge house – a lumberjack and a seaman hold up the city coat of arms.

On the bus, people gaze with bussed-eyes through steamed-up windows splattered with rain drops.  There’s a sudden reek of disinfectant as a man walks down the aisle.  Wipers idiotically, hypnotically sweep and stop, sweep and stop.  People read.  Hold their heads up.  Wet walkers get on.  Ball-cap guys with not much work and a few days beard.  Death by Chocolate, touts a passing store.  Wet people slump in seats, or smear fog off the windows – trying to see out of the Knight bus, while Cartographer records latitude and longitude for land, sea and air, and wonders whether The Amphibians (of BC) could be like The Bostonians (of Boston) or The White Oaks of Jalna.