Polaroids From the Dead

by Douglas Coupland

  Ooohhh…

  I headed back to my car to wait out the drama. Shortly, though, I began to hear horn music playing, live music, not a stereo, and I walked down to the mouth of the bridge, where a bearded man in a white suit stood on the roof of a white Cadillac parked between the two cement lions guarding the entrance. He was serenading the jumper on the bridge with “Stranger on the Shore.”

  The man with the horn was Frank Baker, a restaurant owner of that long-vanished era when “fine dining” meant a T-bone steak, three double scotches and a pack of Chesterfields.

  Mr. Baker, who died in 1991, had once owned a “swinging” kind of restaurant in West Vancouver where your parents would take out-of-town guests, but only after first getting themselves all revved up with Herb Alpert records.

  Mr. Baker was always, to younger eyes, the embodiment of a certain type of cool, so cool that he had even bought the original Aston Martin DB-5 used in the James Bond movie Goldfinger. He was certainly a character, and his restaurant was an occupational puppy mill for a good number of friends during high school who bussed there and diced the vegetables and did food-prep on weekends.

  But Frank Baker was also a good musician, and that night on the bridge people like myself sat in the grass and daffodils along the banks of the causeway and listened to his songs, wondering, I guess, if we too might ever reach that point in life when we find ourselves in the riggings of Lions Gate Bridge, trying to decide yes? or no?, knowing that even if we decided yes, a water landing still offered a semblance of hope.

  Another memory:

  In late 1986 I arrived back in Vancouver after living abroad for a year. On that first evening back I looked down at the bridge and saw that it had been garlanded with brilliant pearls of light along its thin parabolic lines. I was shocked—it was so beautiful it made me lose my breath.

  I asked my father about these lights, and he told me they were called “Gracie’s Necklace,” after a local politician. In the almost five decades since the bridge had been built, the city had been secretly dreaming of the day when it would cloak its bridge in light, and now the dream had become real life.

  Now, whenever I fly back to Vancouver, it is Gracie’s Necklace I look for from my seat, the sight I need to see in order to make myself feel I am home again. We often forget, living here in Vancouver, that we live in the youngest city on earth, a city almost entirely of, and only of, the twentieth century—and that this is Vancouver’s greatest blessing. It is the delicacy of Gracie’s Necklace that reminds me we live, not so much in a city but in a dream of a city.

  Now, I was not a particularly standout student in high school. I seem to remember spending the bulk of those years more or less catatonic from understimulation. One of the few respites from the school’s daily underdosings of learning was the view from up the mountain of the bridge, the city, Mount Baker, of Vancouver Island and of the never-ending cranes continually transforming the skyline.

  In October, the fogs would roll in; the city below became a glowing, foaming prairie of white light. Lions Gate Bridge would puncture through that light, glowing gold, offering transport into that other, luminous arena.

  For grades 8, 9, 10 and most of grade 11, I spent many hours slumped over the physics class radiator, dreaming of the day—January 13, 1978—two weeks after my sixteenth birthday, when I would pass my driver’s test and at last be able to drive into that magic city bathed in light.

  Curiously, I had my sixteenth birthday dinner at Frank Baker’s restaurant—now almost exactly half-a-lifetime ago. Birthday gift: Solomon 555 ski bindings and a down vest. The food: Frank Baker’s buffet table—all the warm Jell-O you could eat. Michelle, Caroline and Michael—do they remember as I do that silly, forgettable evening, back so long ago when we were all still young?

  Recently there has been talk of tearing down Lions Gate Bridge, and such talk truly horrifies me. People speak of Lions Gate Bridge as being merely a tool, a piece of infrastructure that can be casually deleted, plundered from our memories with not a second thought to the consequences its vanishing might have on our interior lives.

  I think that when people begin to talk like this, they are running scared—they are doing something that I know I do myself: I try to disguise what I am really feeling by saying and doing the opposite thing. The bridge is not merely a tool, not a casually deletable piece of infrastructure, and it can never be deleted from memories like an undesirable file.

  I can’t do this with Lions Gate Bridge anymore. Why was it so hard until recently for me to simply say that the bridge is a thing of delicate beauty—an intricate part of my life and memories? Why is it so hard for all of us to say loudly and clearly to each other that the bridge is an embodiment of grace and charm and we must not let it die?

  Why would we destroy something we love rather than let a stupid pride prevent us from saying, “It means something to me”?

  I never said what happened the night of the jumper.

  After an hour or so, the jumper came down and was promptly whisked away by a screaming ambulance. Frank Baker came down off the roof of his Cadillac, took his bows to our claps, and he drove away.

  I myself got back into my old Rabbit and drove across the bridge, but the bridge felt different that night, as though it led me to a newer, different place.

  I want you to imagine you are driving north, across the Lions Gate Bridge, and the sky is steely gray and the sugar-dusted mountains loom blackly in the distance. Imagine what lies behind those mountains—realize that there are only more mountains—mountains until the North Pole, mountains until the end of the world, mountains taller than a thousand me’s, mountains taller than a thousand you’s.

  Here is where civilization ends; here is where time ends and where eternity begins. Here is what Lions Gate Bridge is: one last grand gesture of beauty, of charm, and of grace before we enter the hinterlands, before the air becomes too brittle and too cold to breathe, before we enter that place where life becomes harsh, where we must become animals in order to survive.

  Archive Photos

  12

  THE GERMAN REPORTER

  May 27, 1994

  A REPORTER FROM A GERMAN MAGAZINE WAS SCHEDULED TO ARRIVE, AND I WAS dreading it.

  In the previous two weeks I had visited, on separate trips, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Austin and Washington, D.C. My sense of internal time had snapped from jet lag.

  Too many hotels and airports had also left me geographically dislocated—feeling as though I was from nowhere. As well, I had been working too hard of late. My ability to be polite to strangers had diminished. I was expecting nothing from this encounter with the German reporter.

  The reporter had been flying for thirty-seven hours when he got to Vancouver (via LAX via Frankfurt from Hamburg). His own sense of time and place had pretty much snapped, and because of this, I was prepared to be more sympathetic toward him than I might be normally to a reporter.

  When we finally met in the Hyatt lobby, I was struck by how much he reminded me of myself when I was twenty-four nearly a decade before. Despite his jet lag, he was obviously a good-natured sort—enthusiastically lost, asking too many questions, unfamiliar with hotel voice-mail systems and wearing clothes that will look charmingly dated in photos ten years from now. He had a “soul patch” on his chin and a DEG (Düsseldorf Eis Gemeinschaft) baseball cap worn backward. And this was pretty much me at twenty-four.

  I have always seen twenty-four as a charmed year. It was the year I lost my sense of being young—but that’s another story. It’s reassuring to see people deal with being twenty-four better than the way we dealt with it, which is never too well.

  Anyway, it was a Pacific blue sky Thursday. We ate a quick curry rice at a Japanese noodle dive on Robson Street, and I decided, somewhat rashly, that the German reporter was some form of Dickens-like ghost of myself past, come to visit me in my current state of tiredness for reasons unknown.

  As such, I felt obligated to show this spirit my world, somet
hing I normally never do. I thought this German reporter might be able to help me fix my damaged sense of damaged time and space. If I could help him deal with being twenty-four, fine, but I didn’t tell him this.

  Oh—the things we should have known when we were younger….

  We drove to the North Shore and hiked through Capilano Canyon, through the Douglas firs and yellow cedars and hemlocks—the canyon in the mountain just below the subdivision where I grew up. The sun shone brightly through the lower canopy of leaves—maples, mainly—and inside the taller trees it was cool and dark and quiet and the light was green.

  We saw a woodpecker. The bird’s head glistened red like undried blood, and it was pecking a hole in a dead hemlock tree. We sat on the twisting path quietly, and we sat for long enough that our hearts slowed down their beating, and we watched the woodpecker, not a spit away, and it seemed to not care that we existed.

  In the river below, there were steelhead minnows and fishermen looking for bigger fish. And down this canyon flew a kingfisher with a blue-and-white crested head, cruising the canyon’s twists like a Toyota purring down a California freeway.

  We ate cherries and spat the pits into the river.

  We visited the salmon hatchery—the incubator in which coho, chum and sockeye salmon spawn and in which they die and in which they are born.

  I told the German reporter that in literature, birds are ideas and fish are souls, and that metaphor surrounds us—and that all you need to do is be still and to ask, and the right metaphor will always present itself to you.

  After the canyon we drove the two miles up Capilano Road to Grouse Mountain, where I spent many of my teenage years skiing. We rode the tramway to the top; our gondola was full of forty-three senior citizens. These were the “Rambling Rovers” of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho: forty-three teensy little people like Franklin Mint figurines with white hair, all wearing blue rayon baseball jackets. These old people were, in fact, all so identical that it spooked us. The German reporter and I wondered if that was our fate, no matter how hard we tried, to become a Rambling Rover roaming the world in pursuit of meaning from within an Evergreen Coachline bus with Oregon license plates.

  Up at the top of the mountain, we rode a helicopter and roamed the alps behind the city of Vancouver. In this helicopter, up in those heights, we saw melting reservoirs, virgin forests and islands in the Pacific like lead coins in an ocean of gold. And we saw the glaciers and the wild rivers that stretch until the end of the world.

  Afterward in a James Bond-like restaurant on top of the mountain, we discussed civilization and we looked down on the cloudless, flawless suburb of my youth below. I told the German reporter that he had seen today something I had always suspected but had only recently articulated: that as humans we are always on the brink of wilderness—that we are always animals first—that civilization is an act of political will, and not a given right. And that middle-class peace is something to be cherished, not mocked, because without it, we are lost, and we are only animals and never anything more.

  By the time we returned to the tramway, the senior citizens had vanished. Instead there was a local high school field trip and kids yelling “Sean!” and “Kelly!” and “Heather!” and “Jamie!” at each other, and I had this feeling—as though the Rambling Rovers had come to the mountain, received the word of God, and been given a second chance at youth. I felt as though something was beginning to be reborn.

  After the mountain we visited a cheeseburger hangout where a girl I once knew, an old friend, used to work. I hadn’t seen her in many years and I asked the manager if he had seen her lately. He said yes—just a month before, it turned out. And so I asked if she was happy and he said, as diplomatically as he could, not really.

  I was sad, because we want the people we care about, even if they have vanished from our day-to-day lives, to find some measure of happiness. I was sad because unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use in its absence.

  May 28, 1994

  The next day was sunny too, and I picked up the German reporter, and we did some of my daily stuff—mailed letters, visited FedEx—and we had coffee at a pretentious coffee bar where all the people try to look like MTV stars and fashion models.

  The German reporter asked me what it means to be “real,” which is, when you think about it, an extraordinary question. Each of these people in the coffee bar, sneaking peeks at themselves reflected in the framed artwork, considered themselves to be more “real” than the other people sneaking the same peeks. What, exactly, does real mean? Are you real? Am I real? Was this German reporter real? How real is real?

  The German reporter and I then drove through Kitsilano along Point Grey to Spanish Banks, where the tide was way out. We walked in the muddy sand and his shoes—these ridiculous billiard green “French Foreign Legion” shoes—got soaked, and so he removed them. We looked at the holes in the wet sand made by the breathing clams, and it seemed to us as though the planet was breathing.

  Some people near us, tourists probably, were mystified that the tide could be so low—that a person could almost walk across the sea to the mountains on the other side.

  One of the men in the group said, “Hey—let’s walk across the water to that ship out there.” The phrase stuck in my mind because he was, I think, made temporarily dizzy by the thought that this might actually be possible.

  We then drove out to the Nitobe Japanese Gardens at the University of British Columbia, and I took my shoes off too, and we walked through the Japanese garden. Although it is a manufactured version of wilderness, like a seventeenth-century Disneyland, it is still beautiful.

  Our feet walked over the pebbles and the cool moss and the smooth stones and the zigzag bridge over the blooming irises. The Japanese build bridges in zigzags because after you walk across them, evil spirits get confused and fall off the edges. We felt them fall.

  Then we got back in the car and went to shop for used tapes and records and CDs at a store in Kitsilano. I quickly found what I wanted: Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits and Koyaanisqatsi by Philip Glass, and I sat on a step while the German reporter prowled around. I made notes in my notebook—casual voices and things we had heard and seen over the past day that made more sense than other things, and this is what I wrote in my book:

  I was walking down the street and suddenly I felt I had lost something, but I didn’t know what. (The German reporter had said this as we were leaving the car earlier.)

  I was young and not a soul had found my soul. (A song that was playing on the store’s stereo.)

  Please wait patiently during the silence. (A recorded voice spoken to me by a Toronto Dominion Bank answering machine that morning.)

  I could happily die right now with nothing but today in my eyes. (A line written by Truman Capote I had read in a book the night before.)

  For dinner we visited Cameron and Wendy, two of my best friends in the world, at their house in Shaughnessy. We ordered pizza and sat in the kitchen until it got dark. We lit candles and around eleven, their four-month-old daughter, Rachael, cried, and Wendy brought her down to the kitchen. Rachael, my goddaughter, glowed in the candles, so obviously created out of love by my two friends that it made me speechless to know that such pure love can, and does, exist, and when such a feeling is encountered, no words need to be spoken, so for a short while there was a pure silence.

  May 29, 1994

  The next day it rained and I was happy, because this is how Vancouver usually is and how it feels. The German reporter and I took a ferry to a small island called Bowen Island for lunch. Afterward we returned to the mainland and drove up the fjord of Howe Sound, up Highway 99.

  We drove to Britannia Beach, a tiny town next to a river that floods every three years, although its people never move. They just patch up their houses and stay. People are odd.

  AP/Wide World Photos

  We parked the car and walked down the Pacific Great Western train tr
acks a half-mile to an old herring boat beached like a whale back in the 1940s, majestic and sad. I told the German reporter that this boat was a symbol for a dignified, magnificent death.

  And I remembered two days previously, when the two of us were in the forest, running our hands through the soil in the roots of a fir tree, feeling the soil’s dry coolness sifting through our fingers, deciding that I would rather be buried than cremated, because you give more back to the earth that way.

  Not in a casket. But just buried.

  In a forest.

  We walked back through the rainforest to the train tracks. Farther down the tracks there was a tunnel, and I told him my theory that we instinctively wave to people on trains because trains are a metaphor for being alive: countless souls, trapped together, hurtling across the landscape, with a destination somewhere in the unseeable distance.

  Nobody ever waves at buses.

  I told him how once, in a Metroliner train passing through Delaware, I waved from the train to some people going under the train bridge on a speedboat. It had the feel of a one-night stand with somebody you know you might have fallen in love with had there been enough time.

  We walked through the tunnel, and inside, in its middle, all we could hear was the sound of the German reporter’s Aiwa tape recorder running, so he turned it off. And then we heard nothing.

  We walked out the tunnel, into the light on the other side, and I said that dying was maybe like this: When we looked back at the tunnel, the curve made it look much shorter going back than it did the other way.