Amor de Cosmos

Yesterday I spent a great day with friends cycling from Victoria up to Nanaimo along the southeast coast of Vancouver Island.

I met up with my co-workers Josh and Mark outside the Victoria Clipper terminal in the central harbor of Victoria. BC.  They looked eager to start out so we began by cycling through downtown, passing the British Columbia legislature on our right. BC is possessed of one of the more “colorful” political landscapes in Canada … over a certain period of time something like four of the five recent Premiers of the province ended up under investigation and indictment for various reasons. The second leader of the Province was a man named Amor de Cosmos, who apparently entertained a number of opinions that accorded rather well with his name.

As we prepared to roll over the Johnson Street bridge, Mark’s chain suddenly decided to fall off. This was actually fortuitous since at any other point in the journey this would have presented us with a significant delay, but as it happens we were exactly two blocks from Mountain Equipemtn Co-op which has a massive bike department, and Mark was able to get himself back on the road in about fifteen minutes.

Repairs done, Victoria flew by quickly, a quick succession of bike paths and city streets, and before long we were in the countryside, creeping over hills and flying through beautiful valleys and past farms. Workers were bringing in the hay in the warm sun. One particularly beautiful road, a single lane really, took us through the lands of the Cowichan peoples and through the beautiful valley of the eponymous river, which languished still and brown as we crossed a series of plank bridges through one of the small reservations. Along the way we dropped down into a series of seaside towns — Chemainus with its murals, Cowichan Bay with its chintz.

For the last two hours before Nanaimo, we were forced on to the Trans Canada Highway, which was far less pleasant. Truck exhaust, grime and usually-but-not-always-large road shoulders were with us almost all the way into the city, which we all dearly wished would invest in some cycling infrastructure. Nanaimo is a resource town with a slightly depressed feeling. It’s all about sawmills and logging, but is also a magnet for the regional economy and a bit of an inheritor of other people’s problems. There are (perhaps apocryphal?) stories of the police in Vancouver buying particularly troubled people a one-way ferry ticket to Nanaimo — a form of extrajudicial exile. Nanaimo is also the home to the most famous drug and alcohol treatment facility in Canada, which brings many addicts to town, recovered or not. Many other poor people, largely first nations, end up in town for work or family or to live in a bigger place, or sometimes one imagines because they have nowhere else to go.

I thought of all of this as we rolled into town, checkin in to a cheap hotel and longing for a burrito and a rest. Our bodies (mostly their posterior portions) were complaining about being in bike seats all day, and we fell asleep with ferocity.