Every small town is different in its own way, but they are all alike in having that one main road that everyone speeds up, trying – however desperately – to find a momentary purpose, live out with fervour their fast-evaporating youth, or get to the next bush party. I’ve never actually been to a bush party, and I’ve never wanted to go to one, but I’ve heard about them and I’m sure there must be someone who speeds feverishly to them.
In Brooks, Alberta, Cassils Road was that road, a main route that divided the city into two unequal halves, stretching in the west from the grasslands and half-wilds of the town’s outskirts to the Trans-Canada Highway in the east – a flat of pavement that extends from St. John’s, Newfoundland to its endpoint in Victoria, British Columbia. As a teenager in Brooks, all you can do is visualize, and see that rushing road as a metaphor that gives life to all the future places you might one day be once you escape the grip of rural malaise. But, in the present moment, it was hard to imagine what might lie at the end of it beyond the peripheries of small-town life.
In the context of such a road – a road that metaphorically can go anywhere – it doesn’t really matter how cool or uncool you are in high school. Despite the loathing that can drive teenage life, particularly in the kind of place equipped with little that makes up big dreams, there is a strange vexation with what is. It’s the burgeoning parts of ourselves in those years that illuminate it all, making even what’s undesirable a point of reverence. Even as I eschewed drinking, bush parties, and dating, making me hardly a high schooler at all, there was a certain nostalgia for the particular illusion of youth those things held – a thing already dissolving that I hadn’t yet managed to be enraptured by.
On Cassils Road, beyond the sweep of grasslands and acreages – the houses that looked like they could aptly be caught in Dorothea Lange’s camera lens – there were golf courses, and the Veterans Memorial Highway that went down to Scandia, Taber, and other rural towns that were often distinguishable by a grain elevator bearing their name; a tumbleweed one could imagine blowing across the road. The entrance to the town was sleepy, the homes of Chinook and Prairie Meadows popping up on both sides, the Lutheran Church finally appearing to give some sense that one was entering something beyond a random scatter of houses. Soon, the Cassils Centre Mall appeared, populated with Safeway, Zellers, a few interchangeable trinket stores, and a Dairy Queen that served as a junior high hangout for blizzards, decaf coffee, and Southern Alberta’s version of poutine. I can’t entirely recall it, but I do remember it making us feel substantially mature just to order it in its red plastic basket that had to be returned to the counter, the greasy paper removed and trashed.
The road’s nexus was at the intersection of 2nd Street West – another street that could almost equal the town’s main thoroughfare – and was populated with many of the city’s bars, restaurants, and gas stations. It was here that tires squealed and sidelong looks were exchanged between those of driving age who wouldn’t dare talk to each other between the hours of 7 AM and 4 PM from Monday to Friday, looks that one could revisit eternally over a weekend, mulling the possibilities that lay beyond the everyday existence that saddled us into geek, jock, loser, and weirdo.
Past the town’s most prominent intersection, more houses rose up, and sweeps of green hid the odorous sloughs that populated its outskirts on two ends. The broad hill of Duke of Sutherland Park cascaded downwards – the baseball fields and playground equipment and Brooks & District Museum sailing by just beyond the glass – to end at the Trans-Canada Highway, marked on both sides by hotels and gas stations that were the lone sign of an outside world that brought in tourists and travellers before they would be pushed back out to the stretches beyond. For me – for most of us – it was the endpoint, but there wasn’t a time upon driving up close to the edge of the highway that I didn’t dream of ricocheting onto it, merging swiftly into the traffic already coursing along with unquestioned purpose towards the distant towns and cities that made up the outside world.
I think I was a little bit cool until I hit Grade 9. I could be wrong, but before then I had a group of six girlfriends who always hung out together, all of us in varying states of popularity beyond our small circle. There were those within the group who forged closer-knit friendships, but it was mostly the six of us, walking along the railroad tracks and hiding in the underground dugout before the trains rolled by, drifting through the tree brush and the stream of Sunnylea where murderers and crazy people supposedly hid to capture lone walkers; running into groups of boys that would hurl abuses at us; and riding our bikes to the mall and hanging out at the neon-green coffee shop that may have been called “Coffee” where we would revel in ordering mochaccinos, a word I’ve hardly thought of or heard since.
For that duration of time, the six to nine months that that group of friends came to be only to crumble, I was quite sentimental about everything. I’m not sure if it was the onset of pre-traumatic teen disorder and the angst was starting to unfurl, but that friendship began just as that inner world started to articulate itself. As I started to have a stronger sense of who I was, I started scrapbooks, scrapbooks that were full of blubber that – to anyone but myself – would have looked like the rambling of a teenage bonehead; a time capsule to the inane. I don’t have any of them now, but I remember them well. They were covered with magazine pictures of my favourite celebrities and musicians, columns and haircuts I enjoyed, and fragments of unremarkable quotes and random words that inspired me for an hour, a day, or weeks that turned into months.
Of all the random words, the ones that appeared most commonly across their pages were ‘always’ and ‘forever’. For me, the words held an unmistakable ring of all the things I wanted to preserve, but like the world automatically does – like those who tell you that you can trust them – the truth of the thing was not meant to last. And that meant, as opposed to a slow burn, there would be a full-scale decimation.
In the fights with the teenage boys and the stormy walks along the train tracks through Sunnylea, I could feel an emotional tumult building that would have to resolve itself. Before the time in life when I would realize that life was all loose ends – before Facebook made it possible that some old chum would re-appear saying you were the “Most Likely to Wear Out a Pair of Flip-Flops” – there was the sense that things had to have a definitive end; the proverbial pink bow to tie up an epoch with before throwing it into an attic box.
But how the end played out and how my high school years would unravel soon after reared the sweaty tip of its nose early in the spring, after the fractures in our friendship that had started to glint on the surface had turned into verbal jousting and between-class outbursts. For whatever reason, one of the girls from our old group that I was still friends with got her hands on a note that had been written by two of our former friends. She waved it between her fingers like the Golden Ticket – the proof positive of an abject treachery. Filled with that insatiable craving that gossip always gives, we opened the note and dissected it before our late afternoon science class, a class that was held in a room that was the same garish shade of green as the café all six of us had hung out at.
If it hadn’t been about us, I would have admired the comical quality of the illustrations. But – as it stood – it was the toe tag on the death of our friendship; there was no turning back from such rancour. The beautiful sentiments of always and forever were put up on the shelf alongside my love of Fraggle Rock, multi-coloured jumpers, and those headbands that were so tight they gave you a headache five minutes after pressing them carefully into your hair. The candidness of them is something, nowadays, that would easily get one suspended for a few weeks – possibly even expelled for the seeming intent of bodily harm – but back then it seemed more like a natural part of junior high drama, a thing to be lived through and then let go.
In three illustrations, our former friends had artfully depicted the ways they would dispose of the rest of us. There was a death by hanging and then drowning of my one friend, and for my other friend some archaic form of torture – a physical demise that was painful and apparent. But mine was the one I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. To this day, I can still remember the drawing and recall the feeling that went along with it. Instead of being drowned or maimed or hung from a noose – things that seemed brutal but run-of-the-mill – my smiling face appeared in the window of a space shuttle, the stars in the sky exploding as I flew off to some distant planet. Beneath it, the impetus was made clear in one line of text: Send Justine back to her home planet.
As a junior high student, it sometimes hurts to be hated or disliked, but a feeling worse than that was to be different. My friends pointed out what a compliment it was that I hadn’t been physically harmed – in their drawings, they were faceless – but it was clear to me that I wasn’t even worth imagining a murder scene for. Instead, my very existence seemed so futile and absurd that it made more sense to have me flown off to a distant planet, eternally. I had been made both more and less human, and – as well – my future high school existence had been foretold. It seemed I would be a weird girl.
It can sometimes be a good lesson to know who we are or at least the way we appear to others. However, being aware of that seemed like it would have been more helpful in the middle of Grade 11 and not before the onslaught of high school, which would already be a bastion of awkwardness. I had thought I could get through my high school years being relatively opinionated, and self-righteous, not the good girl but not the bad girl either, but no – I had been defined, and I hadn’t even had the opportunity to negotiate the process.
The junior high years are really the time when the things we will do – the paths we decide to go down – begin to gestate. We’ve all experienced the pitfalls of high school and watched its awkwardly familiar depiction in The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, but it’s the years before when the soul really begins its internal quake, and all of the inner chaos gives way to the external situations we will soon find ourselves in. Many teenagers go outward to search for meaning, whether it’s through a relationship, a group of friends, a sport, or a raging soft-porn addiction. For myself (and perhaps that’s the reason for the space shuttle I was prematurely launched into, long before Richard Branson tried to make it cool), I turned inward to a world that went beyond the external roads.
Up until junior high, I had been a dedicated reader. Much to my embarrassment, I read Sweet Valley Twins books up until I loathed the sight of them, even in a period when Sweet Valley High and Sweet Valley University held the bulk of my interest. I can’t recall quite when it shifted, when – for the first time – I decided to up my reading game. Maybe it was when the musician Marilyn Manson suggested Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut – one of the only literary giants our library stocked books of – or Courtney Love said she was reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. But whatever the impetus was, an interest that had once been relatively superficial bloomed into something deeper.
As my outlook changed, I searched the bookshelves for the volumes of literature I had read about or heard a favourite artist cite. Instead of Pride and Prejudice or Oliver Twist, I headed straight for more angst-ridden fare, recognizing in those currents the outsider status I felt intrinsically. The first books I remember buying that I considered ‘mature’ were The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, a story about depression and suicide whose author eventually fell to it, and Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, a book by a philosopher who spent his last years in an insane asylum, consumed by the madness syphilis caused. It seemed like as good a place to start as any.
I don’t know what happened to the notebooks, all of those pages I had filled with countless ‘always’ and ‘forevers’ as if writing the words down would impress eternity into my state of being, but they went too. Instead of the oversized sheets filled with fashion, random words, and hairstyles I liked, I started to write. I had been telling myself since I could pretty much tell myself anything that I wanted to be an actress or maybe a writer, but that period was the first time since my much younger years that I actually wrote.
My first and most memorable notebook was adorned as much as I could adorn it, dressed up to be a thing that the best ideas and the most perfect lyrics would be home inside. In it, I housed myself too, the most cherished parts that I couldn’t quite get across accurately in the world without feeling like a liar. There were pictures of my favourite bands, stanzas from my favourite poems, and quotes I loved squished into the margins. There was also Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in its entirety – written out so that its points could be wholly absorbed – and the final entry of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank that started with the words “little bundle of contradictions,” an entry that was maddening and heartbreaking in its injustice because it was the last one. It was that entry that made me feel akin to her, her contradictory parts, and the person she was and could not be all at once.
I’m not sure if it was the fortuitous strength of my inner world or my relative ignorance of the outside world, but high school still swelled into something that I wasn’t necessarily good at. By the time Grade 11 had rolled around, I had already been called too many names to mention that were much worse than the ‘weird’ that had been implied in junior high. Compared to lesbian and bitch, weird – at least – seemed like a bit of a godsend, something that went beyond a bland archetype. At some point, I had been deemed the second most likely to blow up the high school. While I took offence at the time, it is worth noting that it was an unofficial vote, and second place is still a good effort.
But once I had been defined, and without too much input, it was much easier to build a wall of resistance and become all the things that had burgeoned from within that had no outlet. I didn’t need to worry about being a bitch – people already thought I was one anyways. As my love of books changed and deepened, so too did my love of music. Moving on from Green Day’s Dookie and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, I became obsessed with The Smashing Pumpkins and found a picture-perfect outlet for my teenage angst in Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. From there, I sought out albums by Joy Division, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I parsed the record stores fervently for the ’90 Best Albums of the 90s’ as declared by SPIN Magazine.
I developed a great admiration for the music of Bjork, Tori Amos, Sleater-Kinney, and Cat Power, and found anthems in the songs of PJ Harvey and Courtney Love that seemed to sum up my feelings exactly. It felt like – in their words and very existence – they offered a counterpoint to many of the things I was supposed to be, even as I thought that everyone wanted to be like them. After all, how could one not help but admire a woman who said things like “Don’t date the football player, be the football player” and “If you treat a girl like a dog, she’ll piss on you”? It may have seemed anathema to the place that I grew up, but for those post-modern maxims, I will always have a soft spot for Courtney Love.
I failed to notice it then, but in high school, the fervour to break free that had marked the earlier years had begun to break apart. In junior high, I had heard the choruses of I hate this town and I can’t wait to get out of here, but in high school many of my classmates began to be consumed by other things. A streak of rebellion may still have existed in our younger years – post-teen reality was still too far to see – but in high school, the future was too close to call and too near to break free from. I remember, on one occasion, a new student had moved to town in the cooler months and asked us what the smell lingering in the air was. We were all familiar with the odour from the local packing plant, but we usually only noticed it on hot summer days when the wind would shift a certain way and it would become all but intolerable. It had become too easy to be steeped in, day in and day out, so much so that we didn’t even notice what we were living within.
I was among those who stayed in Brooks for a year after high school to go to a local college in town. As my one real friend and I drove down Cassils Road on one of the last summer days in August, with her heading off to university in Lethbridge and me staying behind, I felt the twinge of remaining to observe the post-mortem of high school, the place I would have to navigate and traverse with the embers of the teenage years turning from orange to black in front of me. It’s an ultimately strange feeling to go from high school – being pumped full of dreams and fever one year – and rising into a new, arid climate that feels lifeless without the signposts that marked it. Even in the Cassils Road dusk, I could feel the sunlight dying away, the remnant of a life – a road that had lived within me – gone. I knew, however, that I would not be stuck in that town forever dreaming of roads that lead to other roads. After that year was over, I moved away to Calgary, and then I moved, and I moved, and I moved again.
Unpredictably, although my disdain for conservative politics and Nickelback should have predicted it all along, I found a home on the West Coast. Unfortunately, it was in one of the world’s most expensive cities where stuffing oneself into a cabinet for living space each month is about the same price as a 4-bedroom house in the Midwest. When I moved to Vancouver, I didn’t know much about it, but as I took the plane over the mountains and the Fraser Valley on the day that I left Calgary for the last time, I saw the green that flourished well into October. When people ask me why I was prompted to leave, I can’t really remember the answer now, but over time a road slowly unravelled without me even being aware of what it was.
Defensiveness might have been necessary growing up in a small town, but it becomes less useful once one has moved beyond it. I haven’t been back to Brooks for over fifteen years now, but when I saw it the last time, Cassils Road had changed some. The mall had been gutted and a new Safeway had been erected, a smattering of stores around it that laid on the graveyard of some of my old junior high haunts, Dairy Queen and the bright green cafe, purveyor of mochaccinos. Along the road where we used to drift, going from the west side of town and past the railroad tracks to Sunnylea, there is a new development, one that has covered over the old creek and pulled up the roots of the trees that we were convinced thieves and kidnappers used to hide in. At the town’s other borders, there are probably new residential developments and rows of houses spreading out, into the grasslands and towards the Trans-Canada Highway that still gives one the sense it can lead anywhere.
There is no main road in Vancouver, British Columbia. Like most coastal cities, it is all loose ends. West Georgia Street runs through its center, going from the downtown core, over the Lions Gate Bridge, and into West Vancouver before becoming the Sea-to-Sky Highway, providing access to the wilds of British Columbia – the sprawling wilderness of Squamish and Whistler. The I-5 goes down into the imagined land of Cascadia – to the United States and Seattle – and onward to coastal areas and port cities that embody the West Coast. Ferries depart hour after hour, travelling from Tsawwassen and Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands and all the other small, lesser-known flats that dot the Strait of Georgia. The meccas of Burrard and Robson and Main Street represent the diverging, undefined heart of the beating city, but there is no real end and no place to call the center, and that means – from every vantage point – it is a wellspring where one can go anywhere and, in some strange way, among the North Shore mountains and glinting, semi-turbulent waters of English Bay and Howe Sound, imagine themselves everywhere and along every coastline at once.