We went down to Victoria today, an 80 km return trip by the shortest way, and one that we sometimes would do by bike - in Summer! But now, at 0 degrees, it was definitely a ride in the van for us. One of our objectives in making this bold foray was a visit to Mountain Equipment Company (MEC).  When the "C" in MEC stood for "Co-op" we eagerly went there to absorb the outdoors folks vibes and to buy ever greater pile of cycle gear that we didn't really need. To the surprise of many, MEC has remained fairly unchanged, even after the privatization betrayal of the Co-op. Consequently we have slowly returned as customers, although the addiction to buying more and more gear has been largely broken.

We almost did fall off the wagon today, though, but the temptation was extreme. It used to be that Dodie had yellow rain pants and I had black. That was until one day I spotted yellow ones, just like my black ones. I whined so piteously, that I came home with the yellow ones. And the black has sat in a drawer since. But today they had bright purple, in Dodie's size. It was a narrow thing, but we came out without them, and only with two bars of Ritter Sport chocolate. Does anyone know Ritter Sport? We deliberately cycled  to Waldenbuch, Germany one time, to visit their factory.

In this atmosphere of barely controlled retail and chocolate addiction, we strolled along View Street. But here, laid out on the cold sidewalk, under some miscellaneous coverings, surrounded by some bits of debris or garbage, was a disheveled man - not responsive, or maybe barely responsive. A young woman had already stopped, and was on her phone to raise some emergency services. We stopped, to support the young woman, and Dodie tried a bit to get something between the man and the sidewalk, but we did not have enough knowledge of the situation to try shifting him a lot. We do know just a little about the Fentanyl epidemic, and maybe this was part of it. Another passerby asked if we had "Narcan" antidote. But we are country folks and we know little of this. What I do know is that it breaks our hearts to see this on our streets. But it helped a lot to soon see two young women pull up in a car, part of some sort of response team. I could not quite read their ID tags. And very shortly after, a full fledged lights and siren vehicle from the provincial ambulance service. 

Seeing the meanness developing south of our border, this response, and the free health care that the ambulance will drive to, is very heartening to see. We not only accept the tax system  that supports this kind of social structure, we approve of it.

So we were free to continue on our way, clutching our small addiction of Ritter Sport, and thinking  (in the words of a song) of the man on the sidewalk: "There but for fortune, go you and I".

Another song came immediately to mind, this by iconic Canadian singer Doug McArthur and on fiddle Garnett Rogers. It's called "Wino Breath", and instead of walking on View Street and dealing with maybe fentanyl, the singer places himself on Donald Avenue, downtown Winnipeg, and the intoxicant is wine. In the song, the wino gets stepped around, and the singer does not recognize his duty to help  until he is way up on Portage Avenue. He runs back, but it's too late. The angels have already carried the wino off. And they refuse to put him back, reminding the singer that he "passed his brother by".

You can try listening to the song, on this link.  It's track 11.