May 20, 2016
Tim Hortons makes me cry: Things can only get bear-ter
We woke up at first light. Or at least I did, I don't believe Vivian had actually slept. It must be relatively difficult to sleep with a whistle in your mouth whilst simultaneously gripping bear spray and a knife. Had I known she was so well prepared to ambush any unwanted creature that should intrude upon our campsite I probably wouldn't have worried so much about being discovered by the park warden. But as I didn't know of Vivian's array of self-defencive weaponry I was still worried about being caught camping, and so I got us up before six in the morning, and what a freezing cold morning it was too. Vivian didn't need much encouragement to get her tent down and to get out of those woods, mind you. I've never seen such a look of relief as she sped away to safety.
Our cycle path almost immediately merged with a minor road leading into the small town of Banff and at the side of this road, in an open field for all to see, was a bright blue tent. Somebody clearly wasn't trying that hard to hide. Further on I caught up to Vivian as she stopped to admire more elk that were brazenly grazing at the side of the road. Not that there was any traffic on the road, what with it still being really very early. It was absolutely freezing, and I was worried that we weren't going to find anywhere on the quiet streets of Banff to warm ourselves. But luckily I was wrong, for there, like the great Canadian beacon of hope that it is, stood before us a 24-hour Tim Hortons.
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Tim Hortons, for those of you unfortunate enough never to have set foot in this great country, is a true Canadian institution, and when I use the word 'institution', please understand I really just mean 'fast-food chain.' It is something like a cross between McDonalds and Starbucks, I think. To be honest, this was only the second time I'd been in one. I'm not a fan of such places, but under the circumstances (being very cold) the warmth this one offered was a little too hard to resist. Plus it had free wifi. We made ourselves comfortable.
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Vivian went to the toilet, or as they are known in Canada, the washrooms, and came back with an aghast look on her face and declared to me that “the worst thing has just happened.” She then challenged me to guess what this thing was. “Seriously,” she said, “what is the worst thing you can imagine?” Now Vivian did not look like she had just been killed by a bear in the washrooms, in fact she looked very much to have returned in good health, and I was flummoxed. Luckily she did not really expect an answer. “My phone just broke!” she wailed, holding up her i-phone, which had long vertical stripes blurring the screen. This did not seem like the worst thing in the world to me. My phone was, and I'm not making this up, made in the 20th century, and I hadn't switched it on since Australia. It might very well have been broken. I couldn't have cared less. But for Vivian this was a problem. A very big problem.
As luck would have it, John Burt soon showed up. You remember John Burt don't you, of off yesterday's post? He'd had a jolly time getting to Banff at a reasonable hour the day before, and was once again now showing off his friendliness by buying a big box of timbits and placing them on the table for us to share. Timbits are little balls of fried dough, like the middle bit of the doughnut. This really should have been enough to cheer anyone up, but apparently not, and Vivian was still annoyed about her broken phone. John Burt was sympathetic but couldn't help, and he soon left, declaring he was going to cycle 150 kilometres. This was certainly more ambitious than Vivian and I – in fact it would be five hours before we even got out of Tim Hortons.
After John left we soon had another guest, as a young guy showed up at our table asking if we had an i-phone charger that he could borrow. The irony that Vivian did indeed have an i-phone charger that was effectively of no use to her now pleased me on some level, and she was happy to offer it to the fellow who seemed to be in quite a desperate state. He then told us that “the worst thing had just happened to him” but before I could interrupt him and shout out “wait, I know this one!” he told us what it was, and it didn't involve breaking any phones. “I've just been done for DUI” which, for those not familiar with American acronyms, means drinking and driving.
The guy was about early-twenties in age and, after running off to plug his phone in somewhere, came back over to us and, rather alarmingly, sat down in the booth next to me. His breath absolutely reeked of alcohol, and he was almost certainly still drunk. Annoyingly Vivian was actually being nice and encouraging him as he told her the story. He'd just got out of the cell where he'd spent most of the night. God, how drunk must he have been when he was behind the wheel? As he went on, more details emerged. He'd apparently refused to give a breath sample, and was hoping that there was a way he could worm his way out of the charges. I just sat there as they spoke, staring blankly out of the window. My mind was carrying me back to Mongolia. To the drink-driving accident that I had witnessed there.
I had to get out of there. Vivian had a problem with her bike, and I offered to go outside and fix it now. This I did, relieved to be away from the table and the young guy. Soon the two of them left for the shops. Vivian was hoping to find a way to fix her phone in the small town. I returned inside and sat once again at the table and made use of the wifi. But then they both returned, and the drunk sat down right next to me, blocking me in again. He was talking about how this was the worst thing that could have happened to him again, he was going to lose his licence, have to sell his truck. I just stared out of the window. I could see those men in Mongolia. I could see the lifeless bodies lying in the dust. I could see the blood. The young guy turned to me and started asking me questions. He wanted to know about my trip. I should have told him about Mongolia. I should have told him that getting caught by the cops drink-driving was definitely not the worst thing that could have happened to him, and I knew, because I'd seen the worst thing. But I didn't. I made some excuse and I got up and left and I went into the room next door, which was a bus station waiting room, and in there I cried. I burst out crying and I couldn't stop. I cried and I cried and I f*cking cried some more. There was some pent-up emotion inside of me that I hadn't even known was there. I'd rarely thought about the accident in the year-and-a-half since I'd witnessed it. But somehow now it all came back to me – those men dying in front of me, my own helplessness, the whole horrible pointless stupidity of it – and it all came out, brought about by some stupid kid who didn't know how lucky he was.
Fortunately Dea came online and I had someone to talk to and that most definitely helped me a lot. I was really missing her now. Vivian was many things - an entertaining sidekick, hapless to a tee - but she was certainly no adequate substitute for Dea.
We eventually escaped from Tim Hortons at around midday, with me quite hoping I'd never have to see one again (an ambitious wish with 4,000 kilometres of Canada still to go). It was cloudy again, but at least it was not raining. We took a quick tour through Banff, which is a touristy town with big chalet-like buildings. I thought it was trying a bit too hard to look like Whistler, but it wasn't as good as Whistler, although the bicycle path did at least pick up again on the far side of town. Vivian once again shot off ahead, in a worrying development for her hapless sidekick status, and she was nowhere to be seen when I spotted a big, black shape on the railway line that ran parallel to the path. It was a bear! Finally! The first that I had actually seen since Whistler. I stopped and watched, and felt really quite safe. It was a black bear, which very rarely attack humans, though that wasn't the reason why I felt safe. It was more the six foot high fence between us that had my confidence up. This fence exists to keep wildlife off the highway, and the bike path was on the highway side, the railway line on the wildlife side. Feeling assured I took out my camera and tried to move closer to the fence for a better photo, at which point the bear heard me and ran away like a scared little mouse.
It was quite a long time before I caught up to Vivian at the larger town of Canmore, now beyond the National Parks, where we stopped to resupply at the supermarket. In the latest tragedy to befall her, she had lost her yellow hi-viz vest, which was pretty bad timing as we had to navigate a busy road with a very narrow shoulder out of Canmore.
“Don't you have anything else?” I asked, worried that she was no longer visible enough.
“Oh! I have my hunting jacket,” she said, fishing around in her pannier and pulling out a very bright orange coat.
“That's great, very bright. Why do you have a hunting jacket?”
“Oh, well I have a hunting licence. I've got a gun as well you know.”
“Really?” This girl was certainly full of surprises.
“Don't worry, I've never killed anything.” Then she looked a bit confused (which made two of us) and added: “I don't want to shoot animals!”
A few kilometres beyond Canmore most of the traffic joined the highway and we continued on the 1A which was actually quite a nice road. We had a bit of a headwind and we weren't actually descending very much, though it was obvious that we were coming out of the mountains. This was it, the end of the Rockies. That is not to say the road was flat, in fact it was still climbing and falling in a series of steep peeks and troughs. But the big snowy mountains were coming to an end, they no longer dominated the skyline on either side of us as they had before and soon we were pedalling on past the last of them. On the very last of the steep hills Vivian strained every sinew to cycle all the way up. Reaching the summit she declared triumphantly: “It's the first time I got up one without walking!!!” and that was it, the mountains were over!
From there things began to flatten out and the reality of what was now ahead of us began to sink in, at least for me, as I stared out at the flat grasslands that would form the view for the next two thousand kilometres east. This was the start of the great Canadian prairies, something that I knew was likely to prove a far sterner mental test than anything the mountains could have had in store for either of us. Vivian seemed pleased enough to be here though. Or at least she did until we spotted a couple of animals prowling in the grass. They were quite a way away, and difficult to identify but might have been cougars. Realistically they were far more likely to be coyotes or wolves, but in any case it was probably going to be enough to ensure another sleepless night for poor Vivian. I bet she wish she'd brought her gun.
Today's ride: 76 km (47 miles)
Total: 49,737 km (30,887 miles)
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