Scott Owen :: The Canada Experiment

Back when I was 17 and driving away from the West Coast to a Summer job in Calgary and university in Toronto, I said to myself, “Someday I’ll come back.” As I mention on my ‘Quick Stats’ page, I had planned on returning after university, but those plans changed, and I moved to Amsterdam in 1986.

I had 15 fantastic years in Amsterdam, up until about 2001. But with 9-11 and a rise of nationalism and intolerance, combined with some emotional loose-ends, I began feeling very unsettled, and that feeling started snowballing. I’m sure it had something to do with mid-life, too, although it’s more complex than that. In any case, sometime around 2004, I pondered: What actually has to happen for it to be that ‘someday’? Then I realised that, in fact, it just came down deciding that it was.

So in September of that year, Hans and I spent some time in Vancouver, to get a sense of the city, and to look for areas we might like to live. Once back in The Netherlands, we let the idea sink in, and looked into various (re-)emigration options. In December, after much discussion and consideration, we made the decision to move to Vancouver. It was quite nerve-wracking but, we figured, if it worked out, great; if it didn’t, we can always move back, or somewhere else.

We made plans, sold our home, quit our jobs, packed and shipped our things, said our goodbyes (or, rather, our ‘see-you-soons’), and on June 11th, 2005, I arrived in Vancouver to take care of a few of the basic logistics of getting life started here (e.g. setting-up bank accounts, buying a car, renting an apartment). Hans finished a contract in Amsterdam, and followed on July 15th. We bought a home in the area of Vancouver known as Mount Pleasant, facing northwest, overlooking False Creek, the main 2010 Winter Olympics site, and the downtown core. I found the ‘perfect job’, working at the University of British Columbia (UBC), as Director, IT Infrastructure. After a gruelling and sometimes humiliating Permanent Residency process which lasted almost a year, Hans began work as an instructor at three universities in the area.

Somewhere around December of 2006, Hans first made it clear that he was becoming more and more unhappy with living in Vancouver. What had started, for him, “like coming home,” had slowly deteriorated into a fairly isolating experience, closed-in by Anglo-saxon attitudes, the consumer society, mountains and bad weather, and a lack of world-class culture. I could find my bearings, but Hans was losing his. At the time, I couldn’t even imagine leaving the West Coast again, so I suppose I did what I always do when the waters get stormy: I battened down the hatches and became more focussed on sailing a steady course. It can make me seem self-centred from the outside, but really it’s just a survival mechanism when I don’t know what else to do. That undoubtedly didn’t help Hans’s feeling of isolation. But I wasn’t mentally ready to consider moving away, and I couldn’t face the consequences of the alternative – both options were emotionally overwhelming – so, battening down was all I knew how to do.

In April 2007, my father had a bad fall at his home; so bad, in fact, that everyone expected him to die within weeks, if not days. In those weeks, when he was so frail and vulnerable, a lot of my family’s festering wounds began healing. To everyone’s surprise, and thanks to his cast-iron consitution, he pulled through all the injuries and related infections, and was eventually moved to long-term care. Nevertheless, the shock to his body hastened his dementia, and after about six months, he didn’t know who I was anymore. In November 2007, I (finally) had the opportunity to scatter my mom’s ashes, which my father had kept in an urn in his basement for the 20 years since my mom’s death. As I hadn’t seen her for a year-and-a-half before she died, and there was no funeral at the time, scattering my mom’s ashes – releasing her – over the waters of Brentwood Bay, of which she had had so many happy childhood memories, was a real sense of closure for me. My father eventually succumbed to pneumonia on May 6th, 2008 (just over a year after he was admitted to the hospital). In a way, I felt I had already said my goodbyes and mourned his passing in those first few weeks, especially as he came to recognise me less and less. After these and a few other related events – including a road-trip with my two oldest brothers (that’s whole other story!) – those emotional loose-ends I mentioned seemed to be tying up.

Hans’s dissatisfaction with Vancouver wasn’t going away, and he seemed to feel more and more alienated. Our relationship is fundamentally important to me, so, although I doubt I would otherwise have considered moving away from the West Coast again, I had to begin a process of introspection regarding my priorities in life. While all this was happening with my dad, I started seriously asking myself, “What am I doing here?” – Why did I want to come here? Is it what I expected? And what did I expect? What am I looking for, and can it be found? What are my priorities, and is living back on the West Coast really my top priority in life?

I travelled to Amsterdam in December 2007, to get a sense of the city again, on my own terms. The more I opened my mind to it, the more I began to miss Amsterdam. I sensed that Amsterdam society had lost a lot of the polarisation that typified the years after 2001, and it felt like home again. I missed hopping on the train to see the theatre in London or spend a weekend in Berlin; I missed the challenging discussions, a literary population, and thought-provoking sermons; I missed the intimacy of cafés and shops in downtown Amsterdam, the small streets and alleys, and the cutting-edge architecture.

I began contemplating my life in Vancouver. I’m not really into skiing and camping, and there’s nowhere I find particularly interesting to travel to from Vancouver in a day (or two... or three). Aside from the natural beauty – especially the beaches, ocean, forests, and Stanley Park – the city itself strikes me as not much more than a mill-town; a box-store strip-mall on steroids. There doesn’t appear to be much city planning, and there is not all that much inspiring architecture to speak of (with the exception of First Nations-inspired buildings), especially now that most of the beautiful old brick buildings are being demolished to put up Hong Kong-style apartment high-rises, and very little heritage is being preserved. There is desperate poverty and disease in the East End, and the great compassion of which Canadians (rightly) used to be very proud is being replaced with petty regionalism, police brutality, and the selfish mantra about how much “the taxpayers” are burdened by having to care for these people.

My job had been really great, but there were events looming and it looked like the department was set to stagnate for a few years, so it became time to start looking for a new job anyway, which made the timing of a move all the more relevant. There was a fanastic opportunity at another university which I seemed tipped to get, but I would never move to a city I didn’t like just for a job, so I reasoned I shouldn’t stay in such a city solely because of a job either. If I started a new job, I would be looking to give at least a five-year commitment, but I didn’t want to put Hans through that. I wanted a better quality of life for us.

In addition to all of that, I had to admit, the weather in Vancouver is absolutely horrid from October to April. While Spring and Summer are lovely and mild, much of the rest of the time it is oppressively dark grey, constantly pouring rain with rivers running down the streets, and you’re boxed in by walls of grey down the mountains. Yes, it is a rainforest! So unless you are an avid skier and escape to higher altitudes, or unless you’re like the typical West Coast male who spends most of his time playing video-games, fixing up his car, or watching hockey on TV, there is very little to do for half the year, and it can be very depressing indeed. La Gomera seemed so far away.

I’d also come to realise that nationalism and intolerance had grown everywhere – even in the Canada I had idealised. What the Moroccans are to Holland, the Sikhs are to B.C. That said, I was encouraged by the movement Benoemen en Bouwen (Name and Build) led by Doekla Terpstra, and it gave me great hope for The Netherlands – I wanted to be part of that movement. I wanted to be part of stopping Wilders’s and Verdonk’s movements which are rotten to the core, and Mr. Terpstra showed that there are a lot of Dutch citizens like me, who wanted to as well.

Are there good things on the West Coast? Yes, absolutely, and I really miss them. I love travelling on the ferries, I loved lunches the Vancouver Art Gallery Café (a hidden oasis in the middle of the city), I love Summer and especially early Autumn, I loved The Dufferin while it lasted, I love rollerblading on the seawall around Stanley Park, I love the sight and smell of the Pacific Ocean, the forests full of cedar and fir, I love the space, and I love the sound of the white-crowned sparrow on lazy Summer days. I actually love the rain, too, as long as it isn’t months of it.

So, three years later – having given it a good chance – we decided to move back to Amsterdam. We sold our home, quit our jobs, packed and shipped our things, and here we are.

The other great thing in Vancouver is my lovely friend, Terry Farley. I really miss him, but we keep in touch regularly, just as we did over the years before Vancouver, and we visit each other often. (Too bad he can’t move to Europe!)

I reluctantly had (and still have) to admit and accept that I am a product of two worlds – become more European than I had expected – so the West Coast and the pioneering Canada that once was will always tug at my heartstrings. The smell of cedar and the damp forest floor, mist collecting on the needles of the douglas fir, the guttural ballad of a sole raven circling above, the waves tirelessly rearranging the pebbles on the beach and the foghorn calling out in the distance – they are like an old song that transports me back to sweet times. It’s really hard to let go of that ideal I held for so long, but you can’t live in a memory.

I have to get on with life.