Winnipeg part 2

I had a chance today to see some other parts of Winnipeg and they were really nice. That wasn't, however, my intention when I headed out of my apartment. I was intending to hop on a bus, ride out to the eastern part of town, catch a ride with someone to a place just outside the city, and have a fun time with some friends. Little did I know what an adventure I had just embarked upon.

First, I have to back up a little bit. My brother and I were running a little late. Well, we were running a lot late. Well, I was running a lot late and keeping my brother waiting. I suggested he head on over to the bus stop so that he wouldn't have to travel at the supersonic speeds I was going to have to achieve to make the scheduled connection. A couple more delays and a found set of lost keys later, I bolted out the door, my sonic boom rattling nearby windows. By this time, I had already made several crucial mistakes:

1)I had forgotten the name of the street at the bus stop we had agreed to head to.
2)I had forgotten the exact time the pertinent vehicle was scheduled to stop there.
3)I had forgotten to suggest a route for him to take so that I could find him along the way.

Of course, these things, having been forgotten, were the furthest from my mind as I raced to reach Main Street, somewhere along which a number 47 bus would stop (that much I knew), in the process inventing a new illegal act, the crime of jay-sprinting. I arrived on Main Street and headed north, the direction I knew the 47 would take. It was nowhere in sight, and I had no idea whether I had missed it or beaten it. I had, after all, left almost ten minutes later than my brother. Then I spotted it, down a side street! It was just about to turn on to main, and ahead lay a vacant bus stop.

"Perfect!", I thought. My method of running directly over to Main and then north had apparently enabled me to intersect it prematurely. I sprinted to the bus stop as fast as I could. When I reached it, the bus was still waiting for its turn to turn. Then I glanced at my watch, and paused. My lightning-fast sprint had apparently taken me a little longer than expected.

As I stepped onto the bus, I made a feeble attempt to delay it, just in case, by inquiring about the cost and destination of its service. In reality, I suspected my brother would be waiting further up Main at our appointed stop, whatever it had been, so I established myself near the front of the bus and began to carefully scan the sidewalk and bus stops as we passed.

A few blocks further up Main I was growing concerned. There was still no sign of my brother, and then the bus turned off onto a side street and began making its way east. At this point I was faced with a conundrum. It was possible that my brother had simply not made it to whatever bus stop it was we were supposed to meet at. It was also possible that he had arrived in time and caught the appointed bus while I had arrived late enough to catch a later bus of the same number. After all, he had left the house long before me, and I was not entirely sure when it was that the bus was supposed to arrive. It was possible that for any of several reasons he had returned to our apartment but had forgotten to bring his key with him and was locked out. There was also the minute possibility that intervening circumstances had prevented my brother from getting to Main Street at all, such as his getting hit by a vehicle or being hit by a stray improperly tightened bolt from a poorly assembled passenger aircraft jostled far above by some unusually heavy turbulence. Deciding my priority was to make sure I didn't leave my brother behind, I got off my bus at the next station and headed back down Main Street to look for him.

Now at this point I must step aside from my narrative to point something out. Traditional wisdom, and many of its practitioners, would have held that I did the right thing by allowing my concern for my brother to supersede the logical course of action. As I understand it, this would be because by allowing my concern for him to take precedence over logic, I demonstrate the genuine nature of my love for my brother. However, if I had more carefully analysed the situation, I would have realised that since my brother had left long before me, it was more likely that he was ahead of me than behind me. I would have realised that any accident or misfortune that could befall him could occur just as easily after he got on the bus and headed east as before. I would have realised that when two people have lost track of each other while en route but both have a common destination, the way they can be most certain of finding each other is if they both attempt to reach that destination. I would have realised that my brother is an intelligent person who would be aware of this and would thus strive to continue along to our destination rather than to search pointlessly the many possible different routes I could have taken and places I could have gone. I would have realised that the whole point of us trying to find each other in a short amount of time would be to keep our appointment at our destination. I would have realised that I should have stayed on that bus. So in fact, by allowing my concern for my brother to supersede my logical faculties, I actually perform both him and myself a disservice. So, if love means that one wants the best for someone else above all, one ought still to apply logic. In reality, if one wishes to do what is best for someone else, one still does best to stick to one's rational deductions rather than allow misapplied emotion to interfere with their proper application. So much for traditional wisdom.

We left our beleaguered character running south down Main Street searching earnestly for his brother. Now of course, within a few minutes after exiting the transportation vehicle, I realised that I should not have. Running south all the way to Portage, just north of where I had gotten on the bus, I still had not spotted my brother and was coming to a fuller realisation of my mistake. Since he was clearly not here, I would do best to rectify it by navigating my way as quickly as possible to our destination. Fortunately, while it would be a while before another convenient 47 came along, there were buses of every other imaginable number streaming by at a regular rate, and since there is rarely only one way to take buses to a common destination, I stepped aboard the first one that came by and inquired of the driver of that fine conveyance how I might arrange to have myself deposited at one Kildonan Place, the largest landmark near our Tim Horton's rendezvous that I could bring to mind. He kindly informed me that not only would a number 11 bus do me just nicely for my purposes, but that one would be along shortly and that it was an express bus of sorts that would take me speedily to my destination. I thanked him and stepped off to wait for it. It arrived in short order, and I stepped aboard, ready to be reunited presently with my brother.

Now the plight of the common bus driver is a difficult one. I was made explicitly aware of this shortly after boarding as a passenger began to loudly complain that whilst he had depressed the signalling device, the driver showed no signs of stopping. In the first place, the bus was clearly labeled as an express bus, which meant to my mind that it was not intended to stop at every little possible venue but rather to focus mainly on getting its rather large quantity of passengers to their specific destination much further ahead. Second of all, we were at the time in the process of crossing a rather large highway of some sort on an overpass without a sidewalk, and even if the driver had risked life and limb to come to a stop in that very dangerous and precarious position, there would have been absolutely nowhere for this individual and his equally impatient wife to go unless their only intent was a swan dive from the overpass into the speeding crush of traffic below. I can just imagine the suicide note now:

“Dear cruel world: We would like to file a complaint against the impertinent bus driver who refused to allow us to debark at our chosen venue of depontification.

P.S. We can't go on living. Goodbye!”

Whoever the couple were, they were clearly just the sort of difficult folk who would make up a word of unclear derivation, as in was 'depontification' an attempt to remodel the word 'defenestration' by replacing the Latin root 'fenestre' for window with 'pontis' for bridge, or was it based somehow off of the word 'pontificate' and meant that they were attempting to take the air out of some pompous accusations that had been made against them, or perhaps through some combination of the two ideas they intended their own jump to be itself a statement of how they were so dogmatic about their opinion that they were willing to leap off a bridge to prove it; or, finally, was the actual basis of their construction the word 'pontiff' and was their leap into oncoming traffic actually an attempt to assassinate a passing bishop in a vehicle below? I suppose we shall never know.

As we headed further along our route (we appeared to be headed north now) I watched carefully for street names. My destination was on Regent and Lagimodiere, and I knew that Regent also had a rebellious portion that preferred to be known as Nairn, so by watching for these names I hoped to be able to assure myself of my location. However, I saw none of these as I headed further north. Then, I had a revelation. My brother, if he was uncertain of my location, might call home looking for me. Since we had voicemail, this would be an opportunity for me to find out where he was, or for him to find out where I was. We had a means of communication! I hopped off the bus at the next stop and stepped into a phone booth. After a couple of quarters and a couple of tries, I succeeded both in leaving a message and in ascertaining that no one else had done so recently. Remembering that Regent or Nairn or whatever it was called was north of where I had boarded locomotive device 11, and that I still had not passed a road purporting to pass itself off as either of those names, I continued north at an accelerated pace. There was no point, after all, in walking slowly when a brisk trot would get the job done faster.

A couple blocks further north, I began to grow unsure of my surroundings. I was certain my destination was not that far north, and so I walked into the nearest 7-11, picked up a large spiral book which allegedly contained detailed cartographic information about the city of Winnipeg, and carried it to the counter to purchase it. There I discovered that for the price it went for it should have contained detailed cartographic information about the location of every lost and buried treasure in all of history and legend combined, but I was in as much of a bind as the pages I held in my hands, so I relented and purchased it anyways. As I exited that now-tainted establishment I saw a taxicab pull up and thought to compare its driver with those poor drivers of public buses once again.

Apparently we have no idea of the sorts of situations which face bus drivers every day. Take the kind fellow who had directed me to the number 11 bus, for instance. For all I knew, he had had to come into work at 5:00 or some other ridiculous hour that morning, and all day he had to drive around the unappreciative public, taking the flak for doing his job properly, stuck inside the same little chair all day, from time to time having to answer the most idiotic and mind-numbing questions of clueless travellers, such as “how might I arrange to have myself deposited at one Kildonan Place?” It was possible he had been up late the night before having a row with his wife while his seven septuplets screamed the night away because he didn't have enough money to provide for them and he had to work every waking hour just to pay the mortgage on his house to keep them from being thrown out into the freezing cold frostbite of a Manitoba summer. It was possible that he was new on the job and had to study for hours every day in all his free time to understand locations in the city and be able to recognise street names and destinations that people would ask about. It was possible that despite all he went through he managed to keep a cheery manner throughout his day, thereby displaying himself a real hero, one of those fine people we look up to to show us there is still some good left in the human race, some pristine honour that is worth hoping in and dreaming in. Or maybe he was just an imbecile. Whatever the cause and case, he had made a slight miscalculation in directing me, as the map in my hands confirmed. He had failed to distinguish between Kildonan Place, a shopping centre on the eastern end of the city, and Kildonan Park, which lay a considerable ways west and north of there and rather far away from where I wanted to be an hour after I had left my apartment and a good 15 minutes late for my rendezvous at Tim Horton's.

My northward progression, of course, had only hurt my machinations and had been greatly misinformed, as in fact the Henderson Highway along which I now travelled intersected neither with any street called Regent nor even one disguised as Nairn, which ended abruptly a tiny distance from Henderson and was connected only by a tiny side street called Talbot, ironically located almost exactly at the position where the impatient couple had demanded to disembark.

With the image of the bus system now sullied and no convenient way to reach my destination, I finally gave up and called a cab. I hadn't really spent much time in North American taxicabs before, and I figured it would be an interesting and enjoyable experience which could also get me to my rendezvous in short order and put a satisfying end to my little saga. The taxi arrived in about 5 minutes and we headed off.

Now there is an entire mythology built up around taxicab drivers, and the legends therein are very explicit. For one, about half of all cab drivers are supposed to be first generation immigrants. In this regard, I was fortunate. The driver of my taxi spoke in a distinct Hindustani accent that suggested either he or his parents had been the ones who had immigrated to Canada. A second part of the mythology clearly dictates that cab drivers are supposed to do their best to ratchet up the fare by taking the long way or 'accidentally' making wrong turns, etc. In this regard I was either unfortunate or fortunate, I'm not sure which, as my driver took a very direct route, the most direct I could possibly find on the map. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the only thing I was carrying with me happened to be a map, which I had lying open on my lap throughout the entire trip.

The most important element of the cab driver mythology, however, is supposed to be their conversation. The legends clearly state that cab drivers are supposed to talk incessantly on either pointless or obscure subjects. Well, in my cab as soon as we drove off the driver began talking earnestly about things that I didn't understand. That was because he was earnestly discussing something on his cell phone in Hindustani. I felt entirely robbed of the genuine taxi experience. As his conversation progressed, the party on the other end of the line began to do most of the talking, and since he was wearing an ear piece and listening attentively, this meant that the entire cab was perfectly silent. From time to time, he would jut in with something in just the same tone that one would use if one were trying to start a conversation, and I had to carefully listen to ensure that he was still talking to his little microphone, especially since a couple of these comments were actually clarifications about my destination directed to me. All that was left for me to do was to watch the minutes slowly ticking away on my wrist and the numbers not-so-slowly climbing on the meter.

I arrived at the intersection of Lagimodiere and Regent at almost exactly 9:00, a full hour late for my arrangements. I walked over to the Tim Horton's with a little bounce in my step. At the very least, I would be certain I was no longer delaying the poor person who had been waiting for my brother and I to navigate the complex labyrinth that is the streets of Winnipeg. Later, looking on the map and realising how small of a city Winnipeg actually is, I realised that in the process of all my running back and forth between taxis and buses and looking for my brother I had actually covered an equivalent distance to what it would have taken me merely to head to my destination on foot, and also that to do so instead of taking any bus whatsoever would still have allowed me to arrive on time.

When I stepped up to the Tim Horton's, I did not immediately see my brother waiting for me inside. The reason I did not immediately see my brother waiting for me inside is that he wasn't there. I walked up and down regent to ensure he wasn't anywhere else waiting for me. By this time I was more than a little confused. Where exactly was my brother? I stepped into a nearby phone booth to supply a situation update to the poor lonely woman who sits somewhere in a little booth all day saying, “Please leave your message after the beep.” Instead of the woman, however, who was become quite well-acquainted with me, I heard the voice of my brother on the other end of the phone, and was finally treated to the missing half of the story.

He had not left the apartment immediately, but rather he had waited outside for me for a few minutes. Then, he had headed off for the bus stop by a different route than the one I was later to take, and arrived just in time to see the back of the bus pulling away, although he had no idea that I was on it. It had, in fact, been that very bus stop at which we were supposed to meet, and the bus which I supposed to be the second had actually been the first which we had planned to take. At this point, if I had merely realised this, or taken the trouble to glance backward as I boarded the bus, or even been slightly more successful in delaying the bus driver, our entire debacle could have been avoided.

My brother waited for me at the bus stop until it became clear that I was not coming, and by this he properly deduced that I had been on the bus which he had just missed. This was during the time at which I was going up and down Main Street looking for him. Ironically, as he was waiting just south of Portage and I was convinced the appointed bus stop was north of Portage, I probably came within a couple blocks of him at some point or another. Then, when the next 47 arrived half an hour later, he hopped on it and got all the way out to Regent and Lagimodiere by the correct time. By this point, I was somewhere up along the route of the number 11. Again, if I had either stayed on the first bus I got on, or waited patiently for the next number 47, we would have relocated each other and still have been on time for our rendezvous. However, when he arrived he didn't remember where exactly we were supposed to meet up, so instead of heading in to the Tim Horton's, he waited by the Superstore and completely missed the person we were supposed to meet. After waiting for a while, he decided to head back home and arrived back at about 8:40. He had been in communication with the person who had been waiting for us and sent them on their way, although they had waited for a full hour while I gallivanted all across the city.

With everything finally straightened out, I crossed over to the west-bound side of the road and waited for the number 47 bus. It arrived in good time and I hopped on, ready to get home and glad to have had the whole thing sorted out. Now there is a peculiar thing about buses. Their windows are tinted to block the harsh glare of the sun during the day, and at night the inside of them is lit quite brilliantly, apparently with the express intent of developing a one-way mirror effect and making it absolutely impossible to see outside unless travelling through brightly lit areas. Upon leaving its stop on the west-bound side of Regent, the number 47 does not travel through brightly lit areas. It travels through dark, apparently residential areas. Neither does it head west, as one would expect. It heads east for a tour of that outlying end of the city. It heads east through poorly lit residential areas, thereby making it next to impossible to see where exactly it has headed, and rather confusing me quite completely when after about 40 minutes we still had not made it to downtown and I could not for the life of me see anything outside of the vehicle to tell me where exactly we might be. When I finally arrived back in downtown at about 10:30, I had, however, made some good use of my time. I had faithfully memorised every major landmark and street name in the entire city of Winnipeg. For the next time I go walking.