For two weeks, I was an American citizen trapped in Canada. Against my will. A prisoner kept away from my own country. Okay, well not all that but due to ridiculous car trouble I was forced to stay in a small Canadian town for two weeks, with only my mom, my dog and Canadian television to keep me company.
Everything had gone fine for the first part of the trip. We had gone through British Columbia and into Alberta, where we camped and saw the sights. Alberta is extremely beautiful, as is much of Canada. One of the amazing things about Canada that I’ve noticed is the wide expanses of land. The Canadian population is around ten times less than that of the United States, with most of the population living in the border areas. According to National Geographic, it is behind Russia in terms of sheer size, with nearly 4 million square miles. We talk about the world getting smaller with globalization and the information age, but huge parts of the world are still uninhabited and their natural beauty relatively untouched.
When we started into British Columbia after leaving Alberta, the car, a used Honda Accord, started making strange noises. Things started shaking and suddenly it became clear something was really wrong and we needed to pull over. We got out and my mom told me to flag down someone to help us out.
Outside it was freezing. After all, it is Canada. It took about a half hour of standing out by the car before someone decided to stop and help us out. A good looking couple had stopped for us and they informed us that the nearest town was Revelstoke, which was still several miles. We were nowhere near Seattle, we had only just crossed out of Alberta.
The couple was extremely nice and went to get someone who could tow our car. When a tow truck finally came in, we hopped in and my mom talked to the driver as we drove towards Revelstoke. Revelstoke was the only town on a long way towards Vancouver. The equipment we’d need for the car was only available in Vancouver.
We would be stuck in the town for a week. Or so we thought. The car wasn’t able to fixed until the end of that week, trapping us in this tiny town. By the time the car was “repaired,” it turned out that the mechanics had misrepaired it, stranding us in Revelstoke for another week.
At first, I was glad to watch Canadian TV to pass the time. The cable service they had at the hotel had CBC, along with all the big American networks excepting Fox News, along with several European news networks. At the time, it was the heat of the 2004 presidential election, with President Bush ahead in polls by 11% and John Kerry digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. Besides that, there were beheading after beheading in Iraq. To put it simply, I got really sick of watching what was very depressing and repetitive news.
I desperately wanted a book. Any book. A person can only watch Canadian television for so long before they start to go loopy. The town had one small book store, a clothing store with a large supply of books on the top floor and a sort of Value Village store with a gigantic supply of paperbacks..
I went to the thrift store and looked around for an hour. The place was covered with books so I figured there had to be something there worth picking up. Nada. Everything there was as bland as cold macaroni and cheese. At least half of the books there were Cold War-era thriller novels. It’s really amazing how many of those came out before the wall fell. It’s as if the fall of the Soviet Union not only brought down communism but with it also an entire genre of novels.
These books all had titles that somehow related to “red” for the Soviets and something like “Eagle” or “freedom” for the West, all sounding like rips of The Hunt for Red October. I searched through the entire thrift store, hoping that I would find something worth reading but to no avail.
The next store. It was a used clothing store that just happened to have a surplus of used books upstairs. I don’t remember exactly, but I think that the books were priced well over their worth. They, like the books at the thrift store before, were all one hundred percent crap. The only author I recognized was Kitty Kelley, which should really tell you something about the quality of literature I was dealing with. It was a book on the life of Frank Sinatra. I leafed through it, and noticed how intense Sinatra’s eyes were. He would’ve been a good criminal.
