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1977:
Born in the USA
Faced with the choice between a couple
of years in Vietnma and c ouple of years in the slammer,
I chose Vancouver
By Daniel Wood
It was the year Elvis died. Maybe you weren’t
around. Or maybe you were the one who told me you’d
heard it that August day, and we’d agreed: He
was, yeh, too young to die. Or maybe that wasn’t
you. It’s hard remembering that far back. The
drugs, the love affairs, the helter-skelter. Vancouver
then? It was a sleepy—almost comatose—place
where, at night, downtown was emptier than Jimmy Hoffa’s
casket, and signs above pub entrances read MEN over
one set of doors, LADIES AND ESCORTS over the other.
Yaletown was a rat-filled train marshalling yard. Granville
Island an industrial place that few without union cards
would visit. If you used the word “gay”
around the West End then, people would think of Christmas
apparel. The Chinese, they lived in Chinatown. You’d
go to the Orange Door in a Pender Street back alley
if you were poor and liked chop suey; and, if you felt
flush, to the more upmarket On On—in hopes of
seeing Pierre Trudeau and his gorgeous young wife. (Trudeau
made his famous pirouette behind the Queen’s back
at Buckingham Palace that year.) The Italians owned
Commercial Drive. The WASPs ran the rest of town, including
City Council, the mining and forestry corporations,
the universities and the media. If there wasn’t
a mutton-chopped Anglican or Presbyterian in the family
album, you’d better learn to kiss ass. Only the
beleaguered Greeks of Kitsilano had to contend with
intruders, with the Hippies, with, well…people
like me.
Like 100,000 other Americans of that era, I’d
come to Canada at the end of a pointy stick. I’d
argued with the U.S. Army that—in the vernacular
of those times—killing people wasn’t my
thing. The Army had argued it was theirs. The FBI adjudicated.
Faced with the choice of a couple of years in Vietnam
or a couple of years in the slammer, I chose Vancouver.
I was lured here by the seductive words of a Canadian
woman I’d met earlier who’d assured me Vancouver
was practically tropical. Palm trees, she said, grew
in her Nanaimo hometown.
My arrival here coincided, sadly, with the biggest blizzard—to
that time—in the city’s history. I’d
sought escape from the pointy stick, and found, instead,
a tuque-topped, grey, Siberian gulag. I felt duped.
And when I finally saw the palm trees, they were dead.
Like every refugee since the days of Adam, I knew I
could mourn this loss of innocence or…I could
accept my diminished horizons, and—in time—try
to make the place a little bit more congenial to the
values of healthy irreverence, social action and creative
energy that marked the best of the Hippie generation.
By 1977, the city was, in fact, crawling with scheming—sometimes
quixotic—Yanks filled with the desire to do unto
Vancouver what couldn’t be done unto their defeated
brethren to the south. Vancouver was a sort of ingénue
then. It had…potential. It just needed some loosening
up.
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I had three
sorts of friends then, all mavericks of one kind
or another, all chaffing against Vancouver's visceral
complacency, its Eagle Scout propriety and good
looks.
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I had three sorts of friends then, all mavericks of
one kind or another, all chaffing against Vancouver’s
visceral complacency, its Eagle Scout propriety and
good looks. There were the ones who smuggled dope in
shiploads, and later did serious time in Williams Head.
Closely linked to them were the long-suffering idealists—the
poets, Maoists, nudists, vegetarians, feminists, performance
artists, and the congenitally lazy—who stubbornly
believed that, even as stiff-backed and gold-chain-draped
Jack Volrich became Vancouver’s mayor that year,
revolution was still possible. And linked to them was
a third group—composed of less dreamy political
malcontents and writers (often one in the same)—who’d
likely been part of Jericho Park’s celebrated
Habitat Forum in 1976, had touched the hem of glory,
and had decided to trudge up the stairs of Vancouver
magazine on Hornby Street to one of the regular Monday
night boozathons there—in the hope of schmoozing
the boss, Mac Parry (or, at least, flirting with the
fashion models in attendance).
In fact, I first climbed the stairs to one of the Vancouver
magazine beer-bashes in the fall of 1977, foolishly
enamoured by the prospect of becoming a writer. Mac
had gathered around him a group of thoughtful freelance
writers and artists—several of them American draft
resistors—and had tasked them to record the city’s
emergence as Vancouver moved away from its hoary, century-old
moniker as Terminal City (with all that implied) and
toward the cusp of something very different.
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