Before I go too much further into the tale of our adventures in the savage, icy badlands of Canada, there is a small detail which I feel I should clarify.

The cities in Canada are not literally built in the clouds.

There is a common belief that they are; tales of Canada’s sprawling cloud-cities permeate the folklore of nearly every industrialized nation. These tales, like many legends, have some small basis in fact. Seen from a distance, the grand cities of the Canadian steppes do appear to be floating on clouds.

We learned during our trip why this is. The cities of Canada are divided into two parts: the upper portion, with glittering skyscrapers and shopping malls and small outdoor cafes and little sushi places tucked away into business districts, much like you might find in any other city in any other place.

Beneath these parts of the cities, down in the earth where it is perpetually dark, lie the subterranean hearts of Canada’s civilization, where the Morlocks run the strange and ancient machinery essential to the places above.

These dark and mysterious caverns, the foundations of Canada’s cities, emit vast quantities of steam from the enormous, arcane machinery that supplies the parts above with water and electricity and powers the defensive grid. When you combine this with the fact that Canadian cities are almost always built atop natural hills or elevations, in order to provide better protection from Kurgan attack, it becomes easy to see how the casual observer, weary and snowblind, might believe the cities are actually floating on clouds. You can’t actually build a city on clouds in a literal sense; clouds are made of water vapor, a transient and altogether unsuitable foundation for heavy construction of any sort.

zaiah and I found ourselves deep beneath the city, in the Morlock’s territory, as we attempted to leave Canada Place and head back ’round toward the scenic parts of town.

Canada Place, as it turns out, is the main connection between the two Vancouvers, the one that glitters in the sun and the perpetually dark subterranean place of mystery and nightmare. We followed a path behind the building, which descended sharply and then widened into a broad street leading down into the heart of darkness.

Here you can see some of the vast pillars supporting the city, and the eerie red glow of the vast furnaces that supply the ancient machinery with steam. I fear this photograph fails to convey the oppressive nature of this strange place, gentle readers, as I was forced to use a very long exposure in order to record any trace of the details of the place, and thus it appears much brighter than it actually is.

We walked for about half a mile, along the wide passageway where huge trucks carrying coal and other raw materials thundered by. Giant turbines in the ceiling, which I was unable to capture on film, sat poised in readiness to fill the tunnel with cleansing flame should any unauthorized persons dare to venture down this far. As we walked, seeking any doorway or narrow access shaft that might return us to the sunlight and fresh air above, our every step was haunted by the fear of a clanking metal security machine stepping in front of us to challenge us with “Identification, Citizen!” In such an eventuality, we knew we would have little choice but to aim for the eyestalk and run.

Finally, after much searching, we found an accessway that, with many twists and turns of narrow steps, brought us back to the world of light. We were fortunate that the shaft we’d stumbled upon led directly into a construction site; it appeared to be long forgotten, reopened only accidentally and therefore unguarded.

The construction crews paid us no attention. Hearts still pounding, we climbed up onto the sidewalk and tried our best to blend in with the throngs of afternoon businesspeople sipping their lattes. We hurried along the moment we were out of sight of the tunnel we’d climbed through and left the busy sidewalks, circling around behind the business district. There we passed by the fields where, many hundreds of years from now, after the machine uprising, when nothing remains of this city save for her enormous and barely-charted sewers, human beings will no longer be born, but grown.

So it came to pass that we made our offerings of bus fare and blood to a Kurgan driving his bus in that direction, and soon found ourselves walking in a pleasant breeze along the docks that ring the island.

We arrived at exactly the right time of year, as it turned out.

The Royal Canadian Navy was hosting its annual fund-raising, during which citizens are permitted to rent some of Her Majesty’s naval fleet for private excursions in the glittering water surrounding the island. As we walked along the dock, zaiah pointed out this vessel, the Limited Offensive Unit Probably a Bad Idea.

This vessel, equipped with the latest Man-Powered Rotary Reciprocating Dual Thruster Units, looked to us to be a fine way to explore Canada’s territorial waterways, so we resolved to rent it at once.

We negotiated an exchange of currency with a man wearing an “Obey” T-shirt, and set off.

The first thing we noticed as we paddled furiously away from the dock was the…no, wait, I take that back. The first thing we noticed as we paddled furiously away from the dock was that the man in the Obey T-shirt had placed many safety supplies into a small plastic chest, but neglected to give the chest to us. We turned around and paddled back to retrieve it, in the event we encountered some unfortunate incident that might otherwise have led to our certain doom.

The second thing we noticed as we paddled furiously away from the dock was the strange piles of rock carefully erected along the stony shore, offerings to the temperamental denizens of the deep waters, who are loathe to grant safe passage along her surface without these ritual tokens of submission.

At this point, I must pause to reveal that we were on that day the source, no doubt, of many interesting stories the Vancouverites exchanged with one another. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were both out in deep water paddling our small craft like mad, or the fact that your humble scribe was once again wearing bunny ears, but we were for whatever reason the source of much waving and pointing, and many shouted words drown out by the constant thrashing of our pedal-powered propellers.

So agitated by our unlikely presence did the Vancouver citizens become that another naval vessel, the Rapid Offensive Unit Unconventional Use of Weapons, was quickly dispatched to check us out.

Upon determining that we were an unarmed American woman accompanied by a man in bunny ears paddling our way around the False Creek sound and therefore unlikely to pose a threat to the safety and security of Her Majesty’s State, we were left to continue our journey in peace, though the continued reactions of Her Majesty’s subjects reminded us that there would be many a story around cozy campfires that night that started with “Hey, you aren’t going to believe what I saw this afternoon!”

We made our slow way beneath one of two bridges that span False Creek. This bridge, erected during the famous Art Deco era in Canada’s dim past, still bears the reminder of an ancient part of Canada’s history, now nearly forgotten by the youth of today.

Time was when balconies like the one you see here could be found on every bridge in Canada’s western half. According to the history books, when the Canadian government negotiated its treaty with the bridge-trolls that inhabited this part of the continent, these balconies were provided as a service to the trolls. Each morning, as the sun came up, the trolls would ascend to these balconies to announce the tolls for crossing the bridge that day, their low, guttural cries of “One copper! One copper!” or “Three copper! Three copper!” informing the tradesman what it would cost to do business on the other side of the bridge.

The trolls are long extinct now, disease and destruction of their natural habitat having been too much for them to adapt to. Architects today still sometimes include these balconies when they design modern bridges, though they do so only for tradition’s sake, without fully understanding why.

As we traveled farther along, we paddled by the enormous concrete Canadian Palace of Culture and Sport, erected at the same time as the Vladimir Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport was being built in Tallinn, Estonia, during Vancouver’s short-lived attempt to reach out across the Iron Curtain and recognize that ancient Medieval city as her sister in spirit.

Once, Canada’s athletic elite gathered here to compete for the honor of leading the front lines in the regular campaigns against the Kurgan raiders. Today, it is used as a storage depot for concrete, making it, on the whole, rather more successful than the edifice that sits crumbling to ruin in Tallinn.

We saw this graffiti painted on the side of the structure.

I must confess, Gentle Readers, that though my knowledge of Canada and her ways has been vastly expanded by our travels there, I have absolutely no idea what it means.

So it came to pass that on Labor Day, or Labour Day in the modern language of Canada, zaiah and I ventured to take a train ride up to the frozen wilds of our northern neighbor to visit her.

I was not quite sure what to expect. I’ve heard the stories, of course: fierce raiders riding armored polar bears, carrying evil spears fashioned from ice; the great floating cities in the clouds, their perimeters patrolled by armed police riding the backs of furred, horned wyverns; the enormous, heavy tomes, their pages made of thin sheets of iron hammered from fallen meteorites, containing all the wisdom of the Elders in the nearly-forgotten language of the ancients. But I’d never seen any of these wonders with my own eyes, so it was with both fear and excitement I boarded the train, carefully stowing my borrowed polar bear saddle above the seat.

We arrived in the Wildlands in due course, bourne there by the great machine of iron and thunder, and within minutes of setting foot on Canadian soil our problems began.

Those of you familiar with the writings of your humble scribe are no doubt aware that I am often prone to wearing bunny ears in public. This is a not-atypical photograph, showing me in my everyday, about-town ears, which are equally at home during a formal evening in a fancy pub or while traveling the rugged, rocky slopes of America’s midwest.

So it will be no surprise to many of you that I was wearing bunny ears–indeed, these very same bunny ears–on the trip up to the frozen north.

Canadian customs officials, whose numbers today are carefully selected from the most savage of the Kurgan raiders (about whom I shall speak more later), with only those who best their competitors in savage hand-to-hand combat too terrible to write about here allowed to win the honor of protecting the border from their unkempt southern neighbors, were not amused by the ears.

Not at all.

I was questioned about them, at great length and by at least three different people, before zaiah and I were taken into a small room for additional screening.

Now, I am loathe to go to the hardware store, much less to a strange and distant land, without my bunny ears. The story of the ears is too long to recount here, though I will try to sum it up without too much damage to this narrative. The ears are a gift, or perhaps an inheritence, from my London sweetie emanix, who I met while standing in line waiting for an elevator (or as they say in the native British tongue, a “lift queue”) at a convention of perverts, sodomites, and other fine folks. She was, as regular readers will recall, dressed as an Easter bunny and passing out candy at the time. Since strangers have the best candy, I immediately accepted her offer. Fast forward a few years, a couple trips abroad, and an orgy in a castle in the south of France, and the torch has well and truly been passed. So to speak.

The source of my woes

Anyway, there we sat, just moments from disembarkation, sitting in a small room under the cold and watchful eyes of three people in bulletproof vests, who grilled us both about our motivations for making the long and dangerous trek into the icy plains of Canada with bunny ears. They demanded a list of every place I had lived for the past twenty years, whereupon they announced they would do a background check on me in all of them.

During this time, the lovely Eve, the namesake of the woman who chose knowledge over obedience, sat (or, rather, stood) outside the gate waiting. I was forbidden, in the strictest possible terms, to make any attempt to contact her, or in fact to use my cell phone at all.

Eventually, and grudgingly, they let us through. The entire ordeal took even longer than the unfortunate time I made the mistake of telling a British customs officer I was traveling to the UK to visit my girlfriend, which is, apparently, right up there with “I just came back from Columbia with thirty-seven kilos of the finest diamond-grade Bolivian blow ever to choke an elephant” and “I will avenge my people!” on the list of Things You Never Tell A Customs Agent. But I digress.

Customs behind us, we passed through the great hall into the lands of Canada, where I stood blinking, bag in one hand and bear saddle in the other, looking for our transport.

The saddle turned out to be unnecessary, as it appeared Vancouver was a Cosmopolitan enough city to have heard about and embraced the wonders of internal combustion. We loaded up into a Honda of some description or another–or perhaps it was a Toyota–and made our way past the barges laden with animal pelts and the street vendors hawking rhubarbs and small cursed figurines with glittering ruby eyes toward the home of someone who had graciously offered to accommodate us during our travels. (It turns out, in a strange twist of the-world-is-smaller-than-you-know, that her friends were companions of a woman I met in London at emanix‘s birthday party. The world is small, and strange, and really quite amazing.)

The next morning, we rose to brave the twisted ways of the Vancouver public transit system.

Now, I have used public transit in at least five countries. I have ridden a streetcar in Poland that was ancient before the sun was born. I have navigated London’s tube and lived to tell the tale, thanks to the warning to mind the gap. But I was not quite ready for what we discovered when we boarded the bus in Vancouver.

Vancouver’s public transit drivers, like Canada’s customs agents, are drawn by and large from the ranks of disaffected Kurgan tribesmen, unsatisfied with the raider’s life, which leaves too little opportunity to wreak violence upon the rest of Canada’s people. Those who fail to win the coveted spots at the border crossings often become bus drivers, where they greet requests for navigational aid or questions about the fare with the traditional cry “Hark’on dûl goth Khan dok’tôl Akan gol’Kosh Trk’han,” which translates roughly as “With my ax I shall destroy all that you love.” The bus drivers of the greater metro area belong to many different clans, which wage ceaseless war with one another in the dead of night along lonely, deserted streets while the city sleeps.

We learned from an unfortunate fellow passenger to stand quietly and pay attention, leaping from the bus as it crossed the intersection where directions, scribbled in strange glyphs on a large sheet of runed paper called a “map,” instructed us to depart.

We stopped at a charming cafe to collect lunch, then walked to Canada Place to sit beneath the sun and eat. The view from our benches was quite spectacular, with the banner of Canada’s dominant tribe fluttering gaily in the breeze:

There is a secret horror lurking in the design of Canada Place, a grim reminder of an ancient evil, which I will get to in a moment.

Our repast complete, we journeyed forth once more to visit Vancouver’s Police Museum, an excellent place for zaiah and I to amuse ourselves with tales of law enforcement throughout the ages .

The history of law enforcement is the history of weaponry. So it is probably no surprise that the most interesting part of the Vancouver Police Museum, by far, is its weapons room, entry into which is permitted only under escort through a large, locked steel door.

There is also, in another, much larger part of the building, a display of improvised and more exotic weaponry, most of which is made up of all manner of strange and lethal variations on the theme of “I will hit you with this until you die.” There were handmade spears, and flails, and whips, and a spring steel cobra (a fine weapon I was introduced to by a friend of mine in my misspent college days); blowguns, and shivs, and butterfly knives; brass knuckles, and clubs, and axes with curved handles. It was an inspiring display, which made me long to disappear into my workshop for a few days and come out with a doomsday weapon that I could use to hold the moon for ransom. Ah, those glorious days of my youth…but again, I digress.

In front of the museum is a rather…peculiar statue, commemorating the pledge made by Canada’s law enforcement officers to be the friends of small, strangely-proportioned, bipedal space aliens with oddly-configured heads and tiny hands whenever they might be in need:

Vancouver’s finest, known throughout galactic sector R-4 as a friend of any being in need

Rumo(u)r has it that a pod person once saved the police commissioner’s life, during a massive and unlikely conspiracy involving time travel and wildly improbable space aliens who look like crosses between sentient ivy and lingerie models. The next Men in Black movie will reportedly be based loosely on this story.

Our visit done, and reluctant to board a bus again, zaiah and I chose instead to walk the streets of the city, to better learn her customs and culture. Our wanderings brought us over a grand, soaring bridge, where we found this message spray-painted on the pavement, a chilling reminder of the Kurgan raiders who to this day live deep in the Wilds and stage occasional incursions into the civilized parts of the country.

Through messages like this, they seek to remind Canada’s citizens of their grisly practices of ripping the hearts from the chests of their enemies, lest the citizens become too complacent.

On the other side of the bridge, we spied the stylized peaks of Canada Place from the other side.

There are few alive today who remember the days of old, when Canada was known mainly for her hordes of ravening wildmen, who set sail in small, fast warships to plunder up and down the Western coast of the United States in search of treasure and women.

Though the design of this building seems innocent to modern eyes, there was a time when the sight of peaked sails just like these, traveling from over the horizon, would strike terror in people for hundreds of miles along the coast, as they signaled another assault from the Canadian longboatmen. This is why to this day nearly every city on the Western seaboard is still surrounded by tall, thick stone walls, with peaked watchtowers along the coastal side. Once, those towers were practical rather than ornamental; from them, watchers would stand guard, day and night, endlessly scanning the ocean for the first sign of those curved white sails, ready to sound the alarm that would bring men and boys rushing to arms to try, hopeless as it might be, to repel the invaders.

There are few who still remember; today these peaks do not bring the terror they once did. But I will confess, Gentle Readers, that when I saw the building, there across that narrow inlet of water as we crested the bridge, a chill crossed over my heart. It was soon gone; I know, in the rational part of my brain, that there is no longer any reason to fear that Canada will return to her warlike ways. But perhaps that fear has passed into the collective unconscious, a faint echo in our DNA of the trials we once faced from the rampaging northmen of the sea.

We faced a different trial on our way back from this place, one born of dangers subterranean rather than seafaring. But that part of my tale will have to wait until next time.

I didn’t expect the elephants.

The day with figmentj was quite lovely, featuring strolls through Boston Commons and antique naval mines and Christian hair metal and frightening clocks with plastic women in chains and all manner of other parts of the general Boston experience. We ended it by watching the sun set over the river by Harvard square, the peaceful tranquility of the flame-touched sky broken only by the screams of the boating-slaves rowing along the river under the gentle exhortation of scourge and lash:

But all such things must come to an end. Eventually, it was time to head back to Claire’s to help her get settled in to her new digs with all her various and sundry possessions, including her rather fetching Viking helmet, before sailing through the air in a magic metal tube back to Portland.

I am sad to say, Gentle Readers, that once again I failed to seize the opportunity to photograph Viking kazoo porn. I did, however, assist in the moving of many heavy mass-bearing objects up many flights of stairs, which, while undoubtedly not as great an accomplishment as photographing Viking kazoo porn, is an accomplishment nonetheless.

The next morning, Claire had to be on campus early for a meeting of some sort or another, where her indoctrination into the ways of life at Tufts University would begin. I had resolved to seize the morning and make the best possible use of it by remaining asleep while she got up to head to campus. I had resolved to head there myself, at a much more reasonable hour, as I am generally a much more reasonable man than those who profane the early hours with wakefulness, and to meet Claire there when her indoctrination session had concluded.

I didn’t, as I have mentioned, expect the elephants.

Tufts University is not, by the strictest definition, a clown college. Indeed, it excels in the pursuit of many intellectual endeavors unrelated to clowns. Its history, however, is tightly woven with that of the clown, as one of its earliest benefactors (and a source of much if its early funding) was none other than Pt. T. Barnum of “There’s a sucker born every minute” fame. He made his considerable living, though presumably not his endowments, on the back of that maxim.

In 1889, Barnum, when asked by the university’s trustees what he could do to help support the institution in a time of great need, donated the stuffed and mounted hide of one of his most beloved circus animals, Jumbo the Elephant, to the school. There is a parallel to this take in the Islamic story of the archangel Gabriel, who gifted the patriarch Abraham with an enormous stone called the Caaba which later became the object toward which Muslims now bow when they pray, when (as Ambrose Bierce observed) the patriarch had perhaps asked for a loaf of bread.

Just as the Caaba has exerted a magnetic influence on the Islamic tradition ever since, so has Jumbo the elephant had a similar effect on Tufts University, which might have taken its name from the small tuft of coarse fur that adorns the end of an elephant’s tail. The stuffed and mounted elephant was subsequently destroyed in a fire, or so the legend goes, and every bit of it was lost except for the tuft at the end of the tail. The symbolic meaning of this will be left as an exercise to the reader.

There are elephants everywhere on campus. Not actual elephants, you understand, but their representations, in painting and sculptures and mixed media and all matter of other forms too frightful to mention. The pachyderm permeates the collective subconscious at Tufts like gay porn permeates that of an Evangelical minister; and, as with that selfsame Evangelical minister, it leaks out everywhere.

I discovered a strange building during my exploration of the university grounds: a vast building, filled with miles and miles of shelves, along which were stored bound volumes of printed pages. It was kind of like an iPad, if you took all the books in it and, for some reason, printed them out. Prominent in that building was this picture of the Elephant Rampant, trumpeting its victory cry after seeing its enemies scattered before it like leaves in the wind, their broken bodies staining the ground red with their blood and the tears of the widows:

I also witnessed this man, perhaps convicted of some terrible crime, fleeing the Hall of Justice with its symbolic sculpture of an elephant triumphant as its keystone, ahead of the swift and brutal Justicars who will in a few minutes’ time come from these very same doors to run him down, for the education and amusement of the rest of the campus:

The position of the Justicars in the annals of Tufts history is long and interesting. The universally has a long-standing rivalry with its ancient enemy, Bowdoin College in Maine. This rivalry in times long past was fought at a low level, with skirmishers from each college occasionally leaving the walls and fences of their respective universities to stage raids on their adversary’s stronghold under cover of night.

However, in the black days of May in 1897, a large and powerful force ventured from Bowdoin on the path of war. They arrived in the afternoon of May 23rd, and the three days that followed are too grim for the telling. In the aftermath, the Tufts ruling council created an elite group of warriors, the Justicars, whose elephant-shaped masks of cold iron and moon-forged silver soon struck fear into the hearts of all who stood against the university.

Today, the battles between Tufts and Bowdoin are fought in ritual combat on the fields of the gladiators, and the Justicars serve a different function.

Down the hill a bit, one can find these sculptures, erected as reminders of the ever-watchful vigilance and benevolent care of the Great Pachyderm:

And further down still, near the university’s main temple, the idol of the Great Jumbo stands proudly. Offerings of the people adorn his side, written in the secret ancient script.

My journey to the Tufts campus was not without some small difficulties. Claire’s new home is located a short walk from the grounds. I am not, as those of you who have read some of my previous adventures, gifted with a good sense of direction, or even a sense of direction at all. It is only through conscientious memorization of routes and landmarks that I can find my way from the kitchen to the bedroom.

So I will confess a measure of consternation with the prospect of finding my way unaided from her new home to the university. Fortunately, through an accident of geography, Tufts University is located at the pinnacle of the only hill in the neighborhood. “Keep going up,” she said. “As long as you’re going up, you can’t miss it.”

Her advice was outstanding. With the mountain itself as my guide, I am pleased to report, Gentle Readers, that I became lost only twice, and did not walk more than half a mile out of my way.

Close to the edge of the campus, one finds this sprawling mansion, the home of the President of the University.

The low hedge you see ringing the house’s grounds are all that remain of the high, impregnable walls that once stood on that very spot, erected in haste after the attempted coup of 1979.

In that year, the grad students, who spend long and dangerous days in the eternal darkness of the mines beneath the campus, working day and night with pickaxe and shovel mining nuggets of knowledge in dangerous conditions for little pay, and whose labors made the university’s High Council and its president rich beyond dreams of avarice, rebelled. They seized the entrance to the mines and lay siege to the residence of the President himself before the rebellion was crushed.

Today, the relationship between the ruling class and the university’s laborers is much less tense. The laborers have negotiated contracts with the ruling elite that grant them some small measure of hope of upward social mobility, while the elite have largely been able to retain their fabulous wealth and their odalisques, who calm the fears of the aristocracy with the gentle applications of the feminine arts.

It was in bemused reflection of those arts that Claire later found me, wandering the campus without purpose or goal. We dined upon local delicacies called “burritos” and “quesadillas” that afternoon, before returning to her new home to engage in the rearrangement of things and stuff into a more suitable configuration.

The next day found us once more in her car, the vehicle whose stalwart service had seen us across an entire continent, through deep canyons and soaring mountains, past strange landscapes teeming with Mormons and the Guatemalans who’d carried off one of our own, this time on a shorter journey to the airport.

I have flown, through strange happenstance of fate and circumstance, many times in the past couple of years. Each time, I have flown on Delta Air Lines, and each time, my luggage has come out somewhat the worse for the wear. On my trip back from Europe, documented many posts ago, the handle was broken–somewhere, if I recall correctly, between Amsterdam and London. On this trip, I arrived in Portland to find a large gash ripped in the front of the suitcase.

It was not until my next journey, to London and King’s Lynn for a debauched celebration of birthday hedonism, that my faithful suitcase would receive a terminal blow. That is a story for another time.