Oyster Interlude

Janine, a 50- something year old, is demonstrating her ‘munchie-song’ to me in one of west-Victoria’s coffeeshops, involving apple mousse, apple juice and pee. She’s got huge earrings, a leather baseball cap and about 5 bags around her filled with her ‘research’; newspaper clippings, multicolour pens and office materials and I am wondering how I ended up in a conversation with yet another one of these eccentric Victorian citizens. I either seem to attract this specific type of person or something else is going on here… Janine, ‘the apple lady’, seems see be part of a brand that Victoria has in high supply. Where Prince George was the go-to place for the Canadian toothless, Victoria acts as a magnet for single, middle aged ladies – with highly unconventional worldviews I might add.

On my first day in Victoria on Vancouver Island, where to I had to hurry myself from my snowy adventures in the Yukon to meet another Professor, I was watching a very happy sea-otter doing a mudroll on one of the harbour banks when I got into a conversation with another middle aged lady, Cathy. Cathy moved to Victoria from Edmonton in Alberta, West-Canada’s oil province. Our conversation started out nice and normal, chatting about how it is to live in such a province and how to cope with such a dominant  industry, but pretty soon she confessed her fear about Vancouver Island sinking due to an earthquake and started a monologue on a collective awakening, meteorite orbits causing all kinds of kinetic energy on planet earth, sumarian(?) tablets and an elite group of gods that rule the world. I couldn’t really connect with her visions, but I promised to look some of it up and we called it a day. But perhaps that is what happens when you live long enough in Alberta, a province with a highly aggressive corporate culture and an environment that has reputedly transformed itself into version 2.0 of Mars. Maybe you start feeling you’re fighting gods, instead of corporations. The conversation stuck with me and continued through Joanne, another lady I met at Victoria’s hostel, where I had my weekly shower. She told me about her experience as a cook in Fort McMurray. If you have never heard of this place, look it up. Apparently this is Canada’s hotspot to come and sell your soul. It’s the heart of Alberta’s Tarsand industry (dirty, dirty, highly controversial oil). Hourly wages average about 70 dollars -or so she said- and many people come to work for a year or two in order to pay off student loans or make a flying start to the rest of their lives – Some call it Fort McMoney. Everybody, however seems to hate it and get out as soon as they can. According to Joanne it is a nasty place, where people just do what they need to do, don’t ask too much questions – and are met with quite some aggression if they do.

But somebody needs to do the dirty work right? And as it happens, I found the perfect project at the University of Victoria to do so. Bill Carroll, a soft, friendly, hippy grandpa-ish professor in a brown tweed suit managed to get a multi-million dollar funding for his badass Fossil Fuel industry mapping project. The idea is basically to build an open source database, where everybody can easily see how the Canadian government I tied up with private fossil fuel companies (information that is usually worth 80.000 dollar to access) so you can see for example which minister, but also which newspaper or small town mayor, is financially tied to the interests of big oil. Bill and I talked about possibilities for me to work with this database and analyse how public and political knowledge is influenced through such connections. Basically how these companies are influencing local, national and global media, knowledge and politics on the topics of climate change and renewable energy. Et voila, instead of making commercials, I will be looking at how we are being fooled by them… Life - box of chocolates – irony.

Obviously there are some hurdles that need to be jumped in order to get in… I was introduced to University financial politics, which I will not go into much further here but which basically clarified to me why you need to be filthy rich to study in America, even when projects are funded. The result of which, in combination with the whole aftermath of Paris and the growing feeling that Canada is not exactly what I am looking for in a country to live in for 4 years, gave me a bit of an emotional setback. All of the sudden I started doubting this whole plan. I mean don’t get me wrong, if I manage to get a position in this project, I will make it work! But where the hinterland was toothless, the island is middle-aged -and frankly, a bit bonkers- and Vancouver… Well, maybe I should just give Vancouver another try, as I went from hipster to homeless within 2 weeks and probably missed out on a lot of gems, while I was camping out on my industry terrains and Wallmart parkinglots.

I like to think I kind of refined my vandwelling skills in the meantime and by now I have left Victoria to camp out on a beautiful beach for three days to order my thoughts and just read the big stack of books that I have collected from different second hand shops all over BC. That and the 30+ oysters that I have eaten in Victoria seem to have cleared up my mind and my spirit again and seemed to be just what I needed. I also think I might have come up with a solution for the financial and the Canada problem… I love how your brain does that when you relax and just do something else! I also love how that is the exact moment the police shows up for the first time with their bright lights to point out the towing sign right in front of your windshield at 10 pm. Thankfully the touristcard seems to render me either an idiot or blind and the glass of rum I had saved my ass, as it allowed me to stay overnight. All in all the officer was quite nice I’d say.Just like the towtruck driver that scared the shit out of me two weeks ago at 3am, just to tow away the car behind me... The logic was beyond me, but once I assured myself I wouldn't wake up in a police depot, I closed my door again, undoubtedly leaving the towtruck driver a bit puzzled - I had scared him just as much as he had scared me, haha 

With 3 more weeks to go, I will finalize my applications in Vancouver for Bill’s Badass Fossil Industry project at the University of Victoria and one at UBC, where I never managed to actually see the prof. running another cool project, as she is in California, but where I’ll get to work in an indoor forest office – reason enough ;) And then I’ll probably check out Seattle and Portland to see what the wrong side of the border has to offer, before I have to sell Betty and come home…