After I had been a relief letter-carrier for Canada post for about eight years, I finally obtained my own route. Now, instead of facing a different random route in a random neighbourhood five days a week, I could settle into a patch of ground and learn it well. That first route I successfully bid on was a maze of rusty gates, rotten stairs and dogs named Sabre, Chopper or Cujo. None of the occupants owned the houses and so nothing ever got fixed. The racial mix hailed from across the map from Sri Lanka to Portugal and from Calabria to Newfoundland. Every so often a grow op was busted, a person was stabbed or a house was shot up in a gang related drive-by. The bushes were thick, the trees were old and the sidewalks were broken up by the ancient roots.
I nick-named it The Trail of Tears, that is, until I got to know it intimately. Later I dubbed it, The Widow Maker. My attitude toward my route was like my attitude toward my spouse. She is mine, both the good and the bad and I cherish her. I held that first route for about the next seven years. In the first couple of years of walking it, I experienced a divorce that stretched over two years. I also engaged in deep soul searching, psychic repair work, a courtship, a remarriage and continued family building. Broken bones, dog bites and life-affirming revelations all came with delivering to those old stucco and wood houses with dank basements.
The residences all had old gates with slanted crumbling concrete steps leading to weedy yards and another set of rotten wooden stairs which ascended to the decaying front porches. After putting my boot through several rotten front stairs, I asked the occupants to have them fixed. I was always promised that they would contact their absentee landlords. I waited weeks to no avail. So, I simply removed the offending planks in each subsequent case and tossed the mouldering lumber into the front yards, making ingress or egress to the front doors impossible. Now, the turn-around time for new stairs averaged about two days.
This method also worked for faulty front gates, long ago rusted shut and hung from fences with posts rotted at the soil-line. Each one of those gates squandered several hundred precious calories, leaving one weak to deal with the many other obstacles of the day. Snapping the posts off with well-placed karate kicks and laying the whole sad affair flat in the lawn was both emotionally satisfying, easy and safe to walk over. The turn-around time to a new fence was about a week. No official Canada Post paper work was involved or necessary, nor was language a barrier.
The frustrations were ubiquitous, the hazards were many and danger to life and limb was very real. The customers were the bottom layer of the lower-middle class, first and second generation immigrant, unskilled workers and local born welfare recipients. Some had been the children of the first wave immigrants and were determined to succeed after watching their parent's Herculean efforts come to naught. Some of this group turned to the seemingly easy money to be made by a life of crime. There were pimps, whores, dealers, fencers, peddlers, suppliers, smugglers, gangsters, illegal aliens, junkies, crack-heads, meth-heads, coke fiends, alcoholics and schizophrenics. Everyday was a brand new adventure.
As they come to my mind, I will write of these adventures from my Trail of Tears. You will easily find them, dear reader, sprinkled around inside this archive. The territory and setting is Vancouver's East-side in the decade of the Nineties. The stories are all true and I shall only omit enough details to protect those folks still living in that neighbourhood. Do not let my choice of names for these stories give the impression that all was negative. Far from it. There were moments of perfect bliss, satori, shibumi and enlightenment. I dedicate this particular collection of my stories to those people whom you will find described within.
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