Ship-spotting: My friend Bob shows me how to see ships (and life)
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My college friend Bob lives in Vancouver and likes to engage in a little test of skills on his walks around picturesque English Bay and Stanley Park.
(Oh Stanley Park, you gorgeous thing, you!)
He counts the vessels sitting out in the harbor.
Not just any boats, but the bulky container ships that cast anchor offshore while waiting to unload their cargo in the nearby port.
Bob will pause suddenly and say, “Let’s count the ships.”
He says it like a father might say to his son.
It’s a mind game, really, one that measures depth perception and visual acuity. The ships are scattered like children’s toys, pointing off helter-skelter, some partially obscured by others, or lingering so far out they’re mere pinpoints on the horizon.
It’s not really a contest, per se, just a unique way to process the world around you: Stop and look from, say, here and this is how things appear. Take just a few more steps, and — voila! — everything changes.
Bob is good at this game of his own invention.
Me, not so much.
“How many did you count?” he’ll ask.
I’ll hesitate, reassessing, making sure my number is my best guess.
“Fourteen,” I’ll answer.
“I see sixteen,” Bob will say.
And then he moves on, a professor in search of his next insight. Bob has always been able to decipher those ships I do not see.
A few months ago, I visited Bob in Vancouver for a long weekend. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and it was time to renew our friendship vows.
Bob teaches at a local university and I needed a quick fix of his unique Bob View on Life.
You know how it goes; a small alarm goes off in your head and suddenly you have these pangs of absence and fraternal longing.
In my case, I said, “You know, I haven’t seen Bob in awhile now, and I miss him. I miss his laugh, his sunny view on facing each new day, his whip-smart intelligence and wit.
It’s been that way for more than 40 years now.
I first met Bob in the late 1970s. We both wrote for the Spectrum, the thrice-weekly student newspaper at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
I was a features writer and editor.
Bob produced a regular column called Phaedrus.
His work often delved into the realm of night crawlers and street walkers, people you don’t readily notice but whom are nonetheless right there, before you eyes, living on the margins of society.
Like ships on the horizon.
When Bob wasn’t writing, he was running. Marathons jaunts around North Buffalo and beyond. We both shared a penchant for hitchhiking, and did it nationwide.
I now see both Bob’s long-distance runs and thumb-out misadventures as a particular metaphor for his lifelong habit of striking out for places unknown — cerebral, emotional, geographical, often all at once.
But what I remember most about Bob from those days is his laugh, that uproarious whoop that went on for many minutes and invited participation and imitation.
He also had a way of elongating the first names of his friends when greeting them.
“Joooohhhhhhnnnnnnnn,” Bob would say.
“Boooooooooooooooob,” I’d answer.
In those days, when you said something that displeased him, Bob would shoot you, his fingers formed into an imaginary revolver.
Pow.
I got shot a lot.
We lived together one summer with a poet/dancer named Polly, whom Bob knew from high school. Bob vanished one fine day for a cross-country hitchhiking trip. When he returned, he got a part-time job at a local shoe store.
One day, he came home from work exhausted and plopped down onto the couch, perhaps beer in hand, applying a college-student’s bohemian philosophy to his white-collar job.
“Does man need shoes?” he asked to no one but himself.
Bob and I had a falling out (over a woman, what else?) and dropped out of touch for many years, keeping track of one another’s exploits only through mutual friends.
While I doggedly pursued journalism, Bob dove into a more literary world. He was an editor at a Buffalo-based book publisher, focusing on outliers and sexual subcultures. He earned his graduate degree at Stanford, and developed a passion for teaching.
All along the way, Bob published.
Decades ago, well ahead of the curve, he launched Ellavon, a literary website for fiction and nonfiction. He moved to Vancouver, where he became a patron of several local artists and began teaching at a university there.
When you fall out with a good friend, you somehow fall back in.
It just happens that way.
While it may take time, it happens eventually. And both Bob and I are lucky it did.
I don’t remember who called whom, but suddenly we were talking again. You know how it is with old friend/partner-in-crime; it felt like we’d never drifted apart.
It wasn’t long before Bob published on Ellavon snippets of an autobiographical novel I was writing about my breakup with my first wife.
Like any good editor, he encouraged and nurtured me.
When I remarried, in 2000, Bob was there. He laughs a bit sheepishly now about how he left the after-party to dive into the Pacific Ocean with his clothes on.
I’ve never told him, but if I hadn’t been so busy pressing the flesh that day, I would have been there alongside him, tux and all.
It just would have felt right., Bob and I, taking chances, seeing new worlds, people's thoughts be damned.
A few years later, Bob introduced me to Vancouver fine-arts photographer Lincoln Clarkes, who had published a book called “Heroines,” containing his photographs of heroin-addicted sex workers on the city’s Downtown East Side.
Bob also turned me onto a gritty story, which I wrote for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, about how many of those women began to vanish. Until authorities finally arrested notorious Canadian serial killer Willie Pickton — who lured victims to his ranch, killed them and disposed of their bodies in a wood chipper — Lincoln himself was a suspect.
Bob played the role of tour guide to this fascinating yet cruel world.
Then he edited my story.
Gosh, that was fun.
The headline said it all: “Light and Darkness in Canada.”
On this latest trip, Bob and I walked — a lot — sometimes eight miles a day.
It was a Bob Tour of Vancouver. We did English Bay and Stanley Park, of course, but other neighborhoods that were less-known but equally unique and Canadian.
Bob was born in Ontario and has always been proud of his heritage. Over the years, I always saw the country is a slightly-autistic version of the U.S., a weird but harmless little brother who looked up to his older sibling, but could never be him.
In this Age of Trump, Canada has changed in my eyes — and in a big way.
This little brother has pushed aside the jaded older sibling to assume the top spot in the Americas for its progressive worldwide view. It was just so refreshing to walk Vancouver’s affluent West End and see so many minorities interacting without obvious cultural or color lines.
It felt like a safe space to be foreign, without a MAGA hat in sight.
Not only that, Canadians remain as a rule so, um, nice, so courteous. Commuters made a habit of thanking the bus driver when they entered and exited.
If an inside seat on a bus or train comes open, they will automatically slide over from the aisle and make the outside seat available. Imagine that happening anywhere in America.
On our walks, I also noticed that Bob did something I considered very Canadian: He waited at stoplights, even on secondary, decidedly un-busy intersections.
What at first appeared quaint to my Type-A American ways quickly became the thing to do. Take a second and wait.
After all, what’s the rush?
Bob has lived in the same apartment for nearly 20 years now, located just steps from an array of restaurants and bars and nature.
He doesn’t own a car.
And so we walked, giving each other the space to tell our stories, knowing they were received without judgment. We each yielded the performance stage, as it were, becoming a listener as well as a storyteller.
We talked about our successes and failures, about mental illness (which runs like a vein of tainted gold in both our families) and how we both inhabit different cities than the women in our lives.
Bob has a grown son, a doctor, and I am childless, and we both essentially live alone, to pursue our work and our passions.
After a few days, I felt almost Canadian.
And much, much closer to Bob.
And I began to look forward to watching this dear old friend pause on a walk to gaze out at English Bay, to spot the ships that I cannot see.