Spaciousness

I’m writing to you from a sunny terrace in the south of Calgary, Alberta. I’m here for a few days after an incredible week in Vancouver and on Galiano Island, celebrating the wedding of a dear old friend. I’ve been in Canada for just over a week and what has of course struck me, as somebody who hasn’t spent a huge amount of time in North America, is its vastness.

In Vancouver, it was mountains and oceans; in Calgary there are plenty more mountains — the city sits just west of the Candian Rockies, where I’m headed next week — and also a huge expanse of prairies that stretch over a thousand square miles to the east and across three provinces: low, flat lands dense with the petroleum and natural gas that drive much of the economy in this part of the world. I’m used to living in London, in a small one-bed in the middle of Hackney, and I’ve got used to having little space. I roll out my yoga mat between my coffee table and my bookcase, my writing desk is squashed up at the end of my sofa and continually cycling through my possessions, trying to throw things away to make more space. Such a setting is fitting for London, a city where there’s always something to do, somewhere to be, somebody to see.

There’s a part of me that likes being kind of cramped and busy and overly-committed, I think because it doesn’t give me a whole lot of space to think. I like the feeling of going to bed knowing that in my building, or in the building over the road, there will be people up busy with their lives — people who haven’t yet gone to bed. I think of these people, busy in the nighttime, as watchmen or as benevolent guards, taking care of business while I sleep.

In Canada, even in the cities I’ve stayed in, it’s a little harder to locate my watchmen. The cities are spread over grid systems, with spaces between houses, and room for bungalows and detached houses with terraces and lush, manicured gardens and sprinklers that come on timers (my pot-plants, meanwhile, fight for window space). I struggled, at first, with the vastness of it. Many of the cities are driving cities: you can’t just walk to the corner store for the groceries you forgot in your weekly shop and the size of the fridges here brings a whole new meaning to the phrase bulk-buying: I am not joking when I say ice-cream comes in five-litre containers. I find it easy to feel a little lost in such expanses, there’s the feeling, always, of being less contained. But then, last week, we took the ferry out to Galiano Island, one of the Gulf Islands to the west of Vancouver. We sat up on the top deck as the city skyline diminished and, on a hot day — the temperatures have been late twenties, early-thirties — the ocean opened out in front of us, while on the horizon appeared the peaks of snow-capped mountains.

Galiano is a small island, only thirty or so kilometres long, and we drove its length, stopping off at one of the swim-spots before driving to our accommodation. I know this about nature, and yet, I always managed to forget it: leaving my phone back in the car, putting on my Air Maxes and my Deet and burrowing down into forestry that opened out onto an expanse of crisp pacific ocean, I felt so peaceful. This feeling of peacefulness had to do with nature, and also so much to do with space, which, in the life I usually live, comes at a premium. There are fewer and fewer public spaces in London, places you can just be without having to purchase something, and though I’ve carved out my little routes — along the canal, through Hackney Downs or down to Victoria Park, there’s still the feeling of being hemmed in. I like that feeling, of being contained. But I like this feeling, too: of being out in the open.

I’m headed to the Rockies on Tuesday and then on Friday further east, out to Montreal, and then down the coast towards New York, and I’m excited for what’s next: to cultivate this feeling of spaciousness, to embody it as much as possible, to try to find ways to pocket it, take some of it back with me when, eventually, it’s time to return.