We’re taking a walking tour of Vancouver. It’s a lovely April afternoon and our guide Fran is entertaining and informing in her Berlin-via-Oz accent.

It’s our second day here while staying at the legendary Cambie (Hotel) Hostel. It’s been around a long while with a storied history throughout its colorful past. It sits a few blocks west of Maple Tree square, which is the division point between West Hastings Street and East Hastings Street. East Hastings being very much Downtown East Side or DTES which is the epicenter of the opioid crisis, if it can be called that anymore. The “crisis” that is. It’s really an epidemic that people are paying less and less attention to though the numbers are not lessening.

So the Cambie Hostel at Cambie and Cordova Streets is sitting snugly up to the DTES with all it’s cracks and the lost souls slipping through. This is all Gastown. It was re-gentrified once in the 70’s and has since slipped closer to the DTES than away. It appears there is a recent re-regentrification afoot. It’s a typical city mix by day. Helmut Lang, coffee shops, pubs, Vancouver Film School, folks of all sorts and ilks making their way through the day. By night it’s a bit more sketchy and sadly disparate and desperate.

Having spent the last couple days and nights in or near the ‘hood we’d become aware of our neighbours and behaviours. The street folks are present throughout the city, as in most big cities. So we’re in the big city and getting used to characters abounding. That’s part of the “big city life” touristing begets.

The Toonie Tour group of seven, including Fran, are making our way down the steps of Robson Square, which is a clever piece of work. When approached head on, as if walking up the steps, it looks just like that, steps. As you ascend (or descend) you will see an accessibility path that esses through the step-works. It is a very cool piece of architecture.

We’ve been to the top, snapped some images and learned about something of . . . whatever it was we heard there. The group of seven is descending to the lower level and filing through a narrower part of the path. Not a physical constraining passage, just one “sidewalk” at the corner of the steps feature.

Seven of us. All mobile adults. It probably takes us 40 seconds (?) to pass, as a group, past any single point. Tami and I are the last in the group at this point. I hear an exclamation. “Well, Fuck!”. Hmmm, I hadn’t seen so many street-folk-characters in this area. Just as we pass, a young lady who appeared to be waiting for us to clear the 6-foot-wide passage that she was standing aside of, moves past me to traverse where we just were. We both see her. “Average”. No coat or bags. She didn’t look like she was shopping, more like on lunch-hour or an errand from the office. Average age. Not young. Not older than 40 if that. Dress pants and sweater. Hair up in a working-business, not a night at the opera, look. Not unattractive. “Average”.

As she makes her way by Tami, then me, we distinctively hear, at a level we were certain was meant for us to hear “for fuck’s sake!”.