For the past two-and-a-half years I’ve been living in a glorified boot room. The dimensions were approximately nine feet by eight feet, and between my bed, desk and shelves, there wasn’t a lot of floor space to do sit ups.
By contrast, the cells that suspected Taliban and al Quaeda fighters are being held in at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba – which were condemned by foreign newspapers and Amnesty International as inhumane – are just over a foot shorter in each direction at approximately six-and-a-half by eight feet. At least they have a view of the beach.
I couldn’t open the thick black felt curtain that hung over my window because after dark a compact fluorescent light from the complex’s own lighting system would brighten up my room like the daytime. Besides, anyone on their way to our front door had to pass by the window, and, false modesty aside, I didn’t really want to be seen.
Through my hollow door, I could also hear everyone in the house coming and going, and I do mean going – the full bathroom on the main floor was located just across from my "room." I put room in quotations, because after about a week I started to refer to my little berth as my "sleephole."
For some reason I painted my sleephole a bright orange. I meant to paint it a brownish kind of burnt orange but the paint on my walls didn’t resemble the colour swatch at all once it dried. Probably because the previous occupant had painted the room a vibrant school bus yellow.
Someone mentioned to me that they had seen a program where prisons experimented with the effects different colours could have on the attitudes of maximum security prisoners. While pink and light blue had a calming effect, orange generally made the cons angry and aggressive.
Mostly I just felt sad looking at my orange walls, at least until I painted them a sterile white almost a year later.
While I had the loudest room in the house in terms of its location, even nature was conspiring against me and my need to string together eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Our unit backed out onto a little forest, and every spring the robins came pecking at my window, attacking their own reflections and evacuating liberally and messily on my window sill. They’d usually start pecking at about 5 a.m., and come back every 20 minutes after I’d throw something at the window to scare them.
I taped a big "X" on each pane the first year, and finally wedged a stuffed animal between the curtain and the window pane to act as a kind of scarecrow.
Between the robins, the squirrels under the floorboards, my roommates and the other creaks and groans of a 30-year-old ski cabin, I don’t think I had eight hours of sleep in two-and-a-half years.
But for all my sleephole’s obvious flaws, and the very real cramping of both my body and style, I was actually happy to be there and a little sad when I left. The rent was cheap, the house was pretty cool and comfortable and the location was ideal. I had friends in the neighbourhood.
It was sold recently as my landlord decided to head back to the Far East to resume his yoga training, and as the new owners moved in I had to find some new digs.
I found a great place with my girlfriend in Creekside for May 1. It took a whole week to move in.
When I arrived in Whistler I had a knapsack stuffed with about 65 litres of hiking gear. Slowly but surely I’ve accumulated a number of possessions over the years, jamming them into the minute nooks and crannies of my little orange room and around the house. I’ve been back to Ontario twice to visit family and friends and both times I brought the maximum allowable weight limit of my stuff back to Whistler.
On moving day I had clothes, books, a computer, a bike, bike tools, a snowboard, camping gear, sporting equipment, a bed, a desk, shelves, linen, guitars, TV, VCR, and CDs to deal with. I had about two boxes of condiments. I even had a table hockey game.
It was a lot of crap, but volume aside, it was the sheer logistics of moving day that made things so difficult.
First of all, my little orange room was in a unit at the top of a larger complex, some 91 stairs up a winding, covered passage. My girlfriend’s stuff was on the fourth floor of her complex and she had a few possessions of her own. Second, the local car rental company was all out of cube vans.
Thirdly, I had friends coming to visit me for four days who showed up on the day of the move.
Oh yeah, I also had a job to do, and that was complicated by the fact that our editor had chosen that week to visit Hawaii.
To this day my recollections of the move are blurry at best.
I ran around the house throwing my possessions into garbage bags, cleaning and sorting as I went. I almost threw out a big bag of socks and T-shirts and brought a bag of spoiled vegetables to my new digs until I noticed the mix up.
I ran up and down the stairs with bags and boxes for two non-consecutive days. We rented a big SUV for the first moving day, and I borrowed another truck for day two, three days later. I didn’t know where anything was, and wore the exact same clothes, right down to my gitch, for four whole days. I didn’t even shower. It’s a week later and I still can’t find my shaver.
The story has a happy ending. My new room is huge, and painted a soothing baby blue. I have a quiet window with a tree and a mountain view. I showered.
Now if I could just get used to all the space.
