Put it down, perhaps, to youthful exuberance. Vancouver is after all only a century and a few decades old. Put it down to the first warm day of the year, perhaps. Put it down to possibly the last hockey game to be played in the city this year. Put it down to winning. Winning and the desire of all and their uncle to honk, hoot, and holler in a cauldron of flesh, pushing and squeezing together from the waterfront to the bridge on Granville Street.
O way o way o way o way! O way o way o way o way!
It took eleven seconds of overtime for Alex Burrows to make himself the hero, again, and it took about ten seconds after that for the crowds to start to move on mass to begin the celebration. People of every shape and shoe size crammed into the streets of Vancouver and moved with the migratory minds of wildebeest. Granville Street quickly resembled any popular shopping street in big city China: loud, crowded, and moving as slow as maple syrup tossed on snow.
In any direction there was a wall a flesh. High fiving, dancing like Zulus, laughing, singing and generally acting like it was a birthday party for each and every one of the tens of thousands. Everyone smiled at friends and strangers alike. They chanted. Women were hoisted onto shoulders to film the vocal and physical explosions on the street.
Spontaneous dancing broke out on bus shelter benches and any other place there was space to shake a booty on the street. They chanted and sang and screamed. If sound was measured on the Richter Scale this was most definitely a reading of 9.9. Anyone in a hurry to get anywhere was not going to make their appointments. Relaxing to the inevitable seemed to be the norm.
At the corner of Robson and Granville a line of police officers slowly snaked diagonally across the intersection. Uniforms could not part the crowds any more than the traffic that was caught up in the public outburst before they could escape. And they all had hold of the officer sidling in front of their face, for they truly could not see farther than that. I asked if they were a conga line and received a smile in reply. But imagine, I said, that this line of cops could create a conga line of upwards of 50,000 outrageously happy fans. It would also create a new collective noun: a conga of cops.
This was a benign show of collective madness. The guy climbing up the building then getting arrested was just dumb but what about the guy with the paddle?And although it would continue at varying volumes for hours and although I had only traveled a few blocks in the first hour the decision had to be made to turn and fight back the way I'd come for another hour to get to the typewriter.
And on the edges of the crush, if you looked closely, there were the homeless. Shabbily attired, usually sitting still, and guarding their suitcases, backpacks, and shopping carts that held their entire lives in close guard. Sure they were happy about the result in the game but few looked happy about the possibility of losing all they had to the more serious of the revelers around them.
And closer to the docklands the human mass thinned out until very few were on the streets sipping coffee and watching the endless movement of those more excited than they were. On Hastings Street the rave conditions of a few mere blocks away ceased, the noise muted. And on the edge of Victory Square with the sun beginning to set the junkies stared at the backs of their hands or into the middle distance with the appearance of taking no notice at all.
O way o way o way o way! O way o way o way o way
(this is has just surfaced, so ...)