Canada Day

This is a story about just how much you can do with five hours to yourself in Vancouver, Canada.

I’d come to the city for less than 48 hours, to moderate a panel at the Vancouver International Film Festival — an objective accomplished on Friday. And Saturday, in theory, is a day people don’t spend working if they’ve worked the five before.

So it was Saturday, and I was flying back to Los Angeles at 6 PM that night, with a ride to the airport scheduled for 3. Packed before 9, breakfasted before 10, I wandered out the door of the hotel in my new black flats with a borrowed umbrella and one goal:

To find the coffee shop where Mulder ate all the pie on “The X-Files.”

I live in Los Angeles, I’m very used to seeing streets and buildings and coffee shops I know well captured in the media I consume. But I’d never really been to Vancouver before, and “The X-Files” had been formative for me — just one star in the Canadian sci-fi galaxy, but one that shown brightly for me at an early age.

So, according to the Internet, the scene where Mulder ate all the pie on “The X-Files” was filmed at the Ovaltine Cafe, a 2.2 kilometer walk from the hotel. (Even before I left L.A., Google was translating things into Canadian.) I stopped to ask the doorman which way I should head, to orient myself — I told him the street address I was looking for, 251 E. Hastings—

“Oh,” he said. “The east side of town.”

And that is how I, a stranger in a strange land, learned that there is a difference between East Vancouver and West Vancouver, and that East Vancouver isn’t unsafe but, in his words, “there are a lot of lost souls.”

Maybe someone who hadn’t spent the last week telling her friends that she was going to go eat pie at the diner where Mulder ate all the pie would have reconsidered, but I was not that someone. So, seeing my resolve, the doorman suggested I walk most of the way on the street right before Hastings, then cut over to Hastings when I hit the right block. Simple enough. Perfect, as it turned out.

For one thing, while the walk was supposed to take about half an hour, about 10 minutes in I ran across a bookstore.

Do they have rehab clinics for people who can’t walk by bookstores? Especially independent shops full of gorgeous used paperbacks and dusty hardbacks, literally piled up like dunes at the beach? Is there a methadone available for the spicy scent of old paper? There should be.

They were offering 40 percent off on books by Canadian authors. Douglas Coupland is my second-favorite Canadian author (Margaret Atwood wins first place), and they had a book by him I’d never read before.

I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM. I CAN STOP ANYTIME I WANT TO.

Anyways, addiction indulged, I continued walking — but about 10 minutes later, another craving set in. “Gone Girl” had just opened in theaters, and as a fan of the book and the casting choices and maybe even David Fincher, I was ITCHING to see it. I am also, however, very much the daughter of my parents, who have trained me to appreciate and respect any opportunity to travel. Using the free time I had in a new city to see a movie I could see quite easily when I came back home? Blasphemy.

It was Saturday, though, and the vacation feel of the day had already allowed me to succumb to one urge. So when I approached what turned out to be one of Vancouver’s larger malls, with a prominent sign announcing that there was a movie theater inside, I figured what the hell — go in, see if they have “Gone Girl” playing — maybe there’ll be an 11 AM show. Plenty of time for pie after that.

Made my way to the third floor, where the theater lived — only to discover they weren’t playing “Gone Girl” at all. Instead, probably half of the theater’s screens were occupied by movies from the Vancouver International Film Festival.

And I happened to have my badge for the festival in my bag.

I wish I could say that I planned any of this, but the basic fact is, after a few moments of deliberation, at 10:55 AM I walked up to the volunteers at the door and showed them my badge, and when they asked me what movie I was there to see, I told them the last movie I’d heard someone tell them: “To Kill a Man.”

(I am not actively involved in Indiewire’s coverage of the independent film world, because do you know how much fucking TV there is out there?!? But between helping with edits and listening to conversations, I have picked up some stuff by osmosis. “To Kill a Man” sounded familiar, like a movie we had written about more than once. I figured it was a safe bet.)

Thus, I ended up watching a stark, bleak Chilean-French drama that is apparently an Oscar contender in the foreign film category? It was intimate and interesting and really well-made. Unsettling. I left the theater feeling very intellectually stimulated.

The time was now 12:30 PM. I continued walking.

My modified route took me through Vancouver’s Chinatown — as Vancouver has a large Asian population, it was actually pretty hopping, and full of wonderful diversity. At least when it came to the food options.

Another 10 minutes, and it was time for me to cut over to Hastings. And the doorman had been right — it was grim. I’m no stranger to rough spots of towns, but this one had me feeling maybe as nervous as I’ve ever been.
Yet, there it was, the Ovaltine Cafe. Waiting for me.

Scooching past the youths camped out by the front door, I made it inside.
The place was huge, but entirely empty save for one waitress, who handed me a handwritten menu after clearing newspapers off the counter. The menu didn’t list desserts, so I asked her what kinds of pie they had; Mulder had eaten sweet potato pie, but they didn’t have sweet potato pie. I settled for apple, with ice cream. Not damn good pie. But decent enough.

And most importantly — yeah. It was totally, and completely, the diner where Mulder ate all the pie.

Pie mission accomplished, I handed over four Canadian dollars and made my exit. Instead of going the way I’d come, though, I decided to try a different route. I needed to head west and north — Main Street would let me do that.

Just a few blocks down Main Street, though, I ran across a sign for “the Jimi Hendrix Shrine.” That seemed like something I needed to investigate.

Turns out that Jimi Hendrix, as a kid, spent a lot of time in Vancouver with his grandmother, who would bring him to work with her at Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, Vancouver’s most celebrated soul food restaurant. (Lena Horne and Billie Holiday ate there!) The Shrine exists in the only remaining part of Vie’s, a storage room where Jimi and his band used to practice occasionally.

Fun fact: Jimi Hendrix had very nice handwriting.

And this is a thing that exists in the world.

While I was looking around at the Shrine, a small group of people came in, and one of them announced that he was about to lead a walking tour through the neighborhood, which used to be known as Hogan’s Alley before the city bulldozed most of it in the 1970s to make a Viaduct (which is apparently what Canadians call overpasses).

I checked the time — 1:30 PM. An hour and a half left, and I was about half an hour away from the hotel…

So I spent half an hour learning about the history of the black Vancouver community, and seeing what remains of Hogan’s Alley, and finding out that Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother’s church is now a small apartment complex.

It was actually pretty fascinating. The only reason I split off from the tour early was because I don’t trust Google Maps to accurately predict walk times, and I still needed to print my boarding pass.

I didn’t trust Google when it came to time, but I trusted it when it came to space — and Google thought I should walk back to the hotel via a pedestrian path on the aforementioned Viaduct. This turned out to be lovely.

Apparently, Vancouver is about to bulldoze the Viaduct to make room for something else. I do not pretend to understand Vancouver in the slightest.

I walked past and through the majestic scope of the city, eventually arriving back on the streets, and then the hotel. With 20 minutes to spare, I changed my shirt and slapped on some deoderant in the bathroom, then collapsed into a lobby armchair. Fitbit mileage count: 5.02 miles.

Some of this is the result of what happens when you put me on a data diet. I purchased 55 megabytes of a la carte international data from Sprint for this trip, and ended up hitting 54 just as my plane was boarding. 90 percent of that was email and mapping destinations — I was otherwise unable to really look anything up. I was only able to see, and wander, and explore.

However, my family also has a name for this sort of excursion — the Miller Family Death March. Growing up, vacationing with my parents, it was often how we first introduced ourselves to a new city: put on comfortable shoes, abandon the bags, start wandering. The phrase is technically meant fondly (at least until Mile 3 or so), but while there are times that it’s lead to some unpleasant tension, this sort of walk has become ingrained in my behavior.

And I’m grateful for it. Imagine if I’d hailed a cab to visit the Ovaltine Cafe. Imagine if I’d just gone to see “Gone Girl.”

How boring would that have been.