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NOTES & DISPATCHES

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something is local that it is universal. The regular bus has never once departed from its route, yet it has gone around the world. The secret is written in the stars; the starting point will always be the terminus. Why have I so loved the bus? Why this collection of transfers? Why does a framed photograph of two Canadian Car 600s crossing paths on rue Saint-Hubert in 1956 occupy a place of honour on my bedroom wall? It was a birthday present from my girlfriend, who went to the trouble of tracking it down at the archives of the Montreal Transit Authority. Why? I can well imagine the archivist’s face when she told him that nothing in the world would make her boyfriend happier than this, an ordinary photograph of two buses, in winter, on Saint-Hubert: the 669 and the 627 passing each other on a Wednesday afternoon. I was a kid, entranced, in love. I was in love with an elm tree, a frog, a hockey stick, a stone wall, a river, my neighbour Sylvie, my brothers, my sisters, my marbles, my grade 2 teacher Hélène, the brown bus, my bike. Vain remembrances, useless to me now: the elm has been cut down, the frog is long dead, the hockey stick broken, my bicycle disappeared into thin air; I lost the marbles in a game and I never saw Sylvie again, and my sisters and brothers have been taken from me, either by death or by life. And he never existed, that whitehaired driver in a grey twill shirt and a cap emblazoned with the transit authority logo—an arrow going through a circle— driving his bus along route 86, more handsome than any doctor, holding the steering wheel as if it were tremendously important, this driver who wore gloves just like a pilot, like a giant. New chapters open, the titles roll, doors appear and we go through them

into fields, undiscovered countries of questions that will never be answered. Through these doors we see the theory of points of origin and points of departure, an essay on perpetual motion, a reflection on one-way and return trips, the search for transfers and connections: between the belly of the whale and the mother’s stomach, between honey and civilization, the raw and the cooked, the weight of the sky in our head, the shape of the turtle, the curves of the bus; an essay on art, on style, culture and representation, the typography of bus stations, the face of a truck, the circuits connecting cells, mythologies and archetypes, the theory of doors, walls and obstacles, breakthroughs and repercussions; my bus was a salmon who was a tree who was hiding a rope to catch the moon. In July 1944, in a sidebar so small you could easily miss it, Le Devoir reported the death, in Boston, of Jack Wimsley at the age of forty-four. His was a prodigious childhood—piano virtuoso at age eight, several languages mastered at age ten and the youngestever graduate of Harvard University in nuclear physics. But at age twenty he gave it all up and spent the rest of his life in a menial job at a branch library. He left behind only one known publication, a three-hundred-page essay called “On the Importance of Collecting Bus Transfers.” Serge Bouchard is a well-known Quebec anthropologist, writer and radio host. He has written thirteen books in French, one of which, Caribou Hunter, has also been published in English (Greystone Books). A longer version of this essay appeared in French in the journal L’inconvénient.

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Pablo Strauss lives in Quebec City and misses B.C., including the red, white and blue B.C. Transit Flyer trolley buses.

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