some of this is true

I expect it to be quiet, to be empty, like visiting a ghost town abandoned quickly before the lights were turned off. But it’s not empty, there are so many people at the Montreal airport (Dorval? Trudeau?) at 3:30 in the morning, in line, walking, talking, eating, serving food. It is dark outside and the city lights have tinted the sky a pale orange and inside this airport there are so many people that it might as well be day.

I was leaving a party in The Nation’s Capital to catch a bus to Montreal to catch a flight that any sensible person would have paid to have changed, and then someone said, Hey, well how ’bout that, we’re driving to Montreal right now, come with us, so I forfeited the bus fare and jumped in the car and we sped along a dark highway as the road signs changed from English to French and I struggled to stay awake, to participate in a conversation that swirled around me as I fell in and out of sleep.

My eyes open and we are in an area that seems familiar in the way that suburbs make the world feel smaller. Is this it, already, in Montreal? Yes, they say, and after we drop her off we’ll be at the airport. It is after three o’clock, and the sangria is wearing off. I pull my face up off the window, which feels cold on my skin after a week in the damp heat.

I walk slowly into the airport, because it’s five hours until my flight lifts off and at this hour everything should want to move slower. Check in. Find a washroom. Consider grabbing some food but then think, what’s the point. Stand in a line that is a dozen people deep. The group in front of me speaks in Spanish, all holding Mexican passports. Behind me a panicked woman asks if any of us are going to the Dominican Republic. We all reply, No, and this middle-aged woman, with a tired face and no doubt looking forward to a tropical getaway — “I need this,” is how she probably describes it — wanders off to ask someone else.

I sit down in the line because, I think, we might be here for a while. I pick through my bag, and look at the evidence of the week.

There’s the boarding pass from the Saturday previous, airports seem to bookend my memories of travel. The taxi receipt into Montreal, at midnight, to a friend’s house to drink a beer and then sleep on the couch. The receipt from Saloon, a small pub with little that resembles an actual saloon, save for a cactus or two out front and a wooden statue of a moose head hanging from the wall, assembled in flat slabs the way we used to put together 3-D puzzles of dinosaurs. The best poached eggs I’ve had in years. After that, and after hours of walking here and there — while I’ve nothing tangible in my bag to show for it — that night we ended up at a karaoke bar: Amy Winehouse, which I sang very loudly, which is my style. A receipt from the restaurant where you eat in the pitch-black darkness. A ticket from the Biodome, where there are mighty penguins. A postcard from an art exhibit inspired by a break-up e-mail. Bank statement on the way to a small bar with loud music and a pool table where I drank beer that tasted, oddly, like lemonade.

A train ticket to Ottawa.

The program from the wedding, a pen from the hotel. The booklet from the Parliament tour, which became the site, later on, of a massive public prayer rally we happened to pass by while a man at the front prayed for our politicians and yelled very loudly. Passes to the art gallery and war museum. And there were other things, too, in both cities, whose artifacts didn’t end up in my bag, to be sifted through here while sitting on the airport floor.

And a bus ticket, not used, which you already know about.

This is, I am quite certain, his first time flying over mountains as he stares out the window, describing and pointing at what he sees with adolescent wonder. An American, middle-aged, balding. Bald. Why his first flight over mountains would take him north to the small — and like so many others, dying — mill town of Terrace (pop 11,000), I can’t be sure. I am flying there for work, spending less than five hours in Terrace before flying back, barely enough time to realize I’ve even left at all.

We are in the air about an hour and a half north of Vancouver on a route that cuts a line up the province inland enough that the ocean, the Hecate Strait, is just a slim line rippling at the horizon. The American has been fumbling through analogies and confusing metaphors for the better part of 90 minutes with his play-by-play of the scenery, generic mountain after generic mountain, and then he finally finds the words, which he says with the eureka enthusiasm of a poet inventing a new phrase: “It’s like flying over the moon.”

And it is, I suppose. At least in the way he means it. There are snow-draped mountains in every direction, vast ranges of white tips surrounded by black valleys painted with dark shadows. Sometimes there’s so much snow that it fills in the shadows and it looks like meringue topping, whipped up and molded into delicate peaks. There is no sign of anyone — of anything — anywhere. And it’s not like the middle-of-nowhere of the Prairies, where the glint of a metal barn in the distance or faded tractor marks or a gravel range road are never far, reminders that there is, or was, life here. But here there is nothing, not a single thing, and with a few small exceptions (blue sky, gravity, oxygen, snow, the sound of my seatmate’s iPod struggling to overpower the buzz of the propellers), it’s sort of like flying over the moon.

I’ve put up some new photos on this much-neglected piece of Internet real estate, and some of those photos involve alpacas, which aren’t the same thing as llamas, no friend, they are far more absurd. Most families in the animal kingdom have, whether official or not, a ranked order of hilarity. When it comes to Camelids, that list would look like this, from least absurd (but still absurd, to be sure) to most absurd: camels, llamas, alpacas.

The reasons, I hope, are obvious.

At any rate, here are some pictures, which you may have already seen on a Popular Social Networking Site.