The best Victoria Day parade was the one where Hudson Mack drowned me out with the air horn.
That was years ago, not long after he jumped from CHEK News to what was then A Channel, now CTV News Vancouver Island.
CHEK was broadcasting the parade from a position right in front of the Times Colonist building on Douglas. When Hudson hove into view behind the wheel of the A Channel float, CHEK figured it would be a good time to cut away. Hudson responded by stopping the truck (and the parade) and waiting for the rival station to come back. It was a stand-off.
Me, I just happened to be hands-in-pockets on the sidewalk, enjoying this little drama immensely, when someone at CHEK decided to solve their dilemma by swinging a handheld camera around and showing me instead: “Jack, tell us what’s coming up in the TC.”
I responded by gasping for air like a trout at the bottom of the boat, no words coming out (this is why newspaper guys shouldn’t do live TV), not that it mattered anyway because as soon as Hudson figured out what was going on he hit the air horn, which was just slightly louder than the one they sound when the Canucks score. Over the cameraman’s shoulder, I could see him gleefully grinning at me like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Not sure what to do, I fainted.
That’s unlikely to be among the footage when CHEK airs a show looking back at old Victoria Day parade highlights Monday. It will be on at 9 a.m. and again at 5:30, with former parade hosts adding their memories.
That’s as close as we’ll get to the real deal this year. What was to be the 122nd annual parade has been cancelled for the first time in history, and I am sad, because I have been to approximately 120 of them.
Some people give me a hard time for showing up to the parade each year. They act as though I’m reading the same book over and over and expecting a different ending. No, I just like the book, even though it’s so long that when you finally get to the last page it’s time to start Chapter One again. (Really, by the time the last parade entrant staggers by in the moonlight, the pre-schoolers who crowded the street at the beginning have grown up and moved on with their lives.)
I like the marching bands. I like the pennyfarthing bikes and the classic cars, and the pride and enjoyment that people get out of doing what they do. I like the Shriners, if only for the opportunity to call out: “I don’t know your name, but I recognize the fez.” (Sometimes I crack myself up.)
Mostly, I like the human interaction, the togetherness we get from our annual big-crowd summer events, the ones that have fallen out of the calendar one by one this year. The Swiftsure yacht race, which was to be held next weekend, won’t happen for the first time since 1946. June’s 58th annual Oak Bay Tea Party has met the same fate. Nanaimo's bathtub race went down the drain Friday. No Gorge picnic this Canada Day, no Inner Harbour celebration, not even the legendary Saturna Island lamb barbecue, the one that used to have a pig-diapering race. No Victoria Pride Parade, or Symphony Splash, or Sunfest, or Laketown Shakedown, or Vancouver Island Music Festival. (How can you have a mosh pit with two-metre distancing?)
A couple of months ago people were saying, “Surely we’ll be back to normal by summer.” Now, as we watch events fall like slow-motion dominos, we wonder what autumn will look like. An announcement on the future of the Saanich Fair is due any day. October’s Victoria marathon has already been cancelled. Organizers of the Cowichan Exhibition say they’re still proceeding on the assumption their fair will go ahead, but add that they know that if it does, it won’t look like it did in the past. New reality, new rules.
Kelly Kurta, the executive director of the Greater Victoria Festival Society, says she’s happy that Monday’s CHEK show will give the Island Farms Victoria Day Parade a presence in a year in which so much has disappeared. What will happen to the parade in years to come? “I know we have to look at things differently,” she says. “We want people to tell us what they want to see next.”
What I want to see is crowds and shared experiences, when it’s safe to see them again. Bubbles and silos might be necessary now, but the silence is deafening.
