My Story

By Ana Santos
Published: April 13, 2013

 

 

Well, I have never been an angel, but when my mother forced me through a university door back in 1990, she inadvertently ordered a brand spanking new set of wings for me that fit me to perfection.

Almost 20 years earlier, I had been born into a very traditional, non-educated, working-class family in a heavily industrialized corner of the north of Spain.

Within the blind comfort of our ignorance and the pebble-in-shoe discomfort of our limited resources, dreams were exactly that; dreams.

You could have as many as you pleased with the certainty that they would never come true, so you stuck with reality.

Our horizons didn’t extend more than a few kilometres away; our aspirations (who could afford them!?) were confined to the same space.

But I was very lucky – the other three people in my family all made determining “mistakes” to my advantage.

My father made the mistake of knowing no other way to entertain himself but to work. He could hardly read, he could hardly count, so every single peseta he made ended up in my mother’s pouch.

From her part, her mistake was to have grown up in the midst of wars; she could make one loaf of bread last like three or four.

Every cent she got could be split into two – one half for today, and the other… for a rainy day. The rainy day never came, and my only brother, five years older than me, was offered the bounty to cover education fees.

But his mistake was to take after my father; give him a spanner or give him a spade; as for books, they are meant to decorate shelves.

And so the bounty came to me.

I was meant to get married, have kids and stay home, but they thought a bit of education could do me no wrong. Who could have guessed?

I relished every single day of my 5-year university degree and, at the end of it, I found myself staring at a world map stretched out right in front of me.

My first destination was easily picked. England was waiting; there, I could try my newly acquired skills, and it was still close to home if they didn’t work – it is education that I now had, but confidence? Not so much.

But the new country felt like a glove to me, and as I improved on my language abilities, down came the barriers. I was a different person; the Ana they knew in Spain was gone.

In England, I learned to stand tall, still proud of my background, but dreamless? Not anymore.

Nine wonderful years in Britain didn’t quench my thirst to see, to know, to explore. Visits to other European countries patched up my relentless curiosity, but the land across the ocean was calling – could I be brave enough? Why not?

If the documentaries I had watched again and again were correct, the big and wild Canadian landscape was were my mind and my heart were set.

My first visit to British Columbia changed me into a different person once more. One May afternoon, I stepped off the plane in Vancouver. The smell of the cottonwoods, unknown to me till then, blew me away.

The impact was such, I there and then kicked a habit of smoking a packet a day. It must have been the jet-lag, but travelling up the Sea-to-Sky Highway, I felt I was drugged. Could such beauty be real? Could such vastness exist?

Dumbfounded by the sight of The Chief and the bears feeding on the side of road, I didn’t even notice there was a town called “Squamish”, and I didn’t stop.

So that first time it wasn’t Squamish, but coastal British Columbia that stole my soul.

Some years later, still in England, opportunity came to knock on my door. With equal measures of excitement and apprehension, I answered the call. Before I knew it, I was all packed up and ready to go. Out came the map again. Vancouver? Too big. Whistler? Not a place to live.

Surely there’s something in between! An Internet search revealed our town. What a cool name! Perhaps I will try my luck there! I arrived on September 30^th 2004, and I guess this is home because, ever since then, I ache all over every single minute that I’m gone.