The last time I truly learned a city's anatomy was fall 2004, those four months at UVic when I owned nothing with a screen. No laptop, no cell phone, not even a hand-me-down Nokia. The Motorola KRZR that would change everything – a sleek flip phone that felt like holding a piece of the future – was still months away from arriving in my hands like a silver key to a different kind of existence.
You couldn't help but internalize the geography when you had nothing else to do but watch it unspool. From View Royal to campus required a kind of public transit trigonometry: catch the 14 or sometimes the 22 if timing aligned, then transfer downtown for the packed 4 up McKenzie. An hour fifteen of raw, unfiltered time. The routes inscribed themselves into memory not through choice but necessity.
Each bus ride was an exercise in being present whether you wanted to be or not. The 2 from Gonzales, the Oak Bay buses collecting early morning swimmers, the long haul from View Royal – they all demanded your full attention simply because there was nothing else to give it to. Time was measured in physical distance, in the number of stops between you and your destination. You knew exactly how long twenty minutes felt because there was no escape from them.
When the KRZR arrived – this impossibly thin chrome flip phone that seemed like science fiction compared to the bricks people had been carrying – the same routes became just moving containers for checking messages, for planning the next thing while doing the current thing. Then came the third-generation iPhone, and the city fully retreated into background, into something that happened in peripheral vision while I stared at a screen that could hold entire worlds.
There must be millions of us, elder millennials who remember that strange interim – those last analog months between childhood and the permanent tether. We're a peculiar cohort who knew adult life briefly without infinite scrolling, who remember a time before we became information addicts. It's like a recovering smoker describing the world before nicotine, or a former user recalling the texture of life before heroin: that last clear season when time was still just time, when boredom was still possible, when we could still feel the full weight of an empty hour on a bus. We're the last generation to remember both sides of the divide, carrying these fading memories of untethered existence like specimens in amber. Sometimes I try to recall that person who could sit on a bus for an hour and simply sit there, the way a long-time smoker might suddenly remember the taste of air before that first cigarette. But the memory grows dimmer with each notification, with each instinctive reach for the phone, the moment boredom sets in.