The search method was straightforward. We bought tickets, climbed aboard the SkyTrain, and treated the elevated tracks as our personal reconnaissance platform across the Lower Mainland. There was a single line that ended in Surrey. To narrow the hunt, we used a primitive outfit found in the newspaper classifieds that churned out printed address sheets of available rentals. We unfolded that tractor-feed, dot-matrix printed list on the train to see where we might head. If a neighbourhood sat beyond walking distance of a station, it was crossed off. That transit spine carried us straight into New Westminster. The station back then bore no resemblance to the massive shopping concourse and condo complex that encases it today; it was raw Expo 86 concrete, open air, and bare platforms overlooking industrial tracks and quiet streets. The printed list led us just a short walk over to a rental tower at 838 Agnes Street, where we secured unit 903.
It was basic, functional, and entirely ours. For two years, that coordinate served as the engine room for setting up life here, initial teaching terms at Pitman, and getting used to West Coast rain after years in the desert. Looking at these two photographs from 1996, the view outside tells the real story. The one above looks out from the ninth-floor balcony toward the open expanse of the New Westminster station area before modern development swallowed the sky, while the other peeks from the bedroom between neighbouring towers toward the grey ribbon of the Fraser River. It was our first perch in the Royal City, but thirty years later, that river remains our constant anchor, now from the other end of downtown on Carnarvon Street.
