If you’ve never watched someone shoot heroin or smoke crack, spend five minutes on East Hastings and you’ll likely see both.
Along a few short blocks on Vancouver’s East side, this section of street is one of the most notorious in Canada. It’s a dank place. It’s wretched and washed in sorrow. It feels apocalyptic.
Its residents come from countless backgrounds. Some have made poor decisions, others have simply been dealt a bad hand. Regardless of the reason, this is ground zero for homelessness in Canada.
And it has a stunningly unique smell.
The scent of homelessness is not the smell of homeless people. It’s an olfactory cocktail that can only exist in these painfully unfortunate environments. They exist when a tipping point is reached, when everyone else accepts it for what it is. When people are just glad that it’s over there and not in their neighbourhood. And then it concentrates.
The smell is a potent mix of humans in the wild, those who haven’t had the opportunity to wash themselves for days or weeks. There’s human waste on the sidewalks — piles of shit and puddles of piss. There’s a foggy haze in the air laced with the acrid stench of crystal meth and crack smoke, or from the occasional cigarette butt that someone was fortunate enough to find. All of this together creates something horrid, something offensive to the mind.
East Hastings is not new to me. I visit Vancouver often and almost always end up in the area simply because of its proximity to the city centre. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of things that I won’t write about on here. I’ve seen humanity lost — gut-wrenching, revolting things.
But it’s the smell that haunts me. I can shake the mental images, but the smell is burned into my mind. It’s the smell of despair, of desperation, of mental agony.
On a recent visit to the city, I took the street as part of a morning run. And while it seems to have improved slightly since my last visit, it’s about as far from good as a place can be.
It’s easy, for a lot of people, to brush off homelessness. If they don’t see it, it isn’t a problem. And when they do, they turn away. They make up stories about the bad decisions the people must have made to end up there.
It’s almost stunning how fast people can dehumanize an entire population by the way they live. And how quickly that societal rejection pushes a person deeper into a world of utter desolation.
It chills my spine to imagine climbing out from such a place.