I love nature. Hell, I’m a farm boy at heart, no matter how antsy I might get after going more than 36 hours without being able to check my email. I could wax poetic for several paragraphs about the power of clear skies and green spaces and the sheer, absolute wonder that some of the world’s creatures can instill in just about anybody. Suffice to say that nature can be breathtaking in scope and awe-inspiring in its complexity. It’s one of the things in this world — along with whispered words of unconditional love, fresh Montreal bagels steaming in a brown paper bag and Pavel Datsyuk’s breakaway goals — that can move me to tears.

But … I also really love cities. I figured out a long time ago that I am addicted to being places where things are happening and to riding the kind of raw energy you can only find in places where too many people live too close together and things happen with a frenetic pace that suggests we are all trying to outrace some important galactic alarm clock that may emit a jarring buzz at any moment.

It’s one of the more troubling dichotomies in my life, actually. And if it wasn’t such a minor thing — I mean really, I like both of them in their own way, so it isn’t exactly bad — I’d probably worry about it a lot more. But all of this is merely a preamble towards a description of a trip to the capital of British Columbia, and why it’s a beautiful, noble and peaceful city … that I could never, ever inhabit for more than a week or two without losing my mind.

Cities shouldn’t be ashamed of what they are. They aren’t conservancies, they aren’t wildlife reserves and they aren’t small towns. They shouldn’t act like it. It demeans both the city and the truly idyllic towns and countrysides. If I was a little less offensive than I actually am, I’d feel bad about drawing a parallel about period actors dressing in blackface — do the real thing or don’t go there at all.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with providing parks or greenbelts or areas inside cities where nature can thrive. Cities shouldn’t be cold grids of grey stone, by any means. But they should still feel like cities. And Victoria, pretty as it is, doesn’t feel that way.

So maybe that’s why I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out if I liked it there or not. There’s a point that all growing towns eventually hit when they’ve outgrown the notion that they’re a “town”. Usually it happens when skyscrapers start going up, or a swell of developers moves in and begins to throw up condos like they’re hucking

darts at the sky. It doesn’t matter when it happens — for the record, once you have a big ol’ fucking legislature building with gilded radiators, you’re a city — but when it does, you’re simply not a small town anymore and you have to start keeping your grocery stores open later than 6 p.m. and you have to ensure that last call for the neighbourhood pub happens well after 11 p.m.

It is around this point when you also might want to begin expanding your public transportation system so that buses are reliable enough that people actually want to use them. It isn’t that buses in Victoria don’t go anywhere, it’s that they’re so infrequent as to be practically useless. I saw one bus all week with more than a dozen people on it — the one heading out to the university campus.

None of my British Columbian friends should take umbrage, by the way. Vancouver Island itself is staggeringly beautiful and I could easily settle down and live on Quadra Island for the rest of my life and I’m reasonably sure I’d be content, so long as I could get a satellite TV with the sports package and a reliable internet connection.

It’s not about the province, or the scenery or even the hippies, though they are so numerous in Victoria that someone  might consider allowing reasonable humans to bag and tag up to four of them a year, much the way the Quebec government allows farmers to cull the coyote population.

It’s about authenticity, and the way Victoria seems to eschew the more convenient aspects of city-hood in a misguided attempt to cast itself not as another city on the ocean, but as some sort of stoner’s Utopian dream of what a British Columbia city should feel like — lots of parks, lots of ocean, little need for police or other trappings of the metropolises … a slow life riding a vibe that’s dull but benignly friendly and won’t ever change much.

That’s fine for, you know, a place that doesn’t have 400,000 people and is the capital of the province. It’s not a bad thing to have a city that doesn’t cater to tourists and isn’t ashamed to be a little smaller and more low-key than those other Canadian cities that want more than anything to be considered along with the big boys. But surely there is a happy medium somewhere. I mean, by no means should I be able to spend a day walking around downtown and realize I’ve seen everything the travel brochure boasts about.

Museum? Check, all three exhibits. Legislature? Beautiful building, no politicians present. Harbour? Lots of boats, very pretty view. Chinatown? Saw all three blocks of it. Live music venues? I saw two of the three main ones (Sugar, and Hermann’s, the city’s jazz bar), and if I had been able to get tickets to the Talib Kweli show at Element, I would have managed to see the three best-known venues within a week.

Bookstores? Plentiful and wonderful, almost as plentiful as the fucking coffee shops. The aquarium? I stayed away after hearing depressing stories of a bunch of fish and a very depressed octopus. The Bug Zoo took about twenty minutes and Beacon Hill Park was a really pretty walk. But they do have baby goats for petting, and surprisingly you can spend about an hour doing that and not get bored.

Anyway, the point is that, when the locals tell you that one thing you absolutely have to do before you go is check out the local Value Village … and the best tourist attraction in town is a bunch of incredibly cute baby goats … I don’t even know what to think about Victoria as a “city”.

I feel like Victoria is a slacker teenager, and all of Canada’s other cities need to tell it to grow up and get a job somewhere.

And it would be all indignant, like “Duuuude, a job?! Stop being a slave to the machine. Why would I buy into your version of how the world should be, man? Buildings are just buildings, dude, and they’ll fall down one day. Like, everything man does ends in dust, bro. Don’t you see that these trees and these cute goats are like, so much more real than anything you’ve got in your ‘real’ cities?”

And also? Even in a hippie/stoner utopia, you’d definitely be able to find some munchies in your neighbourhood grocery store after 8 p.m. So get it together, Victoria. You’re like a beauty queen with a history of abuse — gorgeous, but something is definitely not right in there somewhere.