Rabbit Hole - Ottawa 29/12/2025
I visited Nas in Ottawa on one of those crisp, cold late-December days. I had to catch a bus out of Toronto at 7 a.m., and I’d forgotten how dark winter mornings get. At 7:00, the city still felt half-asleep, wrapped in quiet. Sometimes I wonder what everyone else has just dreamed about.
I caught up with Nas and we decided to visit a few art galleries before dinner. Nas ordered us an Uber. We got assigned a driver, Mark. While waiting for Mark to arrive, Nas turned to me and said: “You know what’s a good measure of a recession? When white people start taking Uber jobs.”
In a few minutes, Mark arrived. Nas got in and I walked around the car to get in. It took me a moment to get into the car, and Mark started driving before I got in, thinking I was just a pedestrian. When I finally got in, I told him it was all part of my master plan to ditch Nas and escape.
I’m always a little envious of people who can strike up a conversation with anyone. I wonder if they ever feel lonely, or if that’s just how they move through the world. Sometimes, a single question or comment is all it takes to connect with a stranger. The day prior, on the bus from St. Catharines, I experienced that. After I arrived in Toronto and I was heading toward the subway, a woman walked ahead of me, looked at me and asked me about the book I was reading on the bus—The Power of Myth. We ended up talking for a solid ten minutes. Funny thing is, I’m terrible at remembering faces on public transit. It’s happened more than once that I’ve traveled across countries with someone, only for them to point out after we both arrive to our destinations that we’d been on the same flight for the past 20 hours.
Anyway—back to Mark. He asked if there was an event at the City Hall Art Gallery, and from there we drifted into talking about art and why certain pieces stay with us. I asked him if he owned anything that carried a story for him.
Turns out Mark was a corrections officer, working with both the federal and provincial systems. He once had a posting in Hall Beach, Nunavut. His job was to visit small communities when someone from there had recently been incarcerated—explain where the person had been sent, how to stay in touch, and what rehabilitation programs were available. Too often, when someone goes to prison, the community loses them completely. The last memory is the crime, the hurt, the arrest. And by the time they return, they’re strangers in their own homes.
Hall Beach had about 400 residents, and ten of them were serving time. The highest per-capita incarceration rate in Canada, according to Mark.
There were supposed to be two planes flying Mark and his colleagues into the community, but one broke down. And, as Mark put it, the local First Nations staff are brutally honest. One staff member looked him dead in the eye and said he was too heavy to get on the remaining plane; that he’d crash it. So he had to wait for the plane to fly 300 km north, drop everyone off, then come back for him. They did offer to take him by snowmobile, but that meant getting dragged behind it for 300 km over frozen lakes and rough ice. That was a hard pass. While waiting, he bought some wood and tusk carvings; pieces he still keeps to remind him of that trip.
I asked Mark: “So did you find the root cau…” but he interrupted me before I finish.
“Alcoholism. If it were up to me, I would ban alcohol and allow people to smoke weed as much as they want”. I realized now that Mark is no longer following the Google Maps route to our destination. He is taking a longer route to allow our conversation to conclude.
“I’ve never heard of anyone killing another due to weed. The only case I know is when one person invited another to his home for sex in exchange for weed. Turned out, he didn’t have enough. The other guy got really angry and killed him with a toilet seat”
When we finally pulled up to our stop and Nas stepped out, I leaned toward Mark and said, “FLOOR IT NOW,” making one last attempt to ditch Nas for good.