Maybe it's something about that particular bus stop. Every morning I'm perplexed by the way people line up for the suburban bus I take to go to work. Maybe it's the time of day. Six AM is not happy hour in anybody's lifestyle.

Maybe it's leftover paranoia from watching too much crime on TV the night before. As they say in the lottery business, you never know. One of the ten most wanted might be standing right there beside you and, horror of horrors, he might know that you know, and you might know that he knows that you know . . . and who wants to play those kind of mind games at six AM in the dark.

Maybe it's because we're Canadians. As the ad says there are two seasons here, winter and patio, and this behavior is definitely winter all year round.

Maybe it's a lot of other things. But every morning I'm still amazed by the fact that we keep from five to thirty feet of space between ourselves as we wait. Yes, you heard me right, ten to thirty feet.

I noticed it the first day after we moved into the neighborhood. At first I thought I was alone. Then I noticed a dark figure waiting (or was it loitering) under lamplight about thirty, maybe even forty, feet away. He seemed to be waiting for something or someone. At that distance could he be waiting for the bus? Without being too obvious I kept my eye on him. Or perhaps he was keeping a sidling, worried eye on me.

But then I noticed he was smoking. That's it, I thought, that's why he wants all that distance. Shortly after, another man arrived from the opposite direction. He stopped about fifteen feet away and pretended to be looking in his backpack. Then a woman came, twenty feet from the stop and about ten from the dark figure in lamplight.

Then another woman, five feet or more, and another man, and yet more distance, and by the time the bus came the six of us were strung out along a curving line like >C= company on night patrol with the lonely smoker glowing intermittently on the point.

When the bus pulled up everyone quickly converged and much to my surprise exchanged amiable-seeming whimpers and head twitches of greeting. Huh? Did these people know each other?

I suppose it all depends on what you mean by 'know'. They're regulars at the stop, so they see each other every morning. But know?

This then is the routine. We arrive separately, we stand separately, get strung out in the same curve of shadowy bodies. We rarely converse. Rarely stand near enough to exchange friendly glances of recognition, until the bus comes.

And it seems that nothing will change our strange community of non-communers. Now that we're all settled into this behavior, none of us can find a way out of it, no way to bridge the gaps or break the mold.

I've stood in bus lines and queues in a number of places in the world and I've never seen anything like this. Even the last time I lived and worked in cold, aloof, rude London, England, the queue for the Crouch End bus to Finsbury Park tube stood shoulder to shoulder. We got at least fifty good burghers into seventy or eighty feet of queue.

Of course, Crouch End is not Coquitlam. The North London queue embodies a kind of communal solidarity lacking in most parts of Canada. Most everybody in the queue reads the Guardian. That's the Crouch End demographic to a tee. There are a few nonconforming Independents thrown in, tolerated by the others. The only space to be seen in the tight squeeze is the six-inch cordon sanitaire around the man who reads Conrad Black's Telegraph.

At our bus stop no one reads a thing. We mostly shuffle on the spot, look down, or watch carefully as each dark, late model SUV whirrs by towards town.

Bus line-ups in France, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece are more or less what you=d expect, jostling, warm, voluble, eternally skeptical. The incisive staring by the young takes a little getting used to, but at least you know you've been noticed.

I've never waited for a bus in Germany or the northern regions of central Europe or Scandinavia. But even in darkest Helsinki I can't imagine anything like our melancholy line at six AM any weekday morning.

Of bus queues in South America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa I am completely innocent.

Standing quietly by myself with my distant companions in darkest Coquitlam, I can't find much to do but think. Or, better still, look at the stars in the sky when it isn't cloudy. As this is the West Coast I do a lot of thinking.

But I really look forward to the few days when the sky is clear of clouds and dark enough to see all those stars.

From the bus stop, because it faces southwest, the constellation that dominates the night sky during the late summer and autumn months is Orion the Hunter. And I confess when I come down the little hill toward the stop and I see starry Orion set out against the darkness, my heart races.

The three stars, quite near each other in a straight line, are Orion's belt. Very bright stars above the belt mark out his cocked elbow and his shoulders as he draws his bow. Below are the stars of his feet and knees. Nearby in a tight group runs Canis Major, his hunting dog.

Inuit legend has it, alternatively, that what the Greeks saw as Orion is, in fact, three Inuit hunters pursuing wolves in the north, one of them has dropped his mitten and is kneeling to retrieve it.

It's difficult to describe the extraordinary feeling as I look up at this constellation covering so much of the southwestern sky. It's certainly not a feeling of loneliness as I stare into what seems infinite space, into those millions of miles that separate me from those stars, themselves separated by millions of miles from each other.

And neither is it any feeling akin to Pascal's trepidation at being confronted by the black abyss of a universe without God. I suppose Pascal was at a disadvantage when he stared up into space. He wanted to find God out there.

My desires are more modest. I'm just happy to have a few hours of cloudless sky in order to see the Hunters in their celestial migration across vast distances. I love the extravagance of those distances and the huge scale of the array.

In a strange way the experience is redemptive. As I stand there with my briefcase and my sensible shoes, with my cautious umbrella and my sensibly trimmed beard, I feel as if everything petty and trite can be overcome, transcended, in a single vaulting motion.

The umbrella, especially, marks the exact degree to which one's life is inevitably a compromise, a failure really, not necessarily a failure in the material sense, but a failure of imagination. A failure to parry the banal. Out there, unworldly Orion redeems the umbrella's plight.

Then I think of the others. I often wonder if my earthly companions in the bus line ever notice my stellar gaping. Do they wonder what I'm looking at? Do they sneak looks up at the sky to see if a plane is passing in the distance? Or a bird? Or something else?

I often wish they would stand closer so that I might bring their attention to Orion and the three Inuit hunters.

I imagine the mood of the new queue. Curious, upward gazing, not overly chummy or encroaching on each other's privacy, but bonded nonetheless, warmly sharing a secret, full of a modest awe.

I imagine our federal bond with a strange kind of happiness in the dark starry night. Then the bus comes. As always they hurry forward, the remote ones, shy, awkward, standing aside to let each other climb the steps.

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