Interlude

I’m standing on a precipice near Halifax. It’s getting colder, the air smells rainy, and I’m incapable of moving. Bravery and confidence have turned to panic, which has solidified, the same way the muscles in my body have. I have three solid contact points. One is a deep, hand-shaped, finger-depth hole in the side of the ironstone I’m trapped on. Both feet are firmly planted on a space three-quarters as wide as my shoes.

My thoughts have all but halted. I’ve thought of everything.

Jumping: if it were deep water, I’d consider it. If it were cushions, I’d bethere.

The way I came is downhill and my body won’t let me turn around; I can’t go forward. The hand- and footholds are millimeters farther than I’ll let myself stretch. After an instant of shuffling , I stay still.

Help offers have been rebuked. At this stage in my adrenaline rush, I’m incapable of trust. My panic is too deep. “I’ve got three contact points,” says Nick, sitting above on a ledge I could scramble to if I was a foot up or east from my prison. “Seriously, I’m not going to let you go.”

I shuffle vainly. I can’t take his help. It’s beyond distrust. He doesn’t want to kill me, but he will. If I take his hand, I will die.

A shudder moves through my legs, which I spent earlier by walking for two hours. They’ll shake more soon, further rattling my shattered confidence.

I turn my head. The hand is there, waiting. The contact points are still firm, all six of them: mine and his. I turn my body, take the hand, take the step from my outcrop, and work slowly down the tiny path until my feet are at sea level, flat, and secure. It rains.

(*I wrote this in 2003, about two weeks after I moved to Halifax. This was my first real panic attack. Now I get them when swimming, but that's a different story that I didn't use as a writing assignment topic in Journalism school.*)

North-West Rebellion (100 years later)

Winnipeg. Ah, that shining gem, firmly nestled in the crown of Canada, which, I guess, would be southern Manitoba.
Yeah, right.
Driving into Winnipeg is like driving into any other ugly modern city. But the deeper you get, the further back in time you go, until you're surrounded by ancient brick buildings, old tree-lined streets, and cheap, cheap rents, considering you're downtown in a town with almost half a million people.
Winnipeg, so they say, was the centre of Canada's railroad world in the early 1900s, exploding from a farmers' backyard and enveloping ... well, some large area, which is now almost entirely the same as it was in 1920. Cool old apartments, cool old office buildings, and, compared to the last time I was there, much more lively and less abandoned-looking.
I met up with one of my history-friends, Karyn. We met in Bamfield at a marine sciences station where we took the same marine invertebrates course. She suffered from boyfriend trouble the whole time; I cheered her up by making up stories where deep-sea octopods competed with this lame boyfriend for her attentions. Flash forward four years, and I can't make up an interesting story about octopuses to save my life. Can you? Try it! They have to be anthropomorphic octopuses for the story to count.
Anyway, it being Canada Day, we walked down to degenerate obese-looking Winnipeger Square (also known as the Forks, or something) to watch the fireworks. Karyn tries to keep away from various people she doesn't want to see, we get ditched by the girl we go there to meet, and end up walking back to a little Greek restaurant on the corner of Broadway and somethingorother, where the power of a single beer brings me back to the shores of Bamfield Inlet. It's so cool. As Karyn and I sit there and chat, the stream of memories becomes a flood as we talk about people I hadn't even thought of for years and years. All the odd characters, who really become dynamic and intriguing after six weeks in four-person dormitory cabins on the cliffs overlooking Slightly Polluted Bay, come back to life. "So and so found out she was pregnant the whole time," Karyn says. "And Joe Blow, he was diagnosed with this-and-that, after he left the course." And so on. I've forgotten most of it again already, thanks to the flush handle that somehow grew out the side of my memory, but it was still cool to relive a little bit of the time I spent there.
The next day, after Karyn so graciously gave up her bed and slept on the couch (with her cat bothering her the whole time, and me resting undisturbed) , we drove out to a weir over the Assiniboia River, where we talked about fishing, and watched the dog-sized catfish leap from the water, perhaps hoping to catch a giant pelican or small child. As the sun beat down on our heads, we took pictures of fish poachers, half-eaten barbecue dinners, innocent bystanders, and other stupid things nobody would ever bother taking pictures of if they weren't weird.
I thought it was fun.
With that, I proceeded to get lost on the way out of town, missing a turn (the only turn required before the border) less than two blocks from Karyn's house. But after a short tour of ugly and plain suburban Winnipeg, I was on my way, creeping towards the American border, trailer in tow.

Saskatchewan

West of Calgary, in a normal year, the prairie, I think, is usually hot and dry. This year, though, a combination of nightly rain and daily sun made the July 1st rolling grasslands explode with verdence. Saskatchewan is not flat, nor is it dull. Throughout the southern part of the province, following the Trans-Canada, the landscape rolls and dips with the scars of glaciers. To the south of the highway until Regina, you see an island of green thousands of feet above the grasslands that surround it. This area, the Cypress Hills, is a remnant of what the prairies once were before the glaciers etched them flat--a thousand-kilometer plateau of mountains biomes not found anywhere else this far east. They follow you along as you pass through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, mocking the low, chalky, valleys full of rocks and mud left behind when the great continental ice sheet receded 10,000 years ago.
North of the highway, little and big hillocks roll on until the horizon, left behind as the melting glacier dropped the rocks it had etched from the land. In between, just over the Saskatchewan border, is the worst-maintained stretch of highway in the history of road
construction. It's a patchwork quilt of oddball pavement. Each patch is an inch higher than the next, and the patchless spots could well be meteorite craters or dynamite scars, because this highway looks like a battlefield. Fortunately for me, the only victim in this battle was my back (as opposed to something mechanical on the truck that I couldn't afford to fix), with some collateral damage in the form of a mysterious rattle from inside the cab of the truck.
After about five hours of driving, the sun begins to set. I know I don't want to pay for camping, so I turn off the highway to find a treed spot near the South Saskatchewan River to roll up the tent trailer, happily following behind the truck (so far, anyway).
Off the highway, a little of the stereotypical Saskatchewan appears. North of the highway, in this area, farms do go on forever. Ranches and cows seem to be the only thing on this rutted gravel road. Irrigation gear rolls through the fields, watering some sort of plant I don't recognize. And the country roads barely correspond to the maps. I get sidetracked several times, half because I'm looking for an out-of-the-way place to park, and half because a straight road on an Canadian Automobile Association map is not necessarily a straight line in Saskatchewan's backwaters.
Lost or not, I scout horse farms, long treed windbreaks, and other hidden-looking resting places. At one point, I consider parking the trailer and truck in a long row of neatly arranged derelict vehicles, with my own dereliction as a disguise, but I realise the set-up trailer would be a bit of a giveaway.
Onward I go, watching the sun sink below the horizon. I'm now about 60 kilometers off course, though not entirely lost yet. I get the trailer stuck in a small grassy spot surrounded by ditch, and stall the truck at least 15 times trying to back out, while a family of farmers watches in the distance. They'd already shaken their fists at me angrily for coming down their abandoned farmhouse road, so when I passed by, they stared at me in a confused, animal-protecting-territory way. I avoided eye contact and retraced my steps back to the confusing road. Finally, after getting stuck at a ferry station on the shores of the South Saskatchewan, I turned 180 degrees (after jackknifing the trailer three times, and stalling four more in front of a man in a red pickup who I was blocking) and started up Highway 42.
In the distance, in the dying twilight, I saw what grew to be a grain elevator. No railroad tracks went up to the grain chute any more, though. Behind it, there were a few houses, none of which had any lights on. The streetlights were also out. Out of curiousity, I turned in, and drove past what might have been main street to what I called Second Street. It was a tree-and-weed-lined pair of still-paved tracks, with one dark house on one side, and nothing but Canada thistle and mosquitos on the other. I did a full lap of main and Second streets. The one house on the end of Main Street had had its lawn cut at some point recently, and two old trucks were parked out front, but its lights were also dark. I drove back into the thistle off Second Street, and parked. Stepping out, my mouth filled to capacity with mosquitos, and every available space on my skin was covered with the little bloodsuckers, hovering noisily onto my exposed flesh, and lining up like oil derricks on the endless Alberta landscape. Undaunted, I set up the tent trailer, and, feeling particularly defiant to the little assholes, assembled my telescope in the trailer, and carried it into the middle of Second Street, where I was besieged again. Wrapping a towel around my head, I see Venus' half-crescent, and just below it, Saturn, tiny in my viewfinder, wrapped perpetually by its rings. To the south, the last bright object, Jupiter, looks like a blur, but to the left of it, four tiny specks of light sit seemingly motionless.
Satisfied at my telescope prowess, and sick of having bugs in my mouth, I settle into the trailer for the first time since my uncle graciously donated it to my as of yet pointless quest, and began reading Carl Sagan's novel Contact, about, oddly enough, man's first contact with an alien civilization (which was turned into that movie with Jodie Foster). The trailer is comfortable, and outside is dead silent. I get through about three sentences before passing out.
The next morning, I awake to sweltering heat. The sun has been up for hours, I think, because I'm drenched with perspiration, and it's bright and humid inside the canvas walls of the ancient trailer.
Rising and replacing my damp clothes, I step out into a silent green oasis. The dark house across from me looks much less menacing this morning. A walk around the block reveals little I hadn't seen before--there's still nobody here. I find a few more houses hidden by overgrown ornamental shrubs, but that's all there is. There's what looks like an old shop building (though without windows or signs) on Main Street, but there's only a single door in the front, and it's closed. But it has power running to it, and the lawn is cut in front. There's still nobody at the truck house, either.
I go from empty house to empty house, trying to piece this story together. I assume, when the train stopped running to the grain elevator, the town died. I imagine all there was to keep the town there was the elevator, and with it gone, the residents either died or moved away.
The town had died so hard that the north side of Second Street was actually bordered by barbed wire. At some point, in the only sighting of reverse urban sprawl I saw on my trip, a rancher had actually annexed the yard and house here, and made it into pasture, though he left the buildings standing for the animals. I thought about this a lot as I packed up and drove onwards. In BC and Alberta, around every major, and even some not-so-major cities and towns, acre after acre were being scraped barren and then built upon, rendering the land dead and useless forever. Here, though, in this one, small, dead town, a tiny little space, no bigger than your average building lot in suburban Alberta, the land had won, reclaiming a little bit of territory in what seemed for all of the trip before and after this like a battle it would never ever win.

Crowsnest Highway Highs and Lows

It's a long way from Vancouver to Calgary, no matter which way you go. The way I went, though, is much, much longer. Three hours longer, to be exact.
What was a ten-hour drive westward became a 13-hour drive through some of the most beautiful countryside in Canada. Southern BC is beautiful. From the lush green semi-rain-forests of the coast, to the scrubby semi-desert mountains of south central BC, to the gigantic calm and beautiful lakes and farms of the Okanagan Valley, three hours was a small price to pay. Had I had my trailer, and if I had wanted to add a month to my vacation, I would have and could have happily stopped anywhere along this trail and camped for a month. It's probably better that I didn't have my trailer, because I may have just parked somewhere out of the way, and reemerged in October when it got too cold to live in a tent trailer.
Travelling eastward, though, the landscape, though beautiful, became a little sombre. Past Creston, I was entering what was and probably still would be one of my favourite places in the world. The Crowsnest Pass was my home away from home for most of my time in Calgary. A lot of the coolest things in my life happened there; I climbed mountains, I ate food, I hiked in the hills, I swam in the lakes, but, most importantly, it was my sanctuary from what seemed at the time like an unhappy situation. I was, for the most part, miserable in my Calgary home, my free, loving, entertaining home, with my girlfriend. Of course, now I know I couldn't have had it better than rent-free living with someone you like enough to consider marrying, but life is a harsh teacher, blah blah blah.
Anyway, driving through the pass was like a reminder of what this place meant to me. There was the cave just off the train tracks where my best friend and I tried to spelunk, but where I panicked and chickened out. Further up and a little north, there was the lake in the middle of which I proposed to my first ever girlfriend, and meant it. Further from that was the abandoned coal mine we'd explore every summer, searching through the ruins for ghosts and othersuch kitch and history, while marvelling at the massive works of the tipple--the building where the mine cars once dumped all the coal into waiting railroad cars below. All this crumbling infrastructure was fascinating in its dereliction, time after time. And I always knew I could come back to the little house on 19th ave, Blairmore, where I had my first and only engagement party, surrounded by her parents, and mine. Right by the creek you could watch the trout get stuck when the water levels got low during warm summers, and move them to the Crowsnest River if they'd let you catch them. Or, if her parents weren't there that weekend, you could burn all the wood they'd cut from the gigantic lilac hedge. These all sound like childhood memories, but for someone edging up on 30 years old, they were a throwback to childhood, and a source of happiness in the simplest sense. Explore your limits in the wilds daily, and return to the family and fiancee you knew would always be there. My short three years in Calgary are punctuated with technicolour memories of this place, and more and more erupt the longer I think of it.
I passed through this town last week, and it all returned again. Finally, thinking there would be someone to stop in and visit at the old house, I passed by it, and the lights were out. All the familiar vehicles were there. I could have written the guestlist on a single line of paper: her, her parents, perhaps.
I could have written the hardest list of people not invited; the ugliest, most painful list: me. I couldn't have gone back into that house. Not the way I used to. Not the way where I knew I'd look out over the autumn leaves that last season we'd been there, where, as we closed up the house for the winter, I knew, or thought I knew, that I'd be back there. Not in the way where I'd lay together with her, or, when her parents were there, in the bottom bunk of the crappy old bunk beds, hoping for that last kiss goodnight, or whatever, from her before I'd fall off into the soundest sleep I'd ever had, and likely will have for ages, until I'm somewhere that comfortable again.
So, after a quick, shy look at a lost home that wasn't home any more, and never really was, I guess, I began the two hour trek that would take me back to Calgary, and, at least, some kind of rest. I kept the music off, and, as the moon crested over a string of foothills called the Whaleback, which I'd passed by every other time I'd been to Blairmore, I tried hard to keep my mind on other things. But, with it, and the place it led to, being the only thing I'd thought of for three years in Calgary, I eventually let my mind drift back to where it wanted to go, and silently lamented what I'd lost. Following our familiar path to Calgary, I drove alone, trying not to cry, and, more importantly, trying not to fall asleep.

Back to the beginning: Vancouver

In the beginning, there was Calgary. And God said, "let there be West." And so it was.
In a little over 10 hours, sans trailer, which was left in Calgary for fuel economy and uselessness purposes, I drove into old Vancouver town, crashing directly into old pal Nathan, and his lovely wife and son Rachel and little Augusten (Gusto). Fortunately, all survived.
Nathan, despite quite a few years of marriage, is much the same--vitriolic (if that means acidic and smart-mouthed), balding, and fun. Ever-present is our childish meaningless banter, where we lob mindless tripe back and forth until Nathan folds and says something along the lines of "I always love these conversations we have" or "I don't know what we're talking about."
Rachel, my severely pregnant host, kept me company during the early, early mornings when Nathan was working as an abusive English-as-a-second-language teacher. For breakfast all three days we had eggies and toast, as directed by gusto, who knew every step required for producing said food, and dictated in no uncertain terms to his mother what they were. "Toast in there." "Push it down." "Eggies in water." "Wipe face." "Gusto make pooty bum." All these phrases could be heard every morning. Often in that order. And usually using only the consonants G and B, with other interesting modifications. "Eggie in awa (water)." "But (put) it in WoodyBuzz 2 (Toy Story 2)" "Widdo Bear (incomprehensible episode name) (Little Bear mindless tripe watched over and over again (but only once a day, for the sake of Rachel's sanity)).
What a cute kid, though. Responded well to teasing, and became fairly good at making stupid faces and opening his mouth while chewing food with little prompting. Kids seem to know what's inappropriate, and also understand that it's far more entertaining than staying still or being obedient. Obedience is obviously the role of the parents -- again, "eggie in awa."
Another classic of Gateway history lives in Van, good old Karen Liebel. Once entertainment editor, now masters of book-sorting student, in the nine years since she left Edmonton, went to Japan, and came back to Vancouver, she has changed almost none. Just like old times, I put her, Nathan (her former editor) and I together, and we were belligerent to eachother until we became drunk enough to profess our undying love for one another. Perhaps not. But drunk enough to speak civilly to eachother. Sober, these two are entertaining as well, with subtle and not-so-subtle insults flying constantly, but drunk, they're hilarious. An example? Well, we spent about half an hour abusing a bronze statue of a horse (check out the photos on facebook) and ... um, well, I don't remember why this was really funny, because I think we were two pitchers in at this point. MY point, as you may have guessed, is that these two were exactly the same. Nathan may be a little less acidic now, and Karen a little happier than she was nine years ago, but otherwise, it might as well have been 1998, and we might as well have been in RATT, the U of A's crappy 7th-story watering hole/pukatorium.
So, I visited the heck out of them, had that harrowing East Hastings experience (read a few posts down) and then, on my way out of town, did a driving tour of Stanley Park ( which looked much like Halifax's Public Gardens, which also had a ton of trees knocked down by big winds), got slowed down (but not lost) in North Van, and then finally got to cross the Second Narrows Steelworkers Memorial Bridge, as immortalized in Stompin' Tom Connors' song, The Bridge Came Tumbling Down (or something), which I listened to three times while bogged down in traffic on the bridge.
And there began the beginning of the eastward trek. Next up: thirteen hours straight of mountain highways.

the story so far...

Here's the scoop:
Ignore all those pauses, and think of me stinking up a 13-year-old truck with hour after hour of sweat and gas, and you've got my trek so far.
This afternoon, I'm in Leamington, Ontario, after spending the night at a over-50-only campsite I snuck into at 2:00 in the morning. Man-o-man, o I wish I could show you some of the photos. But the battery in the camera died, so that's for later.
Anyway, it's been a mad dash across this great nation of ours, and part of theirs.
I'll break it up into headings, and you can all pretend you're reading different posts that were written as they happened, rather than all at once at the Leamington, Ont. public library. And I may run out of time before I get through the whole thing.
Edmonton!
I wrote about this. Quit job. Left city. Got to Calgary. Drank with the Dude, went to some street fest, sang Karaoke, left.
Um... I'm already out of time.


Today: Leamington, Ontario
Yesterday--Started in Manitoac, Wisconsin (8am)
Day before- Started driving in Winnipeg at 5:00 p.m.Day before: Started in Lawson, Sask. at 12:00p.m.Day before: Started in Calgary at 2:00Day before: Drank in Calgary.Day before: Got to Calgary at 3:00 a.m.Same day: Left Vancouver at 10:00.Three days before that: got to Vancouver at 10:30p.m.Day before that: Left Calgary at 12:00p.m or somethingDay before that: Drank in Calgary with DaveDay before that: Left edmonton and got to Calgary at 8:00p.m. orsomething. You were there.ok. Now read it all backwards. Or try this link. It shows allthe times I got lost.