America by Night

America always sets my stomach churning. Not in revulsion, by any means, but through my fear of their xenophobia. What would that be? Autoxenophobia? Who cares.
Getting to the border at Emerson was easy enough--Canada is calm and friendly and familiar, at least in my mind.
But baseless fears and borders lead to acid reflux. As I passed into Pembina, North Dakota, the guards waved me into a tall rolling-doored garage, asked me a bunch of questions, and then threw me into a room with one-way mirrors, telling me to wait while they searched my very terrorist-looking 1971 Sportcraft trailer. Two minutes later, they come to ask me how to open the trailer, and throw me back into my fishbowl. Three minutes later, they come in, and I tell them that I'll close it for them so they don't break it. For once, their stone faces crack, and I see they're relieved they don't have to figure out how to do it (--don't ask me why--it's the same process as putting it up, only you turn the little black handle in the other direction).
Granite jowls and drooping drawers restored, they wave me through.
I'm unhappy. I can't explain it. I don't feel comfortable in the US. I know it's exactly the same landscape, and all the same plants, as I saw directly north of here, but if not for the cheap, cheap gas and hot, hot exchange rate, I'd be aimed for Thunder Bay and beyond, content in the fact that nobody had their eye on me. Paranoia.
So as night falls, I try to find maps for every state I think I'll be passing through at gas stations, hotels, and rest stops. I find a "North Dakota--Western South East Lower Lakes Area" tourist map and guide," but it describes only the 500 square feet of the rest stop, and mentions the gas station I'd already stopped at.
Finally, I just look at the bottom of my map of Manitoba, which goes all the way to Fargo, ND, and from there follow the Interstate to Minneapolis-St.Paul. (Sidenote: while there, I don't see any dodgy overpasses like the one on the W35 that collapsed yesterday--probably because it's dark. )
Oh--And I'd forgotten to mention that in Winnipeg, I'd looked online and found a ferry that crosses Lake Michigan about four hours north of Chicago. In theory, this shortcut would cut eight hours off my American odyssey. But it leaves Manitowoc, Wisconsin in 15 hours. If I don't catch that one, I have to wait an extra day, and, well, like I said, I don't want to be there that long.
So, replay everything I've said in your head, only consider that I have only 15 hours to get about 1,244 km, and reset your mindset appropriately.
Right. So, I'm barreling like a retard through the northern United States, asking stupid questions and looking for maps, and night falls. Fireworks are going off sporadically in random places off the highway, with it being July 2 and all. Americans and other drivers, seeing that I'm a tourist, pass me, assuming I'm going slow because I'm pulling a trailer. But I'm not! I'm averaging about 120km/hour, not counting the on- and off-ramps I take to search for maps. I bypass town after town on ring roads or circumferential highways or whatever other name they've given their land-raping strip of traffic-easing pavement and overpasses, when, in mid-Minnesota, fog like tar falls over the land. It becomes impossible to see 10 feet in front of the truck.
Do I slow down? Would you?
I suppose I do a little, but only because everyone else is in the way. I'm down to the dregs on the iPod, or at least to stuff I haven't listened to ever before, so Me First and the Gimme Gimmes--doing a ska cover of Sloop John B (and a million other ska covers of easy-listening songs from the '70s) guide me through the soup covering the highway. After playing chicken with a BMW for a while--he'd speed up, then I'd not change speed, and then he'd slow down, and then I'd go exactly the same speed, and then he'd give me the finger, and I'd just turn off the dash lights so it'd be harder for him to shoot me.
All the way into Wisconsin, the fog never let up. Myself, on the other hand, well, I was fading fast. After doing an illegal U-turn just past Menomonie, WI, after sleeping past an off-ramp, I got on track for Manitowoc, but realised that I wasn't really watching where I was going at all, and wasn't really interested in being awake. Unacceptable! I cranked the wheel, and roared on three wheels (two truck, one trailer) into the parking lot of a gas station in Weston, WI, and got a mouthful of the worst coffee I'd ever had, a gutful of the shittiest packaged sandwich I'd ever pushed past my gag-reflex, and enough gas to get to Manitowoc without stopping again.
Roaring back onto the highway, I look at the clock. I've got an three hours to
get 150 miles. That's easy, I think, until I convert it to kilometres and realize that's 240 km. Still possible. Pedal to floor, eyes set to full pay-attention mode, numb ass to shut-up-because-nobody-cares mode, I get back on the highway.
By now, the fog has lifted. The horizon brightens, and as the highway clears, I become zen. I can make it, I chant. From somewhere in the iPod's cavernous stores appears Scott Joplin's The Entertainer. I put it on repeat, and begin a nirvana-like trek into inner peace, knowing that at the correct speed, and with the right amount of robotic diligence, I can make it.
For no reason whatsoever, with the daylight comes God on a lightningbike, trying to flood the earth and kill me with lightning. Bolts fall around me as I'm driving up the highway. Some of them hit close enough to follow from sky to earth, with thunder loud enough to be heard inside the truck at 100 km/h.
Do I slow down?
Well, I can't really see, and the windshield wipers can't really keep up.
So I keep going 100 km/hour. I clench my buttocks to avoid fouling my pants during hydroplaning sessions, and with one eye on the road, and one on the clock, I barrel through Wisconsin. The music shifts again, and Steve Earle's instrumental "Dominick Street," a jaunty onomatopoetic distillation of a fun childhood day, clears the sky and dries the roads. I roll into Green Bay with an hour to spare, and with the song on repeat, I barrel through morning rush-hour traffic and get my first glimpse of Lake Michigan. It's big, it's blue, and it looks like a lake. But this lake only has one side. Cool.
Welcome to Manitowoc, says the sign. I've made it. I miss the exit. I take the next one. I turn the wrong way. I have 30 minutes. I squeal the tires. I back up in someone's driveway. I retrace my steps. I drive too fast through the sleepy old town, cursing the kids/Yankees/tourists who stole the sign that tells me where the stupid ferry terminal is. There it is. No. There? NO. Oh. There it is. 7:49. I have 11 minutes to catch the ferry. I walk up to the door. It's locked. I walk to the pay phone. It's locked. That's stupid. No, it's not locked. But there's no answer when I phone the information line posted outside the building. I look at the truck and trailer, marvelling that they're both still in one piece.
I stand there.
What the hell do I do now? Did I miss it? The parking lot is empty, and the buildings are all locked.
Some sort of police or security people drive into the ferry parking lot. I wave frantically at them. They wave back, smiling jerkily. As in like jerks.
I stand there.
It starts raining again.
In my mind, I take a cast-iron pipe, and begin smashing ...
No, no. I don't. I sit in the truck.
Shit.
I go to sleep almost instantly.
Four hours later, someone bangs on the window. "Do you have a reservation?" someone asks.
"Huh?" I ask deftly, wiping the drool away and noticing that I can't bend my neck.
"Come inside."
Inside, a pretty young redheaded teenager tells me there may not be room.
"Huh?" I ask, using everything I learned in journalism school.
"We'll try to fit you on, but you should have had a reservation," she says in an accent that's a little twangy, but nothing like the Fargo accent (people in Fargo don't have the Fargo accent, either, I should mention).
Something snaps.
"Why would I want a reservation for a ferry that's four hours late?" I ask, but in a voice that sounds far more resigned than angry, since I'm too tired to act anything other than tired.
Her turn. "Huh?" she asks, using all 11 years of school she's had since kindergarten.
"Why. Is. The. Ferry. Four. Hours. Late?" I chant, fairly curious.
"Sir," she twangs. "The ferry left Ludington, Michigan, at 8:04a.m. this morning, on schedule."
Red. Face. Bashful.
"8:04?"
"Yes."
"On time?"
"Yes."
"Ludington?"
"The ferry travels from Ludington to Manitowoc. It does so on the schedule posted. Today, it left..." blah blah blah, I was a retard, the schedule was online, I can't read.
So, anyway, three hours later, I watched as they drove my truck and trailer onto the SS Badger, the last coal-fired car-ferry in commercial service in North America. As the coal trucks filled the hoppers below the car deck of the ferry, I thought to myself, "well, at least I know I can drive 15 hours straight with two bathroom breaks and several different natural calamities attempting to disrupt everything."
Then I thought, "What an idiot."

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.

The Face of Fear

Her mouth is wide open, and, her eyes are teary and wild. She looks frantically around, while sitting on the seat of a BMX bike, rolling as she pushes with her legs towards the curb. Several others watch from the arched entryway of a derelict brick building, in the shade of an unhealthy tree. I notice the man to the left of the biker.
He's holding a syringe in his left hand, and it's pointing straight up, entering his arm on the inside of his elbow. The syringe and its placement are burnt into my mind like a childhood nightmare--the irrational fear that something extremely bad is about to happen, and that I'd better damn well wake up, because what's coming next is beyond comprehension, and too horrifying to even consider experiencing.
"That's Vancouver," Nathan says. More accurately, this is Vancouver's East Hastings. Someone later tells me it's an area called Tinseltown, but by my eyes, it's everything but. I'd never seen anything like this before. Perhaps that means I'm sheltered, or naive or what have you. Regardless, irrational fear was my only response. While Nathan pushed his sleeping son through this group of people, and despite his reassurances, I walked well into the centre of the otherwise quiet street, and gave these people as much room as I thought I should have. Me.
They were monsters. Not through any fault of their own, or in any way they could help, but only in that, in what vestiges of the mind of a six-year-old I still carry with me, they were the embodiment of terror and confusion. I wanted distance. They could cause harm. Nothing else was important.
Looking back afterwards, I wondered briefly, what happens to people like that. What happened, too. The face of that strange, 20-something BMX woman is etched into my mind. And the needle. That and awkward, childless, ignorant fear. I don't want to see that again. Or feel it. I somehow don't know what to do with the fear. But now I know where nightmares come from. And more than anything, I want them to go away.

Burrard Inlet.

Stompin' Tom and I took a walk across the Burrard Street Bridge here in lovely Vancouver. While he wailed about the 19 steelmen who died in 1959 during the construction of the long steel bridge that passes over Granville Island to the east of us, the sky opened up and poured on me. Then some guy ran into me because I was walking in the bike lane.
Like all classic authors, I'm starting this story in the middle. The drive from Calgary was uneventful; gas mileage and truck performance were respectively fantastic and pathetic. Hills were slow on the up, and rock on the down, with downhill speeds often exceeding 140 km/h with little or no shimmy. Uphill, well, let's say if I had a dollar for every middle finger I got for slowing down traffic, I could buy you and me both a submarine sandwich. Just one. And I pick the toppings.
Add the fact that I rocked myself into Hangover City the night before I left, and you've got one sweat-tacular headache-fest of a drive.
Another source of discomfort was the fact that the last time I'd made this drive was at the dawn of my first-ever relationship with ... hee hee... a girl. It was weird seeing it all again in the same order and at a similar pace, but without that new-relationship euphoria. It sort of lacked the same pizazz. Mind you, I stopped much less often to make out this time, too. Sorry, ladies. No time for truck-stop romance.
Anyway, Vancouver is a lovely town. It's not stunning or amazing so far; but it's only been a few hours since I woke up, and I really don't know what to look for.
Here in the present, I'm in Vancouver's super-weird Colosseum library, which looks like a Roman ... colosseum. Duh. Inside, it looks like a huge civic undertaking, well-funded and costing billions of dollars per second to run. You know, the type of thing Edmonton would downsize or never build in the first place. Anyway, I'm here searching for Karen, my old roommate from Edmonton's heydays. Nobody is allowed to tell me where she is (she works here) or if she's even working today. They told me to phone her, but if she's working, what good would that do?
So, I'll see what else there is to see in Vancouver, drive back over the continental divide, and see what happens. See.

Happy Retirement!

I went to two retirement parties this week--my 60-year-old uncle's, and my own. For three months' service to Furnitureco, I got three pizzas and a Safeway cake. For 35 years of service in the saw shop of the lumber mill in Hinton, my uncle got a big party at a derelict hall, a piece of a giant metal bandsaw with "no matter what they say, we'll always miss you" written onto it with a welder, and a cake that looked like children's celebrity Bob the Builder, holding a hammer, with a big finger-swipe through his face where my nephew attempted to steal the sugar rock that was his left eye.
His party was a celebration of a lifetime of high-paying hard work, with a big pension, and medical coverage and all that other shit you get for working somewhere since 1971. Mine was an excuse for the staff to order pizza. I mean, they were sad to see me go, because I took on the role of "main heavy lifter" to avoid the monotony of the digital inventory system--basically a lazer typewriter you shoot at barcodes while the machine chirps or squaks at you, depending on whether or not... well, really, it's so boring, I know there's no point explaining it. It's a gun with a screen. It counts. Boring. So I moved furniture. Avoided the guns.
But that made me the best worker in history. In the Alberta economy, just showing up is a great way to impress your boss. Not complaining about how you could make more elsewhere at the drop of a hat also earns love points with an employer so desperate that he has to give a job to everyone he interviews. But knowing what I was supposed to do and doing it independently was pretty good, too.
Whatever. Basically, I put my back into it, worked three or four months, and then unceremoniously retired. No benefits. No bonuses. No perpetual stability. Some street cred in the furniture industry and wicked abs (still fairly covered by fat) are my main benefits.
So now, while my uncle is going to work on his house and travel a little eventually with my aunt, I'm going to work on my trailer, try to get over the gut-wrenching panic I get when I think of my newly-abandoned income, and wonder what I'm going to do when I get back to Halifax this time.
Oh, and I'm also going to take the wickedest roadtrip in history. Forgive my use of the term "wickedest," but after three months moving furniture, not writing, and not having anything to think about, I'm still getting the neurons back up to full functionality.
So, I guess I'm leaving in a few days. Delayed. Disorganized. Watching the bank account hemmorhage as I catch up on deferred maintenance on my truck, trailer, and family relationships here in Edmonton. Then it's off to Calgary to drop the trailer. Then, with a light truck and a fistful of dollars, I'll roll to Vancouver, dork around with Nathan and Co., go back to Calgary, and get the trailer.
After that, it's wagons east, with no timeline or destination. I'll be your way soon, since there's nothing in Saskatchewan to stop for, I hear.
And I might cut through the States, though I think that might be a little much. Scary.

You're not the ocean, furniture store.

It came to me today. I can't say it was a breeze, because the air doesn't generally move in my furniture warehouse. It wasn't a smell, because, well, nothing in a furniture warehouse smells like anything I'd like to write about. If boring has a smell, it's probably a lot like the smell of furniture.
Anyway, I think it was when the loading bay door opened. The angle of the light awoke something deep in my reptile brain, far from consciousness. The part of my brain that keeps track of seasons and subconsiously remembers successful foraging trips screamed "fishing."
It barely came out as a whisper, but the old neglected conscious part of my brain heard it. Before I realized what was happening, a torrent of old memories flooded my head. Standing on the rocks just outside Halifax, casting line after line into the crystal-clear blue water. Watching the ever-so-subtle movements of the deep brown seaweeds, waiting for that subtle change in direction that meant the tide was changing, and the fish would reappear.
A short wander from that was Laura, my constant fishing companion who made sure my ambitions last summer lay solely beneath the waves of Sambro Inlet. From that my mind wandered to the drive home, and the rotary--a giant traffic circle supposedly arranged for motorized vehicles, but so confusing and misunderstood that it slows the already calm and content and horribly polite traffic into a delicate, gentle nightmare. With flowers in the middle.
Up the road from there is my first house in Halifax. Mere blocks from there is the home of my second girlfriend ever. Two more blocks, and you're on the street I first had tea with my third girlfriend. Three blocks more, and you're on the street where we broke 15 months later. Fourty feet from that, down the same tree-lined, quiet, friendly street, and then down Black Street half a block, there's the two-story home I share with my cousin. We stay on the main floor, and go upstairs for tame dinner parties with our landlords. Within blocks of that, there's more friends, and more trees. And there are memories. And sentimentality. And a big blue-green bridge that crosses the Halifax Harbour, and leads to beaches, beaches, and more beaches.
All this rushed in in about half a second. I could suddenly see myself, maybe sooner than later, on the road, moving west to one coast, and then, finally, back East. I don't know if it's always going to be my home, but I know it's the place I miss most of anywhere I've ever been. I miss the comfort. I miss the convenience. I miss the people. I miss the closeness and the simplicity of the social contact. I miss having to work three days a week to pay for everything I needed, and then a fourth day to pay for drinks.
But I also miss fishing. That simple, soulful profession, too simple to be a religion, but more than enough to be more than a pastime. I miss that. I think I'm going to buy a fishing rod.

Some Kinda Sony Day

(this is a reprint of what I printed on somecats)
So, I just got my early birthday present.
And I'm sad to say that the first song I played on it was some stupid Allman Brothers song. I downloaded my dad's music library and got everything a man born in 1951 would want to listen to. I got the Sony MP3 walkman I was going to purchase in the form of an iPod for my early birthday present. My dad got it. What a genius. I love it. The smartest part was that he managed to give it to me before I bought one.
That's the weird part. I'm not used to being able to buy things. My tax return this year had 5 T4 slips, but they added up to only $13,000, which included $6,000 in EI. A special treat for me was meat with my groceries. Or cheese. Now, I've already made enough in a month and a half to pay for the months of rent I missed, along with what would have been an iPod. Now I don't know what to spend it on. I guess I'll just keep saving it for the adventure. Or I'll buy some clothes for work.
I'm thinking I should get a digital camera, and have spending money for this supposed adventure I'm going to have.
But I have to keep in mind that I'm going to leave. I have the godlike ability to like any job I do. And I really don't get motivated to do other things when the paycheques start coming in.
I just realized I may have sounded like a flake this afternoon when I explained to one of the regional managers of FurnitureCo that I wasn't planning on making a career of bruising the hell out of my arms and hands for $15 an hour (though I did learn that the guy who's been working for the company for 5 years, and who is my boss, is making $12 an hour) because this was sort of my early-(or pre-) life crisis and I was going on a search for the greatest story ever told (or something that sounded less flaky and retarded) and that I wanted to get back into writing for money at some point, but not yet. I'm making a good impression, because I actually show up, and I actually work, but of course, it's not for me. Though I do like the slim waist and functional biceps (as opposed to the old-style droopy-when-flexed cartoon biceps) I'm developing as a result of constant 100lb+ lifting.
Anyway, I'll keep watching those paycheques roll in, and see what happens. Once the novelty of money wears off, I'll start thinking about what's going to happen.
Ah. Things can't be all that bad, though. Dad had some CCR on the computer. Dinosaur Patroller, listening to Buck Owens. Yeah.

And to sum it all up

The Gateway has somehow put all 97 years of its long and tainted history online. This means the most to me, I think, because my entire portfolio of Gateway material predates the Gateway's online publication.
This is a letter I'd almost forgotten. February 11, 1999, Mr. Derek Stephen, who I suspect had a made-up name, submitted his letter, hoping that I'd stop writing my brand of witty, pointless PAG (Personal Anecdotal Garbage, as coined by that year's opinions editor) and, I suppose, hoping I'd write something better. I don't remember what I did, but I'm sure it wasn't stop writing. I probably just verbally abused my staff, and then drank too much.
But read all my great and not-so-great work here. Between my March 9, 1995 article titled "Welcome to the BARD," which took me close to a month to write, to my final contribution on Halloween, 2002, which took about 45 seconds to compile, I tarnished that paper's good name no more than 427 times, not including all the times I ghostwrote letters (and my own obituary). Prouder and prouder.

The Greatest Request Ever Requested

Friends. Hello. I still work at a furniture store. In my rapid trek across the country, I neglected to bring any music. Knowing full well that one can only listed to CBC Radio 1 for so long before going insane, I have a request.
Send me music.
You know me. You know what I like. You know what I might like. You know what I'd hate enough to like eventually. Be nostalgic. Be proactive. Find a song we once both heard and liked. Pick that one. Find some others. Send them, too.
What I'm asking for here is mix tapes (or CDs... it doesn't matter, since I'm getting an ipod at some point). Hell, e-mail me the files, if you want (use the g-mail account nozano _at_ gee-mailedotcom (or e-mail there for my ma and pa's address) and I'll compile them all into what adds up to at least more than three hours of quality listening. And I'll make a best-of CD and mail or personally deliver one copy to each participant. Is that a fair deal? Or I'll just visit you all and we'll drive around and listen to it.
Oh, and I want some Johnny Cash. Don't make me buy a best-of compilation. I already own them all in Halifax.
And with music, comes a soundtrek, that undeniable association one makes between a song and a certain point in a journey or vacation that never leaves you. I also want some of that, too. Please help. Your country needs you. Do it for Ozanada!

And to top it all off, I'm getting sick.

So, I've managed to whittle my hours down to less than 50 per week.
Wait. Have I even mentioned that I'm working yet?
With the advent (and donation) of a 1994 Ford Ranger, I literally "ranged" (haha) my way to Camrose, where I spent 14 hours a day wrapping funriture (rather than plain "furniture"), moved matresses (using strength, rather than fecund momentum) and watched as the unwashed, uneducated, uninteresting Camrosian masses waggled, waddled, and belched through the doors of Furniture Furniture Furniture, buying drunk what they'd probably buy sober.
That was probably the highlight of my week in sub-hickdom: the guy who came in shitfaced in a taxi, bought $700 worth of junk stereo equipment and entertainment unit, and then haggled stinkily with the salesman to take eight dollars off the price. He was our best pal, he declared, reminding us that the store was just about empty (which was quite a surprise to all the other customers there), and that we'd have nothing to do (other than pick up the stuff he'd tipped over) if he left. I've got to hand it to the salesman who sold the crap to this guy, though... he put up with more than I would have. I suggested calling the police, but since three of the other employees had gone to school with the guy, they suggested I go arrest some of my own friends.
Anyway, I'm back in the City of Oil now, working at a different furniture store for far too much money (it'd be a $9/h job in Halifax--here it tops out at $22.50 during stat holidays), avoiding social interaction (I'm too tired and sore to be interesting) and waiting ---so desperately waiting--- for that first paycheque to come in. News came in that my rent cheque had bounced, my phone is going to be shut off, and Employment Insurance, my sweet summer lover, was calling for her alimony payments from our harsh breakup in December. Luckily, I've skipped town.
Also on my plate is a somewhat intriguing but not particularly attractive second interview with the Vulcan Advocate. Vulcan, for those of you unfamiliar with Star Trek, has nothing to do with Star Trek. Rather, it's about 3/8ths of a town somewhere south of Lethbridge. The position pays $4000 more than the poverty-level wage per year, requires me to run two newspapers, and offers up to two weekends per month off. Those would be the weekends where I'm not writing 15 stories per week.
Ah. And I'm getting a cold. There are so many kids here, and so many dusty, dirty pieces of furniture, and so many dumb, slow-working teenagers, that I'm constantly exposed to a barrage of filth and biota. Add to that the fact that there's nothing green in my parents' fridge that is still safe to eat, and you've got a recipe for chronic fatigue. Or scurvy. It would help if they ran their pantry the way I run my pantry-- only buy the bare minimum so that you can afford to pay rent. No meat. No starch. No processed foods. Unfortunately, that's most of what they buy. For example, on the menu tonight was leftovers, something greenishly leftover, and macaroni and hotdogs. Don't get me wrong, I ate it all, but I don't think it's going to treat me right.
Wah wah. Free food. I know. I shouldn't complain. But it's fun.
I've called Halifax quite a few times in the last few days. I really miss it. Everyone is having more fun than me. Last week they played "drunken asshole bowling." Basically, this entailed all bowling in the same lane at the same time, and seeing who could get kicked out the fastest. Good-old easy-going Oceantown mentality won that battle--nobody cared. They played, they drank, they took a cab home. What was I doing at the time? I have no idea, but it involved a mattress. I was either carrying it or sleeping on it, because that's all I'll be doing for the next month.

Zippy

I picked up my truck from my uncle's house. With farewells given to my aunt, who held back her two gigantic scary dogs while we scribbled on bills of sale, I hopped into my brand new 1994 Ford Ranger, turned the key, listened to the awkward rumble of the little engine, forced the reluctant standard transmission into gear, and stalled out the truck 40 feet from where it'd been parked for the last month.
But inside my fat-clogged north American heart, only one thought raced through my mind. It wasn't "I can't afford insurance," or "I have no money to register this truck" or even "I can't drive this truck at all." It was "freedom." Not "Freedom!" as in, "freedom isn't free," but rather "freeeeeeeeedom," like "I'm bored. I'm going to drive across the country," or "I don't want to stay in the house. I'm going to drive! somewhere." Or, most importantly, "It's -90 degrees outside. I'm going to fuck up the environment a couple more degrees by driving three blocks to the grocery store so that my broccoli doesn't freeze on the way home."
So, on three bald tires, and one mysteriously new and healthy-looking tire, I'm going to drive across the country, one province at a time, until I'm tired and sore and lost and content and all explored out. Then I'm going to take a summer off, go fishing, and put shit in the back of the truck and bring it to wherever I want it to go. Oh, and I might see about starting a painting company. I figure, a truck, plus paint, plus someone who knows how to paint, is a pretty good recipe for a pretty laid back summer. Or I might start a fishing company, "Bankruptcy Bros. Fisheries," that I'll run out of the back of the truck. Our business plan: stay out of the house all summer. Our motto: ... well, it'll probably be a quote from some Journey song.

What could keep me here?

I grew up in Edmonton. And for the first time in almost five years, I'm here with no definite plans. I know at some point, I'll have to return to my home, to Halifax, at very least to clean my room out.
But I went for a walk this evening. Edmonton is a big, busy, ugly city during the day. But, if you follow the right path, up the right street, it's hard to imagine the city as anything but beautiful. Walking across the Dawson Bridge, built (like everything else in Edmonton) by developers in the 1920s who wanted to convert cheap farmland to expensive home lots, the silence of the river valley washed over me. The streetlights dimmed, and I looked out over the river, still covered with ice, and breathed in. I couldn't smell the refineries. I couldn't see the condo developments. I couldn't hear any traffic. It was calm, and quiet. It was the lazy city I remembered as a kid.
Walking up the hill into the Forest Heights area, the familiarity of everything was relaxing, and endearing. A few people sat lazily inside the incredibly dated Hilltop Pub, which I'd never been to, but always wondered about. And further down, the little grocery store, where I used to deliver icecream, and watch the icecream truck driver argue with the East Indian store owners, sat quietly, waiting for the next friendly sucker to pend $3.00 for a bag of Doritos. Still further, on the street where one of my best friends used to live, his mother's old house sat empty, long since sold and exchanged for a condo.
And on the walk went. The bridge over what was once the Capilano Freeway still called for me to throw snow and gravel down onto the passing cars, and on the other side, our aptly named Suicide Hill cried out for the old red aluminum toboggan that once aided our attempts at self-destruction far too well (though it was never me who ended up in a cast).
And so on. Hardisty Swimming Pool. Hardisty High School. Mean-Kids Junior High, which was just down the block from St. Kevin's Junior High, which was also my elementary school between kindergarten and grade 2.
Now, Halifax has a lot of good memories for me, too, but not these types of memories. The memories that flooded back to me on this walk were much deeper, much more involuntary. Each step brought back different images, different snippets of my own personal history that invariably made me who I am today, whoever that is. Little fragments of myself, scattered around these southeastern suburbs, crying out to be remembered, and perhaps, at some point, through someone else, much younger, much less tainted, relived.
Could I live for good in Edmonton? Even after that walk, I'm not sure I could. It is a bigger city. And it's a much uglier city than I remember. But if these little fragments of memory remain, and if they're any incentive to stay in a family-filled, prosperous city, maybe I could stay a while longer. Maybe getting reattached to the city that made me much of what I am would do me a world of good.

Where I Started

So, I'm sitting at the surplus computer desk my dad brought home from work almost 20 years ago, typing in the spot where a steady chain of computers, each progressively more powerful, has sat. The old orange monochrome monitor is long gone, and so is the old 7Mhz 8086 computer. But somehow, the 25-year-old metal power bar is still the primary supplier of surge-protection.
The clutter of 24 years of home ownership surrounds me here in my parents' basement; as my sisters and I move from place to place, our lives' shrapnel collects here against the south wall. In spots, the cardboard boxes are stacked taller than I am. Somewhere in there, my kindergarten papers are moldering. Higher up, my comic books are crying, unread. Right behind the bound editions from my years of student newspapering, in a big, long box, sits my telescope.
The telescope seems like a weird thing to be writing about. My first girlfriend bought it for me in 2002 or 2003 as an early birthday present, telling me that she knew I'd never have bought it on my own if she hadn't. She was probably right. Self-denial of extravagances (in this category, everything but food lives) is an ongoing problem/necessity for me. But she bought it, and I used it, and in 2003, Jupiter was at its closest it would ever be for the next 10,000 years. With little help, and with fantastic excitement, I saw for the first time a quartet of Roman namesakes that revolve around the ruler of the gods: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. There were two on each side, and in the middle, almost big enough to discern stripes, was the mighty gas giant.
I'd never seen anything like this in the real world before. I'd seen it on TV, and I'd seen it at what was then the Edmonton Space Sciences Centre. But the reality of seeing it for real (lame) struck me.
I guess now you think I'll try to tie having a telescope to wanting to see THE WORLD for myself rather than on TV.
And maybe that's what's justifying this cross-country trip.
Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll think about this more and get back to you. Oh, and for context, read this.