Down and out in Ontario

Maybe I like going to Canada because it's the one country in the world where it's OK to feel snobbish about being an American. Anywhere else one is reminded of the millennia of art and tradition that have preceded and led up to the grand cultural accomplishments of modern Belgium, or Korea, or Peru. That doesn't happen in Canada. Well, perhaps in Montreal, but I was leaving it for Ontario purposefully and not just because I got a ride there.

I wanted to be somewhere bigger, noisier, more chokingly polluted and comfortable with its own squalor. That pretty much just meant Toronto, unless I headed back south of the border. Being in a city large enough to assure anonymity is a comfort to me. I like walking the pavements, feeling concrete under my shoes, inhaling new odors with each square of the sidewalk. The greatest draw for me, in any city, is the people watching. Walt Whitman had it right in his poem, To a Stranger:

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
 You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
[...] I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

I love riding public transportation, and sitting close enough to other people in cafes to smell what they've ordered, and imagining what their arms, faces, and jackets would feel like. When our eyes meet I do my best to break into them and make myself into that object which they will recall and wonder when they "sit alone or wake at night alone." In return, I'm just as conscious of how I dress, how I walk, how my wrists show while I drink from that cup of tea and where I must go to be noticed. I am, in this way, a public figure, though one deluded and ignorant of his own obscurity.

Four days I wandered the city, lingering in Kensington market, walking the haunts of the graffiti artists, riding the metro, finding those Asian restaurants Asians actually go to, and getting baked out of my mind at a pot bar and wandering the internal passageways of the underground like digestion navigating the gut. I thought of all the cities I had been to in the past year. Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Chicago, Boston, the other Portland, Montreal, Toronto. They blended in my mind, the sidewalks all connected. It was disorienting, and disheartening.

I was experiencing the traveler's sickness. Not quite homesickness, more like a lack of will and purpose. The great question of "What am I doing here?" Some people I know experience this before they even leave. Why go drink tea in China when you could drink tea at home? Usually I would have answered, "Because it is not home." But the answer had reversed on me. "Because it is home." I was tired of traveling. Home was calling, which was no individual place, but having gone down to a few hundred dollars and wanting a roof, a radiator, a bed that stayed put, that pretty much meant heading back to the US. Being poor is fine, but it's much harder to be poor in a country that's not yours, however much it might resemble it.

 I searched Craigslist for the next available ride to anywhere in the US. There was a ride to Buffalo offered and I took it. So, Buffalo would be home.

Montreal to Toronto

Miles from previous: 330
Total miles travelled: 646

From: Villa Maria Metro Station, Montreal, QC
To: Bayview Metro Station, Toronto, ON

Montreal is a city that I want to like more than I actually do. I like their tidy downtown, their efficient metro, and the usually good musicians I can find there, but the city itself has never made any great impression on me. It's always been a cold and grey city filled with people in dark clothing moving at fast speeds. Those same qualities work in New York and Chicago, but those cities have more of a right to be gloomy Gotham. Maybe its the abundance of art-deco, or just greater size. Montreal has all the cheer of a Soviet bloc prison. Lego-land architecture, stained snow. To be fair, I've never been there in the summer. But I doubt the seasons would much change the inhabitants. The women are alright, but I've found the men to be endlessly boring with their assertions of anglo-oppression.

I caught a ride up from Boston thru Craigslist with a Russian immigrant and a Czech-Canadian national. I got some of that special treatment border guards seem to favor me with - prying questions, searching personal items, though no body scan this time - but as I answered the question "Have you ever been denied entry into Canada?" truthfully (Yes) they let me in.

I didn't have any real reason to get to Montreal other than the general rules of the travel sketch. Someone offered a ride and I took it. But I admit there was a bit more incentive than that. For some years, I'd been referring to a French friend of mine who had relocated to Quebec as 'the love of my life.' The term was a bit facetious, a bit serious. Certainly questioning. I was never sure. There was no great idea behind my visit this time, as though it would be the trip when I would make sure of myself and of her. I just wanted to visit. I like her. I like her very much. She's just one of those people whose life I want to be a part of for what's left of it. You call that love, I think.


It came as a surprise when she used the same words to describe someone else. The 'love of her life' she told me, with some pause, is a man she has known since they were both 6 years old. He had called her the week before to tell her he was moving to Montreal. Not myself. What a relief.

I didn't really expect that I was the love of her life, and now I'm not sure what I would have done if she had told me that I was. But that's not what I got. We had no obligation to each other. It was freeing. I don't think she needed me anymore. And I'm not sure I needed her either. That's supposed to sound tragic, but it didn't feel that way. It felt natural, like one season giving itself into another. We were just moving on. We could walk out of each other's lives whenever we wanted. I went first.

I checked out rideshare. A Belarusian immigrant and his Ukrainian passenger were going to Toronto, another ride with the Eastern Europeans and the same foibles: aggressive driving, impeccably clean interiors, thermoses of hot tea, racist comments the others found innocuous and I found tasteless.

It was comforting to have wheels spinning under me, and the great ribbons of asphalt flowing beneath. Then Toronto came into view, and I got out at the Eastbay station.

Craigslist, Montreal, What a Marvelous Modern Age

Miles: 316

From: MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
To: Hurley's Irish Pub, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Sometimes I really do look around, wide-eyed as Louie Armstrong, wondering at the world. Instant global communication, recombinant DNA, National Geographic, Wikipedia, YouTube. I feel like I'm living in a science fiction plot, one of the more sinister ones where the moral doesn't come delivered on a platter in the arms of the giant robot but you have to dig for it. All the old demons of morality, plus a few new ones added to boot.

We didn't get the vision of the future the atomic age foretold. Where are the jet packs? The flying cars? Human-controlled weather? Instead we got smartphones, satellite communication, and technology more sophisticated than anything NASA could produce when they put a man on the moon. And all in products small - and seductive - enough to be carried in a pocket. I write this now on a tablet, a device whose properties I can only liken to the magic mirror of a fairy tale, though curiously, whose contours best resemble the monolith from 2001, a Space Odyssey. What a brave new world.

In a different futuristic vision from the same 20th century decades, you might look at Star Trek. I have never seen an episode of Star Trek. Not for reasons of pride, it's just never happened. But, from my understanding, in that interpretation of the future, there were other promises that remain as illusory to us as the flying cars: A planet without poverty, hunger, war, disease, and mankind so unoccupied as to spend the remainder of his time in exploration. Not the exploration of the conquistadors or the cold war - for profit or pride - but an unendending inquiry into the cosmos. A non-goaled goal. Tellingly, we haven't made much progress in that direction either.

I'm not really a fan of science fiction, but I can't escape certain troubling truths. I write on a tablet in a comfortable coffee bar while the human cogs who made it, on the other side of the world in conditions unknown in North America or Europe since the 19th century, can never hope to purchase one. Like Eloi and Morlocks, we have outsourced suffering. One of us enjoys health and comfort and freedom while the other toils in Hadean conditions to make that rosy world the rest of us love. But I'd rather end the simile there, before getting to the uncomfortable end.

In Welles' Time Machine, the Morlocks eat the Eloi. So the comparison isn't even that accurate since I'd have to change the plot of the novel to better match the modern world. And then it would be a book not only of discomfort, but absolute depression since in this version, the Eloi would not only expect their underlings to produce electricity and gadgetry, but would, at the last, consume them as well. Is not an 80 hour work week the same as eating a man's life?

It's troubling, to say the least. So I read craigslist to sooth myself, looking at the various items for sale or barter. Bicycles, urns, cars, cremains, umbrellas, houses, cell phones, board games, coffeepots, tires. Whatever you are looking for, you can find it there, if you look hard enough. Even love, if you give it enough tries. Or if you feel like something less emotionally sticky, there's always "Casual encounters" for the immediate lay. You don't have to go to Babylon anymore to dip your fingers in the fleshpots. It's all there, online. A global forum of hawkers. If you can imagine it, then it is already there and someone has made five dollars from it. It's disgusting. It's fascinating. It's beautiful. It restores my hope in the capabilities of human design.

I enjoy reading the individual Craigslist sites for cities I've never been to. 'Rants and raves' can be good to get you stirred up over something: the local school board, the conditions in a neighborhood, the prospects of a sports team. The topics vary by city. Minneapolis has been having some problems with hooliganism it seems, while racial prejudice dominates the Los Angeles forum. Miami is full of self-promoters, as usual, and New Orleans mystifies me with it's collection of fiery posts of occultism, transvestites, and strange things seen on the Mississippi.

"Missed Connections" could best be summed up as the collective exhalation of breath of thousands of people, young and old, pining for passersby in coffee shops, metro stations, and checkout lines. Posting words like messages in bottles to the set of eyes, lips, or angled collarbone that tripped them up. I love reading these, particularly when they are in someplace wholly foreign so I won't have to wonder if one is about myself or someone I know.

It's astonishing how much I both enjoy this vicarious experience and how readily available the information is. I think of tele-screens from 1984. But it's not entirely similar. In any of Orwell's books, some crisis arose and the population would rally around a political cause or leader that would unify them and promise security. This politician would have to convince the people that surveillance was for the best. But we didn't have to be convinced. We bought into the idea of hourly having our faces, location, and data recorded, so long as we could all see thru the far side of the looking glass. Individually, we will never have the comprehensive dirt that the library of Congress, or Google, or the Vatican possesses, but so long as there is just enough of the information at hand to make us feel control, we can forgive these intrusions. I do, and I don't even want to.

I want to think of everything I ever put out there as like the ark of the covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie. The ark is placed in a wooden crate in a warehouse the size of an airplane hangar among many other similar boxes, and so presumably becomes just as lost in museum-quality, bureaucratic hodge-lodge as it had been when it was buried in Egypt. If you look, you might be able to find it, but there are a lot of other boxes in that warehouse. But the analogy doesn't work, since the people who might look for me - potential employers, ex-lovers, the department of homeland security - are much better at it than I am. So what if I'm careful? I give information about myself away daily

I should be troubled, and yet I keep reading Craigslist for that repeated joy of looking across the street into the neighbor's open window.

Travel Sketch. Boston

Mile: 0

I had a simultaneous need to be somewhere and nowhere. Eighteen-months a wanderer, with never the same bed from month to month. I am ready for work, rest, and routine. But I couldn't just wait around for those things to happen.

"A man who can't get things to go right can at least go."
~ William Least Heat-Moon

So, a new project came to mind. While I would fill out job applications and send resumes throughout the country, I would be a tumbleweed again. Though this time, of a goal undefined.

Craigslist offered an option. A new journey with new rules. Under the community forum, I would read the rideshare offers. Starting from Boston, I would go wherever people were willing to take me. East was as good as West, North as South. I had nowhere to be that I could just be now, here. A dandelion seed going wherever the wind will blow it.

But what would be the end? Would there be one? After a year and a half of wandering I've been looking forward to a domestic life. Sheets, showers, toasters, and tea in porcelaine cups. But this, this postponement, this non-goaled journey. Why?

Because I'd rather be wandering roads, and new ones each day, than grow familiar with unemployment and indolence. The depression of another refused application is easier to deal with when the road flows beneath me.

This is, perhaps, the most true odyssey I've ever begun, knowing neither where it would take me, or even what I was looking for. If it were the classic American roadtrip, it would have a clear end - California, Florida, Alaska - and expectations of adventure and intrigue. In prior trips I had known the character of the adventure and eagerly anticipated the unexpected. Now I knew them all, their general pattern, and looked forward to their end, which would come when I either found work, or exhausted the last of my funds. Whichever comes first.

So, a travel sketch, and not a project. I guess that shows some optimism that the wandering will be short. Or rather, that I will ramble as long as necessary, and no longer.

Guns, nukes, and tractors

Maine: something done

Waking up on the deck of a dry-docked yacht in Ellsworth, Maine, thinking it's a good thing I'm doing this now. In five years I won't want to sleep boatyards on the edge of thoroughfares anymore. Hell, I don't even want to sleep in boatyards now. Any future rambles should include either nothing but earth under my bedroll and quiet all around, or else a bed.

The light was just enough to let me drop off port-side of the stern and slink away to get breakfast. A man on a bicycle was doing laps on the pavement till his car got out of the shop. He asked me where I was going, but the answer was no longer unusual. Half an hour later, drinking tea on a rock, he cycled back and asked where I started. I said where.

- You ought to stop in at the newspaper in Bar Harbor. They like to keep tabs on things like that.

A few times on this walk I met doubters who said that if I had actually walked as far as I said, then they would have heard about me. I protested this judgement since the staff writer for the news in Little Rock, Iowa (pop. 447) had come out personally for an interview. So, I said I'd keep it in mind to stop by.

I crossed the bridge and onto Mount Desert Island. The water was now salt, but the air was not. The tide was very well out, and I went down to tideline to see what may have gotten trapped in pools or else washed up as wrack. Gulls were hovering, kicking legs like on bicycle, and dropping mussels onto rocks, often having to drop the same one again and again. Letting go from a greater height would do it one go, but then some interloper might steal their work before they could descend. It worked as a technique. I was not able to beat any of the gulls. But I was more interested in what lay at my feet anyway. Mostly broken and dull stone, and a few pieces of well-weathered beach glass. Having gone glass hunting on the other coast, I pocketed a bit of may have been bottle neck. Then, for a packrat's exchange, withdrew the rough telegraph glass I'd carried for some miles and threw it. It will need time to ripen.

It was then about time for lunch. Seeing Hull's Cove not far away, and the country grocer's that sold food plastic-wrapped or out of steel crocks, I bought a cup of macaroni with my last twenty. The clerk placed the change in my hand and I looked at the mint on the singles. B & L. B - New York - was fairly common in this part of the country. L I hadn't seen an L for months. San Francisco. All these miles away and both of us started from the same place to meet here. The shopkeeper gave a concerned look.

- It's nothing about you, I said. It's something else.

- Glad to hear that, he nodded. You take care.

Right about there was the moment where my mind reversed thru records till it came back to the beginning. Not the very beginning, I don't think. Not where the longing started. But the beginning that came up baptized in strawberry-rhubarb jam over pancakes in May of the previous year, then unrolled over every kind of earth - shore, mountain, desert, prairie, forest - to here, to me holding a one dollar bill with an 'L' stamped on it. Trying to think of every place I slept along the way - every tree, coulee, culvert, truck, couch, bed, barn, bridge - to make a sense of it. And then I was in Bar Harbor, walking into the newsroom, and still not making any sense but thinking someone might stop my rambling legs and mind.

A middle-aged man looked away from his computer as I came thru the door.

- Can I help you?

- A fella in Ellsworth told me you like to keep tabs on folks traveling thru.

- Sometimes, yes.

- Well, I walked here.

- Alright, what's your story?

Anything I could say, everything I had come upon, were the elements, maybe, of story. But they emerged separately without narrative. Sleeping inside a redwood. Watching fumaroles rise from St. Helens. Wild horses on the prairie. Memories like bricks in a walk, or like the photographs I had taken, black and white and hazed, all image and feeling, but in themselves... the shapes of clouds and crows' wings.

- I don't think I have one.

The newsman adjusted his glasses.

- We did have a man come thru on a bicycle last year. He had just retired and was cycling around the world. Is your story like that?

- No, it's not. I don't think my story would sell any papers.

- Well, then best of luck on the rest of your trip.

The rest of my trip took several minutes and a few blocks over to a grassy park overlooking the harbor. Lobsterboats came in from the Atlantic. There was no joy, nor pride, just the great sadness of a long journey come to its end. It was no longer something wished, but something done. Not even the ending I had imagined: a sandy beach with the wind, and me walking into the surf, a continent at my back. Instead, I was sitting on a bench, with the sunset hidden - this being the East - listening to traffic and alone. A block away, a car alarm went off.

Behind me now were nothing but moments. Moments which were never stories in themselves, yet collectively were the story:


The Yang Ming freighter gliding under the Golden Gate.

Sidestepping elk in Olympic

Breaking trail down the Bighorn Mountains

Watching goats with Wade

Chasing a calf thru the corn while lightning crept the sky

Moonrise over the prairie

A raindrop dragging itself out over my lower lip

Fires of sagebrush and buffalo dung

Crater Lake blue-goodgod-blue


And somewhere in there the name of God and me listening the whole way thru but only ever hearing the same thing over and over again: I am. I am. I am. I can't regret any one thing without regretting the succession. And so I could condense it all to this. I went many places, met many beautiful people, they changed my life.

Night rose up from the sea and swept westward. A loon called out from the harbor. A hollow and mournful sound. It was winter.

I opened the front of my journal to these words:

This being the second journal of my walk across North America, begun April 1st, 2011 from Seattle, Washington.

Below them, I wrote:

Ended December 5th, 2011, Bar Harbor, Maine.

And with those words, the trip was over. Done at the end of a pen.

The loon went on crying and howling and I rose to make a phone call and find a bed.

Maine: starting up from stars

Seems everyone's is putting out a cookbook these days. Might as well try to make one myself.

Boiled Venison with Squash and Cabbage

Ingredients:
- venison
- squash
- cabbage
- water
- fire

Materials needed:
- knife
- burned out can
- kindling

1. Walk secondary roads for several miles till a road killed deer is found. Early mornings during the autumn rut are best.

2. Check for freshness of deer. Check eyes for clarity, feel stomach for distention, look for parasites. Ticks will leave a cold deer.

3. Drag the deer off the road to a secluded spot. If this is not possible - there is a steep drop, perhaps, or a swamp, or the deer is too large to move - then proceed to 4. directly, but beware the eye of passing motorists. Work with skill and caution.

4. Peel the skin off the back of the deer and remove the meat from either side of the spine. This will likely be the least damaged from impact. Look for deposits of fat. Cut these out and take them as well.

5. Glean vegetables from a harvested field. In this case, squash and cabbage. Late-summer and autumn are best.

6. Break sticks, build a fire, boil water.

7. Put meat and fat into boiling water.

8. Cut squash lengthwise and roast on coals. Remove seeds if preferable, otherwise leave.

9. Chop cabbage, add to pot.

10. Scrape off blackened skin of squash, add to pot.

11. Let reduce. Eat when ready.

Note: Recipe equally applicable to animals and vegetables besides those stated.



I boiled the flesh of many animals I found in the can I carried: elk, mule deer, black-tailed deer, turkey, grouse, mussels, snails. Vegetables too: corn, squash, beans, potatoes, cabbage, and puffball and oyster mushrooms. No salt. No spice. An animal simmered in its own grease is flavor enough.

Save in one case I could name. Outside Belfast, Maine a ruffed grouse broke its neck against an oncoming car. Plucked and gutted, I boiled it that night with nothing more than the greens from its crop - a parcel of evergreen seeds and wood sorrel leaves, their tri-folds lapped into hearts. Even after an hour, the result was a bitter black broth and a tough-breasted bird that, but for a slight give in texture, may have been confounded with oak wood. It was a meal fitting with the piercingly cold night night and tasted of winter hunger and ache of a dark season. Nowhere near so good eating as deer or turkey, or even porcupine.

My hands smelled of shucked grouse for the next day, even after washing. Strong offal and gut juice early on, fading out to vinegar and earth, and finally in the afternoon, old leather. A good smell, one that could be held without minding.

This was not commonly the way I ate each day, but I never passed up an opportunity to do it. To pass by an intact, human-killed animal without any eye towards making use of its body did not seem to fit with the code I had set. To participate in each place I came to, eating with the custom of the territory, or on occasion, eating the locals themselves. The word for this is 'communion.'

Just as sound does not stop but spreads outwards without end to vibration, so too do what might rightly be called the vibrations of life. Some vibrating atoms in the sun made grow the browse that fed the doe that fed me. For the others fed by the same deer - the scavengers who came after - they now hold echoes of those same quaking atoms, and too will pass them on. Namely thru scat, or being themselves eaten. And so photosynthesis and consumption are the processes by which light is made flesh. It is a sequence not only observable, but in keeping with the progress of creation. Before beasts walked the land and birds flew the sky and the waters teemed with living creatures, before seed-bearing plants and trees that bore fruit with the seed inside, was not there first light?

No animal gives itself over to be eaten. Rabbits run, fish mass and evade, even flies caught in spiders' webs will fight the captor. In the final stages of exhaustion, it is not to the predator, but to its own willed death that the prey surrenders. Man may be separate from this view in so far as alone of all creatures, he may have some directive over his body, and so may indeed give of himself. But it is a choice rarely made, a decision passed over so as to take from the earth, even to the last, by denying his remains entry back into cycle.

After a life made on the eating of the once-living, it is a hypocritical and separatist view to insist the dead of one's own kind be filled with poisons, or placed in vaults, or burned to ash. The greater reverence would seem to be in allowing their inclusion in the flow that brought them starting up from stars.