Ontario sucked me into it’s blackhole so completely I almost tried to move back to my hometown and into an apartment and get cemented into place there. I still largely feel the desire- to deep dive into the city like layers of it will peel back on itself and eventually reveal some shred of truth or belonging. I crave the busy activity of life all around me and the bars and shows and restaurants. I want to go on dates and get punched in the face in a mosh pit. I want to be a part of things.Or would I just create a nest and hide and dream of the mountains and the quiet lakes- its impossible to say. Either way feels like a door closing.
Two years of bus life was profoundly lonely. It seems patently unfair to skirt so close to home and still feel this way, so close to the companionship of long nights and drugs and bodies and music and just having somebody to talk to.
Profoundly- adverb
to a thorough or very great extent or degree; deeply:
The Marina in Campbell River in a windstorm. Everything is gray and damp. The grey sea beats up on the grey seawall, spills over onto the gray gravel and the grey sky obscures the looming dark grey island across the strait. The ferry horn marks its passage, invisible grey ferry in the grey mist on the grey sea between the grey masses of land. In the middle of the city many of us are living in the parking lot. Grey smoke spills out from my woodstove into the grey sky and nobody seems to notice or care.
I like to walk along the pier every day to the boatyard where they are stripping old paint off of boats and repairing hulls and coiling ropes- the names of the boats are wry little inside jokes and bad puns. One large liveaboard yacht has its windows lit up every night in the gloom and they gleam like beacons, like candles left on for those lost in the dark. On the way down the Spit bald eagles circle above the big box stores and bleak suburban plazas.
One totem pole in the Wei Wai Kum cemetery commands attention every time I pass. She hovers protectively and reaches out enticing talons. Most of those buried here are children.
One night at the fishermen’s pier it is so miserably frigid and damp there is no escaping it. I rent a Sawzall and blow the fuse on my house inverter sawing a hole in the ceiling for the flue pipe for my woodstove. Snowflakes come through the hole and melt on the hot cast iron and I sleep curled up on the couch beside a sputtering fire- it takes some time to exert mastery over the tiny stove and actually have it produce a fire worth writing home about.
Down the ass end of Menzies Mainline, a potholed excuse for a road, I spend the start of October at Brewster Camp. Old Camp 5, old logging camps where families lived. There’s an unsettling surprise of a tombstone under a feral apple tree. Here’s a sound I forgot I knew- the ripe onomatopoeia of an apple falling from the tree and hitting the ground. The days are formed around the desires born out of solitude. Wake up. Make coffee. Read a book. Journal. Jude and I tramp around in the damp ferns and lichens, through mushroom patches, following the sound of water. I can hear a waterfall distantly through the trees and the beauty of the thing is having the freedom and the time to find it. We walk toward water constantly. Sometimes we surprise a mushroom picker in their chanterelle patch, suspicious and jealous. In the evening I put the kayak out on Brewster Lake, immediately outside my back door, my bus, my life. A few kilometers down Brewster Main there’s a collection of beaten up old RVs and campers in the desiccated old apple orchard, other permanent fringe dwellers. When its time to leave I take a round about route, trying to avoid the 14kms of Menzies Mainline that take two hours to drive down, cursing at the potholes. I pray fervently to an unknown entity not to run into a logging truck on the single track of Mohun West, but at least it isn’t potholed all to hell. In the bus I skirt lakes and cliffs and clearcuts, climb and descend hills, gun it through mud and washouts, but the sun is out and there are no potholes and I’m lost and there’s no cell service and this is what I love. When we spit back out onto the highway I am triumphant.
Thanksgiving weekend out at Little Bear Bay, right on the estuary. The view outside my wall of windows is a panorama of ocean and mountains. There are more people here. They’re talkative and knock on my door to introduce themselves. Paul and his wife and their permanent wall-tent set up that leaks smoke out into the sky and smells like salmon and wet wool. They run a fishing charter and on Thanksgiving we cook Coho right out of the ocean and asparagus I had in my ice box and Paul pulls out a baggie of shrooms and Lord knows I’ve never said no, I don’t know what my own best interests are. It’s dark out and I can’t find the bus, I’m sliding down the bank into the estuary at low tide, only able to orient which way is ‘up’ by the stars, and then barely. Falling down into the ocean. I want to lie down in it and become a sea creature, feeling multitudinous. Every city night every camp night every day of my life has led me here, falling down in the ocean and not knowing what way is up.
Am I surprised when Paul creeps up to the bus in the dark, knocking, after I’ve reoriented myself and found my place, upright, drinking and smoking in the dark? No. Do I know better when I let him in? Probably. Am I still disappointed and upset when he makes a move, fumbling around in the dark, his wife asleep two hundred feet away? Yes. Get out. Get out. You should go now. I show him the door definitively, although he’s upset and desperate and still trying. My heart’s hammering away in my chest and I can’t breathe and I want, once again, to be where there are no people, because I don’t know how to avoid these scenarios. I thought you wanted this, he says. I want to believe the best. The next day after the hangover becomes manageable enough to move and he and Jenn are out in their boat, bringing back the lonely smell of the sea, I pack up and leave for a fresh start. This is not who I want to be. You are not who I want to be with.
