Probably because I've never flown into or out of it, Canada stories told by me are mostly U.S. stories. Even when I was living in San Antonio, as I was on both these trips, I insisted on going overland, which necessarily squeezed the Canada part. But Canada was definitely there, and definitely a foreign country, though back then I was scarcely able to guess how foreign.
I had no plans to mention the trips on this site, but recently (this is May 2009) my mother sent me a letter I wrote dated October 24, 1986 and postmarked Rio de Janeiro, and it reminded me, not entirely pleasantly, of all the writing I'd done in that decade to accompany all the traveling I'd done in that decade. I've kept all that stuff in a drawer where not even underwear lives. And after taking a peek, hoho, I sent that stuff right back! But the trips themselves remain personal treasures, and for sheer one-darn-thing-after-anotherosity, this pair is hard to beat. I'm presenting them here in grainy and distantly reconstructed form, rather than as the too-artistically semi-novelized version I wrote in 1988 in my Florianópolis apartment.
May 1984
The venture's capitalization: a Greyhound Ameripass and a plane ticket from Boston to Seattle, both purchased in San Antonio.
Bivouacs: outside New London, New Hampshire and Hillsboro, North Dakota. This trip was, by the way, the first time I had set foot in New Hampshire. Technically, I suppose, I should call it and not Nevada #48. (Alaska would come in 1990; I'd bag Hawaii in 1999. Bagging Maine in 1982, I'd passed through New Hampshire.)
Socially speaking: a guy in the San Antonio bus station said, "Hey man, you look cool," and after giving this sally the Travis McGee four-count it deserved, I replied, "I am cool." Chuckling appreciatively, he then pointed out that I wasn't, y'know, shaking or anything. I scanned the station interior, then returned the observation that neither was anybody else. As it was then time to board my bus, he pretty much had to kick the chessboard over and rush into his unsuccessful drug-sale pitch. Also, I saw old college friends in Jackson, Tennessee and Seattle, tried to see still more in Vermont but couldn't hitch a ride from Burlington to Winooski in time, and also dropped in on one of my brothers in Syracuse.
Literature: the first Joe Bob Briggs drive-in movie review I'd ever read.
Clothing: my friend in Seattle loaned me a curious garment, a lined windbreaker with "VFW - The Dalles, Ore." printed on it, and a large hole below one of the armpits, big enough to pass a softball through. The thing gave me the warmth I needed, but where'd you GET this thing, Tim? Predictably, he'd hauled it out of a dumpster, in the time he'd been living off tree-planting contracts in the Northwest. Less predictable was where the hole came from. In the barn where he'd been living, he awoke one night to find a rat in bed with him, chewing on this jacket, which he'd left lying on or near himself. Apparently he also had in bed with him a cardboard mailing tube, for it was with this that he slew the rodent. I expressed amazement. "Well, I had to hit it more than once," said Tim.
Beer: in Fargo, my first Grain Belt, which I enjoyed, though the barmaid was crestfallen - she'd just told me her joint had, and I quote, Everything! I can't remember the brand I had in Lethbridge, Alberta - "Old Lethbridge"? - though I remember perfectly the circumstances under which I bought it and drank it. The town was filled with loitering Indians and - I think now - Hutterites. The latter extended their idling range into what I took to be Lethbridge's sole liquor outlet. They were gathered by the counter, but spontaneously parted for me. I ordered only three bottles, but nobody laughed. (In my experience in these Canadian semi-official retail establishments, nobody ever does, no matter how paltry the request.) Then I went to a hillside by a railway bridge, and sat down with my haul, and only then remembered that twist-off caps had yet to make it this far north.
Nice memories: Coeur d'Alene, and the evening sky directly above it. The latter is vivid, though how I arranged to view it from a bus is not. I had the knack then, but do not have it at all now, for getting deep-down comfortable in a bus seat. I traveled much on Ameripasses, a week, two weeks, and (once, in 1987) for a whole month, seldom stopping for a night in a motel, or even a roadside bivouac. The two outdoor kips on this trip were exceptional.
Could've been a better memory: between Sioux City and Kansas City I sat next to a woman from Louisiana who told me the moderately sad story of her life. I didn't mind - she wasn't a pest, she knew when to take a break, and I was not unsympathetic to the tale, which was much more about the absence of good luck than a successful quest for bad luck. I tried to say the right things. As I got off in K.C., she handed me a note she had written, a sort of apology for unburdening herself on me. I can't recall at all what I said at that point, but I am sure it was inadequate. Well, I hope she's OK. It was 1984, and there wasn't much of a national stage back then for professional feel-badders, as far as I knew, which was about squat, since I watched no TV at all. So, talk to me! And write to me. Her note was kindly, a far nicer and more tasteful touch than the one I got from that guy sitting next to me on the train from São Paulo to Ourinhos in 1996: he'd called me super-masculino, a real machão.
The border: remarkably hard to cross, I do not know why, though I bet it could be looked up now. Going north, I had my money counted (I believe I had $140 in Canadian travelers' checks - I wonder now where I got them from). Going south, I sat on the bus for almost three hours while inspectors inspected something below us. Anyway, this arch across the prairies was just a caper: it would not be until 1997 that I went to Canada in order to study Canada.
October 1984
The venture's capitalization: an Amtrak ticket from San Antonio to Chicago, and a VIA ticket from Winnipeg to M'Clintock, a village about 65 miles short of the railhead at Churchill. And of course a VIA rail schedule, which I probably picked up in Winnipeg in May - I always visited railway stations, whether or not I was riding that day, because I would be riding someday and information like this was hard to get otherwise. (Whether or not I did that thing on that trip, I surely did it sometime and somewhere, and isn't that remarkable? Who has ever reconnoitered Canada?) The schedule would have clued me to the stop in M'Clintock. I zeroed in on it as a good place to launch my inflatable canoe. Hudson Bay Or Bust!
Firepower: none. This elicited the sort of look you'd probably get in a Canadian semi-official liquor outlet if you ordered just one beer, uncapped please. There were polar bears about, I was informed by railway personnel in M'Clintock. They said you could kill such an animal with a .22 if you hit it in the back of the neck. On this tundra, and I mean the genuine article, knee-deep lichens and nothing else at all on a tract you could easily hide Lithuania in, I don't know how you'd ever get behind a polar bear.
Seapower: nil. My Sea Eagle 300 had lost a plug, I couldn't inflate it, and that was that. Preparatory to this trip, I had unrolled the craft on my patio in San Antonio, and between two slabs of limestone I would find that plug weeks later. Meanwhile in M'Clintock, I just threw back my head and laughed. Once again, the damned thing had succeeded in making me take it places. I wasn't going to make it to Hudson Bay, but otherwise had no regrets, and caught the down-train that very evening.Pik: on the up-train a small Indian boy had asked me where I was going, I answered and then asked him the same question, and this was his answer. Pikwitonei was what he meant. No northern Canadian village looks really good, and I speak as one who has canoed into and then out of several in the Northwest Territories, but when it's frankly an Indian settlement (I do not know if the "First Nations" descriptor was then current), it suddenly looks much worse. The kid's confident familiar monosyllable bothered me, though it would take me almost a quarter-century to guess why. In a quarter-century I would evolve my definitions of an aristocrat ("anyone who, on account of the circumstances of his birth, enjoys privileges defended both by law and tradition") and of a savage ("anyone who lives in a small world adjoining a big world, gets lots of stuff from the big world, and has no idea at all how the big world does it"). Pik was a dump, and yet Canadians outside it were supposed not merely to pay for it but complain they weren't paying even more for it and for even more of it, and Canadians inside it were supposed to act as if such payments were so obviously due as to make questioning them a punishable rudeness.
Literature (1): in the Winnipeg Hudson's Bay Company multistory department store (and on my May visit I'd been astonished to find there was such a thing, as I'd been astonished in 1978 to find on the Mackenzie River little huts calling themselves the same thing), I bought a volume titled The Coming of Winter. Its cover bore a photograph of beer bottles in snow, and its first five chapters had won some kind of Soviet literary prize. I will stop right here, to spare any Canadian readers further embarrassment.
Cigar: yes. On the train back to Winnipeg, I accepted one or more from a man whose wife had just given birth. This was also the first and only Canadian I ever met who was grateful for, as he saw it, Ronald Reagan's defense of the his country's north. He saw otherwise no obstacle to the U.S.S.R.'s marching right into Canada. At the time I was skeptical, having seen how inhospitable and unrewarding that area was. Who would invade, and how, and why? Well, I know now: Russians, in sheer bulk, because anything is more secure than Russia.
Incidents of public nosepicking: 1. This was in Thunder Bay, to which I'd bussed from Chicago. I was looking for a motel, I think; I do remember asking someone who happened to be in a phone booth; she gave me some information while pointing directly at her pituitary gland.
Supranational moment: in Winnipeg, killing time before my train, I wandered by Vimy Park. It was a cold gray day and here I chose just to stand in it, looking up at the snowflakes. Seemed at the time the right way to think about WWI, and satisfied with this thought, I went on to whatever was next. In fact it is merely one way to feel WWI. Vimy Park is not richly instructive. You leave it knowing no more than you already did. But you feel, however momentarily, the power in "superpower." We projected force overseas, and nobody has forgotten. Since the only countries that routinely do the same nowadays are Moslem and crazy, and everybody forgets this immediately, it is hard to say anything serious anymore about superpowers. But there was a time...
Traditional multi-thousand-mile detour: on the NWT trip we had decided to cut things short in Ft. Good Hope rather than invest a further week or more paddling to Tuktoyaktuk, so with that chunk of time liberated, we drove to the Grand Canyon before returning to New York. With no paddling at all on this trip, I decided I had the time to visit various people in the (U.S.) Northeast. On a University of Manitoba bulletin board I found a ride to Minneapolis/St. Paul; there I was very generously put up in the dorm room of a friend of my driver, and from these guys I learned of People Express, an early and very fun cash-at-the-cattleguard airline. It wasn't even in the phone book, but I went to the airport anyway and there it was, with a flight to Newark. My cabbie was interesting: he was the first and only person I'd ever met who'd volunteered for the U.S. Army with the specific intent of being sent into battle in Viet Nam. He was disappointed to have had to do his hitch in Alaska. This could've been the first intimation I ever had that for all my travels, there were all sorts of people that were just invisible to me. Hitchhiking can give you the idea you're seeing the whole of human psychology. Not so.
Literature (2): visiting my other brother in Philadelphia, I was shown for the first time Zippy the Pinhead.
The homestretch: People Express didn't have a flight to San Antonio so I picked Houston instead. There, I rode a limo to that point on its route closest to yet another college buddy of mine, and resolved to walk to his house. This was harder than I planned, though, because while my inflatable canoe fit nicely in luggage compartments, it rode poorly on my shoulder or back. Except for the very beginning of this trip, when I'd contrived to get the thing from my cottage to the San Antonio Amtrak station in an elaborate relay of bicycling and municipal-bussing, I'd never had to hoick it any great distance. Here in Houston, I discovered that the inflatable fit nicely in an abandoned shopping cart. I pushed it through residential streets to my friend's house, the paddle sticking straight up. A policeman drove by me, but did not tarry to ask what I was doing.
© 2009 J.A.Hutter