We're seven days on the road now - We've made it from Hammertown to Vancouver. It's raining and it's perfect.
We have another three weeks ahead of us: another three weeks of not thinking about the job, not worrying about the cats at home, or getting the trash out, having no schedule or role except to be nomads together, and to run these roads, between friends and once familiar places.
It was pure coincidence, but is adding spice to this journey, that it began just before Halloween, finishes with Thanksgiving, and that this hysterical and panicked race for political supremacy reaches one of its climaxes in three days. I've voted as an absentee for twenty-six years, and though I will again on Tuesday, I'll be doing so while in Seattle, where I'm still registered.
The continent is majestic. We've stopped for the night in Spragge, Ontario - north of Superior, Thunder Bay, just west of Winnipeg, in Swift Current, Calgary and Revelstroke. I love that name...Revelstroke. I once had a friend who grew up here - an unhappy childhood, she said. But as I bought take-out downtown, and imagined one of the waitresses was her sister, and drove between those towering and inspiring summits, draped in wisps and splashes of cloud, I thought - at least she had this magic, and knew that was part of what had made her special to me.
It's a huge land. In space, in breadth, in imagination. So many memories crowd in, of times I've crossed the continent before, in cars, on trains, hitch-hiking. In a hurry to get back someplace, or reaching for someplace I'd never been; loving, longing, sometimes lost.
It is deep and humbling Earth we're crossing, doing it together for the first time, and it's her first time ever. We feel seeds being planted in us as we observe this land, and the people on it, how they are part of a place and that place part of them. It's felt like a grand sweep, rolling west along the Trans-Canada, through the tumble of northern Ontario, the lakes then the flatlands of Manitoba, the country they call Living Sky for millions of reasons, the Rockies thrusting up, the bulge in the mantle that it is. Sometimes its good to feel so small. It's small and a piece of something grand. How lucky we are.
We have another three weeks ahead of us: another three weeks of not thinking about the job, not worrying about the cats at home, or getting the trash out, having no schedule or role except to be nomads together, and to run these roads, between friends and once familiar places.
It was pure coincidence, but is adding spice to this journey, that it began just before Halloween, finishes with Thanksgiving, and that this hysterical and panicked race for political supremacy reaches one of its climaxes in three days. I've voted as an absentee for twenty-six years, and though I will again on Tuesday, I'll be doing so while in Seattle, where I'm still registered.
The continent is majestic. We've stopped for the night in Spragge, Ontario - north of Superior, Thunder Bay, just west of Winnipeg, in Swift Current, Calgary and Revelstroke. I love that name...Revelstroke. I once had a friend who grew up here - an unhappy childhood, she said. But as I bought take-out downtown, and imagined one of the waitresses was her sister, and drove between those towering and inspiring summits, draped in wisps and splashes of cloud, I thought - at least she had this magic, and knew that was part of what had made her special to me.
It's a huge land. In space, in breadth, in imagination. So many memories crowd in, of times I've crossed the continent before, in cars, on trains, hitch-hiking. In a hurry to get back someplace, or reaching for someplace I'd never been; loving, longing, sometimes lost.
It is deep and humbling Earth we're crossing, doing it together for the first time, and it's her first time ever. We feel seeds being planted in us as we observe this land, and the people on it, how they are part of a place and that place part of them. It's felt like a grand sweep, rolling west along the Trans-Canada, through the tumble of northern Ontario, the lakes then the flatlands of Manitoba, the country they call Living Sky for millions of reasons, the Rockies thrusting up, the bulge in the mantle that it is. Sometimes its good to feel so small. It's small and a piece of something grand. How lucky we are.
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