Backpacking Blues

This past Friday morning, I loaded up my backpack with a few essentials in preparation for my trip to Montreal to visit a friend who has recently moved there. Putting the backpack on my back and fastening the waist and chest bands around my parka gave me an unexpected sense of exhilaration on the unusually bright January morning.

(It’s been a particularly hard slog this January, hasn’t it? I am reminded of a line in The Cowboy Junkies’ song Seven Years: “Haven’t see the sun for seven days, November’s got her nails dug in deep.” Well January has meat hooks and they have settled gangreneously into my flesh.)

Where had this emotional thrill come from? I theorize it was the rucksack on my back and the train ticket in my hand.

I spent a few years in my twenties overseas with a backpack as my only baggage and a train as my mode of transport. I deciphered the 24-hour clock (18:20 translates slowly when your train is leaving in mere minutes) and squinted at train destinations in foreign languages in a variety of European countries (I spent 3 days in Paris trying to figure out this place called Benelux). That beat-up red backpack and my Eurail pass represented a freedom of will and a richness of learning.

I knew the weight of a real Munich beer stein. I felt the heat of a Roman noon outside the Coliseum, with its bored Italian youths dressed up as Gladiators. I saw the light that Cezanne saw in the south of France, blanching the rock and Cyprus trees over the Mediterranean. I felt an incomparable peace while drifting through the glowworm caves in Te Anau, the dark space above me lit up with tiny specks of eerie light. I swam just above the proliferation of sea creatures on the Great Barrier Reef, avoiding the grey and deadened coral nearby, killed by an increase of a single degree in sea temperature. I hiked the foothills of the Himalayas, and spun prayer wheels of the Dalai Lama.

But I also lost my nerve at the sharp end of a knife, wielded by four boys in Cape Town who were insistent at taking my purse. It was there, after only four hours on South African soil, that I lost my nerve.

Perhaps symbolically, I bought one of those wheelie suitcases, stopped staying in youth hostels and rarely travelled longer than a few days by myself. My world adventures were confined to friends and relatives in the U.K. and, more recently, the North American-friendly Cayman Islands .

But the weight of my backpack that Friday morning brought back the thrill I get of going somewhere new. Of getting on a train at one end and getting off in a totally different life. So I started with Montreal – somewhere I have been before, albeit 17 years ago. Where next? Somewhere new, somewhere different. Somewhere that will give me that familiar sense of exhilaration on a bright January morning.

I hear Brazil calling my name…