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…

Some Things

I have just finished reading Heather Mallick’s Pearls in Vinegar, written in the style of a Japanese Pillow Book, a form which appears to be a few paragraphs on a variety of sometimes-connected topics. Inspired by the short, non-committal bursts of writing commenting on everyday life, I thought I might take another stab at blogging. I was getting quite sick of seeing that tomato zombie guy every time I forlornly returned to my blog, only to remain witless and wordless.

On Reading

At school these days, we teach children when to abandon books (as part of a larger plan of teaching reading behaviours). While reviewing the reasons we might not finish a book (words are too hard, topic is not interesting, you don’t like the author’s style of writing), I realized that I rarely abandoned books. I would plough through novels, intent on finishing them, but missing large sections as I read the words on the page, but really didn’t take in what was going on.

And so I abandoned several books: Sister Crazy by Emma Richler, On Beauty by Zadie Smith (however I do plan to come back to this one), Snow Falling on Cedars by Joseph Guterson (okay, I abandoned this one awhile ago) and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (although this was a forced abandon, as it was due back at the library and unrenewable). I was beginning to worry that I had lost my taste for fiction (and that non-fiction was just a repetition of the same facts and ideas about teapots in space, extended to 400-odd pages) and that being drawn into a good book was out of reach.

Luckily good old Ian McEwan stepped up in the form of a phone call from the library saying that it was my turn to read On Chesil Beach, which I’d put a hold on back in July. Wanting to keep up a run of good books, I went out and bought Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, an author I can always rely on to bring a density of thoughts, images and meaning to a single sentence. The ending, which I read on a terrace in the Cayman Islands, had me gazing out to sea for a good ten minutes after I closed the book.

Cayman Americanization

I spent the week after Christmas in the Cayman Islands with my cousin and his girlfriend who now live out there. Having visited several Caribbean Islands in the past (and having not been out of the province for a year and a half), I was looking forward to a change of scenery, some fried plantains with rice and peas, and a whole lot of sun.

And while I got these wishes, I also got a lesson in Americanization. Though a British territory (and populated by many ex-pat Brits), the main port of George Town is set up for foreign workers as well as the daily onslaught of Cruise Shippers, who must line up like cattle to get on and off their ships. There are several Burger King and Wendy’s outlets as well as higher end restaurants (with higher end pricing) offering middle of the road Italian and seafood options. It took a trip into West Bay, where many locals live, to find a place that would actually serve me rice and peas.

And the bars along the main drag, though frequented by some Caymanians and some Jamaicans (who make up about 20% of the island’s population), were staffed and patronized by Australians, Kiwis, Canadians Americans and Brits, all playing the likes of Bon Jovi and Prince, with an NFL game on TV in the background. It felt like my undergrad years, with the heat turned up.

Getting asked out via email

I’m trying to figure out if this is a new low or high in my dating career. The uncle of a kid in my class asked me out via email. His sister-in-law (the kid's mom) suggested it, saying I was a lovely person (possible high); however, going on just this recommendation, I wonder about his standards (possible low). A fellow teacher did some detective work (by asking the sister of the kid in my class) and determined that the uncle is getting a bit chubby and lives in a messy house. I declined politely. He could have been that tomato zombie guy.