Many of the images of my spontaneous roadtrip in the spring have faded into the chasm of lost memories. I wanted to pay them justice, however, and exersise my recollecting and relocating skills, create a small shrine to it's short life. I've been wanting to do some writing about that tiny trip before I dust off my big gun, my recent trip to Spain. It all started in a laundromat on Bloor Street in Toronto.
I have known Danielle since my crazy teenage years (I know I know, I am still pretty crazy, but those were somehow crazier days), when we would drink entire magnums of wine, tequila, whatever, and shave designs into each others heads. My loudmouthed, attractively unladylike, firecracker Danielle. We were a tightly crocheted pair back in those days, feeding off each others spontaneity and wildness, and then somehow I lost her. It was when she went West, and I became domesticized with a boyfriend, floating Southward to the Dominican for two years. So answering my telephone to Danielles voice was certainly a surprise. "Wanna go for a drive?", she says to me with a recognizable tone of mischeif and obviously I'm in. "I'll be in Toronto in a few hours."
I get my stuff together, not really knowing where we're going, but knowing we aren't coming back for at least a week and that we weren't going to be anywhere close to home.
Danielle arrives at my shared apartment on St. Clarens, and we throw our arms around each other for the first time in God knows how many moons. I shake hands with the scruffy British friend she's brought along, James, and we sit for a moment in the car and discuss excitedly where we are going to go. For whatever reason, we decide we are going to go to Myrtle Beach, but we don't even know which state in America to find Myrtle Beach. We punch it into the GPS, we go.
On the way I find out that James, a photographer working in Muskoka for a while, has suspiciously missed his flight back to England that morning. There are talks of the party the night before, the hangover, but it's obvious that it's not just Canada that he's in love with and I quietly admire him for his rebellious act. Suddenly this journey is getting more and more interesting as we pass along. From the back seat I am trying to get an idea of what Danielle is doing now: what happened to her house with her longtime boyfriend? Does she work? Obviously not. Thats okay, neither do I.
Danielle doesn't want to talk about it too much and I leave it alone.
The closer we get to the border of the states the more we worry that James may not be able to get in. Of course, we worry that they will have too many questions we won't be able to answer at border control, such as "what do you do for a living?" and "who is funding this excursion?", etc. etc. We make a breif stop in Niagra Falls, let the mist from the giant water-monsters touch our faces, we see the commercial madness of the place, the ferris wheel and neon lights and we leave. Bigger fish to fry.
We get to the border and immediately we are grilled by sarcastic, crew-cutted border officials about everything from how much allowance we have on our credit cards, to where we work, to where our parents work and get told about how strange our spontaneous excursion is-- it's obvious they do not have the same sense of humor that we do about life. They also aren't liking this British guy we have driving the car. They send us to immigration and we sit in a strange flourescent-lit government waiting room for 2 hours. Funny thing: James' visa is up in...............10 minutes. Needless to say we are not welcome to roam in America. We get sent back. Now we have to visit Canadian immigration because James has no visa to get back into our country either. We have an extensive conversation with a brute, bald, proffesional wrestler-looking man from immigration and he gives James an extended visa for 6 months, so long as he doesn't try to go to school or get a job. "And if you do, I will personally find you and remove all of your organs." He stamps his visa with a smile and says have fun.
We reset the GPS deciding we'd like to stay in our own country thank-you-very-much, and make a visit to the ocean. We are going to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on the East coast.
The first night we pulled onto a backroad somewhere in Eastern Ontario to rest. All I remember of it was that it was freezing on that Spring night. I arose at around 3 or 4 am with Danielle, James asleep in the back, a rusty-wooded barn sleeping at the side of the road. Cows in the field. We were back on the road again, and watched the most beautiful sunrise as we entered the province of Quebec.
My memory fades in and out of what I think happened next and some specific memories I will never forget, taking place somewhere along the stretch through Quebec. The long open TransCanada Highway was amazingly beautiful as the snow was just shrinking across the landscape, stubby mountains curled up in the distance. We stopped at a natural spring to wash ourselves along the road, Danielles hair freezing instantly in the cold.
We drove through Montreal and onward and onward and eventually hit Moncton, New Brunswick. We had made reservations at the cheapest hotel we could find, with help from some friends back home near the internet, seeing as we hadn't planned anything. When we arrived, they offered us a cheaper room and ensured us it was clean though it was "a little burnt". We took it. All three of us shared the room, piled our change on the bed for "food money", cut a pop can in half and had our first celebratory drinkoff. Desperately tired, we slept well there.
After making a random detour to Nova Scotia by accident, stopping in the 'blueberry capital of Canada', we turned around to get on the scenic Acadian Coastal Drive. We stopped in mall bathrooms to wash our hair and faces, brush our teeth. We stopped occasionally to take photos of cape cod homes and dilapitaded farm houses, gift shop gas stations. Eventually we find the Confederation Bridge and pass over it excitedly! I'd never been!
Once over the bridge the first thing we want to do is go to the coast, the blood redness that is Prince Edward Island coasts. Our scouting for the closest beach brings us to an eerie, vacant subdivision-esque place: there are no people living in it, just commercialized cape cod homes waiting to be sold at insanely high prices to boring yuppies, no doubt. So we pull into one of the seafoam colored homes, like we lived there, and go and spend time at the water. Somehow it wasn't very satisfying. We left, Charlottetown in the GPS.
The island seems as though it's from another world, though only a few provinces over. We were delighted by the new scenery, and played around in it like little kids. Finally we entered the teenie-tiny capital of PEI, population 28,000. We found a hotel room we could afford and set up camp. We start freaking out about money. None of us anticipated we would be doing all of this really, and we hadn't made any solid plans. We tried to go to a pawn shop and try to get rid of some of our things, but the pawnshops wouldn't take anything too expensive because they knew there weren't too many people wanting to buy what we had, for the price it was worth. We tried not to panic, we pulled some strings, got just enough to skim by as we were in Charlottetown and for the way home. Not after spending frustrating hours trying to barter with the bank to let us cash out-of-province personal cheques. Thanks Deborah, if you're reading this.
Sitting in the hotel, stealing wireless internet on James' laptop, I get a message pop up on the screen from a friend-of-a-friend. Nadien, who just so happened to spend some time travelling and hitchhiking around with my moon sister, one of my best friends in the world, Julia. She says she's in Charlottetown and wants to meet up. I've only met her once before but feel like I already know so much about her, after hearing about her from Julia. They share triple-goddess tattoos, both love astrology, she likes to write and so I don't see why not seeing as she knows so many of my friends. We plan to meet up at a pub for some beer.
When she arrives I'm on the telephone to Ontario with one of our mutual friends, Damien. She doesn't seem to be intimdated by our meeting, and our conversation at the pub opens up around lovers, past loves, relationships on the rocks, our yearning for the open road, breaking free breaking free gotta get out gotta get free. More and more it seems like we are all meant to be here, and I am enthralled and amazed by our interconnected web of experiences. We all seem to be going through the same things and having the same feelings about life, though we've only met up breifly in this moment. Nadien invites us back to her apartment, though things are rocky with her living situation, relationship. We go over and keep drinking, get out the guitar, sing songs together until the wee hours of the night. James drives back to the hotel and Danielle and I decide to find our way on foot there. Nadien asks us to come back the next day to stay the night, and we gladly accept her kind offer.
The next day we wake up and decide to go to the Anne of Green Gables site, though it isn't supposed to be open for another few motnhs. As was the motif of the trip, things worked out to our favor and it was the first day the house opened to the public, and we were the only ones there. Just as I remembered it from the books! Cliche, I know. We spent more time walking through the fairy woods, playing like children, walking hand-in-hand down lovers lane. We decide to leave, and blindly meander down the highway in search of the ocean again. We turn the corner slowly on an open, dusty, grey highway, and a lonesome fox walks onto the road in front of us. We stop. It turns its head toward us, and we unroll the windows. It blinks its inky eyes at us, unafraid and sits an arms distance away from us outside the car. It looks up at us and sits perfectly facing us, glances back at the road from which we came.
We are so amazed by the conversation we say nothing. It turns and walks away. As we slowly pick up speed and turn the next corner the sky opens up and there is the Atlantic ocean. Sitting quietly like a secret, waiting for us, are the most beautiful red cliffs I've ever seen. The fox confessed the message! We are so amazed by the vast blueness that we park the car and jump down the rocks to it. Danielle and I sit, she cries on my shoulder as I hug her, and now I know everything that has happened to her since we've last seen each other without having to say a word. We spend all day there cleaning out our souls. A couple hours later we take all of our blankets out of the car, lie them on the freezing cold ground and huddle together to take a nap, as close to the view as possible. I call all of the people in this world that I love the most and tell them how I feel about them. I suddenly feel alive again.
That night we meet Nadien and Devon, her boyfriend. We have drinks at her house and somehow we all are still reeling on the feelings of connectedness. We talk about the moon, how we've been following it's patterns on the trip, and how tonight is supposed to be the full moon. We should celebrate! Nadien wants to take us to her favorite spot in Charlottetown, the ship yard. She tells me of how she goes there when she misses home, sits in the captains seat of her favorite ship. She tells me how once, her and Devon, had dreams of sailing a boat together. I get the feeling from her tone that it will not happen for them. We all drink wine together and muck about tra-la-la-ing over the thickness of the full moon on the ocean, on us, ont he world. I think I will always remember the feeling of that night, how the earth seemed to gravel at our feet, surrendering. How we all, for those breif moments, felt real and connected and we understood each other. The inexplainably positivity within myself and the people we met inspired me. On the journey home I made up my mind that I was going to Spain in one month.
And I kept on riding the wave of that Spring synchrodestiny, sliding down it's wide paths not reaching for any passing branches to stop me. I decided I would walk across the country of Spain with my childhood friend at the end of April on the El Camino de Santiago, a 1000 year old pilgrimage. And I did.
(But I'll leave that story for another storytelling night....)
