Homage To Summer Pt. 1

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy for me.
I guess not any crazier than things always are for me, especially with all the wildness of the summer, but that wildness seems to get thicker as my summer memories approach the fall ones.

It was only last Monday that I packed up my things from the cabin in Muskoka where I've been living and working all summer! I thought I was nostalgiac then: saying goodbye to some wonderful people I met, knowing it would be a while before I go back up there. Finally completing a hectic summer work contract at a Muskoka resort. All of this can be very overwhelming when you are an open chasm of emotions like me: yeah I know, who'da thought? I'm a pretty stoic lady.

But digesting all the craziness that's occured since I returned to Canada in the spring from Spain has been a bit tough. I've sifted through much of it on the long bus ride to the West coast of Canada over the weekend. Although there's been lots of heaviness, the universe has been kind enough to toss in some sweetness, too. As I sit here with a tea in Port Moody, British Columbia (which will be my new haunt for a while), I realize I've got some stories worth telling.

I guess this blog is an homage to my crazy summer. It's that time of year again, when the leaves back home are falling, and though I'm not there I'm still feeling the changes of autumn in me. So buckle in, because I'm taking you on the derby-car ride of my summer. I've decided to be as honest and as open about everything that's happened as I am comfortable to be, so if you're not into reading personal things about peoples lives that you know, you should probably stop reading here and pick up that OK! magazine instead.

After hoofing it across Spain for over a month on a 1000+ year-old pilgrimage, I was obviously tired as fuck. And not only the obvious physical tiredness: having slept in random bunks at makeshift hostels, under bar awnings, in fields, alongside ditches, walking with only chuck taylors and a backpack through mountain passes and in the hot summer sun. It was also a very emotional trek for me. I left Canada to embark on this journey with very little money, leaving behind a kind lover who was nothing but good to me. And at first this wasn't even the least bit bothersome-- I was on a crazy adventure in Europe and I wasn't thinking about anything else. However, when the rain started to fall in Spain, and didn't cease for a couple weeks, things started getting strange in my brain. We, my childhood friend Caitlin and I, were walking alone for quite some time. We started climbing in elevation without knowing it. There was snow. There was icy mud. To say the least we were pissed and unprepared. But we were also really open out there, and things that were long packed down in the files of memories and emotions were suddenly popping up for the party. I got a lot of thinking done in those days we spent alone. I think it was necessary to clean out all the junk I had built up inside before having met the 7 other lovely travellers in Leon. From then on, we were a team, a strong organism, and I finally had other people to blabber about my life to.

Anyway, so unbeknownst to me at that time, things were only about to start getting heavier. Once my friend and I reached Leon, near halfway through the trip, I needed some rest. My choice of footwear turned from a joke into a bloody nightmare. Everytime I walked my tendants felt like they were tearing, stress fractures cracking in my bones, my feet felt so big inside my shoes that it was more comfortable to walk on the ground with nothing. I needed some rest, after having walked for nearly 20km a day, every day straight at that point. Something just generally was not right in my body. I felt weird; fatigued at random times, weary, just unexplainably weird.

We rested at an albergue (the term used for hostel-type municipality run refuges for pilgrims along the 'el camino'), and because of our arrival time we had to share a room with 4 bunk beds. We just so happened to be blessed with the top bunks with snoring seniors below us. I awoke at 4 o'clock in the morning, scrambling to climb out of the top bunk without waking everybody and not throw up in the hallway to the bathroom. I was sick for a few hours, repeating the same process constantly, all the while thinking I was dying. These two old dutch ladies (whom we called our "camino mamas") told me the next morning that I was suffering from exhaustion, and that my body was retaliating from the overexertion.

So just after Leon we met these really cool people who had all found one another along the way too. There was 2 girls from Quebec, a guy from British Columbia, 2 guys from Slovenia, a young American guy from Florida and one from Germany. They became our friends quickly, and my wine-sharing cigarette-smoking 'bad pilgrim' friends. Not so strangely we all became very close, as we would spend days walking together and nights staying at the same albergues. Because of the size of our group, often the albergues would reserve entire rooms and spaces for us to share so our group could stay together. We always had a guitar, we were always singing songs and magnetizing other young pilgrims. So much so, that on our last night in Santiago we had a farewell dinner with all the great people we met-- the table had about 23 people at it from all over the world. I could go on forever about the dynamic of our strange little group, but I'll just sum it up with the word 'awesome'. I do, partiularly, remember one moment where everything changed. My entire existence shifted.
We had found a beach in Villfranca, and we were all sharing wine together and hanging out. It was a lovely day, but again, I wasn't feeling right. I looked up at my friend Caitlin, we locked eyes, she looked at my belly and I instantaneously knew I was pregnant.

I can't really explain how I knew this, but I knew it. It had been something I had told Caitlin could be a possibility, but it was more of a joke, in which we would resite Baby Mama lines and things were funny because they were Amy Poehler we were talking about and not Brittney Rand. I needed to know for sure, so I asked the most fluent speaker of Spanish to go to the Farmacia with me and get a test.
When we arrived back at the albergue, I dropped my stuff and went to discover my fate. My fate took less than 6 seconds to reveal itself to me, and Brittney Rand was, in fact, pregnant.
So what did I do?

Well, that was the very moment I started smoking again.
I'd quit, and had been on a detox. It was a strange concept to find out I was pregnant and go straight to shoving a ronnie in my face, but of course it helped me at that very moment.
I took a cigarette, leaned up against the wall of a castle, took about 3 puffs
and then proceeded to sing every curse word I knew and sob uncontrollably until I couldn't breathe. That lasted for a whole of about 20 minutes, while Caitlin rubbed my back and said nothing.
Then I remember a moment of complete clarity, where the crying turned off, I was sound and silent and unafraid, and I began to plan. It's crazy when your world completely changes, and you are scared as hell and even more confused than ever, and your mind takes control of the situation like that. Of course, I was still fucked up about it, especially because I had left that other person behind in Canada and hadn't anticipated such a complex situation on my hands.
I was totally alone in this one.

So, the rest of the El Camino de Santiago, Brittney Rand was making one of the biggest decisions of her life. Was I capable of hard things? Of course I was, I was walking across the country of Spain. Was it selfish to not want this? Could I do this alone? I honestly don't know how I managed all of it, overwhelming as it was, but the only way it became real and something I could deal with was to be open an honest about it with my friends. I began referring to it as Villafranca, because that's what I would call the baby if I would have it.
The strange thing about all of this is that a card-reader had told me before I left that I would be carrying a child in the near future, but obviously I took that metaphorically-- right! Carrying a child of knowledge! That makes sense! Yeah, no.

The rest of the trip was lovely, and this new knowledge didn't slow me down, but humbled me and made me more aware of who I was. It added a strange twist to my life, because I had to deal with being in limbo, where I couldn't do a damned thing about the state of things even if I'd wanted to. It was a good environment to think about my life and what I was going to do, because my world had become very small, and to me at that time there was no other world outside my little body, on that big trail.

The camino is something that would take ions to describe in all it's glory and wonder, but it should be left to another blog, really. After reaching the holy city of Santiago with my new found friends, and my oldest friend in the world, Caitlin and I went back to Madrid. We stayed in one of her family members' homes, with his artist wifes wild sculptures everywhere, and flounced around the city for a week.
By this time, after much ado; after deciding and undeciding I was going to carry Villafranca and give him/her to gay dads (first thought), after thinking I was a powerful amazonian, independent woman who could do this one on her own, after toying with the idea of allowing the decision to be made by the ex-lover, I decided I was tired. I decided I was not an ideal parent, not a beacon of light and hope, and that I could be capable but it wasn't fitting right. I decided I would allow myself the freedom to be selfish, and that in my selfishness I was, in fact, being quite selfless. I wasn't, and am still not capable of providing for a child in the way I feel a child should be provided for. And by knowing and accpeting that reality I feel like I did the most loving thing I could do. I remembered the way I grew up, the environment I lived in as a child, and my children would be different. I wanted to be overjoyed at this kind of news. So I made my decision, despite some key disappointed people, and made arrangements to end my short time of confusiona and wonder and lovelieness with Villafranca upon arrival in Canada.

I won't go through what happened in the first two weeks I arrived back to Canada, because to me it is a blurry place. It's a dark, unsturdy place that I don't much like to revisit. But, I did get a lot of writing done in that time, as I did go a little bit crazy in the head, and rightly so. I think thats fair. I spent long days in bed in the most pain I've ever felt in both my body and my heart, apologizing to the wind for my horrible mistakes. I consoled myself with the idea that Villafranca would come back to me one day; that he or she was just waiting on a nearby branch, and would return in another form when I was ready for it. I hadn't completely recovered yet and started my new job at Billie Bear Resort in Dwight, Ontario. I moved in to my cabin, the place I'd be living for the next few months, and met the women who would help pull me out of my post-Spain blues.

I was happy to be back, to say the least. I needed familiar faces, I needed the joy they brought and I needed to laugh. All of my best friends were right at my fingertips again, as they always are in the summertime, as everyone lovely I know flocks back to Muskoka or nearby. At this point, my heart was severely broken because of my own doing, and a complicated situation with said ex-lover (who at that point had vacated Ontario with another woman). My ego was damaged and all I needed was to be close to my friends, and to swear off men (almost...) entirely. I began writing and painting again, and once my body was back to normal it became possible to go out again. So, not that it was the best thing to do of course, I danced and partied and skinny-dipped and camped and scared off all my blues with so much fun even I could barely handle it. Fortunately, my friends are so fucking cool that they would pick me up whenever I had time off, to spend it with me and make me feel better again. In the first month I was back I went on an impromptu roadtrip to the far reaches of Delaware to see Tournament of Death 9. Look it up on YouTube, but only if you dare. I actually saw a person eating glass, and I bet that's more than you can say for yourself.

I went Canoeing to Betty's Island, snuck out with the girls to smoke joints under the moonlight in the woods after hours at work, sang my favorite songs with my favorite people in my favorite pub after hours, went skinny-dipping with loads of awesome people at 3 o'clock in the morning, went to a campout hawaiian-themed party at a native reserve, spent mornings with my best friends over tea, and began to love my life and myself more than ever before. My friends taught me that it was okay to make mistakes and fail, and reminded me that I was a lovely person no matter what I'd done. I am the only person who has ever taken the very path I'm on, and so it's expected that I should be uncertain sometimes. All-in-all, my friends healed me and for that I am very grateful.

Alright, well that is basically the first half of my summer right there. The second half starts getting romancey, adventuruous and bizarre. Its full of latenights and exciting debauchery!
Who doesn't love all that grimey goods?
Until next time, dear grasshoppers....