Talking Pictures And Memories In Motion
Got this great birthday gift from my niece the other day, a talking – or in her case, babbling – picture frame.
She’s coming up on her 15th birthday (months that is) and so maybe her mum and dad had something to do with it, like going out, choosing the frame, inserting the picture, trying to coax something out of her once presented with the present, wrapping and then sending it….. but hey, it’s the thought that counts, right?
I’m thinking that by the time I’m put in the ground we’ll probably had holographic picture frames with dozens of poses and interactive conversations that can be updated minute-by-minute from our wrist-phone/video-still camera/web browsing devices, which will be great because then we won’t actually have to have any face-to-face or verbal communication with anyone. Ever! Great, yeah?
Yes ladies, its true, the clock is ticking on the soon-to-be obsolete 37-year-old model, eight days and counting now. Wacky. I never figured I’d make it this long, or maybe that’s some bitchy 21-year-old talking shit after one too many pints of Kokanee Gold at Tapley’s in Whistler, at that time the kind of work-a-day tavern where an ignorant and world-weary twenty-something could talk shit without being hauled outside by a table of loggers and throttled till his eyes popped.
Those were some curious days though. My father driving me off the island of Montreal to the wicked big turn where the Trans-Canada kissed off the 417, one heading southwest to Cornwall and Toronto, the later following the Ottawa River to the capitol before the pair, inevitably reconnected somewhere around Sudbury if I’m not mistaken. Or is the Sault?
I wonder if I’d have it to watch my 20-year-old son wander off with a pack on his back onto the ribbon of asphalt cinching together (roughly) St John’s, Newfoundland, and Victoria, BC, 7000+ kms to the west?
Long rides those cool, still-short days in early May. To a North Bay campsite that first giddy night when me and a newly-bought dome tent (this was the first generation of the free standing tents that everyone takes for granted today), a footlong pizza sub, half a dozen Snickers and I almost got blown into the river like a giant blue and grey nylon tumbleweed.
There was the horrible piss smell and the sight of the nicotine yellowed and chronic 70-year-old street alkies naked in the showers at the Sally Ann in Sudbury the next night, where I learned that the men have to bathe and listen to a sermon before they’re allowed to eat. A couple of lost days that included the dreaded trudge up that long hill into Wawa, and the inevitable initials carved into the base of the three-storey-high Canada Goose that stands watch over that shitty little town. The back of the goose is covered with names written, carved and stamped, words, poetry, stories, tales of woe, predictions of madness and early death and always, somewhere, the question, “When Will Someone Stop To Pick Me Up?” Wawa has the distinction – or at least it did back then – of having its place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the place location of the longest hitchhiking layover… seven years if memory serves.
Then Dave from Tennessee picked me up after a bleary night shacked up in the bush a few kms outside of Thunder Bay. Almost didn’t stick my thumb out as there was a diner up the road and I was on the way for coffee and a doughnut before I got too far into the day. We drove together across the deadlands of northern Ontario, a thousand miles of pine forests and Lake Superior, grey skies, fishing lodges – Kenora’s 50-foot fiberglass Muskie – and six-wheeled Ford pick-ups. Over the next four days – the second leg of the break-in process for his new (Japanese-built!!!) pickup with the .45 tucked under the seat, a return trip between Tennessee and Alaska – we worked our way through multiple flats of Coors beer, half a case of Wild Turkey bourbon while getting an education about the nuances of Hank Williams Sr.’s music (all David’s), and a few skins of hash, a bottle of Courvoisier cognac and the nuances of Another Overnight Sensation including a Dynamo Humm sing-along tribute to Frank Zappa (courtesy of me).
It was a blast.
I tried to match his stories of life as a barge pilot on the Mississippi River (and how Southern gals are wild for that Huck Finn shtick) with tales of my previous year’s working travels in Europe and the sexual proclivities of Montreal university girls. Somewhere along the way we may even have brushed up against the truth.
Dave and I split up after something like 4,500 kms together and final beers at a Prince George, B.C. peeler bar, though to this day I regret not taking him up on the offer to head up to the Yukon and Alaska, places I’ve not been to this day.
Those were plenty simple days.
Eventually drifted into Vancouver where I pitched my tent in Stanley Park, spent some time in late summer picking fruit on a farm in the Okanogan where, among other things, I had all my kit stolen and got bit by a rattlesnake, bilked social services out of a September welfare cheque worth $450 – still can’t believe how easy that was – to get me back to Montreal for the start of semester. But, not before a big, blowout weekend party at the Whistler resort, right?
It was 18 months before I saw home again.