The Homeowner, Part 2

Houses are money pits. It’s not their fault; it’s their nature. I suppose I still would have bought my house had I known how expensive it would be. It’s equity, after all. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not stupid; I knew it would be expensive. I knew we had to put a sizable down on it, to reduce the years we would need to pay for it (interest rates were about six percent back then, far better than the sixteen when I graduated, but six percent still made for fairly big payments); and I knew we had a lot of furniture to buy, considering neither Bev nor I had much of anything. What I didn’t realize was all the other stuff we had to buy too.

We were lucky in that we were able to buy much of our first furniture from the prior owners. That saved us a lot of money. And we were able to buy some discontinued floor models from the furniture stores, saving us a bundle more.

We were very lucky in that my parents bought us a used snow blower as our house-warming gift. It was also my birthday gift and my Christmas gift that year.

We were not so lucky in much else. There was a lawnmower to buy, rakes and shovels and deck furniture. And a barbeque. And utensils for the barbeque. There were can openers, there were pots and pans and utensils and cutlery. Spices! There were sheets, and pillows and headboards and skirts. And there were phones and cable and utilities to connect. I really don’t think either of us realized just how much there was to do when setting up your first house.

There were the big expenses, to: there were taxes, there was insurance.

That left little for food. I jest, but that’s what it felt like. Jeff was rightly amused one day by the thinness of fast-fry steaks I’d bought to barbeque, but when one is on a budget, one must scrimp where one must save. But food was a must.

That left even less for vacations. Maybe we ought to have skipped one that year, but we didn't. We did go to Manitoulin that year in September. It didn’t cost much, just the gas and the groceries, and we’d have bought those, either way.

Summer became autumn, the leaves paled, green to yellow and then spotted brown, falling, becoming brittle and crunching underfoot. Winds shifted from West to North. The first snows lit upon the blanket of leaves I’d ceased racking after the October rains became November flurries.

There were Christmas trees to buy, Christmas lights, Christmas gifts.

Then the snow came.

It was a big year for snow. It snowed every day. It snowed every day! There were flurries, there were centimeters of accumulation. There were three to five, there were ten to fifteen. If it did not snow, it blew.

The wind picked it up and swirled it around and I discovered that my house was built in such a way as to invite an eddy at my door. I also discovered that a double wide drive is not a boon. A double wide drive holds a lot of snow, far more than a single. The banks are higher, the crests reaching a meter in height in no time, making it a chore to throw the snow over it, snowblower or no snowblower. My snowblower was old, the chute lower than later models. I had to pull the banks down when they rose too high.

I cleaned out the driveway everyday one week, only to watch as the wind carried another meter back into it. I cleaned it before going off to nightshift, only to discover that an equal amount had filled it while I was gone, and had to clear it again so that Bev could get to work, a task that took about an hour.
Then the melted windblown snow stalled the machine. I had to finish by hand. I cleared what I could and collapsed into bed, only to rise to a blinding blanket of sunlit snow having swept back across the width of the drive, once again.

I woke too early, having slept for no more than five hours. Seeing that much snow again crushed me. “Will this never end?” I thought. I staggered out to clear it again before Bev got home. The blower would not start. I’d always had trouble with the electric start. If the machine didn’t start on the first pull, it flooded, and it flooded just then. I called my father, asking him to come over to help me. When he arrived, he noted that the shaft was slightly bent on the electric starter, causing the teeth to wear down. “That might be the problem,” he said. He removed it to have it repaired, while I started back in on scooping up the snow and wrestling it up hill, up a track I’d built on either side of the driveway. My father tried starting the machine again, saying that it had probably sat long enough. It started on the first pull, manually. I never used the electric start again, and never really had trouble with it ever again, either, not until it had grown old, the belts and springs and bushings likely worn out like the teeth on the starter. The only real trouble I ever had with it was when the auger belt went, years later. None fit it. The manufacturer had stopped making that exact diameter of sheave wheel. Any replacement belt I tried was either they were too loose or too tight. I finally found one that almost fit. The blades never stopped rotating after that.

The next day, my neighbour left a note under my windshield wiper: “Please don’t put any snow in my yard.”

I noticed that he had no issue putting about three quarters of his own snow in his neighbour’s.

I ignored his note. What’s good for the goose, and all that….

 

The Falling Man

Where were you on 9/11? That’s my generation’s “Where were you when JFK was shot?”

We were preparing to go to Manitoulin. We were excited. We were packing. We were hauling coolers and bags to the Jimmy (my SUV). This would be our first trip after having just bought our house. We had no money, all of it sunk into what was truly a money pit of new needs. If you’ve never bought a house, you have no idea how much crap you need to make a home. We needed to get away for a little while. But it couldn’t cost anything, either. So, we were going to Manitoulin. All we needed was food, and we would have had to buy that, anyways.

We did not want to return to a fridge full of rot, so I made a quick trip with the perishables to my parents’ while Bev took stock checked off the packing list. My mother met me at the door.
“Have you heard what happened?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been packing.”

“The World Trade Center is on fire,” she said. “It was hit by a plane.”

My mind was on the six-hour trip ahead of us. “That’s horrible,” I said. Then I said, “Well, it’s happened before,” latching onto a bit of trivia buried deep in the detritus scattered throughout my memory. “A B-29 crashed into the Empire State Building during the War.” (It was actually a B-25.)
I went home, thinking that I had to stop for gas on the way out of town.

We jammed everything into the Jimmy and were almost out the door when my father called. “A plane hit the other World trade Center.”

“Mom told me,” I said.

“No,” he said, “another one!”

That was weird, I thought. You’d think it was impossible that two buildings could possibly be hit in the span of 24 hours. Besides, how could anyone hit one, let alone two? They were huge. They were in plain sight. Hundreds of movies and television shows told me so.

“They’re saying it’s a terrorist strike.”

Wow, I thought. But we had to get on our way if we were going to make it to Manitoulin by supper.
We jumped in the Jimmy and were on our way. We thought we ought to listen to the radio for a while instead of CDs, at least until we heard the news; surely they’d report on what was going on. We were just passing out of town, lumber mills to either side when the music on the music was interrupted.
“The World Trade Center is gone,” they said.

“Gone?” I said. “Where could it possibly have gone?” There were seven buildings, after all. They were enormous. The Twin Towers were about 415 meters tall. They were 110 stories, both of them.

The radio station cut away to a television broadcast. We heard too many references to the visual footage and had no clue what they were talking about so we turned to CBC radio for their continuing coverage; they, at least, knew we couldn’t see what was going on. We remained rooted to CBC until we lost transmission, barely speaking as we tried to process the fact that at least two planes and possibly a third airliner had been hijacked and driven into the World Trade Center, the third narrowly missing the Pentagon, only then listening to CDs, checking to see if we could pick up Sudbury CBC after a half hour, and every ten minutes or so after that until we picked up the broadcast again.

What was going on? A state of emergency had been declared. All air traffic had been forced to the ground. Borders were closed. Were we at war?

Reports were still a mass of confusion when we resumed listening as reporters asked questions that few people had answers to, relying on eyewitness reports, invariably focusing on the human tragedy, the loss of those within, the sacrifice of law and fire personnel. We kept hearing mention of “The Falling Man.”

We pulled into Espanola, fueled up, picked up a meal-to-go and other essentials from the Independent grocery store there, overhearing the one and only conversation of the day, The Discussion.

When we arrived at Bev’s family’s camp on Silver Lake, just five minutes beyond Silver Water, we turned on the TV. Of course we did. We’re a visual culture now. We turn to the TV when things happen. Nowadays people would probably turn to Twitter, but it was 2001, not 2006.

The reception was crap, more snow than picture. There was a great deal of rabbit ear and knob adjustment—it was an old tube TV, perched on top the fridge and prone to fuzz when the fridge pump kicked on.

I finally got a clear picture. Clear-ish, anyways. It was still grainy.

The first thing I saw was a vision of the eponymous Falling Man, plunging headfirst past the rush of vertically stacked windows behind him, his clothing whipped and rustling about his body, one knee drawn up to his waist, the other trailing. His head was thrown back, his eyes downcast, as though watching the ground’s rapid approach.

My heart lurched. My breath caught in my throat. My knees grew weak. I had to sit down. Tears welled up, further reducing the clarity of the man’s tragic, terrible, terrified panic and courage, and his desperate decision to have chosen such a horrific end rather than to be incinerated in the hell that must surely have raged around him.

The Homeowner

I decided that it was high time to kick start my life. I’d listened to prophesies of doom for too long. I’d lived in my parents’ house for far too long. I wanted my own place, my own roof, my own rules. There weren’t many rules at my parents’ house, if any (I was an adult, after all), but I’d carried most of those from years past into those years I’d stayed with them after college and university. Some, like no overnight guests, may have been inferred. Rules or no rules, it was a big scary world out there; interest rates were just easing up; the commodity market had never been in worse shape; the threat of layoffs forever loomed. My parents’ place seemed a safe haven. Or was it a trap. Arrested development, failure to launch? Either way, having to admit to a girl that I still lived with my parents had long since become an embarrassment.

I decided that it was high time that I moved out. To buy or rent? I thought renting was throwing good money after bad. There was no equity to be gained by renting. And renting in Timmins cost about as much as a monthly mortgage. I decided that I ought to invest in equity. I asked around at work on how one did that these days. I received advice. I went to a number of banks for preapproval. My bank matched the best of them.

Then I asked Bev. Would you like to move in with me? Would you like to buy the house with me? She had to think it over. That’s understandable. It was a huge step. But we’d been going out for a year by then, too. If she didn’t know how she felt about me by then, it was likely that she’d already made up her mind. The truth is, she was scared what her father would say.

I already knew what her father would say, and I simply did not care. We should get married first, he’d say. Then buy a house. Then have children. That was the way things were done. It was beside the point that he had married, divorced, catted around, knocked up Alma, and had a shotgun wedding where Bev was the undeclared special guest. Enough said about that. I was thirty-six. I didn’t want to wait another two years or so, scraping together enough money for a wedding and a house at the same time. I had enough money for one or the other, and I had no intention of dropping ten grand on a piece of paper and then living in some slum lord’s apartment. Should I have saved up my money over the years for this eventuality? Maybe. But travelling had saved my sanity so I’m unwilling to speculate on what I might have done were I more pragmatic. Were I to do it all over again, I’d likely do the same.

I began looking at houses. I asked Bev if she wanted to join me, without her having committed one way or the other yet to the prospect of going all in with me. She said she’d look at them once I’d eliminated the chaff. That was promising, a commitment of sorts.

There was a lot of chaff. There was a lot of threshing. Most of the houses were a misery of renovations waiting to happen, time capsules from the ‘70s, Sanford and Son sets, all priced for the expectation of promise and not what they were worth, to my mind.

My mother helped me pare down the list, pointing out which she liked and why, which would cost a lot to repair, and which might be nightmares. I finally had it down to a list of three or so. I asked Bev to view them.
The first was a split level on Diane, a stone’s throw from where I’d grown up. I pointed out a crackling corner which might be a problem. What we didn’t like about it was the crawlspace under the living room. It had been renovated as a half-height playroom for toddlers. I thought the idea brilliant, but otherwise useless for anyone with children topping three-and-a-half feet in height.

The second showed some promise, until closer scrutiny revealed shifting cinderblocks in the basement. The cinderblocks were pressing inward. I had visions of the house having to be lifted on stilts while the foundation was put to rights.

The third was vetoed immediately upon entering it. A migraine hit Bev like a hammer blow, the spike driven in so suddenly that she almost staggered under the blow. She’d never once had a migraine. She’d never actually ever suffered from any form of headaches. She was fine again twenty minutes after we left.

Then one day my mother suggested a Sunday drive to look at houses. I couldn’t think of a more exciting prospect. Feel the sarcasm. We did not have to drive far. We left the house and rounded Blahey, a court a block away from my parents’ place on Victoria. We noted a private sale sign hammered into the lawn of a simple white bungalow, a mature birch spreading its canopy across the front lawn. A man was tending the grass.

“What do you think?” my mother asked.

It looked nice. Well kept. Nowhere near as tumbledown as most houses I’d had the good fortune to inspect over the past month. It had to be outside my price range.

My mother insisted we stop and ask to see it.

We did. The owner mulled over the prospect for a moment and then agreed.

I was taken on the grand tour. It was clean. There were no cracks in the corners. It was not a time capsule. The basement has largely complete. The rooms were spacious. I thought the atrium too spacious, a waste of space actually, but the rest was good. The rest was great.

And it was within my price range! And it was only ten or twelve thousand dollars more than the tumbledown money pits and deathtraps I’d had the good fortune to have walked through. There was no way I’d be able to sink ten to twelve thousand dollars into any of those and have them look like this house. I asked if I could bring my girlfriend around the next day. He said sure, but he did say that he would entertain any offer that was tendered.

“How many offers have you had?” I asked.

“None,” he said.
That was worrying. What was wrong with it, I wondered.

“How long has it been on the market?” I asked.

“I put the sign up, yesterday,” he said.

I brought Bev the next day. She didn’t say much. I think she was thinking about what her father might say.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s a big step,” she said.

“I know it’s a big step, but what do you think?”

Silence. Fear of father radiated from her.

“I want it,” I said. “I want my own place.” I knew I was applying pressure on her, but I believed that she needed to escape her parents’ house as much as I did mine. If we didn’t soon, we’d become those middle-aged people who never left.

“Let’s buy it,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll ever find another house as good as this for the price.”

“Okay,” she said.

My parents were thrilled. So was Bev’s mother.

Albert was not. Personally, I don’t think that Albert ever liked me. I don’t think he ever approved of anything I ever did.

But enough said about that.

No sooner had I bought the house, the manager of the Mine was standing in front of we the body of employees saying, “Things aren’t looking good right now: the market, the exchange rate. Now is not the time to be making any big purchases.”

The Amazon

My time in the Amazon was more like my Contiki trips than the Galapagos was. And not. My head was filled with expectations. I had rain gear and good hiking boots. I had my imagination.

I also had the expectations of what I’d seen on a travel show called “Don’t Forget your Passport,” a Canadian travel show similar to the Lonely Planet Guides. I saw an episode on the Amazon, in Ecuador, where the host and intrepid explorer stayed at the same place I happened to be booked into: the Kapawai Ecolodge and Reserve. I watched him ride in the bow of a dugout canoe, slash his way through the undergrowth, sit in parley with chieftains in authentic indigenous dress. I was stoked. I just had to get there.

I completed my Galapagos tour, said goodbye to my travel companions, both New Orleanais and middle-aged alike, and flew out of the Islands back to Guayaquil and Quito. There was a delay in Guayaquil as we disembarked our plane, watched our luggage unloaded and transferred to the identical plane alongside it. We watched the passengers disembark that plane and board our plane, their luggage be transferred from their plane to ours. Only then were we allowed to board their plane. That took a couple hours. Then we were off again for the half-hour flight back to Quito.

Air Coffin

I ate supper, strolled El Rondo again, and slept. I rode and returned to the airport at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am, where I boarded the ricketiest plane I’ve ever set eyes on. Mel Gibson and Air America came to mind. I dubbed thee Air Coffin

There was a family flying out with me, a couple in their 60s, their son, his wife and the son’s boy. The pilot offered the front seat to the boy. I’d have loved to sit up front but I knew that it would be the thrill of a lifetime for the boy and who am I to argue with that. As to flying Air Coffin, it wasn’t that bad. It was loud. It rose and fell on hazy thermals, but it was otherwise a smooth 45-minute flight over mostly unbroken rainforest, a few wide strips of clear cut evident here and there. I saw a red airstrip slashed out of the crest of a hill, the thatched huts of the Achuar Indian community following its length, a river bending about the base of the hill it rose above. We plunged down on the little strip of land cut out of the jungle, landing fast, bouncing twice before fully alit, the huts but a blur until we lurched to a stop.

We were led down a steep switchback to the river where a brightly canvased river bus awaited us. The sun burned off the haze over the next thirty minutes as we wound our way downriver, the blue acrid smoke of our exhaust trailing us, the only haze remaining. The shadows shortened, leaving only the jungle closing in on either side, the canopy reaching out and scratching the striped canvas.

We arrived at the lodge in time for lunch, then spent a quiet afternoon walking along a sandbar beach at a bend of the Pastaza River, lectured on Ecuadorian rainforest and the Achuar culture. We watched the sun set, the late golden light draining fast. The sun sets fast that fast close to the equator.

Kapawi Lodge

The sun down, we hiked back to the lodge, our haven of comfort in the jungle. It boasted twenty raised cabins connected by a wandering walkway, the reeds and river grasses filling the spaces between. The cabins were what one might hope for, round, thatched, almost treehouses, the balconies boasting a hammock for those leisure moments as we waited for the triangle’s clanging, calling us to dinner. The beds were comfortable, the mosquito netting draped across the screened windows like curtains. But there was no electricity. There were solar panels that lent limited light to twenty-watt bulbs that were good enough to guide one to the washroom but not for reading. There was no running water. There was a basin and ewer. There was a shower of a sort, as well; Each day sacks of water were laid out in the sun to be heated by day and hung in the shower for a nighttime wash. In the mornings there was the basin.

Days of canoe trips and hiking followed. I had to laugh at how I was misled by “Don’t Forget Your Passport.” Where the intrepid host wore hiking boots, we had to wear calf high rubber boots, and for good reason too; mud crawled up our legs, and were we wearing hiking boots, we’d have surely left them behind in the mud somewhere. We also had to wear lifejackets, where the intrepid host did not, acting like he was exploring uncharted territory, where no white man had ventured before. And I’d have been convinced had the natives not been attired in Columbia sandals and Coca-Cola tee-shirts. The natives were depicted as secluded, but they were rather comfortable with the presence of we tourists, in my opinion. Too comfortable. It was almost like there was a tourist eco-lodge nearby. There was a lot of jungle, though.

There were macaws, there were lime green parrots. There was a flurry and crash of movement in the perpetual twilight, no more than four feet from me when we startled some bird in the undergrowth. After whatever that bird was had escaped our catching sight of it, I spotted something at my feet, something I’d seen a few times on the tube, a line of leafcutter ants crossing the trail at my feet. I called out to our guide who retraced his steps to where I guarded their passage. We crouched low and were treated to the ecology of the ants. Then we were on our way, too busy rubbernecking to note where our Achuar guide was going, at least until we reached a fork in the trail, our guide nowhere in sight. The only prudent thing to do was wait and call out. I saw a silhouette resolve from the undergrowth, one led be a gleam of teeth as he chuckled at our obvious discomfort.

One afternoon we kayaked the Kapawi River and the lagoons nearby. We were told to keep an eye out for river dolphins, but we didn’t see any. I didn’t see any catfish or piranha, either, although we did have catfish for dinner once.

There were night walks, bats flittering overhead, insects and snakes scurrying and slithering about. Frogs chirped and croaked all around us.

One thing I really wanted to see, and did, was a sloth. We heard him first, hooting and howling from out across the river that rounded the lodge. He was hard to spot; he didn’t move much; but once I caught sight of him in my binoculars, high in the trees across the way, I spent a few minutes each morning and evening seeing what he was up to, which wasn’t much. Sloths are slothful by nature, no more than couch potatoes in trees, really.

But what would be a trip to the Amazon without a little cultural exchange. We visited the nearest Achuar village, scaling the switchback to where it perched high and dry like all native villages in the Amazon. We saw chickens, we saw pigs, we saw children running and hiding as children do. And we watched the art of Achuar face painting.

There was lots of bird watching. There was a lot of bird watching in the Galapagos, there was a lot of bird watching in the Amazon. I wondered if it were a middle-age rite of passage. I was treated to their book of sightings, too, much as a I’d been in the Galapagos.

The boy was not interested in bird watching. He was interested in football, and my being the only person present that he wasn’t related to and wasn’t staff, he talked to me about it, a lot. He talked to me about just about everything: his friends, his school, his sports, his favourite football team. He’d flop over the couch in the lounge, practicing his preteen postures with abandon; he saddled up next to me at the bar, always asking me what my favourite NFL team was. His grandfather laughed when I said, “the Edmonton Eskimos.”

“Who are they?” the boy asked, his face squinted up in question.

“My team,” I said, “they’re in the CFL.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

Galapagos

The Galapagos marked a change in travel for me, or a beginning to said change, anyways. Adventure was apparently on its way out. Luxury was in. Backpacking was out, although I landed there with a backpack in tow. Dinner jackets were in. Early mornings were in. Late nights were out. There was sightseeing, wildlife sightings. There was neither scuba diving nor white-water rafting. Sipping wine and scotch replaced guzzling flagons of beer. My travel companions were older now, and sadly that meant that Europals were out.

I miss that aspect of travel more than anything, those spontaneous meetings, those fortuitous temporary friendships. I don’t miss the nights of excess, although I do miss the nights. The nights were fun. The nights were the most memorable of times. I mostly miss those earnest conversations over coffee or drinks, the sun bearing down, the heat, the closeness of the nights. I miss hanging out, listening as the tropical breeze rustled foliage, as the surf rolled in and crashed onto jagged shorelines. I miss the cabanas, the bamboo huts, and the songs of cicadas. Mostly I miss the people I whiled the hours away with. The discovery.

This is not to say there was no discovery in the Galapagos; there was. There were finches and penguins and sea lions and seals. There were pink and red flamingos balanced on impossibly tall and thin legs, iguanas that snorted viscose brines as they purged the salt from their bodies. I climbed steep hills, leapt from jagged rock to jagged rock under the spray of coastal geysers, scaled jet black dunes and strolled rust red beaches as rich as PEI’s soils.

I walked in Darwin’s footsteps on the brown sands of the isthmus of Bartolome Island Beach, watching as cormorants and boobies whirled about the spearhead obelisk that pierced the Pacific. I lay an arm’s length away from disinterested seals. I raced a Giant Tortoise; okay, it wasn’t so much a race as a stroll, at least until the tortoise stopped and growled a breathy gasp, releasing a gallon of urine in defiance of my presence.

But I did it alone (metaphorically, that is). And it was all very strictly monitored. I suppose most of my adventures were strictly monitored. I’ve been treated to instructions to not take flash photos here, do not approach that frieze; do not stray here, do not touch that. Keep together. Do not lag. It was much the same there: do not stray from the path; it is okay for the seals to touch you but not for you to touch the seals. Respect the tenaciously tough and fragile ecosystem. I was okay with all that. I was there to see, not to destroy.

But it was all so very comfortable. Course after course of gourmet foods followed one after another. There were perfectly paired wines. There were Egyptian cottons. There was air-conditioning. There were pleasant middle-aged companions who shared my table at meals, who asked me what I’d seen, what had captivated me, who showed me their wonderful pictures, and on this occasion and that, shared my excursions, trekking up trails and crouching next to this animal or that. They were wonderful people. They just weren’t my age. They had mortgages; they had children; they’d paid off their mortgages; they’d retired. They gardened. They cruised. They bird watched. They checked off their lists, consulted one another on the species they’d chased down and captured with camera. They showed me those pictures so that I too could marvel over their conquests. They discussed whether to get into RV’ing, or did RV’ing mean the end of cruising. They went to bed early.

There were no mosquito nets. No bowls below lights to capture the moths as they fluttered about the lights. There were no late-night cocktails under the stars. No deep conversations of self, unrealized expectations, and unexpected regrets. There was no leafing through one another’s CDs, discussions on whether Oasis was as good as Radiohead, or flirtations.

That all sounds shallow, but there’s an ambiance to backpacking, roughing it a little, and hanging out with people who happen to be in the same metaphorical place as you.

There was one couple of near like age as me. They were almost ten years younger than me, but as I was sharing time with people about twenty years older than me, I was forever hoping to fall in with them. I did not. We rarely found ourselves in the same groups as we made our way ashore. We did not share meals. They sat second seating, I sat first. We did meet for drinks a few times after we finally crossed paths long enough to say more than “hey” to one another.

We crossed paths for the first time on the Bartolome isthmus. We were not in the same group on that day either, but all groups ended their day’s touring on the isthmus; so, when they spied me sitting on the beach, watching cormorants and boobies circle the spire, they approached me and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said with more enthusiasm that I wished to gush forth.

They sat, pressing their toes into the cool sand beneath the hot, much as I had.

“How’s your tour?” he asked in a thick southern accent

“Good,” I said.

My “good” must have been less enthusiastic than intended because we all laughed.

“Where you two from?” rushed out of me. I’d never come across so thick a southern accent and was very curious to place it.

He gave me a pause before saying, “Man,” he drawled, “y’all talk funny. Where you from?” He spoke slowly, slower than anyone I’d ever spoken with. His words flowed forth as though accustomed to sultry heat and a conservation of energy.

“I talk funny?” I said, clearly astonished by his having said what he did. Then I too paused.
We laughed again.

“I’m from Ontario, like way north Ontario,” I said. “You?”

“Nawlins,” he said.

“Nawlins?”

New Orleans. His girlfriend was from up “north,” he said, which I assumed meant somewhere north of Nawlins, if way South of what I considered North.

“How are you finding this trip?” I asked.

It was alright, they said, but not what they were accustomed to doing. Which was? Backpacking. Thumbin’ it. I had to listen hard to cut through his drawl and suss out what he was saying, but I began to get the cadence of it in a little while. Her accent was less thick than his, even if she talked less. They were there doing what I was, checking off an item on the bucket list.

It took them a little while to cut through my accent, too, it seems, or so they said.

Funny, I never thought of myself as having an accent until then.

 

The Equator

Collected from the airport, my guide and driver shuttled me to my hotel. While on the way, I mentioned that I had a day to spare and wouldn’t mind an excursion or two, if time allowed. I was told that there were a fair number of options and that there were pamphlets to choose from at the front desk. All I had to do was give them a call and they would set me up; “that’s what we’re here for, Mr. John.”

It turns out that Quito is quite the destination, and thousands of people choose to visit the city, not only as a jumping off point like I had, but as an actual destination. It just wasn’t what I was looking for just then. It’s spectacular, if you haven’t heard of it. It’s a World Heritage Site, after all. It had once been the seat of Spanish power in South America, and had all colonial administration in its seat at one time, judiciously chosen for its high altitude near-temperate climate. There are a lot of churches, a great deal of stunning architecture, volcanoes nearby, and a lively nightlife. And as much chaos as you can stand, too. Most places outside of the developed West are chaotic, I’ve found. In spite of that, it’s beautiful there. So, who wouldn’t want to go there? Me, apparently. My younger self pleads ignorance.

My hotel was around La Ronda. Where exactly? I have no idea. I didn’t stay there long. I slept there on three occasions though. That night and the next, between my Galapagos and Amazon legs, and prior to leaving. I recall blue and white tile work with a hint of Inca, lots of potted plants, mostly ferns, otherwise floral or leathery leafed, and far too expensive breakfasts. I checked in, noted the terrace, the restaurant, the pool, and went to bed.

I took my time rising. I’d weathered the Mr. John confusion, hoping that would be the one glitch of the vacation. There’s always one. At least one. In this case, there was one more. I discovered that I was missing a few toiletries. No problem, I thought. There were bound to be pharmacies about.

I browsed pamphlets and my Lonely Planet guide over coffee after I had my first overpriced breakfast. I decided that I ought to go see the equator, seeing that I was only about ten or twenty kilometers away. I wasn’t sure how long that might take. Twenty kilometers may not seem too far, but I’ve found that navigating cities can take hours, depending on the chaos nurtured there. Maybe it’s not chaos; maybe it’s just a laissez-faire attitude towards the rules of the road.

I called my contact and he arrived in about an hour. His company could offer me whatever I wanted, he said; so, we discussed my needs and wants and decided on an agenda. I paid my excursion fees and we were off. We picked up no others. Not counting my driver and guide, I had the minivan to myself, so, that saved some time. No need to crisscross the city, no need to herd cats. They only had to herd one. I asked to stop at a pharmacy, I picked up my deodorant and blades and we were headed north to the Middle of the World where the equatorial line divides the northern and southern hemispheres. It was a thin strip of brass that cut across the asphalt, a sign on the shoulder pointing north and south. The cliff fell sharply away from it, the valley a hazy, smoky blue beyond with what I expected were thermals rising to become a storm. Spots of white stucco and grey concrete and red tile broke the foliage here and there, as far as I could see. I saw wide gaps too.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Coffee,” they said. A flash of Juan Valdes (remember him?), leading his ass down mountain trails, crossed my mind.

“I need a snap of me astride the equator,” I said, handing my camera to my guide.

“That’s not really the Equator,” my guide said. “We crossed that back there. It was moved because it was on a blind corner and there were a lot of accidents.” Not the equator? I shrugged. Who would know? Who would care? I did the tourist thing and stepped on either side of the little brass line that apparently meant nothing, my arms held wide, and smiled for the obligatory photo.

They took me to Guápulo, a neighborhood in Quito, home to local artists and a couple of hippy cafés and bars. Beads, macramé, tie-dyed paint jobs; you get the picture. The weather was less than ideal, cloudy, threatening rain, so I opted to return early, have supper, and see what La Ronda was all about.
It rained, and did not let up, so I was forced to carry an umbrella, something to trip over and stab people with in close quarters, something to be conscious of carrying and losing. Once I got off the major streets, the side streets were narrow, the buildings usually no more than a couple stories high, the laneways steep. There were a lot of clubs. There were buskers on every corner, cowering under awnings and trying to cast a brightness the early evening lacked. I wanted to explore more, but I had an early flight in the morning so I didn’t stay out late. I hate being conscious of time when on vacation. I found a lively club not too far from my hotel that hosted a number of backpackers, so I decided to linger there and not stray too far afield. When I looked around, I realized that I was getting older. The backpackers were noticeably younger, the music less to my taste, my newfound invisibility surprising. A couple guys chatted with me when I broke the silence between us but by and large the conversations were shallow and quick, those younger men far more interested with braided blondes and brunettes in halter tops, flannel shirts, Rastafarian toques and Doc Martins than me. I don’t blame them. If I were their age, I’d have been far more interested in those women than me, too. I left after only a couple beers, not wanting to lose my way or risk the hangover; like I’ve said before, I was getting older.

After breakfast my guide delivered me to the airport for my flights to the port city of Guayaquil and then the Islands. The first flight was shorter than the wait to board, just 30 minutes. We rose up, vaulted the mountain peaks and swung about over the Pacific, plunging down to the coast. The wait to board the flight to the Islands was longer still. An hour later I was in the air for another hour and then I was on San Cristobal Island, and then on the cruise ship. Have you been on one? Galapagos cruises are small. The number of people allowed on any island at any time is strictly regimented to limit their impact on the delicate ecology. It was small, but it was cozy.

My stateroom was better than any I’d had thus far, spacious, brassy, woody, marbled. And I had it to myself. That’s good and bad. I wasn’t crammed into a single bed, I could spread out, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone else’s idiosyncrasies, but I missed the camaraderie of those Contiki tours, where twenty or forty people are thrown together and, through shared experience, forced to get to know one another. Or is that just a factor of youth? I see now that twenty-year-olds are similar to children in that aspect. They’re open to meeting new people, open to new experiences, open to what comes more so than older people, certainly more so than couples who tend to keep to themselves.

I wasn’t alone, though. A few middle-aged couples adopted me and there was a young couple from New Orleans that I hung around with from time to time, if not always.

I saw the writing on the wall. I wasn’t part of the young crowd anymore, despite my only being in my middle thirties.

Funny how that happens in the blink of an eye.

Mr. John

My plans made, I prepared for my shortest flight in years. For the last few years, getting there, wherever there was, tended to be a two-day affair, with lengthy stops between flights, some as short as five hours, some as long as eighteen, or even twenty-four when the plane didn’t arrive. The six and a half hours to Quito seemed a puddle jump by comparison.

I’d been lax. I’d done little to no research on Quito, only considering it a waystation between actual trips, someplace to sleep. I should have taken note of the amount of time I’d spend there between the legs of this adventure.

Landing in Quito was an adventure. The airport, indeed, the landing strip, was pressed in upon by the city, its buildings within hailing distance and very little space between. It is also bounded by mountains. That leaves little room for a leisurely descent. One moment the airliner was gliding along, the next it sped forward and plunged downward, its nose diving down perceptively from within. My stomach lurched with it. I felt the need to brace my feet and lean back into my seat as we dove into the airfield. The city lights drew up fast, transforming from a sheet to pin lamps. Cars raced us, falling behind quickly.

We landed, the wheels slamming into the ground. The flaps fell, the brakes engaged (are there breaks on a plane), and I felt myself flung into my belt, my spine weightless against my seat. When we turned to taxi, I noticed how close the buildings were. They were right there! I’d never landed at an airport what wasn’t conveniently way over there, miles from the city they reputedly sought to serve. Quito’s airport was actually IN the city!

I disembarked it a cool damp night, the city’s altitude making it feel autumnal despite its straddling the equator. I collected my bags, got my passport stamped, and consulted my itinerary. I was to be shuttled to my hotel, but I’d seen nobody I would have recognized as expecting me. There were few in the airport proper at the outside edge of Arrivals. I followed the flow, passing more than a few tour groups clustered around someone in a brightly coloured golf shirt, holding aloft a sign, a clip board in the other hand, mentally checking off the people around them. I kept looking up at their signs, looking for a match to my own itinerary, my anxiety growing as I eliminated one after another. Before I knew it, I was outside, under glaring incandescent lights dappled with flurries of moths. I saw a phalanx of expectant faces three deep, most of them obviously family members in no need of signs. My fellow passengers rushed toward them, embraced and kissed and scooped up, broadcasting their love for one another with the brightest of smiles.

There was a number of signs held up out there, as well. Most bore the name of companies, tour groups and such, a few bore names. I scanned them, not seeing mine, my name or my tour company. I glanced back at my itinerary, searching for a name, then back at the signs, looking for a match or a clue and finding none. I became a little concerned. Did no one come to collect me? I paid for a transfer from the airport to my hotel and was a little annoyed that there was no one there. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world; there are cabs, after all; but I had no idea where my hotel was in relation to the airport and what the ride might cost. It was late. And I was tired after a day of travel. I was in a country that was by no means English-speaking. Was English even common in Quito? I was growing a little anxious, my stomach twisting into what would eventually become a knot. I decided to ask for help before hiring one of the cabs that were in plain sight just past the greeting masses.

I re-entered the airport proper, weaving between those streaming past me into the night. I approached a tour guide, obviously a tour guide, a woman in a crimson red golf shirt with a company logo stitched into its breast, Quito Tours, or some such. She looked at my sheets, asked another tour guide, this one in a blue golf shirt. They gestured to another to come over. Not one of them recognized my tour company. My gut was clenching. They called out to airport security employee who also looked at my itinerary.
She asked, “Did you look outside?”

I had. She decided that maybe if we looked together, we might find my ride.

She scanned the signs much as I did earlier and pointed one out: MR JOHN. She drew me towards the man displaying it before his chest.

“Are you looking for…” she asked, her question directed at the face above the sign, glanced at my papers again, “Leonard, David John?”

He looked from my papers to his. “Mr. John,” he said, nodding, obviously pleased to have found the eponymous Mr. John.

I too looked, comparing his blurry fax to my sheet. I began to feel my anxiousness ease away. He pointed from one sheet to the other, from one name to the matching other: “Leonard David John?” he said. “Mr. John?”

“Is that you?” the girl asked.

“I think so,” I said. I suppressed the urge to giggle. Mr. John. I was Mr. John. They thought my name was Leonard David John.

“That’s not my name,” I said, thoroughly confusing him. My middle name is John.”

“This way, please, Mr. John,” he said, leading me to the car that would take me and my pack to my hotel.

No matter how many times I tried to tell him that my name was not Mr. John, I could not for the life of me convince him otherwise.

The Courtship

Bev and I began our courtship as I was quitting smoking. I’m surprised to this day that she didn’t run for the hills. I thought I was coping rather nicely; she tells me that I was a bear for the first three months. You’ll have to ask her why she stuck around.

Our first date was for coffee at a sub place downtown. It was a cold day, windy, the air still carrying the icy bite of early winter. I was early, killing time at Buc’s before the appointed hour. I kept note of the time, leaving five minutes before we were to meet, recognizing her from her picture as she ran past me, her eyes pressed narrow by the blown snow, her brightly coloured scarf wrapped tightly around her neck and held down against her black wool coat. I smiled, prepared to make our acquaintance, but she rushed past. I think she recognized me, but I wouldn’t swear an oath to it.

I ordered a coffee, found a chair facing the entrance and waited. Our first meeting was short, maybe about a half hour. Conversation was easy, and she carried none of the excitability of the last brief fling I’d had. I expected there would be no games like the last time, so we made a promise to contact one another again.

Over the next couple months we met off and on. She endured my smoking. I raised my intention to quit, explaining about my upcoming Egyptian excursion, the smoking there, and the likelihood that I’d fail in my attempt if I quit earlier. I brought her to all the best places, the coffee shop, the show, the Welcome. I don’t know what she thought of the Welcome, it being the ultimate dive, but I wanted her to see me in my element, bad habits and all. I wanted to see what sort of girl she was. Did she like bars? Did she like music? Live music? Did we see eye-to-eye? Were we compatible? What was her politics? Did she like the same things as me? Did she like the Welcome? Probably not; her last boyfriend had a drinking problem and she very likely disproved of bars and pissing the night away in one, but she didn’t say anything. Early days. She still stuck by me, just the same. I suppose I showed promise.

I left. I returned. I was smoke free.

Mostly.

She saw me puffing on a cheroot at Finn McCool’s when she and I were out with friends. There was shock. There was a touch of anger. I saw it in her eyes and brushed it off, smiled at her and shrugged.
“I haven’t inhaled,” I called out to her, raising the cheroot higher, as if that gesture explained my intent.
“She’s mad,” Dawson said, seeing the look in her eyes.

“She’ll get over it,” I said. I needed a puff just then, the cigarettes around me testing my fortitude, and thinking that puffing on a cigar would help me through the temptation. I did quit cigars too, shortly afterwards, but I was not to be dictated to just then. I’d been a bachelor for decades and accustomed to doing what I wanted, when I wanted. And I was anxious. No one had ever dated me for long. I was adrift in uncharted waters. And I was quitting smoking. I needed a little relief.

In time we introduced each other to our parents.

I had no clue what to expect. I’d never been introduced to parents before. What I didn’t expect was to be largely ignored. Bev’s father Albert was engrossed in fixing a broken lamp with a piece of PVC pipe. Alma was busy in the kitchen. Bev’s brother Greg and sister-in-law Laurie was engaged in conversation with Albert and Alma respectively. No one talked to me. Nobody seemed to be aware that I was even there.

Albert did ask me what I thought of his lamp fix, obviously proud of the prospect of having saved the cost of a lamp. It was warped. The blacks did not match. The textures did not match. I thought it was ugly as sin. It was broken. I wondered why he didn’t just throw it out. I shrugged and asked, “Does it work?"

It did. Albert was pleased. I don’t remember if it was ever put in use, though. It disappeared after a time.

I was engaged once or twice during supper. I’d answer the question, then the conversation drifted away from me again.

Time passed. I began looking forward to my next vacation. I wanted to do something different. That’s not saying much. I wanted to do something different every year. I asked myself, “What have you not struck off your bucket list?” I wanted go to the Galapagos Islands. I wanted to go to the Amazon. I wanted to go to lots of places, but when I researched my vacation options and realized that both options were to be had in Ecuador, potentially two trips in one, I was sold. I planned on doing the Islands one week and the jungle the next. I watched travel guides on TV. I read travel guides.

I asked Bev if she’d like to go. If she wanted to really get to know me, I reasoned, she ought to see me doing what I liked best, travelling. That way she could see me away from Timmins. I didn’t drink much while on vacation. (Or so I told myself. It all depends on the vacation.) There was too much to do, too much to see. Besides, I wanted to share my life with someone; I wanted to experience things with someone. I wanted to find my elusive soulmate, not sure if that person actually existed.

She declined. It was too early for us to go away together, she said. “What would my father say?” she asked, knowing full well what her father would say.

“I’m not asking your father,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said.

Did she expect me to stay? Probably not. I certainly wasn’t going to stay on her say so, either. My parents had never holidayed much and I’d never been much of anywhere until finally bursting forth on my own. I toiled year-round underground. I didn’t have many friends, as far as I could see. I deserved a little joy in my life, and no one was going to deny me that.

Did I go to Ecuador?

You bet your ass I did.