THE EXPEDITION Chapter 15: Small Towns, Large Extremes, Short Rants, and Deep Stuff (Section 1)

In which cyclists raise spirits 

Date: June 7, 2019

Indian Head to Wolseley 33 km

Thirty three was a bit far. Also, the weather being so up-and-down hurts. And some days were just harder than others. Sometimes there were great long chunks of just open dirty abused land that felt like it went on forever and I couldn’t see an end, or a point. I’m sure I was probably also walking through invisible clouds of agricultural chemicals, and of course the exhaust fumes really were never-ending. Sometimes my head felt like it was going to shatter into a million pieces. Sometimes I wanted to leave it on the side of the road. Sometimes I asked myself if I could give up.

Somewhere around the middle of the day, I stopped to empathize with one of those prairie barns, the kind turned into a parallelogram by the elements and the spot it’s on… somewhat scratched and dented, and bent out of shape, but maintaining its integrity.

As if to underline how I felt by the end of the day, the campground tucked away in the wooded, twilit corner of Wolseley turned out to be called Sleepy Hollow.

The man who runs it is nice, though, and not at all terrifying or mysterious.. He’s just quiet. He gave us a spot away from the other people there so Mr Myrtle could run and bark, and made sure we were safe and sound before he called it a night (and so did we).

Date: June 8 2019

Wolseley to Grenfell 26 km

We woke up early the next morning (not a hundred years later, or however that story went) after a good enough rest to keep going. That might not sound like much, but sometimes it’s an awful lot.. The 26 kilometers to Grenfell was like a rerun of the day before, except an even straighter and less green stretch of highway, and I was walking with a migraine most of the day. I think that was the day a golf ball landed on the shoulder in front of us, out of the blue. I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from but I didn’t even wonder till later – I was just it didn’t land on my shoulder, because I was hurting enough. It was probably also the day I figured there was oodles of time before another train passed, so the only nearby trees, between rails and road, would do as a discreet and impromptu bathroom. I was wrong.

I couldn’t have made it without that rest at Sleepy Hollow, or without the niceness of passersby.

A man from Quebec doing a cross-country trip stopped to talk a while that day. Most cyclists did – we were a pretty unusual spectacle, and not much less unusual when they learned more! Mostly they’re just sociable, and kind. Also, I’m older than most people traveling this way, and although I met some even up into their eighties, I’m clearly not in the peak physical condition that even the older ones are. It makes people both curious and concerned, and I was always glad of both.

The man from Quebec was so appreciative of what I was doing, and so encouraging, that I scraped myself together enough to reach Grenfell. I hope he knows how much difference he made, stopping just when he did and being so positive.

By the time we reached the town, I felt so crummy that I decided that if the motel by the highway in Grenfell would give me a discount, I’d get a room even though it felt like cheating. You get the reality you create, though, and because I felt like I was cheating, I probably sounded like a cheat, and they wouldn’t give me a discount. They also wanted to argue about whether or not they were allowed to refuse a room to someone with a service dog, and I was too tired to argue. I did report them for that, though – it’s not legal, and although I could go sleep in a tent, a lot of other people couldn’t, and then what would they do?

After I’d ditched the idea of a room and settled us down near the gas station to make a plan, I went over to the picnic spot by the gas station to have a snack and feel sorry for myself and get over it and get on with things. A young Japanese man doing a fast-forward (so as not to miss his return flight or any of the next semester) bicycle tour of Canada stopped to take his dinner break with us. As the slight, almost elfin cyclist scarfed down most of a bag of bagels from the shop, thick with peanut butter from his pack, we traded stories and ideas. He was such a nice guy, and got me feeling so much better.

He was thinking about how to find other ways to get home, though, after talking about the climate crisis, and was reconsidering future travel ideas. Bicycling was already part of that, but there’s always more possibilities. So many people like this young man use bicycles, or scooters, or what have you, not only for daily trips, which is wonderfully responsible, but for things like this vacation. Granted, he was doing a speed version, but there’s all sorts of other ways to go.

We’ve gotten such a limited idea of how things can be done, including moving around. We never used to zoom everywhere all the time. We also never used to treat travel as entertainment, or as a commonplace part of daily life. We can’t keep behaving as though vacations justify spewing oil and gas into the ecosystem. There’s always ways and places at hand to take breaks, or to get away or get inspired. The world isn’t a playground, it’s a planet.

Beyond that, the pandemic has shown the extent to which travel can be either skipped altogether, or replaced by communication technology. It’s now normal in business, politics, social, and pretty much every avenue of life. Most of what we do is adaptable to virtual practice, and if it isn’t, it’s probably either not as necessary as we think, or so utterly crucial that travel is acceptable.

That’s a whole ‘nother thing… mostly in western culture, needs and wants have become redefined and misidentified. Most of what we think of as necessities aren’t. With this, we’ve developed an uncanny ability to justify almost anything. We live in a world dominated by convenience and luxury, even though it’s quite literally costing us the world, and we make that make sense. We know what’s happening as a result of how we choose to behave, but explain away our own complicity. That in itself is another level what basically amounts to cultural gaslighting. Cognitive dissonance of the masses, encouraged on a level meant to maintain the global status quo.

Except it’s not, any more. The contradictions are getting too jarring. The effects people don’t want to see are flooding and burning our homes (or our vacation destinations). The effects are also now part and parcel of the pandemic (but that hadn’t happened yet as I sat in Grenfell, Saskatchewan, with a brilliant and exuberant young man who couldn’t conceive of giving up on anything, regardless of how monumental it might be). But change has become so inconceivable that instead of changing, people pull the wool a little farther over their own eyes, or practice that justification we’ve gotten so good at. Worse, many are falling into deep pits of depression and existential panic, and too many give up – on the planet, on humanity… even on themselves.

These are the kinds of things I often thought about while walking. Walking is busy… a lot was meditating, but also much processing of information and observation, getting my fingers (or toes I suppose) into ideas, figuring things out and wondering about others. Throughout, of course, there was a level of me constantly watching for animals and vehicles and everything else around.

Finding others to share it with out loud along the way was always a high point. Conversations on the road and in messages would combine with articles I managed to read sometimes, or that people copied and pasted to me. Those would percolate with research, experience, and the immediate world of effects I was walking through. Perhaps, even, walking as I was brought the Earth into my thinking, too, through the soles of my feet day after day, and sleeping on her so many nights. It felt like it.

Drifting amongst the percolating ideas would be stray (or not so stray) bits of stories or scraps of wisdom from places I respect enough that the words are all still somewhere in my head…talking about road tales and map mishaps intertwined with pieces of the climate crisis brought one to mind… “no matter how far you’ve traveled in the wrong direction, you can always turn around.”

That applies to how we live with the planet, and how we live with ourselves. I’ve lived with depression and related things my whole life, and still find myself on mental detours. Sometimes it takes a couple of apparently incorrigibly happy  roaming cyclists to remind me to turn my perspective down a new road.

My Japanese friend pulled up map of Grenfell and found a few likely-looking good places to camp in the town. Having made my whole day better, he put himself together to get back on the road – he could get quite a bit further yes, being much quicker than I – and I got Mr Myrtle tucked into his trailer so we could find ourselves a spot for the night. As we did, one of the gas station customers struck up a chat, and before I knew it, had drawn us a map so we could camp in his yard, and had gone ahead to let his other half know.

The family looked after a collection of lovely little bungalows, one of which had recently been vacated and cleaned but not yet re-occupied. We camped in the nook of its little porch, and I was given the run of the place for the evening. I had a much-appreciated shower and washed out my things, taking advantage of somewhere to dry them without the risk of losing them to highway wind (I now understand the ubiquitous bits of laundry blowing along the highway).

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