Saskatoon, SK

I arrived in Saskatoon late last night
After hitching the two thousand miles from Guelph
Snow covering every inch
Standing there sometimes
In minus fourteen
Peeing one morning
Barefoot and shirtless
In minus twenty-two
It was awesome
I'd thought of it as my greatest challenge
My biggest test of faith
In all these years on the road
Stretching right back to
USA '98
When I first realised
Some perfect
Beneficial
Groovy
Force
Operated in my life
The force that took me down to Mexico
The force that transported me
Penniless
Kept me sheltered and fed
Through thousands of miles of
North America
Europe
India
Etcetera
But this seemed different
Canada in the winter time!
Perils of
Actual death
Not just hunger
Sleeping out
Maybe getting wet
This was real
What to do
For example
When night falls
The temperature's twenty below
I've been deposited in the middle of
The vast Ontario wilderness
And freezing and frostbite and -
Well, in any case
I made it
It all worked out good
I was offered a place
Each day and night
Never spent a penny
Even though I wanted to
The magic is unbelievable
God loves a foolhardy fool
But I suppose what you're really wondering is
Exactly how did it work out?
Well I'll tell you
But first we'll have to rewind
Right back to Guelph
Right back to last Wednesday
Right back to me thinking
It's time to move on
And then wondering how
And checking planes and buses and trains
And just thinking
Fuck it
I can't be arsed with this
The thought of hitching terrified me
But I knew it had to be done
I did my trembling thing
The trembling subsided
And then I just got on with it
Well do I trust or not?
Or does God only work His magic
In sunny climes
On snowless ground?
No
Of course not
The God in my head isn't quite so limited as that
So I guess I had to prove it
Marching daftly to the highway in Guelph
Holding up a sign for "BC! Please"
And pretty soon got a ride
Straight to the front door of some friends' house
In Burlington
Good start!
The magic still works!
And confidence is instilled
One night there talking crazy Yorkshire talk
(Everyone was from Yorkshire)
And then after being deposited at a truck stop north of Toronto
The hitch began in earnest
It was cold and I shivered
It was six degrees ABOVE zero
Yowzers
I knew substantially lower temperatures were ahead
And I was nowhere near equipped
Oh well
The eccentric Englishman
Who plans in retrospect
Knows it always works out
And it did
Like I said
My final ride the first day
(After slight detour from expected highway
Thinking go with the flow)
Offers me dinner and a bed
And a day out the next day
Taking a boat to an island in Georgian Bay
Plus dinner and a bed
The following two nights as well
Gives me a great groovy hat
A big red warm coat
Some wool socks
And warm mitts
I do some healing
We chat all spiritual stuff
It's awesome
And then I'm on the road again
Sunday morning
Minus fourteen
A long cold wait
Everything white and beautiful
Loving the madness of it all
Loving my crazy new hat
With flaps over the ears
Get diverted again
But trust
And once more
Just before dark
A man takes me north from North Bay
Asks me if I want to watch the game
(The CFL final)
Stay at his
Shoot some pool
On the table in his basement
Andy the forest fire fighter
He's a great and groovy guy
He feeds me up
Sends me on my way
Says
Come back if it don't work out
If you're getting cold
But like every day
I get picked up quick
And I'm on the road again
Left this time really in the middle of nowhere
Have to walk a couple of miles
Tromp tromping in the falling snow
Whooping for the quiet of it
The solitude
And then get picked up by a crazy Christian
Who tells me he had to pick me up
Cos someone was trying to kill me
Did I know who that someone was?
Yes
That's right
Satan
Phew
I thought for a moment
It was someone real
But Satan I can deal with
So I settled down and let him 'minister' to me
Non-stop
For like forty-five minutes
And smiled inside thinking
Wow
He'd probably be doing the same if he had Jesus in his truck
And felt good that I
Never once tried to debate him
Nor point out his flaws
Just let it all wash over me
A non-reactive antidote
To all the arguments I was having
A few weeks back
And not long after that
A Mennonite picked me up
Offered me a bed
And even though it was early in the day
I thought
Why not?
It's not every day you get to spend time with a family of Mennonites
Say yes to everything, right?
Especially on a trip like this
So I slept in the loft above his cows
Dug him a trench
Tossing off layers
Right there in the cold
Met his wife and 7.5 children
(He was a year younger than me)
Ate Mennonite potatoes
Even ate Mennonite apple pie
And answered questions about the outside world
Answers which were apparently "very interesting"
This was near Englehart
I was going nowhere fast
It was about then that I looked at a map of Canada
And saw just how insane it was to attempt to hitch it
In the middle of winter
On these crazy Ontario roads
They'd told me so but -
It's all folly to an Englishman's ears
Who can contemplate a provincial slice of a country
That in itself takes twenty-four solid hours of driving to get across?
I'd travelled less than three hundred and fifty miles
I'd been on the road five days
Seen pretty much nothing but snow
And trees
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of trees
And not even beautiful trees
Just scraggly
Spindly
Scrawny trees
Standing shivering and ugly
Waiting to one day
Be hacked to the ground
Sawed and pulped
Something about this trip through Canada...
It was like the scales were falling from my eyes
It had always been the promised land
Where life was easy
People were happy
Everything was better than England
I mean
I'd been here eight times
I'd lived here one solid year
I hadn't just based it on movies
Like Bill Barrett and his
Magic America
But I was seeing a different side now
People chained to their work
Everyone divorced
On medication
Wrestling over children
Bitter and
Obsessed with cash
Industries that pulverised nature
The slowly-dawning realisation
That certain pockets of British Columbia
Far from define the whole
Now it was
Rednecks in big trucks
Nice people whose greatest pleasure
Was to shoot little animals in the head
And these endless thousands of miles of
Denuded ugly trees
With no change in sight
Save for
Denuded
Ugly
Prairies
I must be mad
Standing out in this snow, this cold
My socks all wet
My toes going frozen
Nobody stopping
Waiting an hour
On highway 11
Truck after truck
Knowing
Trucks don't stop no more
Their insurance has changed
It's not '98
Nor Colorado
What am I doing here?
In insufferably large Ontario
I'll never get out
And all for -
Yes
Chasing a girl
That old chestnut
High hopes but -
What the fuck
What the fuck am I doing?
It was the one time I thought about turning back
Toronto
England
Something safe
Not the madness of -
I keep on thumbing
That's the voice of doubt
God is good
Everything'll work out
But still -
I genuinely said it
"God help me!"
And within five seconds
A truck pulls over
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Written on the door
(Pronounced win-a-peg, apparently
Not winnie)
And I think
God, I hope he's going there
Or at least far enough to
Thaw out my toes and dry my socks
And he is
And he's happy to take me
We're on our way
Oh Holy Road God!
How can I ever thank Thee?
I've said it again and again
We're rolling and
I figure we'll be in Winnipeg soon
Just sit back and -
We pass a sign saying
Thunder Bay - 733km
And I think
My God!
That's not even out of Ontario
How big is this province
This country?
It's mind boggling but -
That's pretty much it
We drove all day to Ignace
(677 miles)
And after sleeping in bunks
Reached Winnipeg the next afternoon
(287 miles)
Where we were to part
And I was to strike out for Saskatoon
Once so unfathomably far away
Now a mere 500 miles distant
Still, that could be several days
Depending on what happened
But -
Fate is weird huh?
The morning before I'd been thinking of retreat
Thinking another two weeks to get there
Thinking it was all mad craziness
Or that I might still end up in Ottawa
Quebec, somewhere
Sneaking into Vermont
(Surrendered to the road, you see)
And then trucker Ed says
Next load's ready and
Whaddya know?
It's Saskatoon
I'll be there that night
It's all happened crazy fast
Ed trucks on
(He's now done 2400 kilometres in 36 hours)
And we roll into town
Crazily-named Saskatoon
Where I now sit
In the apartment of a girl-slash-woman
I'm seriously in love with
She beautiful
She lovely
She's all those other things and more
And agan I say it:
God bless that crazy Holy Road God
For the wonders He doth produce!
Ah fuckin' men.