On our way (05/07/13)

Despite the fact that it had taken me and Scrib 28 hours to hitchhike a drive that should have taken two hours, we were more than ecstatic. We'd had more than a day to hone our musical talents on the side of the highway, we'd had a chance to converse with some interesting individuals, and we'd had a glimpse of several small towns which we never intended to see again. (We'd also had the opportunity to sleep under a bridge 10 miles out of Kamloops because we'd been dropped off so close to the city at such an absurdly late hour that there was no traffic to get us into town.)

Finally, we had a chance to reunite with Fernweh and Aids. We found them sitting at a bandstand in downtown Kamloops, and consummated the reunion of Hoboism with the prompt consumption of cans of sardines and beer.

The group was one again!

The next few hours we dedicated to making cash. Details will be spared as to how this was done (as per the Hobo Code) - but, let it be known that a guitar (skills or no skills) and a sign can make you a shitload of fast cash.

Eighty bucks in hand, we decided to rape the dollar store of its goods. We began to clear shelves of cheap food, but quickly realized that if we were going to hop a train out of Kamloops, as we'd planned, we'd need a lot of liquor. We sacrificed some (read: most) of our foodstuffs for liquor money.

From the dollar store, we headed to the liquor depot. A 60 pounder of Appleton's left the store with us, and we made our way towards the train tracks.

This was a new crew. Fernweh, my brother slash husband, had hopped freight across Canada before. Last year, we'd tried to hop from this exact spot, but the train had left without Fernweh and they'd ended up hitchhiking.

Scrib, who'd hopped freight short distances across the Island, was more than excited to finally go on a long distance journey across the rails. His speech was rushed, his movements were ecstatic, his energy unmatched.

Aids had never so much as been on a train, and was a bit anxious to plummet into the world of trainhopping. Her nervousness showed in her voice.

The first two trains were a bust. The slaves masked themselves as oncoming trains, confusing us into a perilous conundrum which left us crouching sheltered in the bushes while our potential rides sped by.

Fortunately, the universe supplied us with the perfect alcove for chilling in. A rounded hole had been dug about five feet deep into the ground where we'd dove into the bushes, wide enough for all of us to fit in, and smooth enough for us to kick back on.

Half an hour later, our journey truly began. We felt the rumble of the train before we heard it, and, like an infuriated tiger creeping towards us, the growl grew louder and louder as the steel snake tore down the tracks towards us. Once the conductor's unit had sped past and the train begun to slow, we dove out of our hiding spot and fled down the tracks in the opposite direction, searching for the slave.

Running with an 80 pound backpack, a guitar and a didgeridoo isn't always the most relaxing thing to do, but sometimes it's necessary.

A sweaty, ten minute jog later and we found ourselves at the end of the train. The back unit purred quietly as we approached, awaiting our entry. We climbed the stairs, greasing our hands on the forever filthy handrails, and let ourselves into the unit.

We crouched within the slave for a few minutes. We'd almost made it on our way - we were on the train. The only thing to wait for now was the train to start. We spoke in excited whispers (despite the fact that there was nobody to hear us) pre-living our journey and contemplating the areas and adventures we were bound to end up in.

Ten minutes later, the train lurched forward, slipping us into the beginning of our adventure. The train slid slowly down the tracks, through the trainyard, past oblivious security guards, and out of Kamloops.

Once we'd left the city limits, we found ourselves free to fraternize on the back of the unit. We hung off the back the slave,  sipping shots of Appleton's while our feet dangled five feet above a landscape that lunged past faster than a cheetah.

Scrib, so awestruck and inspired by the untouched beauty of the train's path through the wilderness, stood staring at the stars with a glint in his eye and a jaw hanging open. He proclaimed his newest love, a newfound, heartfelt infatuation with life on the rails. He compared this experience to all his past loves.

It was great to have him here.

It was great to be here.

It was great to finally be on our way.

Icicles (poetic stance)

Though these towers had dwarfed us before.
never had we known them as such a fantasy.

Insignificant,
our wake left no mark.
Surreptitiously scouring the streets,
subjugated by the jungle's systematic will.

The smiles,
far and few between,
hung like dying petals from concrete flowers.

Human interaction
became a distraction;
an abnormal reaction
to an etiquette infraction.

Still, there was reason
to say that beauty was in season.

Those who wore smiles
would carry them for miles;
each footstep
taking them far from denial.

When there's love for life,
what's there to deny?
Nothing to question;
no secrets to imply.

So reside
inside
the happiest place,
practice painting that picture
each day,
life's an art.

Farewell!

Chelsea and Sheldon were perhaps the most welcoming hosts I've ever met.

The night before, after we'd returned from the beach, Scrib had gone to see another of his friends. Chelsea and Sheldon welcomed me, Fernweh, and Aids with open arms; not only feeding us, but offering us food to take with us on our journey. With nothing to offer in return but our thanks and our love, we felt a bit guilty.

That night, we slept on the couches downstairs. We were awoken at 7 in the morning by Scrib coming in through the front door, bewildered and excited.

The night prior, he'd gotten drunk as shit at his friend's house and attempted to walk back to Chelsea's. In his inebriated mindstate, he'd accidentally taken the train tracks in the opposite direction and gotten so lost that it took him 4 hours to get back. However, this was meant to be: he'd found a full 26 of Smirnoff vodka sitting in pristine condition on the tracks.

"Want some shots?"

We had a 7 am round of shots and toked up a bit, but that ended up sending us all
back to bed. A few hours later, we awoke and finished our liquor slowly before realizing that this would be our last day at the house. Though we'd had nothing but excellent times, and though they assured us otherwise,  we felt like we'd stayed too long.

We said our farewells and caught a ride downtown where we grabbed  few beers and headed up to Dennis's to make another farewell. Once that was done with, another of Scrib's friends drove us towards the highway.

We finished our beers, headed to McDonalds and bought way too many burgers (judging by the fact that Aids started puking them back up right away) and receded to the underpass to sleep off the alcohol in preparation for the next day.

Meh (poetic stance)

My mind is in one world;
yours lost in another,
but when they're twisted and twirled
together, you'd think they were brothers.

Two separated entities,
two mangled brains,
so segragated mentally,
as to drive them both insane.

Yet, they remain somehow same,
individual thoughts
sharing the same pain,
and that's all that matters
as our consciousness gets fatter;
feasting on knowledge,
insatiable (like any mind is);
gorging on questions
unanswered by those who feed them to us.

Curiosity, cooked down
leaving us wondering what we're looking for,
and when we'll find it.

Reunion (3) 05/05/13

Well, the ride to the beach passed smoothly. Chelsea, Sheldon, Scrib and I cracked jokes the whole way down the highway, and I had a chance absorb the soft silences between their nostalgic conversations.

They dropped me and Scrib off at a small mall, so we could wait for our other husband, Fernweh, and our pet, Aids, before we met back up with them for a ride back to Vernon. Aids and Fernweh arrived fairly quickly. We denounced our love for eachother with aggressive shrieks of affection; our reunion was obnoxious, loving, and undoubtedly frightening to any passers by.

The transition back into our old ways was instantaneous. Fernweh had certainly been happy to see us; the messages he'd sent to us prior to our meeting were no longer of any relevance. He was beaming as he gallivanted around, apologizing to Aids for mistreating her and promising good times as we strolled into the liquor store and grabbed ourselves a bottle of cider.

Aids, however, was cherry red and cranky. Sunburns had blossomed all over her face. We trucked her down to a small stream and sat her down in the shade, sipping back some cider. This kept up for half an hour, until Fernweh produced something that drew wary glances from Scrib and I.

It was green.

And leafy.

And covered in trichromes.

Scrib and I hardly smoked weed, but lately, marijuana and its cognitive, creative and spiritual benefits, had been arising in conversation more and more often. Hands down - we missed the ganja. We figured we'd give it a go again, and contemplated getting back into our old stoner regime.

We took a few tokes and refused to let the initial wave of anxiety bother us; slapping it away as if it were a mosquito. However, just like a mosquito will always buzz back towards you, the boots of anxiety will always be there to stomp you back down. You've just got to learn to ignore them.

Scrib receded quickly into a state of introversion, though he seemed content with it. This lasted for a few hours before we remembered that Chelsea and Sheldon were going to take us back to their place, and that we hadn't even made it to the beach. Oh well, we'd had a great time. Scrib and I had spent some time with some cannabis-influenced thoughts that we hadn't had a chance to relate to in years, and we were more than excited for that. Not only that, but we were more excited as to where this night would lead us. Our first night together in Vernon had proved fantastic, and now that the whole crew was gathered, we were sure to have an even greater time.

Bedbound; 05/05/13

Awakening in a bed was a strange feeling.

I didn't like it.

It was too comfortable. Dangerously comfortable. If I didn't get out now, I never would.

I crawled out (in the process, redefining the word groggy) and trudged downstairs to Chelsea's room.

She greeted me with an overwhelmingly unexpected torrent of exuberant energy. She announced that if I was hungry, there was a whole kitchen upstairs that was ours for the taking.

These words roused Scrib, who'd been sleeping on the couch in the living room. We bounded upstairs to the kitchen, and for a moment, we could only gawk. Food seemed to pour from every cupboard and drawer in sight. The counters were laden with fruit and an abnormal amount of fresh cakes.

We had so many choices, we couldn't decide what to make.

In our confusion, we tossed a whole bunch of random shit into a pot, selectively spiced it, and chowed down.

Having finished our meal, we began receiving vulgar texts from our lost travel buddy, Fernweh. He'd grown sick of Rose, he was telling us that he wanted to pawn her off on us and get rid of her before he ended up killing someone.

We needed to come get her.

What?! 

No way! It wasn't our fault that they'd ditched us two days early and we'd ended up taking different routes. Fernweh had been on the road for far longer than I had, he knew that travel groups rarely stick together.

If he was so tired of her, they could come to Vernon and he could leave afterward.

Besides, we were already planning to go to the beach. This, however, turned out perfectly: the beach was halfway between Vernon and Kelowna, where Fernweh was staying for the night with his father.

His dad offered the two of them a ride, and we were left with the promise of reunion. Fernweh, too, was left with a promise: he would be unshackled from the chains of Rose.

Cat Tranqs

We'd been waiting since midnight for Scrib's friends to come pick us up, and he hadn't been having the best of times.

Most of the time that he'd been conscious, he'd been wandering in circles, mumbling about how he wanted to go home. I had to remind him incessantly that we were in the wrong city. Finally, he threw up enough colourful shit to fill up a bathtub and passed out in a bush. I sat down near the bush to keep guard and wait for his friends to arrive.

The sound of Chelsea's vehicle roused Scrib from his intoxicated slumber and he bounded to the car, his face curving into a grin of angelic proportions. His reunion with Chelsea and Sheldon (her boyfriend) was filled with hugs and such cuteness that the pale night sky seemed to glow golden.

Chelsea introduced us to her friends - some that Scrib knew, and some not - and I was fascinated by how relaxed and non-judgemental the entire group was. Such was the entirety of Vernon.

They loaded us into their cars, Scrib joined Chelsea in her car and I jumped into Sheldon's. We quickly engrossed ourselves in some hilarious conversations and before we knew it, Sliverpick was passing bumps of ketamine around to everyone in the vehicle.

Once we arrived at Chelsea's place, we wobbled out of the car like inebriated sloths and ventured up the great mountain that was Chelsea's driveway. We reached her house and were quick to claim all the cushioned surfaces we could find. More bumps of ketamine were unloaded, like rounds being fired from a clip loaded with blurred vision.

Those who could muster the courage to stand were off balance and forever floppy. Such is the Ketamine walk - you're perpetually powerless to stand up straight, but you'll never quite hit the ground. The night kept on, conversations were laden with wit, nostrils were laden with drugs.

By the time 6 AM rolled around, Scrib had been KO'd for a few hours, and I figured it was time to write a really crappy drug-induced poem and hit the hay myself. Tomorrow would be a great day, we could tell.

Reunion (2)

So... this was Vernon, eh?

An oasis, seemingly - situated so close to the desert, yet sustaining itself so lusciously and vibrant - just like the faces of the street's pedestrians.

Scrib was overjoyed to return home. His smiling face matched that of everyone else's as we strolled through downtown. A new town is ten times better when you've got a friend to show you around, regaling you with tales about every street corner. Such was Vernon; his history here was colourful in the strangest of ways. Friendships had been formed here, drugs had been done here, blackouts had been forgotten there.

We searched high and low for his old friends, and finally found out that one had gotten a job at a local gas station. He wasn't on shift by the time we got there, so we figured we'd grab a couple bottles of cider and head down to one of Scrib's old drinking spots.

We sat down on a bench by a slow rolling stream, listening to the soft murmur of its flow and letting the luminescence of the stars flicker down on top of our alcoholic craniums. The serendipitous sound of Celtic music arose from the speaker of my phone as we passed back and forth the bottles of cider, though the music soon came to become indecipherable as our voices rose above it.

As the last bottle was finished and tossed into oblivion, we found ourselves staring into the obnoxious glare of a flashlight. Three cops strolled up and told us that they'd received a complaint about some belligerent morons (to paraphrase) hanging around this park. We'd calmed down by then, so it was no problem to convince them that it wasn't us. They soon left, and I stood to leave.

Scrib, too, stood - if you could call it that. His balance had been ground into nothing; his coordination had been curb-stomped. I'd never seen him this drunk - shocking, because we'd drank much more than this on a million more occasions. Perhaps the excitement comingled with the alcohol creating a shit-storm of emotion that captivated his motor functions.

Either way, we roamed back to the gas station where Dennis was working. He was just getting off work, and him and Scrib locked eyes. Someone might has well have taken a paintbrush and dipped it into a jar of recognition before slapping it all over both of them, because the looks on their faces were more than memorable. They embraced and rekindled their friendship, though Dennis was a little put off by how hammered Scrib was. Understandable - to make an impression like that on a person you haven't seen in so many years was a bit strange. He was worried that Scrib himself had changed.

We made our way to an old school where we drank a few beers with Dennis and Scrib got ahold of another one of his friends. Dennis parted ways and me and Scrib decided to wait around until 3 AM for Chels to come pick us up. Though it was midnight, the night was still young; though the rest of the story is for another entry.

Isolation (poetic stance)

Psychokinetic energy mangled my mind and disrupted my spirit's engine,
sending my brain into a sea of confusion.

Who, what, where, when, why?
I've been assailed by questions of unknown origin;
they soiled my brain like raindrops,
the main stops in my mentality became mutilated processions of indecipherable thought.

Who does one turn to when they've forgot what they stand for?
What does one stand for when they've no one to turn to?

The blinds shielded me from the predatory rays of happiness,
as I lay, slacked and discharged, wondering how to refuel reality.

Mid-ponder, a cataclysm of cacophonous cries called to me,
careening through my head;
a verbal stampede,
stomping their callous implications into my psyche
as if they were vikings,
pillaging and raping my mind.
Bits of grey matter became gold for their treasury.

The onslaught, soon satiated, quickly abated and fled from my head.
I thought I'd nothing before, but now I had less than nothing.
Though, in a way - is that not more?

Isolation

Damn. A thousand bucks down and we hadn't even started our journey. The only thing we had started was a painful dependance on alcohol. The litres of booze that we'd consumed was utterly and retardedly impressive, so I decided to take a night off and hang out with the Mums, now that we'd regrouped in Nanaimo. 

She was a bit shocked to see me (having just paid rent for a house, despite spending only four nights at it) but she welcomed me with open arms. She whirled up a fantastic stir fry whose flavours were comprised of a myriad of epicly delicious proportions.

Following the meal, I was shown by my own brain how strongly I'd come to rely on alcohol by the onset of some gnarly withdrawal symptoms. These weren't your everyday hangover effects, marked by nausea and vertigo, oh no. This included those, but there was also an onslaught of audio hallucinations, reminiscent of the days I'd spent binging on drugs and arguing with the voices in my head. 

Maybe some weed could knock some sense into the subconscious chatter in my head? Right as I readied myself to walk up the street to spend my last five bucks on a doobie, my mom informed me that she no longer needed her stash of roaches anymore. She passed them off to me. 

That was the first surprise; the second surprise was that I found a bag with a small dose of chenga (herbs soaked in dimethyltryptamine) that I'd forgotten about. It had been gifted to me by Zezza , a dreadlocked cutie with a boatload of sass who was planning to come travel with us. 

I mixed the chenga in with some weed and lit up the doobie, preparing myself for some mild visuals with relaxing tunes . This was not the case however, for as I hauled back the first toke I was plucked from reality so fast that I couldn't even coordinate my hands well enough to use YouTube and put on a song. I leaned back and let the DMT consume my reality. 

As I closed my eyes, I found myself looking from a distance at a monstrous entity that I could only label as the Creator. To be in the presence of such omnipotence was overwhelming, and I reached out with my mind, asking the Creator if I could touch him. The wish was granted to the umpteenth degree as the being held out his massive arm and pulled me out of my body. 

I watched him whip my flailing body in front of his gaping jaws. A cataclysm of cacophanous cries arose from his bowels. "You are MINE. I CREATED YOU." His screams echoed through my head like nails screeching against the chalkboard of my brain. "YOU. ARE. MINE." He tossed me in the air as if to catch me in between his jaws and shred me apart. Instead, he caught me again and threw me back into reality so hard that my eyes flew open. 

Whoa. Time to sleep that off methinks.

Swassy Decisions

The homesickness had ceased to subside. The first words out of my mouth were a slurred grumble of irritation.

"Fuck this. I'm waking up in a pile of dirt with a hangover and an empty stomach. This sucks. What are we doing with our lives, Scrib?"

"Well, right now, I've been flicking these little green worms off your sleeping bag for the last half hour. Get up, dude."

My irritation dissipated as we laughed, coughed, coughed some more, then left our alcove and walked the three feet back to the highway. It didn't take long after we'd stuck out our thumbs for a ride to pull over.

The time passed mainly through conversations about our driver's company - he made mobile gun targets and spent a hell of a lot of time testing them out. He showed us a few videos of his products on the range as he took us all the way to Hope.

Hope was a great place. The people were friendly - ecstatic to encounter travelers with smiles, a rarity in such a small town. We offered them a few tunes on our didgeridoos before we hit the road. We couldn't dawdle - we still had to find Fernweh and Aids in Osoyoos.

The walk to the hitching spot was tedious, hot, and filled with the deathly gross repercussions of swass. Swass (along with mosquitos and people who don't pick you up) is one of the most aggravating aspects of traveling, particularly with such an exemplary amount of ass hair. Swass is the precursor to buttchafe, and buttchafe can easily half a group's walking speed.

It took us three parched, sweaty, painful hours to reach the hitching spot - right at the junction of highway 3 and the Coquihalla. By the time we'd arrived, we'd figured, fuck it. We didn't want to be on this swassy highway for any longer. We'd go wherever our ride was going, be it Osoyoos, where Fernweh and Aids awaited, or be it towards Kamloops. Scrib had spent some of his teenage years growing up in Vernon, north of Kamloops, so we figured that if we went that way, we could rendezvous with them.

Well, as it turned out, we got picked up by a fellow named Greg who was going straight to Vernon. Fernweh and Aids would have to wait, we supposed.

Monotony

Well, mainland hitchhiking had maintained its monotony.

Three hours after standing in the sun, Scrib having burnt the entire underside of his arm from having his thumb abjectly dangling above the highway, we decided to call it quits for a while. We could go make some cash in Abbotsford, grab a few beers, and exploit Murphy`s law. (Hitchhiking in years past has taught me that any time you crack a beer on the highway and plan to enjoy it, a car pulls up right away forcing you to toss it or slam it.)

We flagged up $40 pretty quickly and split a pizza from Pizza Hut. (Narrator`s note: try their Veggie Korma pizza. It`s fucking delicious!) We grabbed a bottle of cider and some beers as well, and headed back to the highway. I swore to Murphy along the way that if He allowed us to get picked up by exploiting his law, I`d dropkick the beer into the forest.

We cracked a beer and got picked up. Damn. I wanted to drink that beer, but I stayed true to my promise and kicked what remained off into the forest beyond the highway.

We dove into the car and met our new chauffeur: a smiley east Indian girl named Ramen who called herself Noodles. She was nice - perhaps too nice. Though I can`t say anything against someone kind enough to give us a ride, she clearly didn`t know much about hitchhiking because she dropped us off in a ridiculous place with no room for any cars to pull over and minimal traffic. Gee. Murphy sure showed us.

We walked along the highway for a while, sheltered by the shade, until we got our next ride.

Our saviour, a mustachioed, ex-patch Hell`s Angel, had a truck filled to the brim with glass windows. The experience we had really went to show two things: where there`s a will, there`s a way. You can always fit any amount of shit into nearly any small space. On top of that, it showed that playing Tetris as a kid really helps to teach you how to cram shit properly into a vehicle.

The ride was short and intertwined with twisted stories about how our driver had tried to kill his roommate with a shotgun. He`d missed, however, and shot himself in the knee. That explained why he couldn't help much while we rearranged the stuff in his car. Rough.

He dropped us off twenty minutes from where we`d met him and we were quick to crack the cider and sip it back. The sun had just begun to set when we got picked up by a fellow named Gary, who took us all the way to Chilliwack.  He brought us to Burger King and bought me and Scrib a couple burgers. Scrib was almost entirely overwhelmed by Gary`s generosity, spitting out endless thanks. It was an adorable thing to see.

Nice. As we sat down to eat our burgers I checked my Facebook on my phone. I saw a friend request from a girl I hadn`t talked to in over a year since we`d been in Toronto... and... it turned out she`d just moved to Chilliwack. Coincidence? I think not. This was meant to be. We exchanged numbers and decided to meet up.

Our plans fell through though as the sun fell beneath the horizon and me and Scrib found ourselves heading back to the highway to make a nest next to the hitching spot. We fell into a world of dreams as the traffic buzzed by in the back of our minds, soothed to sleep by the song of their engines.

Icicles

I awoke chilled - not just to the bone, but frozen as well. My mind swam back towards the embracing warmth of my old bed at my mom's place. Was it possible to digress so quickly into homesickness? Impossible! Regardless, as i heard Scrib rustling around beside me, I felt nothing stronger than the desire to wrap my sleeping bag around me so tightly I suffocated in its warmth.

I wallowed in self pity for a while before Scrib got tired of waiting for me to stop being a pussy, and told me he was leaving. Not wanting to lose his company, I ripped the sleeping bag from my body like the Hulk tearing his shirt from his body. The moment the sun hit my body, I was engrossed with a wave of vitamin d that tore my depression away like a tsunami roaring over the shore of my sadness.

I remembered my purpose. Our purpose. Even though we hadn't money to share, we had love, we had music, we had laughter. We were here to share these with the world - and it was worth it, even if we had to wake up shivering on concrete. Hopefully the world would reciprocate the feeling.

That being said, I was still chilled to the bone. A night of shivering can leave you shaking for hours. Having your internal organs turned into icicles is never fun; shivering within the bright of day makes one feel a bit foolish.

We pressed on. Vancouver had been fun for a night, but we had friends to find. We hit the SkyTrain and decided for the first time in either of our lives that we`d pay for our tickets. Weird. It turns out we didn`t need them though, because security was slacking and the guards didn`t even offer us a second glance - despite the fact that our huge bags and instruments took up 5 seats and would usually arouse suspicion.

Regardless, we made it to King George station - exactly where we didn`t need to be. To catch our bus, we had to reroute back on to the SkyTrain and take it back to Surrey Central, where we jumped on the bus for an hour before it dropped us off at another bus which we rode for another hour before we were finally in Abbotsford.

Damn. The highway looked mighty enticing today. It was finally time to stick out our thumbs! 

Meh

Excitement always swashes through an Island boy (or girl) as the ferry bumps up against the coast of the mainland. It was a statement: you were finally here, rolling with the real city cats, free from the relaxing isolation of Vancouver Island. North America is now your oyster. the excitement rattled me and Scrib, for not only had we opened the oyster's shell, but within lay a massive pearl, gleaming with the light of an adventure. 


The first thing we noticed as we got off the boat was that the bus prices were fucked, costing nearly twice as much as the bus from Nanaimo. It was time to test our skills as a homebums- we conjured up some cardboard, pencilled in our need for bus fare, and had barely whipped out our instruments before people started throwing money at us. We had 8 bucks shimmering in our hat within seconds. Maybe we should fly this sign more often?

We hopped on the bus and succumbed to even more generosity - the very same lady, an elder grey-haired woman with a fantastic smile wisened by her years - who had already contributed so much to our bus fare, now offered us two boxes of granola bars. Never turn down generosity, I`ve been taught, as long as you aren't taking advantage.

So, we grabbed the noly bars and jumped off the bus downtown. Damn - i'd forgotten how the concrete jungle looked. Drabness contrasted with the bustle and jive of the hundreds of people parading through the streets... normal people doing normal things... going to work, walking their dogs, getting out for lunch - and, above all, forgetting to smile. Few people know how to smile in a city, some even seem scared when you smile at them. Whatever - we could smile enough for this whole city.

We sat down on Granville street and pulled out our didgeridoos. We puffed and panted, pumping out beats and packing back change, until a young Asian woman sat down with us. She told us she was from Korea and had never heard anything as beautiful as the didgeridoo in her country. We played her a requiem, and once we finished, we found her weeping. Such joyful tears I``d never seen - within her eyes, angels seemed to sparkle behind glass walls. She ran off wiping her eyes, ran back wielding two hot chocolates - one for me and one for Scrib - then bid us goodbye and left.

It was dark now. Me and Scrib had made enough for a bottle of cider, so we grabbed one and brought it back to last year's hobo spot - a sheltered carport with a few chairs and a table. We set up camp there and spun the bottle of cider, contemplating deep into the night about what the future held for us. 

Farewell

Well, the day had finally arrived from Scrib and I.

Fernweh and Aids had decided to prematurely leave the group, having spontaneously headed out a few days prior. Scrib and I had decided to wait until the planned date: May first.

Having spent the last of however many thousands of dollars we`d spent (save the money for our ferry) we were freshly broke, hungover, and curious to remember what broken life was like. We traunched towards the ferry terminal.

Having misread the time, I had to dodge the curse words as they flew from Scrib`s mouth like profane missiles. He was convinced that we were going to miss the ferry, and wasn`t afraid to make sure the population of the parking lot knew that. 

We made it, though, with six minutes to spare. We boarded and headed straight to the upper deck as the ferry departed, separating us at last from the shours of our Island. We waved goodbye to Nanaimo, with its sparkling harbour and rundown buildings, then turned aruond to face Vancouver as we closed the distance between us.  

The mainland promised us infinite adventures and endless insanity; though, it seemed already that we missed the island. It was as if we were parting with our family... but as sure as we missed it, we were sure that the day we returned would be an amazing reunion.  The thought filled us with comfort as we leaned back into our seats, serenaded by the soft soothing song of an accordion being played by some old Scottish dude.

It was the perfect song to signify the start of a journey.