Transition

An hour of poetry production had left me drained; my prophetic vision of myself pumping out words to the sunrise dissipated as I crawled into the tarp nest I'd haphazardly set up last night. Sand crawled into my socks and refused to leave. For a few hours, I pretended that the perforated protection provided by the tarps was any sort of cover, but once again, we arose sodden, angry and anxious. It was time to get the fuck out of this annoying wet province.

Our first realization was that the off-ramp to the highway was way too far to walk to, so we headed back to the metro station to dry off for a while and take a bus further east. Fern`s caring nature was showing this morning,  but his impressive fury was off the hook this morning. I've never seen somebody so angrily buy other people breakfast burgers. He hurled them down on the table, kicked his chair and sat down to eat his burger with livid eyes. When Squanch declined to eat hers we both snapped at her.

Ten minutes in a security guard came to tell us to leave because we were making a mess, we told him to fuck off because we were paying customers. He went and got the station's manager, a big black dude in a fancy uniform, who took a look at us eating our burgers, dripping wet. He took a look at the defunct old security guard who was hassling us, shook his head in pity and walked off. We took our time eating the rest of our breakfast and staring down the security guard before hitting the bus stop.

Fernweh's hatred was quelled by the bus driver. Hospitable as he was, and due to the lack of anyone else on the bus, he drove us ten minutes off the sanctioned transit route (way faster than a bus should be driving) and dropped us off directly on the highway. Cool.

Of course, it was still pissing rain in the tradition of our journey through Quebec. Fortunately it was only a few hundred meter walk to the nearest overpass, so we headed there. We tried hitchhiking with futile hopes that cars would pull over in a sort of slalom between construction workers and Bobcats, but they didn't, so once the rain stopped we started hiking the highway eastwards.

We'd only made it half a mile before getting picked up by a cop who sympathized with our situation. He gave us a ride to the closest "town," if you could call it that - a gas station, and A&W, a hotel and a few houses. Here, we could await good weather and establish a more solid hitching plan.