Liftoff 1

                                                Liftoff



                    “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
                     Healthy, free, the world before me,
                     The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”
                                                                        Walt Whitman



I was over the moon. Actually I was just west of Morris, but the cosmic coordinates felt similar. That first ride had been easier than I thought. The rest of the planet should be a cakewalk.
I waited on the side of the highway for a while. Then a while longer. And then a long time. For some reason, all the traffic on the main highway of the country seemed to have been abducted. I drew pictures in the gravel shoulder with a stick, and decorated them with buttercups. I tried an incantation or two. As I was reassessing my trajectory, a U Haul truck with bright blue and white Ontario license plates came out of the midday heat shimmer.
First Rule of Hitchhiking: It’s not up to you.

He had a baseball cap, sunglasses, moustache and leather driving gloves. He said he was just going ‘just a little way down the road,’ but I was already street smart enough to know he was lying. No one with driving gloves, in a rented truck from Ontario, was stopping in Manitoba. After the initial formalities were dealt with, I found out. He was a real estate agent moving to Vancouver because ‘that’s where the future is.’ His was tired from driving all night long. Did I have a licence? A few hours later I was steering his starship through the Saskatchewan twilight. ‘Alberta Bound’ played on the radio. Orion played on the horizon. You could smell the ozone.



                                          *         *        *

 “Then began a long apprenticeship, to become something certain in my own right,
  from which to see and be seen. Beyond that came the search for connections,
  freely offered and accepted, to confirm that the world and I, after all, we made of
  each other.”
                                                                             Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels



She came down to pick me up at the payphone, on Robson Street in Vancouver. She was lovely. I had met her in Mexico during my Blue Period. She drove me home and we discussed our dreams. I was beginning to understand how bittersweet my human encounters were destined to be over the next few years. There is no perfect velocity.
A few days later she drove me to the Peace Arch border crossing, south of Vancouver. She gave me a kiss and her silver flute. We named him ‘Merlin.’ I caught her eyes in the rear view mirror, as she turned around before the frontier.
My left was hung.
“Citizen of what country?” Asked the sunglasses at the checkpoint.
“Canada.” I offered.
“Purpose of your visit to the United States?”
“I’m in transit.” I said.
“What is your final destination?” He slid the glasses down his nose a bit.
I smiled.