Addendum:

Sodium sulfate is mainly used for the manufacture of detergents and in the Kraft process of paper pulping. About two-thirds of the world's production is from mirabilite, the natural mineral form of the decahydrate, and the remainder from by-products of chemical processes such as hydrochloric acid production.

First glimpse

of the rockies, between strathmore and calgary, just a faint shadow through the clouds. I thought it would be a "short" day today, but i still logged 714 km, and I'm not at my cousin's just yet -- pit stop in a starbucks to try to finish the nagging unfinished piece of work that is today's version of the big Unfinished credits that have followed me throughout my life. (There's always one thing I have to push to its limits; in this case, it's a report on some focus groups we did at one of the hospitals).

Renee asked me yesterday what I think about when I drive. It's not very profound. I think about driving, and the little friendly competition the A4 with BC plates and I had where we both hovered at 160 km/h throughout western saskatchewan, and why the guys on harleys had to block both lanes just to be contrary outside calgary, and how the landscape in western SK and eastern AB off the transcanada looks so prosperous, and what exactly those driller thingies that look like this:



are called. (Oil well pump, google image tells me).

And what they are mining near Chaplin, SK, that looks like snow:



(Sodium sulphate, apparently, whatever that's used for).

And I think about the month's worth of Sunday Edition podcasts that drifted through the car, and whether I should stop and try to buy a phone for my new place at Staples in Swift Current, and whether they sell wine in grocery stores in AB, and whether the Safeway in MooseJaw has a starbucks (it does), and whether my tummy hurts because of the eggs or the bread in my breakfast panini.

And of course, I think about my life, and the cyclists on the transcanada (all heading east; 2 sets of m/f couples and one solo man with a little trailer), and what I will have to do to get ready for a real pilgrimage on my bike, and all of the books I've read about women traveling solo on bikes, from Dervla Murphy to Josie Dew. Thinking about how the travel problem-solving even at the simplest level -- where to get a coffee -- will be so magnified, and wondering what I can mine to get the nerve.

I'm tired of driving, so tomorrow will be a short drive to Banff. I booked a room for tomorrow night there, and will go for a hike tomorrow afternoon. The mountains, finally.

There are no buffalo

in north dakota anymore, but I did stop in Buffalo, ND to get gas. I left Fargo with a too-hot americano in hand and didn't really pay attention to the gas gauge; by the time I did, it was inching down, and as soon as Fargo was three sips behind me, it was pretty much farmland on both sides of the road. I developed that itchy worry about how long I could keep driving with the quarter tank, trying to calculate distances to likely nodes of services with the shifting "your tank will take you this far" number on my dashboard. It's such a weird little tension when driving, the desire to keep going and not to get off the road, wanting to push it, and the surging anxiety about the Unknown and possible empty miles.

So I pulled off at an exit that had the little gas pump icon, and followed it down a flat winding road, to a completely empty, dusty town. I spotted some people loading folding chairs onto a truck and asked them where the gas station was. I'd missed it completely -- just a couple of pumps, one diesel, one not, with no sign at all, deep ruts. Friendly woman, non-premium fuel that I tossed into the audi recklessly.

A drive this long is so intense and intimate, such a sway between Big Expansive Thoughts about the Big Expansive Landscape and all of the people in them, and the intense moments where you get locked into a tractor beam of relationship with the big wide truck in front of you that is stuck behind a small car, with not-quite-enough room to get between them. This becomes the Total Focus for what seems like an indefinite, forever period of time. And then, you pass, and suddenly you're in the landscape again. Moments where the google-approved border crossing turns out to be a Bad Idea because of a static long truck lineup, and setting off to look for another maybe-border unmarked on the map seems both just sensible and anxiety provoking.

I didn't expect to find North Dakota so stunning -- yes, the flat plains that look remarkably like where I grew up, especially around the cottage, the familiar memory of running in blazing open-sky heat, where the one tree 2 km down the road was a sought after oasis for the 5 seconds of shade as I passed under. This part was familiar, but the flow of rolling hills, green green green was surprising, somehow. High plains, stunning. Beside the road, high water still, sloughs that are probably not always full, the residue of the only-dimly-noticed floods of last month. The sparkling blue of inland lakes in the west that is so different from Ontario's dark green-blue, or the grey of the greats.

So many stories hinted at -- the class years gouged into the hills near Kenmare (state champs in 68!), the empty shells of farmhouses, the first oil drill I noticed as I was nearing the border. I stopped in the town of Kenmare, lured by the promise of the Historic Mill! Sunny saturday afternoon, completely empty town square. The choo choo cafe closed down, another empty store next to it, one woman carrying a take-out container across the square, a couple of rough looking red-tanned guys muttering about how it was too nice a day to work heading into the windowless Beer Bob's bar.

As soon as I crossed into Saskatchewan, the landscape was radically different -- people doing saturday things in pickups, recreation areas, a different kind of farmland, dustier, populated. Dusty not-green golf courses with holes on crazy lumps of land, golf carts perched on top. Driving more slowly, the opened up throttle on the empty land of ND far behind me, just trying to stay alert enough to pass sensibly, grateful for the zoom of the german engine but perhaps a little too scottish in my recklessness.

The day, to moose jaw, 924 km altogether, and a tatty hotel because the slightly more cheerful ones were full or available only to smokers, spying on the Vanier Grad of overheated parents in suits, girls in Fancy Prom-type gowns, one accessorized by a weeks old baby. Dairy queen chocolate dipped cone, sleep. Momentary reflection on how there is no time to reflect when you're busy driving and noticing. Wondering where I'm going to.

No Cream Cheese

I don't notice my blood sugar while I'm driving until it's too late, sometimes. I waited too long for lunch today, and pulled off just before St. Paul to a Chipotle. I realized I looked deranged when I kept saying "no cream cheese" to my burrito maker when I was trying to say "no cheese or sour cream" -- and then couldn't figure out which of the spouts contained iced tea. (To be fair, it was the unlabeled samovar-like thing that would have held *water* in Canada).

It was 850 km worth of almost-prairie today, all straight road, sunny blue clouds punctuated by an occasional sudden storm, pickups and cars with boat trailers, small sparkling lakes. Big blonde people in the Chili's in Fargo where I ate dinner.

I had an email from F noting that a long drive gives you decompression time with no obligations, no need to interact in any way you don't want to. I think I need that... and I think my life really doesn't lend itself to that. I was listening to a piece on CBC the other day about how with the current array of technology, you can't lose yourself in a foreign city the way we did even five years ago -- the stream of tweets and fbook and wifi means that you are as hooked into other people as anywhere else. I've kind of arranged this trip on purpose to be relational -- and it's got an accidental but perfect symmetry where my stays started with my childhood home, then the familiar bed at P's, then the familiar-but-new space of my first real-life meeting with the miraculous Amy. Then tonight, a never-before seen town (though of course, it looks like every other edge of a mid-size american city, though the full double rainbow in the parking lot of the Target was pretty unique to the northern mid-west). A funnel from the known to the new. And, a need to respond to an email about work, and one about a requisite signature for my rented place in TO, and a call about community response to bp's illness, and a nagging realization that I haven't responded to stuff about the orphans. Hard to lose myself when I have destinations, no time to just roll free, the wifi hook.

I think that tomorrow and sunday I'll just undo it all and try for that decompression. Being with the people who care about me at the beginning of this trip was invaluable... and now I think I need to just drive until I'm done, and not talk. Hurt and hope are still washing over me as I go, punctuated with license plate bingo, gratitude, the voice of david sedaris, the two or three songs iconic of this trip so far: AC Newman's Ten or Twelve, Arcade Fire's Keep the Car Running, Alison Kraus & Robert Plant's Gone Gone Gone.

One warm line

I'm in chicago, being thoroughly taken care of by my dear friend pamela, who just made me a bowl of buttery salty popcorn and left me to read for a while. So far on this trip I've slept in already familiar beds, tracing a one known line. 857 km is barely a dent in the map. But I did cover a stretch of michigan I don't remember seeing before, scrubby with intense cloudbursts and many lurking speedcops. Today was mostly listening to david sedaris, being a little dreamy, driving in as relaxed a way as you can when the cargo is shifting uneasily behind you and you're wondering if the bike is puncturing a painting and the clouds are opening up violently and unexpectedly. I realize I still find toll roads weirdly exotic, attached to the kind of gleeful excitement I felt when I first started driving the NYS thruway to in the Pursuit of Romance.

Threaded through the day of mundane drive is an undercurrent of sorrow about bp's health. P showed me a dvd interview of her mom one of her students did shortly before her mom died, and we cycled again through the "so vibrant one minute, gone six months later" sense of shock. I was thinking that this past few months is the first time I think I've really been conscious of aging. Not for any tangible or "rational" reason, but just a sensation that there are only so many five year chunks in one's life, and I may have edged toward having fewer left than behind me. The thwarted interlude with the married poet was another chink in this sense -- the idea that after a certain point, the potential for new connections and sustained intimacy becomes thinner. And then if you find someone you become truly enmeshed with... well, the possible narratives that could fan out have the horrible potential to look like bp's -- life that becomes truly joyful, then dashed to the ground by a turncoat body.

Despite this undertow, I *am* feeling increasingly hopeful as I head west. The chokingly humid run with beth this morning reminded me of what I want to leave behind -- something cloying, something sticky, the churn of leftover stories -- and what I want to run toward.

Day 1

My sister told me that any road trip needs to begin with a song played loudly, and that your journey should take shape around it. I decided to goofily play Canada's Really Big as I ping-ponged my way out of the recklessly parked cars in the market. For a few minutes, I contemplated rewriting the plan and actually staying completely within Canada instead of my half-and-half itinerary, just for the romantic satisfaction of rounding the lake and threading across the prairies. But I opted for the friends-as-stops plan as written, and pointed myself toward the QEW.

It doesn't feel Significant yet, especially the first 55 km that I traced so many times going to rochester, before the turn off in Hamilton. The familiarity of the 401 wasn't overshadowed by the shiny new stores on Manning road (more coffee, a bottle of wine for dinner).

Visited my mom briefly, then to B&J's where I did a conference call on my BC project before my mother came for dinner. They gifted me with a new burr coffee grinder as a housewarming present, which was bloody nice -- and still the distance isn't real. 387 km out of 4922 -- barely a divot in the map. Starting to find a rhythm of audiobooks, new music and the radio. And realizing just how much my car likes to urge itself forward in 6th. So far avoided the many speedtraps, but I can't imagine this trend continuing through the revenue-thirsty interstates.

License plates spotted: Manitoba, Quebec, NY, NJ, OH, MI, MO, CO, MN.

Scratchy

F's term for people bickering and at odds is "scratchy." And I seem to be scratchy with everyone in my world at all these days. It's trite to talk about the stress of moving, but it's real -- and here I am again, on the brink of some adventure, and instead of feeling graceful and brave about it, I've got my mouth open in a big yowl of anxiety and fret and sullen stompiness that I am alone in feeling this.

I have a slurry of emotions about this move and its magnitude, and somehow every moment of loss and fear that I've had has encrusted itself to this moment. And I have that dark inversion happening where I can't see the bright spots, can't stay focused on that image of the goat cheese and arugula salads and the ocean, can't hold it in the centre. I'm just agitated, sad, worried and -- oddly enough -- feeling abandoned, despite the fact that this loony move is my choice.

I think part of it is just the disorientation of watching three strangers drive off with all my stuff, and being experienced enough to know that the disgorging will mean weeks of not knowing where anything is, wandering around holding a single spoon and feeling its existential, dislocated angst. And part of it is a sort of constant inner dialogue about realizing I'm on my own and that the people I've imagined spending my life with are off on their own rides, just as beset as I am in different ways, but far away.

I'm also really conscious that the intensity of my physical presence when I'm scratchy can be so hard to digest that the people who are best able to support me are the ones at arm's length -- either the ones I talk to in small doses (thanks, Kat ;-)) or the ones at the streamlined end of a data line.

In real terms, it's been a extremely overwhelming week. Ian's funeral, and the waves of people who call me by a name I don't even recognize as my own anymore. Then the strange little interlude with the other Ian, the poet, and the sudden choking off of the effusive interest, fantasy burst before it even formed off the end of the bubble pipe. Then of course, the news about bp, which suffuses me with inarticulable sorrow and a kind of panic at losing my touchstone to grace. Trying to articulate my untethered feeling to my here-community, and finding myself so out of sync, a blast of angry agitation that is so much about feeling alone. Then the absurdity of believing that I could be light-hearted with someone, find a balm in the physical, with my young courier boy, when I'm feeling like this -- and our sunday afternoon date turning into "I've met someone else." And, ironically, his showing himself able to stay and talk about the intimacy of fear and death -- more digestible small bursts of me.

Me, scratchy, preaching so eloquently about embracing the uncertain and emergent to the learners in my course, drowning in so much abstract anxiety about what's in front that I can't pause to form any kind of appealing story of possibility. Pause, breathe.

One more

At the funeral the other day, Carol Anne comment that she didn't want to cry, because it wasn't "her place." Well, I could argue that -- she was Ian's caregiver, she's not close to her own parents, she's been part of that family for a long time. But I get the impulse, the desire to not put yourself in the centre of someone else's grief.

I'm feeling like that today. I got the news that bp is sick, has what is likely advanced bone cancer, unknown primary. I'm trying not to second guess prognosis, or to claim the grief and numbness. But I'm bitterly sad and worried, for him and his family and for me. His concepts have reshaped how I see myself, and how I aspire to engage with the world. He's not just a friend and mentor, but a meaning-maker in the best sense. A master of generative living. I feel an atavistic sense that if he isn't there as an avatar of generative presence, I will be less.

Anxiety

I have been reading Patricia Pearson's excellent and clever book about anxiety. It's illuminating. I'd come to realize in the past few years that much of what I'd thought of as "fear of X" in my life (insert any number of concepts here) was more of a free-floating anxiety. Among other gut-crackling observations, Pearson writes about phobias (like, fear of peas) as objects that can become totems for *all* of our fears. The woman who runs away from peas has found a convenient container for everything she can't handle.

When I was at Ian's funeral the other day, I was reflecting on how the ceremony of farewell to someone -- even sparely Catholic -- has taken on the power to be about all the accumulated loss in the world for me. About the person, yes, but also about generalized, blank, untethering loss. Of people, of potential. The more iconic the rituals, the more wrenching. On Tuesday, I was fairly placid -- until Gillian, after painstakingly pulling flowers out of the arrangement on the casket as directed, briefly fell into disintegrating sorrow. Then, plunged into all the loss and sadness I've had.

I have those moments as I'm packing and finding books or clothes that evoke stories, nodes of intimacy offered or grasped, still at bedtime when there is a gap where there used to be night-time calls with F I for almost the entire time I lived here. It's not the calls themselves, so much -- so often they were scratchy or unsatisfying -- it's the ritual of bidding goodnight to someone who cares about me as I turn my body over to the edgy, unpredictable dark of the night.

During all of my time with B, we had a constant conversation about the things I was afraid of, that she helped me avoid and manage. Unlocked doors, people vomiting, the turkey that harboured killer bacteria, being alone, fire, heights, people out of control, the maniac who would jump out of the bushes at women's only events, driving too fast, that the stranger offering us a ride on his sailboat in new zealand was going to kill us, clients wanting too much from me, thuggish boys who would beat us up, friends and their untold anxieties that played out in social weirdness. All dating back to my nightly prayers as a little girl that the bathtub wouldn't overflow (I thought the house would fill with water and I would drown), that the attic above me wouldn't burst into flame and crash me into a firey death. Pearson describes the spinning, the churn, the playing over and over of the same scripts that trap and paralyse and push your relationship with fear into the centre of any social dynamic.

It was really freeing for me to start recognizing that it wasn't the specifics I was afraid of, but that I always carried an abundance of anxiety that could fix itself to anything. A very small regime of drugs threw a muffling blanket over the constant threat of metaphorical flame. Now I can greet the anxiety as a somewhat reasonable character -- oh, I'm anxious, okay. Interesting. Rather than spin agonize repeat.

In this move, I'm starting to recognize sadness as having the same free-floating properties. Yes, I'm specifically sad about the loss of potential with F, sad about moving away from B, sad about regrets and moments I've had in my life where I haven't lived into my best self, where I've been self-absorbed and uncompromising in ways that freeze possibilities. I lift the sadness off a shelf with a fleece that triggers a memory of climbing on Skye, the drawings of Trixie the goat that B had made for me, a faded polaroid that falls out of a book of J&S&B topless on hanlan's point (where I stayed on the sand reading while they got on a stranger's boat). But I am learning to fondle the sadness a bit, shape it, put it away, recognize it as a reminder to settle into, value, feed the connections with the people and possibilities that actually surround me.

I just shoved a copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into an empty wine box, box #28 or so in the endless parade of "does this come to BC or stay here?" decisions I've had to make about practically everything I own. I've only sketched out the vaguest notion of what this life I'm going to have in BC will be -- the one where I might dip into Wittgenstein, cook with mindfully selected goat cheese and arugula, light candles scented with faux sea air. My life here, crammed into my 550 square feet hovering above the city, is a little clearer -- fast, money-earny, bursting with people and stories, cheap sushi on the grass in front of UHN with a client talking about care models, coffee thrown down the gullet.

The books at hand evoking the time in the eyrie in Portland, fusing words to F for the first time. Another sigh, another piece of tape RPPPPPPPPPPED across the top.

West is just a question posed, a hint of an echo of a desire. A suburb on the sea, not of anything in particular, just a house in which to be and write and find. A blank, with shadows of people I'm linked to on the edges.

I'm multi-phrenic at the best of times, but in the past days it's been Work Write Talk Knit Renee Pack Finish Blankie Pack Liz Pull out knitting Pack Drive Arrange Drink beer with B Work Pack Drink Vodka and Watermelon Ice on date with GB Ice Knee Pack Talk to Sister Pack. Bashed up against a funeral and three different sets of encounters with people I haven't seen for two decades. A reunion shooting itself at me one bb at a time. Lots to ponder there, torrents of different possible stories lived, unlived, untold, unexpected, foreseen, unseen. A possibility held out in the form of the enamoured poet from the pub the night I sold my loft, cross-purposes revealed when his ardour turned out to be of the cake having and eating variety. I'm not opposed to the cake-mouth-stuffing of course, but as with Neil the surreptitious foot fetishist, I like to know which part of me is being eyed lasciviously before agreeing to try to bend in that direction.

Life. Trying to grab onto just one piece of yarn that's mine.

Bossy

Renee told me to post on my blog so she can test the RSS feed.

We've had such a good weekend.

The end.

Wistful

My cousin's boyfriend did a FB status update about being bored. I don't know if I've ever been bored. Restless, impatient, frustrated, sleepy -- but not bored. I do do wistful though. And there is nothing more wistful than remembering back 17 years to a humid august night at the Michigan womyn's music festival, a field of women teary-eyed as Ferron sang the quintessential wistful dyke breakup song. Flash forward, dinner at my ex's house-that-used-to-be-mine, with my online friend who also used to be a lesbian but isn't any more, Ferron at my kitchen table because the woman who lived in my ex's basement after we split up brought her because her friends, the documentary film-makers, made a film about her. Talking to my dyke friends about what to wear on my first date with some man I met at a pub. Life don't clickety clack down a straight line track indeed.

I've been faithful

to the wee diary book for a week now, and I like the practice. But what I notice is that I can't think of what to write, and then I start to write and then POOF the spaces are filled up. And no backspacing.

My car is all nimble, and in it and with it I'm all nimble. I went to ikea today to get some outside furniture, certain that it would disappear seasonally if I waited. I wasn't sure if the chaise would fit in my car, and in fact, in the box, it didn't. But taking B's creative persistence about these things, and what F taught me about tying things down so they don't flap about, I ended up removing the chaise from the box, levering it and propping it up at an angle with two other boxes, and securing it with my kayak strap to the front passenger seat so it didn't whack my head off. And then I proceeded to shove six folding chairs, a folding table and several armloads of towels, sheets, pillows, a duvet etc. into the space. Then ably hopped up and reaffixed the bike rack to the roof, because it would have become a trajectory in that mess.

When I got home, first I ran off to give K a cheque for my new place I'm renting. Then I steeled myself with some fruit berry candies and managed to wrassle all of the furniture upstairs, hyperactive elevator doors be damned.

In the bath, I was reading Heather Malick, whose vitriol can run away with itself but who is often caustically funny. This is what I wanted to fit in the wee diary:

Trust me to enshallow my love. But I fell in love with France because of the sunlight hitting the Seine in a certain way as I sat at a café drinking table wine. As usual, I qualified my love and this is why I am not what they call a "fun" person. Perhaps the sun is glinting off the corpses of the two hundred Algerians tied up and dumped in the Seine to drwon in the riots of 1961, I thought. But I still fell in love.

Victoria and Nancy-Ann

Two women named Victoria and Nancy-Ann have bought my place. I am guessing these are not the names they use in the world. What a weird mix of euphoria, delight that it’s two women, relief that I can move on (and that I made a modest profit on the whole thing) – and sadness and wistfulness. Walking home from the pub, having a burger and one too many glasses of wine with B, totally happy -- then totally weepy and sad.

Seems inevitable, me with my complicated feelings. (The other day, Alan-in-Moonbean said to me “you know, you light up a room – you have that spark… and then you realize how the wheels are turning and you think, “that is one complicated woman”). Yeah, yeah. Always with the ebullience and the wistfulness.

But, that’s me. Celebrating selling my place by eating hamburgers with my ex at the pub I’ve only discovered in the last year, getting chatted up by a guy named Ian (what the hell IS my demographic, anyway?), fretting about reading in too many different and stupid places about how women “become invisible” in their 40s, trusting that the universe turns up what you need when you know how to ask for it. Trusting that the stance of abundance is the right one.

Example: I did this jiggery pokery trade with L for the lease on my car, content merely to not have the car on my plate anymore – and then she reflects on it and gives me an extra cheque. I decide what I’m comfortable with at the bottom line for my place, and the first offer is exactly that. I end up with $38K above what I paid for it 3 years ago, which is not too bloody bad for this economy.

Oh, and I love my car. But that will have to wait for some non-burbling time.

5 years

I was wandering around my neighbourhood today killing time while more viewers (probably #20 or so) looked at my place and decided not to fall in love with it, and I went into this quirky little store in the market that's kind of a bookstore, kind of a cooking-stuff store. I had the notion that I might buy something for my new kitchen. Instead I picked up this 5 year diary.

It's tiny -- doesn't give you much room for any day -- but I like the idea of the flow of days over time. I was thinking about how different I am today than I was 5 years ago, and all that's unexpected about my life right now. I was wondering of course what May 1, 2014 would look like. I can't imagine.

I've never been great at the every-day-discipline stuff, but I think 3 lines -- a gutenberg-era twitter space -- should be doable. Not quite sure *what* to capture, though. Food? Dreams? (Let's not even GO there, given the horrifyingly explicit electra dream I had last night involving my father and a flowered bathing cap). Sensations? One dominant thought?

Now I just need a really good PEN.