On the Road again 2017 #5

It strikes me as I watch the passing of an endless stream of images framed by the steel frame of the train's window, that I am less emotionally engaged in this trip than any other that I have taken in the past 15 years. Normally when I head west, it is at the end of a long spring where my anticipation for my summer trip builds after numerous dreams/fantasies about hitchhiking and at least a few attacks of spring fever. But now for the second summer, I am heading west  to go back home. In fact, with the exception of hitching from Winnipeg to the west coast tomorrow morning, my trip is over. It feels wrong to me- as if I have done something out of order. I never promised that any of my writing would make any sense but this feeling may make less sense than normal.

My pack is perhaps the lightest it has ever been. I am not planning on doing a lot of camping and therefore I am carrying only the basic necessities (although because of the internal frame on my fifteen year old pack, it is surprisingly heavy -even when empty). But the fun I usually  have in packing my stuff, of deciding what I need and what I really don't need was done a month ago -  when at least part of my agenda was figuring out what I could fly with. (I just at this moment remembered that I never bought gas for my stove. If I stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere I will not be able to make tea- dumb). The process of my packing has been backwards and I suspect that the gas is not the only thing I have forgotten.

I also suspect that the other reason why I have invested less energy into this return trip is that my thinking for the past month has been focused on past trips. I have just finished the first draft of my "book". I started last June trying to develop some sort of a framework for sharing the stories of the various drivers I had met in my travels. I worked on it again in December when I visited Sudbury and for the last month I have spent a few hours most days re-reading and editing some of those stories. It is a surprisingly exhausting process. As I read the different journals that I originally produced and the hundreds of blog entries that I have generated in the last seven years, those stories reminded me of those events ; they have allowed me to re-live those trips; to visit again some of my drivers. So many of those freshened memories needed to be savored, to be touched in my mind for a few minutes. So often those memories reminded me of another time, of another driver, of another scene from some other trip and I would spend half an hour trying to find my notes on that trip as well.

So by being lost in the past - delightfully so - I have had less energy and perhaps less need to dream of the upcoming trip. I am not sure what the next step in the process should be. I suspect that my just over 117,000 (150 single spaced pages) is far too long and now I will need to spend hours going through it, chopping/deleting those delightful and important memories. And of course this trip will generate a whole new set of images to be savored in the future.