On The Road Again 2019 - Epilogue

Before I left on my journey I had had this vision of the perfect trip. I would get great rides with only short waits in between. The weather would be nice (no rain but not too hot with just enough wind to keep the bugs away). If I slept outside it would be a glorious evening with the sky full of stars, soft grass to sleep on and no bugs. It was going to be my final hitchhiking trip - one more time across at least half of the country -celebrating my 70th birthday. My sense of the romance of hitchhiking was going to be fulfilled in every way imaginable.

It was instead not the best of trips. The weather for at least 24 hours was terrible; the rides, while they were great when they came were bracketed by long waits in between. My sore foot made walking and even standing uncomfortable and occasionally downright painful. And the trip took at least a day longer than I thought it should.

Perhaps even worse, some of the rules I had created for myself, rules that in the past seemed to garner me good rides - were demonstrated to be rather irrelevant. The person with the skateboard that I met at the Flying J just outside of Winnipeg, the one who was fairly aggressive seeking rides with the truck drivers and who was annoyingly hyper - got to Vancouver Island the same time as I did. The nice young man with the large dog ( a husky/shepherd mix) got just as many rides as I did, hitchhikers who asked if we could stop and then begged for smokes so they could smoke when we stopped - went as far as I did. I didn't hear any of my travelling companions tell stories nor or do anything else to get that few extra miles - but they got them anyway.

At least on this trip, it didn't matter where I stood, what I wore or whether I had a sign saying where I was going (no one else did). It was, quite frankly a little bit depressing. I felt silly that I had tried so hard to be a "good hitchhiker". When I got home - just over a month ago - I was clear. That had been my last trip. I was done with hitchhiking. My body was no longer in good enough shape to make it fun, I was just too damn old to be out on the highway with my thumb stuck out. I did not need to prove anything to anyone. I had hitchhiked across the country numerous times, made a few epic trips like the summer I crossed the country twice or the time that I went from Sudbury to Yellowknife to Duncan and then back to Sudbury. I was done. But......

I am quite sure that when springtime comes around again I will think about all of the drivers that I have never meet, of the endless possibilities that are out there if one only trusts the gods of hitchhiking. I suspect that I will miss my dreams of being on the open road and I may, just one more time, be seduced by those dreams.

Who says I am too old?

Looking for the Good Stories

When I am a vendor at one of the markets, of course, my primary goal is to sell some of my stuff - ideally some small things as well as a shawl or/or a rug. Not only does selling something feel good in that it validates what I do but as well the money I earn helps pay for my food and my hydro bill. But as great as it is to sell things, there are times when the people that I meet and the conversations that I have with them are far more interesting and important than any money that I may make. On a busy weekend, I may have 20-30 people a weekend coming up to me, watching and asking questions.


Sometimes it is just a brief conversation with a young person who wants to learn how to weave or spin. They ask me if I would teach them or did I need another apprentice. As flattering as that is - I always redirect them to someone who is qualified to teach, but I always encourage them to try. Sometimes it is a parent with a child of the right age and both are interested in what I am doing. They ask all kinds of questions about the spinning wheel, about dyes and about wool. Part of my mission is to demystify spinning and weaving. It is always fun to share what I know and to encourage others to just play. I have had numerous conversations with usually older people who start off their conversation with.... " I can remember my mother doing that when I was a little child". It seems to be such a fond memory for those people, one that they have probably not thought about for decades. I am glad that they share those memories with me. Because I sell within the Cowichan Valley, I fairly often have Indigenous individuals coming up to me and talking about the "spinners" their parents used to spin the wool for the sweaters. Making Cowichan sweaters was and is such a recognizable part of the local culture that the individuals are rightly proud of the sweaters they have knit.

At the Duncan Market this past week, an elderly woman in a power chair rolled up to me and watched me spin for a bit. Then she told me that her grandmother had immigrated from the Shetland Islands (a place well known for its wool and its knitters) to Vancouver Island and that she had taught some of the Indigenous women how to knit. The lady then told me that she had shown some of her mother's knitted toques to someone who was knitting a Cowichan sweater. The knitter showed how in the piece that she was working on, she was using exactly the same knitting stitch that was in the toque. Somehow, in spite of the fact that my visitor and I have different experiences with wool, we felt connected to each other and to wool. It was an important moment, we need to look for and to recognize the points of connection. I asked my visitor if I could share the story with others, she said yes and I have.


The following day, as I was eating breakfast and scanning the over-night headlines, it struck me that I could do a whole blog, day after day just listing all of the bad stuff that is happening in the world. I would not have to even comment on the news - just say - "here is some more bad news" and leave it up to people to decide what to think or feel. But that would get really boring and I suspect, would get really depressing to write and to read. While there are times (more often than not) when news stories are worthy of a comment or a reaction, I think one of the secrets of staying sane is looking for the positives of life. I have little patience for those who only see the world through rose coloured glasses, but there are individual and collective successes that need to be celebrated; there are great stories that need to be told.

I heard one such story this weekend.

Looking for the Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

It would be so easy to become and stay depressed for the whole day. All one has to do is to read the news' headlines. For example, this morning there are stories about the two mass shootings in the US; the fact that India has changed the semi-independence status of the Kashmir region, thereby making the region a potentially even more explosive point between Pakistan and India; Trump has cancelled the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons between itself and Russia so that it has the option of placing land-based nuclear weapons close to China; the climate is getting even warmer than the scientists anticipated; there may be a shortage of medically needed drugs in Canada; the authorities in Hong Kong are still beating up their citizens who are protesting; some 17 year old has apparently tossed a younger person of the roof of the Tate Museum in London and the prevalence of ticks means that we need to always check ourselves for them after going for a walk in the forest. Ugh!!!

It is hardly worth getting up. It would be so much easier to just stay in bed, with the covers pulled up over our heads, pretending that tomorrow will be a better day. But it won't. Or at least tomorrow will not be any better unless we do something to change the world today - and then do something every day thereafter. I suspect that our collective inertia and chronic depression over the state of the world has as much to do with the realization that we need to all work hard, all of the time if we want our grandchildren and their children to have a future. It just sounds exhausting.

However, there are rays of hope shining through the dark grey clouds that are formed by stupid politicians and their frightened acolytes. One of the tasks that we can do every day is to find those little but startling beacons of hope and to talk about them, to disseminate the positive news, to tell our neighbours, our friends, our families that there are some good things happening in this sorry world of hours.

My favourite news story of the weekend is the fact that our Prime Minister, and the leaders of two other, frequently opposing political parties all marched in the Vancouver Pride Parade - beside each other, talking about the importance of diversity and the acceptance of differences. Trudeau (Liberals) May (Green Party) and Singh (NDP) will all, in a few months, be hotly contesting the right to run the country. They will face each other in public debates and do their best negate (if not destroy) the opposing points of views. They will walk and on occasion cross the line of personal attacks. At least two of them run the risk of losing their jobs as heads of their parties if they lose the election. But in spite of the enmity that can exist in Canadian politics, in spite of the political stakes that the election will challenge, in spite of the frustration they each must share with the opposing points of views - they walked together in a parade that recognized people have the right to be who and what they want to be.


I know that marching in a Pride parade is an attempt to garner votes. I know that being seen at such an event, especially on the West Coast is not politically risky. In fact, the leaders would have faced more of a public backlash if they had not appeared. But they appeared together, looking as if they were having fun. There has to be hope in the world when competing political leaders can have fun together - doing a good thing.

Pass it on.
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