Location Sharing

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

In 1970, it was called a year off. Today it’s a gap year — organized, supervised, and tracked to the minute on a phone. I took mine with very little money, no survival plan that bore any relation to reality, and a Jack Kerouacian sense of adventure, a naive belief that I could find my way. University could wait. But this would only work if I got as far from the family safety net as possible.

Today, that idea seems quaint, a bit mad. Now, we are addicted to contact. Contact equals security. Security equals happiness. But it is also time-consuming and anxiety-inducing.

After travelling 4343 kilometres from home on The Canadian, the trans-continental train, I rented a “room” in a basement apartment in West Vancouver on Marine Drive. It consisted of a bed stuck in a hallway. My landlady spent her days smoking and watching soap operas, and her evenings drinking and entertaining men. I spent my days selling clothes in the menswear department at Eatons in the Park Royal South shopping mall down the road and thinking of ways to avoid returning to that wretched apartment. I sent my parents a one-page letter with my location and my new address. They now knew where I lived.

I had to move. I next shared a house with a woman named Francis and her son Frankie, her live-in paramour, an American army deserter named Jason, and a laconic Englishman named Jerry. My basement room, a real room, had a private entrance of sorts. There was now space for my barebones collection of possessions, including a suitcase with its enclosed stereo system with turntable and two speakers, and two albums: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s, Deja Vu. All I needed. And a car radio. Off went another letter to my parents with my new, new address.

As time went on, the jobs came and went. After Christmas, 1970, the work at Eatons dried up, one drip at a time. I tried my hand as a door-to-door Collier’s Encyclopedia salesman for exactly five days. It was not a gift I possessed.

A small company needed labour to clean out steel containers, each the size of a small travel trailer. I made my way to the docks early one morning and entered a noisy, crowded, dimly lit shop floor. I was instantly uneasy. Grade 9 Machine Shop had been nine months of never fitting in, never wanting to start a machine, and watching the clock tick one second at a time for forty straight minutes every single school day.

A large, tobacco-chewing, overalls-clad man looked at me. He had a close-cropped, grey, buzzy head of hair and a look that said: my shop, my rules, no airy-fairy commie nonsense here.

“Are you the kid old Ross sent over?” he growled.

“Yes sir. That’s me all right.”

“Yer late. Go get a pair of those overalls on over there and get back here pronto.”

Six or seven steel containers had to be cleaned out. I would climb inside with a grinder, grind the rust off until the container was perfectly clean, pressure wash it, let it dry and then spray paint each of them inside and out with a heavy black gooey substance that smelled like a vat of rancid cooking oil. I emerged daily completely covered in dust, rust and that smelly paint.

“You look good, boy,” my boss would say, spitting a gob of tobacco juice on the shop floor and walking off chuckling.

I felt like I was apprenticing to work in a mine, above ground. By that spring, I was ready for more change. I handed in my overalls, sent one more mailing address to my poor parents, and headed to the Cariboo for a summer of camp counselling in the beautiful British Columbia wilderness.

At the end of the summer, I climbed back on The Canadian for the long 4343 kilometre ride home. I packed up my stereo suitcase, my two albums, my car radio and my backpack. Was it just a year off? No. There is no such thing.

I was thinking about all of this when our friend visited yesterday.

“Let’s all go for a walk through the forest down the road,” suggested my wife.

Our friend: “Graham, you already ran eight kilometres this morning! Aren’t you going to be tired?”

“How did you know that?”

“I saw you on Strava of course! I know everything that you do.”

Strava, the activity tracker. How could I forget? So I am not so different. The days of mystery are gone for me, too. I guess we are all products of our time.