The man rinses his truck with a hose and a spray nozzle. He circles the truck once, pays particular attention to the seams where metal meets metal, and to the gutter above the doors of the cab. He holds the nozzle close to the edges of the rubber around the windshield to remove the lodged grime. He sprays the grill and each hubcap in turn, he rinses the under-carriage and the wheel wells, the Chevrolet insignia, and the licence plate that identifies the truck as vintage 1949. Then he lowers the rear gate and washes wood chips from the box. Occasionally, he takes a slug of beer from the bottle on a table under the awning of the house, until the bottle is empty, which occurs precisely when the rinse is complete.

He goes to the refrigerator in the garage and grabs another bottle of beer and takes it out to the table, beside which sits a full pail of wash n’ wax and cold water. He takes a sponge-glove from the white plastic chair next to the table and drops it into the pail, then drinks a bit of beer. He walks with the pail to the driver’s side door of the cab. It takes him a half hour to sponge every inch of the truck, and rinse the soapy wash n’ wax mixture off with the hose. He moves the nozzle in a sweeping motion from the roof of the cab, along the sides, and then the rear gate. He likes the way the water cascades over the body of the truck, how the red paint seems almost liquid.

He sits on the plastic chair and downs half the beer. The afternoon is hot, the beer now tepid. He removes his short-sleeved shirt and hangs it over the back of the chair. He is tanned to just above his elbows, his face is brown from the sun, but his shoulders and torso are pale white. His fleshy belly folds over the waist of his pants. He takes two cloths from the table and buffs the truck until the sun passes between the big oak and the high wood fence. He stands back and regards the truck the way a man sees his reflection when shaving. The truck looks like a bright red candy in the late afternoon sun.

You can hear a gentle surf, a ferry has just arrived from the mainland and passed through the bay at the front of the property. This was his late father’s home. From his father he learned the inner workings of machines and how to make moonshine. He hated his father because, as an adopted child, a boy, he was meant to work hard - chop wood, clean the eaves, paint the fence - and if he didn’t do a good enough job, his father would use the belt. The truck makes him feel young without having to really think about it all. He finishes his beer and opens another.

My writing voice came to me while stopped at a red light, and left when the light turned green. That was years ago, just after reading poet Richard Hugo’s book The Triggering Town, about the craft of creative writing. In it he asks: “whom are you writing for?” And then suggests you look over your shoulder to find “no one’s there.” But this, I think, only works for poets, because there usually is someone hovering at a writer’s shoulder - that someone being the embodiment of the marketplace.

In John Sladek’s book Roderick at Random, about a robot with “artificial intelligence”, who lives and learns in a world on the cusp of our oh-so tech-mediated society, a certain box-store bookseller has initiated a program where a writer sits in a house and writes on his computer, which is linked to a remote computer that does a real-time sales analysis. Every time the writer keys the space bar, a sales projection is fed back, so the writer knows when the writing “falls off”, when he should change a word or possibly a sentence – “or else!”

As many freelance writers know, such a program is not very far off the mark – where a column, an essay, or an article must be neat, where the last paragraph or at least the final sentence must relate to the opening. In this way, a reader is presented with something entire, a nifty, satisfying package. But I can no longer call myself a freelance writer because, as the miles accumulate – on the road, in the air, across the waters – I find myself stymied at every turn. The strategy of neatly tying the beginning to the end holds little coin in my life - there seems to be no end to the travel.

In an essay for The Observer in 2006, Martin Amis wrote about how he abandoned a novella: “You come to write the next sentence, and it’s dead.” Well, I have abandoned far more writing than ever completed. There are stacks of notebooks, megabytes of files, drawers full of napkins, scraps of paper, business cards, file folders, Xeroxed excerpts from books and magazines, not to mention the shelves of books once consulted as research tools. It’s not so much that my writing projects have met with, as John Updike puts it, “points of resistance” The reason for my incessant abandonment of writing (anything) is more mundane. I find it a difficult task, almost insurmountable, to write or do anything creative with my hands wrapped around a steering wheel, or while on a train rattling from Jaipur to Goa, or while flying through the ever more turbulent air (as noted by Robert Fisk).

The life of a gypsy merchant has its price. The rewards are in the journey itself - the people and sights and smells, the passing landscapes, the small victories in navigating travel in foreign lands – and to write about each segment feels like a day job, anti-climatic. But enough cliché and drivel, I must get on the road. The light has turned green. That is how it goes- red to green to red again, my voice comes and goes. The mind never stops plotting, of course, but concise and properly edited words are as elusive as the fountain of youth. My days have become like dry leaves in a fall wind.

The trip started from my home in Nanaimo, BC – a burg just a little too big to be a pleasant place to live, with more malls spread along the highway than can really be needed, as if shopping is the only creative outlet for the 80 thousand or so souls who call the city home. Nanaimo’s downtown has been a ghost town for ages, with very few shops of note and a nightlife that includes junkies and slobbering drunks. To be honest, the well-heeled folk are better off venturing no further from suburbia than the closest mall.

Strangely, as vendors of clothing and accessories, Nanaimo has never cottoned to our style. We don’t sell the common brands that fuel box stores, preferring instead to flog handcrafted hats and bags and clothing, some imports and vintage. We set up our tent at street markets and music festivals in spring, summer and fall. In the winter months we set up booths at universities and colleges across Western Canada. The most recent trip took us as far as the prairie jewel, Saskatoon. Even at –30, the warm heart of the place was notable.

These journeys would provide rich material for any freelance journalist or photographer. The themes could be various. Why are so many Korean Christians working in the motel industry? Why do so many men who stay in motels dream of a better life? Why do motels persist in faking domestic environments? What do we feed our students? University and college food courts vary wildly, from the wonderful dhal at UVic’s International Grill, to the drab and damn-near poison offered by some food services. Which student body is the most stylish? The most addicted to mobile devices? The drunkest? There are endless slants on which to hook an article. But I rarely write freelance anymore. I blame my computer - just when a good idea crops up, I find a wireless connection and vanish into cyberspace.

Still, this last trip was remarkable enough to write a blog post and upload some altered snaps. There is also a particularly splendid experience that insists upon proper comment – all about manners. I know it’s not fair to say that one student body is on the whole kinder than another. But the students in Regina and Saskatoon are better mannered than any I’ve come across – particularly in Saskatoon. As an example, let me tell you about my wounded hand and a lost glove.

I will get to the wound. First, let me tell you about my gloves. They are expensive, made for construction workers who want both protection and flexibility. They are snug and well padded. I bought them because of a skin condition that’s exacerbated by my work. I constantly handle metal clothes’ hangers and plastic bags and get rashes so bad that my partner has dubbed me the lizard boy. The rashes are painful and often lead to cracked skin and raw patches. The gloves protect me from rashes, and her not-always-funny taunts.

Just before leaving for the prairies, while loading the van, I misplaced my left glove. It was a real mystery. I looked everywhere. But it simply vanished, and I had to make do with inferior gloves. The highway from Blue River to Jasper was covered in thick-packed snow and ice. From Jasper to Edmonton the road was two lanes of dirty slush, kicked into mini-storms by every passing 4 X 4 and semi-trailer truck. Somewhere along the route – maybe a spider bite in the Blue River Motel, or while checking the chains on the rear wheels of the van – I scrapped the edge of my left hand. Uncharacteristically, I wasn’t wearing gloves.

Within two days my left hand had swollen to twice it’s size and a nasty pit of pus developed, requiring minor surgery. The operation took place in the emergency ward of the Grey Nuns Hospital in Edmonton – two Mash-like tents erected in the ambulance bay (the place was under renovation). It was there I met a stranger who remembered me from 40 years back, and she remembered that my last name was once King. I lost track of her after the curtain was pulled and the emergency-ward doctor drained the wound, spooned out the last bit of pus, and stuck packing in the hole.

Next came an IV drip - three times daily for five days. Fortunately, my partner Joann and I were staying at my mother’s condo, a mere 10 blocks from the hospital. Infection is a great social equalizer – rich and poor in the same room, each hoping that the cool liquid dripping slowly into our veins will rid the alien swelling. The night nurse was a real treat, an ex go-go dancer, lively, efficient and charming. The nervous banter was almost worth the price of admission to her IV unit.

All this happened while I helped my partner with our business. I unloaded and loaded gear, assisted with the set up of a trade show booth, and wrote a grant application. Both hands were wrapped in thick layers of gauze. The dressing on the wound was changed daily, and the IV gear in my other hand was awkward to say the least. The needle pinched. I needed help to bathe.

“Will you bathe me?” I asked my partner. “Or do I have to ask my mother?”

“I could watch,” she quipped. “But that’s just sick.”

My mother laughed. “That’s for sure.”

After the dressings came off, I used wide bandages on my left hand, wrapped from palm to knuckle. Then came a week of antibiotic pills and a trip to Calgary where we stayed in a motel and worked two campuses. I sprayed disinfectant on the light switches and doorknobs and water taps. I cleansed the wound religiously and watched it heal. The weather was seasonably uncertain. Some freezing rain, some snow. I used my backup wool gloves.

After Calgary my partner flew home to Nanaimo and I continued to Saskatoon and booked into the College Drive Lodge – where there’s enough material for a mini-series, complete with a body that never got buried, a madwoman returned to sanity, and an unsettling suicide. The lodge faces a busy, divided roadway. Across stands the cancer hospital and, two blocks further east, the University of Saskatchewan. The first morning was –30 C with a stiff breeze. I unloaded in the university parking lot, hauled the rolling racks of clothing and dolly loads of goods and infrastructure down a hallway, an elevator, and a further 50 feet to the tunnel entrance of the Place Riel Student Centre. It took four trips to unload everything.

My hand throbbed and burned - low-grade pain, still healing. I was on my second to last load, passing the staircase, when I spied the glove. It was on the cement ledge at the bottom of the stairs - my lost left-handed glove. The way I figure: it got snagged on a hanger while loading the van in Nanaimo, three weeks previous, and came loose while unloading in Saskatoon. Some kind soul found the glove and placed it on the ledge. I still had the right-handed glove, too. I was whole again. Symbolically, at least.

There’s more to the journey, of course. But nothing that compares to the moment when I found the glove. The experience continues to affirm my fondness for Saskatoon, and the warm heart of the prairies. I’m back home in Nanaimo, writing this with my wound still bandaged – just an ordinary strip. Yesterday I used the gloves to prune some trees in the backyard and ripped a hole in one of them. They’ve served me more than well. I will get a new pair. I know exactly which mall along the long strip in town to shop for them.

tags: runran

I was conceived on December 22, 1950: the product of a trumpet player and a beautiful young woman. Two sets of 23 chromosomes lined up and joined down the middle. Four weeks later I had a heart and a brain. They’ve been at odds ever since. In my sixth week, I grew an eye at the side of my head and an ear near my heart - the closest they ever came. At three months my penis was obvious and most major decisions in my life began to take shape. In the fourth month, I started to move about - this is called the quickening; according to Old English Common Law, if I died, someone would have to bury or cremate me.

It’s 1951: millions of Koreans are dead after one year of slaughter; rock’n’roll shakes the radio waves; the Atomic Age has begun in earnest with clandestine experiments on soldiers and civilians. Credit cards are introduced. The first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) is completed. UNIVAC is introduced. EDVAC begins performing basic tasks. The Aiken’s Mark III is delivered to the Naval Surface Weapons Center. But I’m a month overdue. The cold war is in full swing. I hold out until late September.

I used to have a recurring dream of being at the controls of a spaceship. I can’t get it to stop moving forward. I try to reverse or veer off into space. The controls do nothing but blink and make whirring sounds, while I careen forward faster and faster. I feel torn from some comfortable place. I land on the Canadian prairies - 53° 34? N / 113° 31? W: parkland mostly, laying between southern plains and northern tundra. A vast landscape bordered by mountains to the west and Hudson Bay to the east.

Read more [ childhood ]

[ written in response to Sue Thomas’ questions in The Wild Surmise ]