Getting Around

I was very adventurous in my teens.  I never thought of it that way since for me it was simply a matter of getting around.  Our family had gone from middle to low income following my parents' nasty divorce and my father's chronic defaulting on child support money.  I didn't want to pester my mother for bus money or for any money at all.  I didn't have a part time job and I didn't have, or want, an allowance.  I simply wanted to be free and mobile.

To this day I claim that I did not learn how to drive for two very basic reasons: my financial status and the desire to not contribute to air pollution.  I did have these high ideals in the early seventies, like many, but I might also have been traumatized in grade nine by a documentary that was required viewing in school. These were graphic and totally uncensored videos of car crashes and broken, bleeding and charred bodies of the drivers and passengers.  The less than subtle message-do not drive dangerously or under the influence of alcohol-was clear.  I do not know how many of my peers followed through on the brutally presented advice and counsel.  Some kids couldn't sit through it and had to leave the room.  The images are still stark in my memory which to me suggests trauma, enough trauma to discourage me from ever wanting to get behind a steering wheel.  And of course I did not want to pollute the air.

Hitch-hiking in those days was cool.  Thousands of young people were hitch hiking back and forth across Canada, all around British Columbia, or like me, up and down Vancouver Island.  I was fourteen when I first started getting around this way.  I remember one of my first rides was with a man with a thick accent and not at all shy about expressing his disapproval of a fourteen year old thumbing rides.  I was like, yeah, right, I'm already fourteen, eh?

I continued hitch-hiking everywhere.  I saw it partly as a necessary evil, since I did need to get from point a to point b, and as an adventure but also as a kind of rite of passage.  I learned very quickly to strike up conversations with complete strangers.  I learned to ask leading questions.  I learned amazing social skills and grew very rapidly and I made some new friends and met tons of interesting and amazing new people.  I also landed in a few, but only a very few dangerous or scary situations.  My mother didn't like it, but swallowed her worry and lived with it.  My father accused me of bumming.  I blithely ignored him and it was hitch-hiking that helped me escape from him one evening when he tried to hit me.  It was August.  I was barefoot, dressed in jeans, a T shirt and no money.  I spent the night with friends in Vancouver (I was living with my father that summer when I was seventeen in Richmond).

I was nineteen when the hitch-hiking began to slowly taper off.  In my twenties and as the eighties were beginning fear began to infect us all and I soon lost my innocent trust in the kindness of strangers and stuck to public transit or old fashioned walking.

When I was forty-two and staying part time with my father in a small coastal village during my time of homelessness I revived the ancient art of hitch-hiking, which actually was often done on the Sunshine Coast.  I got around okay.  I remember with especial clarity what I believe to be my last ride ever: A fellow with long hair picked me up in his Volkswagen van and suddenly it was 1972 all over again and I felt sixteen again.  He had a young copper coloured pit bull dog, possibly a cross with a Rhodesian ridgeback.  She was beautiful with a coat that shone like red gold and soft brown eyes, decided that I was her new best friend forever and sat on my lap all the way to the ferry.  The same gentleman gave me a ride into town once the ferry docked and Penny the pit bull sat again on my lap.

I didn't see Penny again till eight years later.  A lovely couple decided to buy one of my paintings.  We sealed the deal in a coffee shop on Commercial Drive.  I left without the painting but $600 richer.  There was a copper coloured pit bull seated by a table on the sidewalk with a young woman.  The dog saw me and began wagging her tail and whimpering furiously.  "Penny?" I asked tentatively.  The dog went ballistic with joy as I crouched over to pet and cuddle my long lost friend.  The young woman was extremely nonplussed about what was going on until I explained to her my first meeting with her lovely dog eight years ago and she nodded with confirmation.  Not bad for a cat-lover eh?