Gap Year on a Greyhound Bus

               I recently read several memoirs referencing someone’s Gap Year, an event more common in Europe than the US, but also typically available only to those college graduates from families of wealth or stature.  During their Gap Year most students gain life experiences, often through internships, volunteering in a service program, learning a new language or indulging in artistic pursuits.

                Anyone who knows me knows that I am not a member of a wealthy family, and while I am seventeen kinds of fancy now, I most certainly wasn’t when I graduated from college in 1993 and returned to the bustling metropolis of Tylertown, Mississippi.  My triumphant return to the boons of my youth (having moved 5 whole hours away from my family in an effort to live “somewhere else”) found me clad in pleated shorts with a braided belt and Birkenstocks, and rocking a goatee, do you hear me? 

I don’t know if I was delusional, scared, forgetful or simply unaware that one is supposed to find a job before one receives one’s diploma from one’s college, but I returned to the Cream Pitcher of Mississippi armed solely with a very expensive piece of parchment, bereft of position. Unsure what my next step would be, I received a fortuitous invitation from my college bestie (John Allen) to travel out of the country to visit his family at their lodge on the shores of Lake Kakagi, or Crow Lake if you don’t care about the Native American way of life or language, which is rude.  Allen’s Crow Lake Lodge is located just outside the charming Nestor Falls, Ontario, Canada.

When I presented the plan to my parents, The Dad looked at me like I looked at him that Christmas he gave me a rifle instead of an argyle sweater.  My mother asked how much I thought it would cost to fly.  Unsure, we researched it and after a few calculations, she informed me that our family was wealthy enough to offer a Gap Fortnight via Greyhound Bus.

Surprised and excited we could afford anything, I proudly boarded that majestic transporter of common folk, in McComb, Mississippi and arrived only a short 36 hours later in Duluth, Minnesota, where John’s brother lived.  From there it was a short drive to Ontario.  This was, of course, way back in the day when all you needed to cross into this outpost of Great Britain was a valid driver’s license.    

I boarded the bus, full of excitement, which turned to wonder, which turned to confusion as to why the floor was sticky and why it smelled like urine.  I perused the faces and outfits of my fellow passengers and found none to my liking, taking a seat by myself, filling the adjacent seat with my travel accoutrement.  The driver told me I had to share my seat with someone.  I informed him that he should fill the bus around me and if, at that time, there was a need for someone to sit in the adjoining seat, I would gladly let them.

After a bus change in Memphis there was a 4-hour layover in Chicago, where the sweet lady who ran the lunch counter let me sit behind it with her because, “[you] don’t look like you belong here, hon”.  I concurred and ate my complimentary pie and coffee with 24 inches of Formica countertop between me and the unwashed masses.  What?  I’m not being a snob, I promise you I smelled ‘armpit’ and ‘butt crack’ and ‘cigarette smoke’ in equal measure. 

After we re-boarded, I spent the trip to our next bus change in Madison, Wisconsin, steadfastly avoiding eye contact with the elderly gentleman across the aisle whose left hand remained down the front of his pants, while his right hand shoveled Funyuns into his gaping maw.  Okay, that was somewhat snobbish.  Mea culpa. 

Suffice it to say, I arrived in the sparkling city of Duluth (Germanic Midwesterners are tidy, y’all; no litter and no grafitti!), and was met with a banner unfurled welcoming me to the Great North.   After a quick stay in Duluth we headed north to Ontario where I spent the next two weeks doing my version of outdoor activities like:

·         Pretending to enjoy catching, cleaning and cooking fish; actually enjoying eating it;

·         Popping a wheelie in a canoe because I weighed at least 100 pounds more than my passenger (cabin boy Stephen; his paddle didn’t even touch the water, he was so far in the air);

·         Being pushed off a 60-foot cliff into water so clear you could actually see me struggling not to drown;

·         Inadvertently shoplifting a braided leather bracelet on our one trip into town, because I got so excited that trendy accessories actually fit my meaty wrist; and 

·         Being too fat and/or uncoordinated enough to water ski for the first time.  It didn’t even work with me trying to start from a sitting position on the end of the dock. 

John returned me from my successful Gap Fortnight via a non-stop road trip from Ontario, Canada to New Orleans in a gold Ford Tempo with a cat, cooler full of baloney sandwiches and Mello Yello, ketchup-flavored chips (popular in Ontario) and enough No-Doz to keep 67 college students awake for finals.  I don’t remember much from that road trip except that we either experienced or hallucinated a tornado in Missouri and drove so fast past the St. Louis Arch that, to this day, I am uncertain if I saw it.

If the measure of success of an experience is that you learned something, I can say this was a successful Gap Fortnight.  If nothing else, it drove me to graduate school to ensure a future with enough money to fly wherever I needed to go, resulting in the bougie wonder you know and love.

Carpe Experientia, y’all!

I’m not referring to the cologne from the 90s

We often hear stories about Lewis and Clark and how successfully they maneuvered the vast unknown of the US.  However successful they were, there are tales of the incompatibility of their personalities and I am reminded of a time in my past when I traversed this country to visit our neighbor to the north, Canada.

                I graduated college in May, 1993, and was to set out on the course of my new career when I realized I had neglected to actually obtain employment.  Having no idea what to do with myself, I moved home and panicked. I decided I needed to travel and my best friend John Allen’s parents had a lovely resort in Nestor Falls, Ontario and I had been invited to join them for a week or two.  My parents and I looked at our finances and to the bus station we went.

                Have you ridden a bus from McComb, Mississippi, to Duluth, Minnesota?  No?  Well I have.  It took more than 24 hours of non-stop driving and I use the term loosely.  We stopped for about three minutes in every podunk town on the route through Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin.  I don’t know if our driver was lost or drunk but we weaved our way northward spending hours-long stops in both Memphis and Chicago. 

                Do you know what people do in the bathrooms of the Chicago bus station?  Well I don’t because I refused to enter due to the overwhelming stench of “stock show” greeting me before I crossed the threshold.  I took refuge with the kindly snack bar manager who let me spend time in the employee breakroom because, in her words, “You don’t look like you belong here, honey”.  I concurred and enjoyed my respite from “the bus people”. 

                I made it to Duluth, the rendezvous point as John’s brother Lee lived there and it is very, very clean and very, very close to the border.  Upon my arrival, we ate, watched a Joan Rivers standup special, slept and headed to Allen’s Crow Lake Lodge on the shores of Kakagi Lake.  Kakagi is the word for crow in a language I failed to establish.  We headed to the land of ketchup-flavored potato chips armed only with a driver’s license as it was all you needed back in the gentle, innocent days of the 1990s, well before anyone wanted a piece of Britney and she was simply a former Mouseketeer whose family lived about 15 miles away from mine, just across the border into Louisiana.

                Upon arrival I was greeted warmly by the family and coolly by the weather.  August in Canada is simply delicious weather; 70 degree days and 50 degree nights which required a lovely fire.  I was not sweating in the summertime and I was loving life even though I was voluntarily swimming which required a level of public nudity I felt inappropriate.  I tried water skiing but was unable to surface on the skis, even when they tried to start me from the end of the pier.  My body is not built for water sports, such as canoeing, which I try to avoid.

                It was decided by those who decide such things that we were to fish and I was to participate, just like in my youth in the Texas and Mississippi.  At least this time there would be no sweating but the setting, ominously, was canoe-related and I’m not referring to the cologne from the 90s.  The day began with John and his father in one canoe.  I and the 12 year-old cabin boy Stephen were in the other.  Yes, the Allen’s are a two-canoe family.  It’s fancy up in Canada, y’all. 

At the time of the event, I was 6’ and approximately 275 pounds give or take a Frito Pie; Stephen was 5’5” at best and 110 pounds at most.  Due to the differences in our masses, the canoe was riding low in the rear and barely skimming the surface of the lake in the front.  I don’t know the nautical term for popping a wheelie but were doing so, I can assure you.

Anyone familiar with canoe etiquette knows you must paddle on opposite sides of the craft in order to keep your forward momentum on a reasonably straight trajectory.  John and his Dad were making great time.  Young Stephen and I, on the other hand, were taking a more meandering route.  For every deep stroke I made, Stephen’s paddle did little to counter so we made continual, lovely loop-the-loops in the water as if we were a graceful, but boring Ice Capader. 

It was bad enough we fell further and further behind, but all the circling had caused me nausea, coupled with an irrational fear of a snake swimming in my back pocket (as the water was mere centimeters from the top edge of the vessel).  The only thing keeping us from being forever lost in the mists of Kakagi Lake was the repeated stops by the Allen men due to their constant laughter at our performance.

Even in adrift on Canadian waterways, I’m funny.