It's blue outside in Vancouver, and it smells like hundreds of cows. The rest of the group is inside where it's warm and orange, with lots of music and smiles, just behind me. The ground is cool and soft on my feet. Another full stomach, more hospitality, more manners and small talk. I took a shower here, probably the last one until the wedding back in Chicago, that half waypoint. We inched into Canada today, waiting in traffic for over an hour at the border.
I thought back on our eleven-hour drive out of Yosemite to Eugene, Oregon. We met Derek's friend Remy after his tenth drink of the night. He was short with a straw cowboy hat and wild eyes. He smoked cat nip cigarettes and make sudden movements. After a lot of coaxing and repeated questioning directly into Remy's ear we made it to his ex-girlfriends apartment near the university campus. We had been cleared to pitch out tents in the backyard. When we got there a party was in full swing, and I danced through the living room with a beer in hand, and a giant pack on my back. "Oh, you must be the campers!" one shouted over the music. I laughed and made for the kitchen, then out to the backyard, where I had to clear a group of people to set up my tent amidst sidelong glances. We were hungry and went back into the kitchen to use their stove for pasta, and ate a lot of their food while waiting for the water to boil.
We camped the nest night outside of Eugene, near the coast. Remy said he knew the way, but we almost ran out of gas looking for this place, never found it, and by the time we crashed illegally in some state trailer park, I was ready to wring his neck. I was hungry and tired of following this guy. We all ate like wolves that night, without a word to each other, without so much as a glance away from out bowls illuminated by small pools of light, like the only thing that existed was macaroni and sauce.
I slept well that night, it was cold and the wind smelled different than the Midwest. The next morning we said goodbye to Remy, he was off to his pig farm outside of Eugene. We packed up the car and set out eyes on Portland, making it there in a couple hours, driving easily along the coast.
When we reached Portland I got off at the nearest climbing gym and hit the wall for a few hours. I smelled terrible and everyone knew it. I had rivers of sweat that cleaned the dirt off my arm in vein-like patterns. I climbed hard and it felt good to move something besides my right foot. I met up with the guys in the late afternoon. We bummed around Portland a while, cooking on the street near a closed coffee house. Their wireless Internet still worked, and Derek’s laptop picked up a signal. At one point I was sitting with a computer in my lap, and a stove in front of me in the middle of Oregon. I remember laughing about it.
The sun was slow to fall that night, and after dinner we decided to play some music on the streets for a while, try our luck. Lance and I don't play an instrument, but that didn't matter. We sang, and during solos brainstormed on things we could do. There were handstands, one-armed push-ups, climbing random things, and if none of that we could always hum along. We ended up making eight dollars that night, and scored a pretty good sized nugget from a couple of stoners that walked by giggling in low-pitched voices.
An old hippie named Willow came and sat with us, chatting away and teetering in a cross-legged position. She had greasy gray braids hanging down her neck and a few missing teeth, but still managed to blow out a tune on her dirty harmonica. She gave us a book of folk songs entitled,"Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads," and signed it with a shaky hand in a scattered combination of all capital letters, cursive, print and pictures.
It read:
"To Derik, MAX, Tyler, LANCE,
thanks for the jammin, keep jammin in the
streets and & everywhere else
peace, love, and a smiley face,
Willow
I HOPE our Paths + again in this life or Another"
It was dark now, and the stores were all closing up. We were energized and giddy at our success, and thought to ask some of the closing restaurants if they were throwing out any food. About an hour later we had a bundle of spring rolls, rice, sauce, and a few old scones and pastries for dessert. We sat on a curb laughing and eating, excited and inspired talk, grand plans for all the rest of the bakeries and pizza joints we came across, when a pair of true buskers walked past and stopped to compare loot. They had three-quarters of a good-looking pizza, and offered it up, they looked stoned. We accepted and offered some spring rolls. They were dirtier than we were, or at least their clothing was. There was a taller one with long dreadlocks and a bent neck that made his face lean to the left, and his features followed along with the tilt, like his face was melting. The other one was pale and quiet with an oversized coat and dilated pupils. He didn't say a word, but the melted face made up for it. "You'd have to be an idiot to starve in Portland!" he cackled and elbowed the oversized coat; he sat motionless and didn't speak. We said goodbye to the two and made for the car. There was something eerie about that guy in the oversized coat. We were on our way to Seattle, and drove for maybe an hour before scamming a campsite nearby.
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