Home Home Off The Range

[ or, Farewell Home on the Range]

Why does all the best whiskey drinking happen the night before leaving?

In the aftermath of our last Taffy-cooked meal, we downed the last of our last bottles. Alison and Jerome gave me these parting gifts: 1) a piece of petrified tree, 2) a piece of fence post. In a million years the piece of fence post will look just like the piece of petrified tree, they said. They know me so well.

We woke puffy-eyed and head-sore and swore we’d keep in touch and see each other again and soon. Sharon drove us into Sheridan a back way. A dirt road way. A sun on the snow in the shady hollows way. We were indignant at never having been driven that way before. On the other hand, the new old road way lulled us into feeling like we were going somewhere, distracted us from of the awful truth of going back.

“Oh, deer,” I said. It sounded like: “Oh dear!” but I meant: “Oh, deer.” As in, don’t hit that deer in the road. A buck bounded off the dirt shoulder, off into the morning.

Security is no joke at the Sheridan airport, but it is a comedy routine. The check-in counter computer system scoffed at my Canadian Passport. My suitcases were selected for a random rifle through. Once we were all checked in, the security staff moved over twenty feet to begin the perusal of our carryon baggage. We fumbled with our coats and boots, laptops, hand cream and perfume bottles. A construction worker offered to help me take off my belt. Feel any safer America? I don’t.

All that to board the same Beech 1900 we came up on. Twenty seats or so. We sat together, schoolbus style. We took pictures of each other. We took up half the plane.

Denver was sad – terminally so – as we found our terminals, airlines, gates and parted ways. Denver to Chicago I sat next to two jive-talking white wannabe hip-hop boys. They were sweet, but exhausting. After the seat-belt sign was switched off I transferred up a few rows to have more space. There I sat next to a gigantic wilderness hunter / linebacker type, also sweet, in a “he could kill you with his bare hands but wouldn’t think of it” kind of way. My favourite thing about him was that he didn’t speak.

By Chicago I was feeling parenthetical [on account of reading Sebald]. Chicago O’Hare was a complete bordel. [Bordel is the French word for brothel; in this context it means a big mess.] Every flight was late. The Montréal departure gate number kept changing. Elusive as a portal in the time-space continuum, I followed it around the airport – me, half the Austrian telemark ski team and a family of habitants. [Habitant is French for inhabitant, or dweller. Under the monsignorial system in Québec, the peasant settlers who farmed the land for the absentee landowners were called habitants. We still call someone recently of the rural regions habitant. It’s like hick – sort of an insult but can also affectionate. Case in point: We also call our beloved Montréal Canadiens nos habitants, Habs for short. The Habs are 4th in the Eastern Conference and 8th over all.]

My flight out of Chicago was 45 minutes late. I sat next to a total bitch of a man who wouldn’t turn off his cell phone because he was busy berating some poor travel agent re: the lack of direct flights from Montréal to Dubai. Have mercy!

In Montréal at last at the end of a long journey I stood in customs clearing limbo at the edge of the baggage carousel and watched the same bags go round and round, mine not among them. A misery of line-ups, forms to fill out in duplicate, rubber stamps to retrieve and the collection of many the-same-looking red-ink signature squiggles ensued. Bureaucracy is also a French word. It means “I would kill you with my bare hands if I could but sadly I’m in a weakened state due to all this red tape.”

It was nearing midnight by the time the last rubber stamp declared me officially in Canada and I was reunited with my husband, dog, and mother-in-law, who had been waiting semi-patiently throughout this ordeal. I didn’t know they let dogs into the airport. And, at that hour, there was hardly any traffic. Every cloud of red tape has a silver lining.

That was Friday. The suitcases finally showed up, somewhat late for dinner, Saturday evening. Sunday I ventured out into my neighbourhood. There are so many people in this city! So few of them speak English. I took my film to the drug store where, out of some blue-collar perversity, I’ve been taking my film for over a decade. The photo counter woman knows me. When I handed over my seven rolls she said: And where have you been? Wyoming. It’s a remarkably beautiful place, I assured her. I’m sure it is, she assured me.

And there it is, the malaise of travel: the despondency of long distance only sinks in when one encounters the odd ontology of a sudden return.

“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine… If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I though, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.” W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
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