Here’s the fifth installment in my Winter Short Story Series telling the story of a long road trip across Canada. Scroll down to catch the earlier installments. Enjoy and feel free to share…

Dawn beat through the curtains. Red and lilac pierced a flame into the ceiling. The Doppler sound of transfer trucks shifting gears as they left the Big Stop next door hit the walls too, and the orange-faced clock flashed five a.m. My father was gone.

The hotel hummed from some imperceptible core: water heaters, air ducts, maybe the sound of vacuums but it seemed too early for the cleaners. The blade of morning light cut quickly through the ceiling to the wall as somewhere far off the sun launched over the horizon. I reached my hand upwards to intercept it. It burned a red line into my palm.

I imagined my father had slipped out while I slept like a child (as I still did then), sped off in the Jeep heading south or west or anywhere away from me and the home we were headed for, so full of stories and memories of loss and mistakes. But when I reached the window, holding a blanket around me like a cape, more for fear of the forceful sun than the morning cool, I found the Jeep still parked where we left it the night before, a little crooked in the third space from the last.

I dressed quickly. I would have to leave before he came back. Incase he came back. I wasn’t gonna be left. I could leave too. Anytime I wanted to. I’d make for the highway and throw out my thumb. Or maybe hop the median to the Big Stop, hang out by the coffee machines and talk to the truckers. Anyway, I had forty dollars and a tin of almonds in my backpack.

The hallway carpet tumbled down the stairs and died in a rubber strip below the door. Outside, the sidewalk pulled me toward the edge of the four-lane road where I teetered for a moment then jumped. The trucks were moving, all toward the highway, but I couldn’t see anyone around. Inside the gas station, the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered but nobody was standing at the coffee machine. I ducked into the bathroom.

I read a story once about a kid who lived for six years in a mall bathroom. No one discovered him until they installed cameras after some guy shot nine people in the food court. I thought hard about that kid as I stood in the last stall hoping nobody had seen me go in. I knew then how much easier it is to be alone alone than just alone. If it’s just you and the trees, like it was the night I stood in that dark forest and wanted so badly to be alone with it, you don’t feel it so much. But when there’s all the evidence of other people – rows of toilets, stacks of coffee cups, hallways of hotel rooms – you know for sure there are a million other people, and not one of them knows you. And you feel it.

I didn’t stay there long. I ran back across the road and pushed through the front doors of the hotel. The hunter green carpet pulled me back up the stairs and down the hallway. I guess I knew I’d come back: I fished the plastic key card from my jeans’ pocket and slid it into the lock.

My father stood at the window, one arm raised to prop the curtain open, the other pressed against the glass.

“Where have you been?” he said, leaving the window as I entered the room.

“Nowhere. Just out.”

“Just out? It’s six in the morning.”

“Yeah. I’m ready to go,” I said.

He paused, tilting his head a little like he needed a better look at me. “You alright?

“Uh huh.”

“Your mother won’t like it when I tell her you’re out gallivanting on your own in the middle of the highway.

I shrugged. Where were you? I almost said it… but didn’t.

“Don’t forget anything,” my father said. “I don’t want to have to come back here.”

“I found ten dollars in the Big Stop bathroom,” I blurted out.

“What?”

“It was just on the floor in there so I took it.”

My father squinted. I wondered if the mauve morning light had painted me up beyond recognition.

“Nothing’s free,” he said after a while. Then we both left the room and never spoke again of that morning we spent apart.

Here’s the fourth installment in my Winter Short Story Series telling the story of a long road trip across Canada. Scroll down to catch the earlier installments. Enjoy and feel free to share…

The rest of Ontario slid past my window like an old cassette skipping in the tape deck: trees, lakes, little houses with large trucks in the driveway, every hour or so a general store and a gas station. Occasionally, like a thundering refrain, a stacked logging truck passed us and my father would sweep away chunks of bark and woodchips with the windshield wipers. I knew, every time, that the smell of it took him back to his days working in the woods – planting and cutting, planting and cutting, life and death, life and death…

Eventually, the tempo quickened: less trees, bigger houses, cars made more for pleasure than hauling. Into Quebec where the Laurentian-style houses peeked out from under their curved eaves. Through Montreal where we dreamed of sesame bagels while locked in traffic. Passed the silhouette of Quebec City cut out against the reddening sky. And on to Riviere du Loop where we bought french fries from an old bus and slept in a chain hotel.

“Let’s find some place to get pancakes,” my father said the next morning. “There’s nothing like Quebec maple syrup.”

There was a small restaurant not far from the ramp back onto the Trans-Canada where an old lady in a yellow dress spoke in French and my father pointed to the photo of pancakes in the menu and held up his fingers to indicate two.

“I only learned the swear words when I lived in the Townships with your mother,” he admitted afterwards.

“Tell me one,” I whispered.

My father laughed. “They all have to do with the Church. I don’t remember.”

“Yeah right.” I fiddled with the brown napkin lying helpless at the side of my placemat. “You never remember the good stuff.”

“I remember the first time we tried to tap the maples,” my Dad answered, holding the glass bottle of dark syrup up to the light.

“You worked all spring and only got a liter of syrup.”

“Yes. Your mother made cheese blintzes and we ate about half of it that first night!” he laughed.

“Yeah, I know that one.”

We ate our pancakes then my father slapped twenty-five dollars onto the table and we snuck out before the French waitress could attempt to describe the exact amount of the bill.

“Can I drive?” I asked as we approached the Jeep.

“Not till New Brunswick,” may father answered.

“You said after Montreal.”

“New Brunswick is after Montreal.”

I rolled my eyes and rounded the back end of the car to the passenger side. A tall woman stood smoking with a leather leash hanging from her wrist. A black dog stared in the opposite direction the woman was blowing her smoke. Neither moved to acknowledge us, although they stood inches from where our front bumper aligned with the curb.

“French women,” my father said with a bit of a wink as we backed out.

“Yuck. How do you even know she’s French? She could be from Alaska or Peru for all you know.”

“Not Peru,” he said.

“Okay. Not Peru. But anywhere else.”

“Maybe.” He steered the old Jeep back toward the highway, glancing for a moment into his rearview mirror. “Did that sign say east?” he asked as we took a ramp onto the highway.

“Est.” I exaggerated the accent.

So we headed east again. Toward New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island where I was born and where my father was too, in some ways I suppose.

I stumbled upon Seaside, initially ignorant of its wealth in history and purpose, in 2010  when I was invited to play the 30A Songwriters Festival. 30A is a stretch of old County highway that parallels the white sugar-sand beach for about 30 miles. The Songwriters Festival fills little listening rooms all up and down the 30A for one weekend in January. They put me up in a beach shack in Seaside and I played three shows that first year.

In 2011, I returned as an Artist in Residence for the Escape to Create program and spent the month of January writing in a little house hugged by pine trees a few stone-throws from the beach. And, in 2012, I returned once again as a guest of the 30A Songwriters Festival. This time, I brought my typewriter.

Seaside was built on a dream, a theory. It looks at development and land-use from a community prospective: quaint homes nestle in around open green spaces, community gathering places, and a large central square, all within walking or cycling distance. Every east-west street culminates at the Gulf, and you catch a glimpse of the water, or at least a turquoise suggestion of it, from almost any interior intersection. Robert Davis, a renowned architect and a man I would meet several times during my stays in Seaside, founded the town in 1981 as model of New Urbanism. It has changed, of course, taken on some of the inevitable qualities of a tourist attraction since (especially after it was used as the location for the blockbuster film “The Truman Show”). But still, if you stand on Tupelo Street, among the little salmon-colored and white clapboard beach houses, and stare down toward the Gulf, you can sense the original idea: simple, natural, thoughtful, idyllic.

I placed my “Waywords” typewriter in the town center at Central Square Records and collected two full pages of typing. My little blue Olivetti looked at home there, surrounded by vinyl albums, hand-screened posters, and T-shirts with graphics from famous book covers. I almost bought the Walden one. It occurred to me later that Robert Davis and Henry David Thoreau would have had much to say to one another, and I considered for a moment inviting them both to dinner…

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be returning to beautiful 30A for the 2012 30A Songwriters Festival this weekend. It will be a real pleasure to be back in that wonderful coastal community.

The Escape to Create organizers, who had me as an artist in residence last year, are also putting on a great event for me at Central Square Records in Seaside on Thursday. I’ll be reading from my recently released book “Creature of Habit” and playing songs from my new album “Creature”.

Reading & Performance
Thursday, Jan 12th 3-4pm
Central Square Records
89 Central Square, Seaside

30A Songwriters Festival Performances
Friday Jan 13th – Sunday Jan 15th
Schedule TBA or visit www.30Asongwritersfestival  for updates

See ya there, Florida!

What a year, they all will say.

For me, it has been a year lived deep in the art of survival. I wrote with hunger for the page. I sang when I was given the stage. I made a record and a book I believed in. I lost some and gained some. I spent the year in love and on the road. I learned the perpetual lesson of sorrow and the strength it can produce.

Out there in the world, there has been turmoil and revolution. Still the power of money is inarguable, though a million kids slept in tents and marched against it. Still injustice clings to the backs of the poor and underfed, though they filled the squares and toppled Dictators. Still the clatter of violence dirties up the television screen. Still the earth shakes cities to the ground, spews fire and dust, and floods streets with the sea. Still the massive wheel of capitalism turns. Still we know it isn’t right.

Yet, another year. Perhaps this will be the one: a year of collective resolution. To do or die. And perhaps, I’ll make another record.

Cheers.

p.s. Stay tuned for the next entry in my Winter Short Story Series, coming after New Years, and hopefully before the world ends.