I must have been lonely. I have a distinct memory of sitting in a park, in where I think is Sudbury, Ontario, my back against the trunk of a large tree, listening to Bruce Springsteen. Specifically, I was listening to the end of “I’m on Fire” off Springsteen’s Born in the USA, and marveling at the plaintive high lonesome “woo-hoo-ooo” trailing off, as the narrator of the song expresses his longing for the girl, his desire so intense it goes beyond words (as an aside, the song was released in 1985, which does not fit into the timeline of this trip taking place in the late summer of 1984, so perhaps I am conflating memories).
I must have been lonely, because although I am generally rather shy around women, I asked out a woman at the science museum that day, a woman I’d never met before. That’s how I’m pretty sure that the park I was in, listening to Springsteen, was in Sudbury: they have an interactive science museum.
As best I can reconstruct it, I went to a science museum called Science North, which had just opened. I just found its grand opening online, in June of 1984, and it's quite a nice museum. Most of it is interactive, and there were several guides to help people around the various exhibits. I struck up a conversation with one of the guides. She was a pretty girl. I remember her hair mostly, the way her blond curls lay along the curve of her head. I probably broke my rule of trying to make myself as boring as possible.
I finished my tour of the museum, went to the park, listened to the yearning tones of Springsteen at the end of “I’m on Fire.” I must have been staying at a nice campground, because I made myself as presentable as I reasonably could. Then I returned to the museum (I don’t recall if I had to pay a second admission), found her, and asked her out.
She almost said, “Yes.” She thought about for a long moment.
She said, “You seem very nice, and I am flattered, but I am afraid I’m going to have to say no.”
“Even a cup of coffee after work?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sure it would be very nice. But I have to say no.” She smiled.
I let it go. I returned her smile (it was a very nice smile), told her it was very nice to meet her, and said goodbye. So close! She almost said yes. And I can’t really blame her for saying no, I was a stranger wandering through town, living in a frikkin tent. I could have been a murderer. I could have been a crazy person.
It was a different time.
Thinking back, the amount of time I wasted chasing girls was ridiculous. But I suppose it wasn’t really wasted time.
I felt good about being turned down, oddly. Her parting smile let me know she really wanted to say yes, so that felt nice, even if she did ultimately say no. I also felt good about even getting up enough courage to ask her out. That wasn’t typical of me. I normally didn’t have the bravery or the flirting game to pull that kind of thing off. Perhaps it was that mythic figure I was trying to become, attempting to emerge.
#
If the Agawa Rock Pictographs and the near-date with the woman from the science museum were the high points of the trip, then my arrival in Ottawa marked the low point.
I continued on down Hwy 427, toward civilization. I’d been out on the road camping for over a week, and was getting a little weary. The prospect of a big city excited me. I could stay in a hostel with a warm bed and a hot shower. I could go to restaurants and bars.
The hostel was a nice, two-story house, with dorm rooms, eight beds to a room, bunk beds lining the walls of the second-floor rooms. A sign at the front door stated, in large block letters, that the curfew was midnight. A tumble of large rocks led up to the back of the building, and a second-floor entrance (a door or a large window, memory is not clear).
Remember the curfew.
The bar I wandered into was a bus ride away. I don’t know how far, I only remember taking the bus system there. The bar was a little too bright, and all done up in primary colors. It looked more like a fast food restaurant. Still, I’d been on the road for almost two weeks. While I’d have preferred a dark, quiet old-school bar with lots of wood paneling, the Burger King vibe of the bar would have to suffice.
A young man and a woman—pretty clearly a couple—sat at a table near the center of the bar. I wanted someone to drink with after my two weeks of relative isolation. I asked to sit down with them, and they said yes.
I don’t remember their names. They were friendly, and we had fun. We laughed a lot. We drank a lot. They gave me their phone number in case I was ever in Ottawa again. I laughed, thinking it would be years before I was ever in this part of the country, if ever, but I took their number.
We parted ways. They headed home, I took the bus back to the hostel.
It was after midnight. It may have been well after midnight. We may have closed down the bars (I just checked closing time in Ottawa, however, and last call is 3 a.m., so this seemed unlikely). As I said, we had fun.
I tried the front door of the hostel and found it locked. I remembered the curfew. I knocked a few times, assuming I’d get at most a lecture on staying out late. I’d stayed in hostels and always found them accommodating. This placed seemed pretty casually run. No answer to my knock.
Lights were on up on the second floor, where the beds were (and where all my stuff was). My drunken logic at the time was simply to climb up the rocks in the back of the building and ask someone to let me in there. I scrambled up the rocks. I saw a guy sitting on a chair, getting something from his pack. I waved to him, smiling, trying to look like a friendly, unthreatening guy. He glowered at me briefly and disappeared.
Ever-optimistic, I assumed he was going down to the front door to let me in. I climbed down the rocks to meet him at the entrance.
I should add this detail to the tale: at some point, during either the climb up or the climb down, I fell and scraped the side of my nose and face, pretty noticeably. It was bleeding. I couldn’t see myself at the time, so I didn’t know how bad it looked.
I made it down and found my way to the front door, expecting to be greeted by the guy I’d waved to up on the second floor.
Instead, the host of the hostel opened the door. He was very angry. I remember him yelling at me as I packed my things hurriedly into my backpack as I was thrown out onto the street in the early hours of the morning.
I left behind my favorite hitchhiking shirt hanging on the back of a chair, the hospital scrub shirt I’d mentioned earlier. I can still picture it, hanging there.
Luckily, I had that phone number in my pocket! I’d planned to use it years later, but clearly I was going to have to speed up the timeline. I’d parted ways with them less than an hour before
The man answered the phone. I told him what happened with the host of the hostel.
“What a dick!” he commiserated.
“I know.”
I explained how I had hurt my nose, and how it was bleeding.
“Sorry, man.” I’m sure he knew why I was calling, but to his credit, he sounded chipper and happy to talk to me.
“So. Can I spend the night there tonight?” It was a big ask, even for folks I’d just been out drinking with, and whom I'd formed a beer-aided brotherhood. I listened to the long pause at the end of the phone, followed by muffled voices (this was before mute or call holding; he must have held the receiver against his shirt). I didn’t hear his wife’s response, but when he returned to the phone, he carried his earlier enthusiasm.
I quickly added, “Or just let me know where a cheap hotel is.” I wasn’t bluffing, I had traveler’s checks, and I could have paid for a cheap room. “I just want a place to spend the night.”
“Hey, buddy, no problem!” I didn’t sense any hesitancy, which boded well. “Where are you?”
I told him my address, he said he’d be right there.
The two of them drove up, it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes later. He seemed fine with the late-night interruption, and she seemed fine with it as well. They both seemed fine with the still-bloody scrape along the side of my face.
They pointed me to the guest bedroom. I brought in my backpack, crawled into bed, and slept a long hard sleep.
The next morning, blinking in the morning reality of our hangovers, I detected a few tensions I hadn’t picked up on the night before. The guy continued to be friendly, but the girl had turned a little cold (mostly to her boyfriend, she was polite to me). They had bandages for the scrape on the side of my nose, which had turned dark and red. I remember sitting down with the guy at the kitchen table with my Rand-McNally Atlas to figure out the best place to pick up Hwy 417 East.
I also remember an exchange revolving around the album, Thick as a Brick (music plays a surprisingly large role in this travelogue). I must have been perusing their album collection.
“I love this album! The cover is so cool.” I pulled out the album. We were laughing at the fake newspaper stories on the cover.
His girlfriend, notably, was not laughing.
He put the album on loud, very loud, top volume, party-level volume. I thought it overly loud, and I was the one showing so much enthusiasm for Jethro Tull in the first place.
At this point, his girlfriend was no longer trying to hide her hostility toward him. He appeared oblivious, though I’m sure he was quite aware of the dynamic. I realized I had stumbled onto the borderlines of a battlefield that had existed long before I’d arrived, and would continue to exist long after I’d left.
I wasn’t blaming her, and I wasn’t even really blaming him (though the playing of Tull at top volume seems like classic passive-aggressive behavior, and was kind of a dick move). They had been a lot of fun to hang out with drinking the night before, and they’d been incredibly to invite me—a drunken near-stranger—into their home in the middle of the night. They’d saved my ass, at a time I really needed it.
And then, they had the courtesy to drive me out to a good place to continue my journey east, toward Montreal, the International Border, and back in the United States.
#
Looking back this all seems a little unlike me, or at least unlike the me I like to think I was back then. I’m a Midwesterner, born and raised in Iowa, and I even went to college there. I have a deeply-baked aversion to offending people, and I am generally mortified at the prospect of hurting someone’s feelings. I may have been quite the risk-taker in this time of my life, but I was also unfailingly polite and respectful (the relationship grows a little more complicated with authority figures, but we’ll not delve into that now).
When I think about getting thrown out of a hostel, getting yelled at by the host of the hostel, and starting a fight between the man and the woman who had so graciously taken me in, it doesn’t look like me, doesn’t seem like me, doesn’t feel like me.
It was a different time. I suppose I was a different person.
As I stuck my thumb out on the road departing Ottawa, I felt guilty and hungover and ready for home.
