Sweet Grass Farm, Elora, Ontario July 14-20, 1978
In early July I was summoned by my brothers to attend a business meeting in Vancouver. (I’m a director of the Drexel Company, a family business started by my father and grandfather). So I flew to Vancouver, visited with family, catching up on their goings on and answering myriad questions about my trip – yes I’m still alive, no I haven’t had any problems, and no, I have no idea how much longer I’ll be on this journey – and attended the meeting. In the few days I was in Vancouver I did more talking than I'd done in the previous six weeks. And I could feel it. My throat ached, and my jaw and neck were tense and sore. I hadn’t really realized how little I’d been talking on my trip. I was often the only person on a trail, or at a campground (especially in the places that weren’t official campgrounds). I suspected the people I had met and conversed with had thought me shy (haha) or reticent (hahaha!). Anyway the little jaunt to Vancouver confirmed for me the fact that I – and especially my voice – needed more time alone – and quiet, with no talking, or at least not having to talk. So as soon as I could I hopped a flight back to Ontario
Once here it wasn’t long before I finally came to rest – literally – at Sweet Grass Farm, the bucolic homestead of a childhood friend, Tom, and his wife, Jo – known to her friends as ‘Sal’ – and their toddler Barney. Sweet Grass is near Elora, about an hour and a half west of Toronto, in a quiet rural area of corn fields, hay and horses. The house is a classic – two story red brick, with an old wooden barn out back. There’s even a couple of horses to complete the picture. And two dogs, Leo, an old red setter type, and Codroy, a huge black mountain dog (Bernese?) with a tail that could knock you off your feet.
Tom and Sal have welcomed me with love and generosity. I have a wonderful comfortable bed with clean sheets, and access to a lovely clean bathroom with hot water, a fully equipped kitchen – and two great friends to share it all with. Sal is about eight months pregnant with her second. Barney, her first, was born in Argentina, and keeps everyone busy. As usual, the household revolves around the needs of the toddler. At least until bed, which is blessedly early. And then the adults play... .
Most mornings I’m up early, and by 9 am have already taken the two dogs for a walk, and maybe done some chores around the farm – swept the barn, tidied things up – nothing too strenuous, although one morning I did bring sixteen bales of hay in from the back field. That was good exercise. Most days I also play a little flute out in the barn – for the horses. They’ve been one of my most appreciative audiences. They’re particularly fond of the Mozart pieces. They stop eating and lean their great heads and necks out over their stall doors, watching with interested eyes. Obviously cultured beasts.
And I’m reading a lot. Tom has introduced me to the Beat Poets (Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Brautigan and others), a generation of poets in the 40s and 50s who rebelled against the conventions of American life and the ‘American Dream’. Their poetry hits home. Is the ‘Canadian Dream’ any different from the ‘American Dream’? Sure it’s less glitzy and glossy, not quite so technicolour. But are Canadians any less caught up in the rat race, the drive to succeed, the one-up-man-ship? And what about me, working so hard, damaging my vocal chords? What dream was I chasing? What dream am I chasing now? How does a rat get off the wheel, extricate itself from the maze?
Tom’s also given me several books that are bending my reality, inviting, and sometimes forcing, me to consider who I am, what I’m doing and where I’m going: Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, William S. Burrough’s ‘Naked Lunch’, Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, Tom Wolf’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’, Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, and Tom Robbins’ ‘Another Roadside Attraction’. And they don’t just ‘invite’, they offer ideas about jumping off points, ways of making an exit. My favourite line, I think from Keroac’s ‘On the Road’, is when the protagonist, Sal, calls into work, and tells them he won’t be in because he’s ‘calling in well’ – like he’s finally woken up and realizes just how meaningless it all is.
“Trains cross the continent in a swirl of dust and thunder, the leaves fly down the tracks behind them: the great trains cleave through gulch and gulley, they rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges over the powerful brown wash of mighty rivers, they toil through hills, they skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields, they whip past empty stations in the little towns and their great stride pounds its even pulse across America. Field and hill and lift and gulch and hollow, mountain and plain and river, a wilderness with fallen trees across it, a thicket of bedded brown and twisted undergrowth, a plain, a desert, and a plantation, a mighty landscape with no fenced niceness, an immensity of fold and convolution that can never be remembered, that can never be forgotten, that has never been described – weary with harvest, potent with every fruit and ore, the immeasurable richness embrowned with autumn, rank, crude, unharnessed, careless of scars or beauty, everlasting and magnificent, a cry, a space, an ecstasy! – American earth in old October.”
Most afternoons Sal and I swim in the pool – an above ground affair, unheated, that ensures you swim hard and fast, and get out to get warm. We sit in the sun, drink Earl Grey tea in the afternoon, sometimes with scones, and talk endlessly about politics, the state of the world, and travels. Especially travels. Tom and Sal have done a lot of traveling, and spare no effort in trying to convince me to go somewhere – anywhere, but preferably somewhere warm – for the winter. I hadn’t thought about ‘what next?’ In the short term I planned to continue across Canada, but what about when the weather turns? What about when it gets cold?
I am finding the talk – and the consideration – of what next to be challenging. There were so many possibilities. I could go back to Vancouver and work – there is always work. Or find somewhere else in Canada I might want to settle for a while and do... something different? Or...I could ‘go south’. But where to? Mexico? South America (Tom and Sal’s favoured option – especially Argentina, where they’d spent so much time)? Greece? At night, instead of dropping off to sleep, I’m wide awake, my mind racing with thoughts and ideas, analyzing and comparing options. At times racing forward along a particular track, at times going in circles, lost in its own machinations. My mind has always been what many would call ‘over-active’. I am sometimes overwhelmed by its speed and intensity; I want it to stop, to leave me be, let me sleep, let me enjoy a few minutes of relaxation, of not doing or thinking about anything. But I can’t seem to shut it off...
My time Vancouver diffused (de-fused) me. My time here at Sweet Grass has also, in a way, been unsettling. I need time to re-collect, recollect and reconnect to myself. Time to regroup.
It’s time to resume my solo sojourn, to pack up my car, head out, and see where the road takes me.
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