by Angela Long
For weeks my neighbours asked me why I was leaving. I told them it was to find work, to pay off debts, to be closer to family. None of those answers satisfied them. “But this is your home,” they insisted.
As I get my bearings, other vehicles begin to pass. Those stuck behind me rev with impatience. No one knows that the last road the wheels of my car touched was a Haida Gwaii road. A road without stoplights or collector lanes.
Soon Campbell River is upon me and I hold firm to the steering wheel, navigating my way through the streets like I’m crossing a war zone. Then it’s Nanaimo. Then the horror of the Trans-Canada Highway.
You would think I’ve never driven before. But I’ve been driving for nearly twenty-four years. By eighteen, I had driven from the Black Forest to Berlin on German autobahns and throughout the Swiss Alps. While living in Montréal, I cruised the streets in a 1970s cargo van. In Arizona I navigated the White Mountains in a Ford pickup. I’ve driven east and west on Southern Ontario’s Highway 401 more times than I can count. I’ve driven from Vancouver to Toronto multiple times.
I used to hop in the car and drive ten hours to see an ocean or a desert cactus. I used to love to drive. But Haida Gwaii changed all that.
Now I dread sitting behind the wheel while vehicles barrel past me on all sides. They move so fast my car shakes. I dread the neon headlights of a monster pickup truck burning into my rearview mirror from behind. I dread the sound of a fully loaded logging truck trying to gear down. I dread seeing the wooden crosses and fresh flowers adorning trees and utility poles. No one slows down to pay their respects. They are all in too much of a hurry.
But what I dread most is becoming like everyone else. Already, my speedometer has risen from eighty kilometres an hour to ninety. To one hundred. The farmer’s field, the view of the mountains, the sign for a winery – all these things have become more and more meaningless. Less and less part of some grander journey. As I accelerate, I become just another person trying to get somewhere and get there as quickly as possible.
Haida Gwaii taught me that getting somewhere quickly was a futile pursuit. Mostly because there weren’t many places to go. There was one main road. People drove fast on that road, but not without taking time to wave. They waved almost apologetically as they pulled up alongside you to take the lead. They waved as they approached in the oncoming lane. And at certain times of year, the deer population caused nearly everyone to slow down. Even hardened drivers of big trucks didn’t want to hit fawns and their doting mothers.
Perhaps when you drive up and down the same road all the time and you see the same sights, you realize that it’s never the same road or the same view. It’s always different. The sea, the sky, the trees. Everything is always changing, if you slow down enough to notice. There’s no need to rush from A to B because you realize your life actually exists between those two letters.
No one on the Trans-Canada Highway will let me live between the letters. As I drive, I fear for my life. I listen to soothing cello suites and piano sonatas. I adorn the Corolla with hanging crystals and Hindu gods for protection. I breathe deeply, pretending I’m driving down Tow Hill Road on my favourite stretch, the unpaved part, where the cedar boughs drape over the road, creating a tunnel of green.
But it’s difficult to ignore the strip malls and parking lots, the headlights boring into me like the eyes of a creature possessed. It’s difficult not to drive faster, to get out of this hell, quick. I accelerate past one hundred kilometres an hour without realizing my speed. It’s a heady feeling. For a few moments, I cruise alongside everyone else. No one seems to notice. There are no waves of camaraderie.
Then I slow down, mostly because I’m going uphill. I see the mountains tinged with snow. I see a river below. Wherever this life is taking me, I want to get there below the speed limit.
Notes
The events in this book took place between 1992 and 2010. During this time I travelled to more than a dozen countries and met hundreds of people. But only a fraction of these experiences are included in Every Day We Disappear. Within this narrative, two journeys to India (2006 and 2009) and two occasions when I lived on Haida Gwaii (2007, and 2008 to 2011) are merged for the sake of storytelling. Please forgive any gaps in time or space. Information gleaned from three Lonely Planet: India guidebooks, published by Lonely Planet Global Limited, has been included – the 10th (2003), 12th (2007), and 17th (2017) editions. In addition, I referred to personal journals, letters, correspondence with many of the people who appear in these pages, and other research to write this book.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the publishers and editors of the following magazines, newspapers, literary journals, and books where the following poems and essays (often in earlier versions) have previously appeared:
The Toronto Star: 2008, “Riding a train to Anywhere”, appears in this book as “The Train to Anywhere”
The New Quarterly: 2008, “English Lesson 1: Greetings” and “English Lesson 3: The Interrogative” appear in this book as “The English School”
Somebody’s Child, Touchwood Editions: 2011, “A Familiar Face”
Canadian Stories: 2009, “Entering the Cavern”
PRECIPICe: 2008, “Get Up and Spin”
Grain Magazine: 2010, “Shanti, Shanti”, appears in this book as “The Travel Agent”
The Sun Magazine: 2009, “The Monk, the Woodcarver, and the Sage”, appears in this book as “The Monk” and “The Woodcarver” and “The Sage”
The Nashwaak Review: 2009, “This is India”, appears in this book as “The Boy on the Road”
Other Voices: 2008, “Waiting to Steal the Gods”, appears in this book as “The Orphan”
The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Volume 10: 2014, and Traveler’s Tales: 2014, “Good is Coming”, appears in this book as “The Sage”
The Nashwaak Review: 2009, “Reading the Flow”, appears in this book as “Mother Ganges”
Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia, Mother Tongue Publishers: 2013, and EVENT Magazine: 2009, “Varanasi Drafts”, appears in this book as “The City of Light”
Kyoto Journal: 2013, “Heroes of the Hills”, appears in this book at “The Acupuncturists”
S.i.W.C. Anthology: 2008, “Droplets of Hope”, appears in this book as “The Doctor”
PRECIPICe: 2010, “Love in the Time of Silence”, appears in this book as “The Volunteer”
Tower Poetry Society: 2008, “Between the Planks”
Room: 2009, “The Princess and the Poet”
The Globe and Mail: 2008, “Sights Unseen”
Conspicuous Accents: Accenti Magazine’s Finest Stories of the First 10 Years, Longbridge Books: 2014, Italian Canadians at Table: A Narrative Feast in Five Courses, Guernica Editions: 2013, and Accenti Magazine: 2010, “This is Sunday Lunch”
The Globe and Mail: 2008, “Our Expiration Date”
The Globe and Mail: 2008, “Loneliness and Longing for Risotto”
Room: 2010, “Nabob Tins and Turkish Carpets”
The Globe and Mail: 2008, “Happy not to be a Mother”, appears in this book as “St. Mary’s Spring”
The Globe and Mail: 2011, “Driving– and Living– in the Slow Lane”, appears in this book as “The Slow Lane”
Thank you to Libros Libertad publisher Manolis Aligizakis for his permission to use versions of several poems extracted from my 2010 poetry collection Observations from Off the Grid.
~
These stories began a decade ago in a studio apartment in Vigevano, Italy, where a boyfriend with a charming accent said, “Your new job is to write.” Every day, as he taught music throughout the region of Lombardia, I sat down at a kitchen table facing a fourteenth-century brick wall and wrote. The stories continued – in an off-the-grid cabin on Haida Gwaii, a Craigslist sublet in Lake Cowichan, a snow-covered bungalow in Hokkaido, a renovat
ed shed in my parents’ backyard. And now I sit in Toronto’s Pape Village, listening to police sirens and the rain.
Who to thank for all this? I could begin with the journalist from Lisbon whom I met while travelling in Morocco at the tender age of nineteen. “You have fire in your eyes,” he said as we sat on a hotel rooftop looking out at the Sahara Desert. “You are meant to write.” Never underestimate the power of such words on an insecure, fledgling writer. So, thank you, Tiago Franco.
Thank you to all the teachers, friends, lovers, and strangers who always seem to say the right thing at the right time. I hope you know my address book (yes, I still have one of those) is my greatest treasure. Many thanks to those who employ, house, and befriend transients.
Much gratitude to the writer-friendly Radiant Press for choosing me as one of their first authors, and to editor dee Hobsbawn-Smith for encouraging “Angie” to take ownership of her words.
Thank you to my parents who always answer their phone, and seem genuinely happy to hear my voice.
Thank you to the people of India who brought me back to life.
Finally, thank you to Giuseppe, who eventually left the jungles of Thailand to marry me, fulfilling both my secret wish to Amma and the prediction of a Varanasi fortune-teller.
Photo Credit: Peter Bregg
Angela Long is a journalist and a poet. She has contributed to an extensive list of anthologies and periodicals, and has had articles published in The Globe and Mail and other newspapers. She is the author of a book of poetry, Observations from Off the Grid published in 2010, and has earned a BFA in Creative Writing from UBC as well as a Masters of Journalism from Ryerson. Currently Angela resides in Toronto, Ontario.
