August 04, 2004

The following is a transcript of notes made on July 27, the 13th day of my bike ride:

I awoke in the middle of the ruined house to the sound of birds once more flying through the windows and into the gloomy sky. The wind still blew strongly and the clouds looked full of rain. The previous night’s storm did little to clear the skies and I biked bitterly thirty minutes down the road for breakfast.

And the food and coffee in Selkirk warmed me up enormously. I was about to ride away with a smile when the Home Hardware guy stopped me.

"Do you know where you’re going?" he asked.

"I’ve got a map," I said.

But he came out a minute later with a more detailed map of the region.

"Take the scenic route," he said.

His route took me along the lake all the way to Port Maitland — the point where the Grand River flows into Lake Erie. The lake looked beautiful and savage on the cloudy day, and so did the Grand River. I ate lunch by its shores thinking how oddly intertwined my life has been with that of the river.

Its waters seem to flow through all of my adventures, and they also found me here in Port Maitland, almost 200 km downstream from home.

I followed the river upstream for a while until I came to an abandoned and dilapidated barn. Inside, machinery was left to die and small animal cadavers hid in the hay. Everywhere there were signs that the place once buzzed with honest labour.

The tittering ladder on the ground allowed me to climb with some difficulty into the hayloft. The hay was old but still dry and a tribe of Canadian Geese once nested in it — piles of their excrements were everywhere.

"When you’re on the road," Trevor once told me, "I insist you sleep in an abandoned barn."

I told him I wouldn’t be able to find any.

"Never mind then," he said. "Anyway, it would probably have been a bad idea. I know someone who once spent a night in an abandoned barn and contracted all sorts of animal diseases."

But I was too tired to care about diseases or the smell of geese shit emanating from the hay. I lay down my blanket on the cleanest pile of hay I could find and spent an uneasy night listening to bats flapping their wings in the darkness.

"Oh, what a beautiful loser I have become," I murmured, thinking of Cohen’s book. At the end of the story, the narrator breaks down and hides away in an abandoned tree house to molest small boys while wearing garments smeared with semen, urine, and shit.

Similarly, your humble narrator ran away to hide in dirty places with his dirty thoughts, his sole pair of pants smelling strongly of sweat, urine, and cum. His constipation became my own and now I almost have the full force of his poetry in my veins.