Day 47: Excess baggage

I slept well at Doug and Bonnie's house and Doug made me french toast before waving me off with one of Bonnie's home made cookies.

It was even windier today than yesterday and I could only really do 10kmh. I plugged my music into my ears and found myself in a sad mood. I've written quite often about all the amazing, kind and inspirational people I've met, but I haven't really talked about the sad things I've learned on my trip and they're starting to weigh me down.

I guess it's easy for people to talk to me because they're never going to see me again after the minutes or hours that we spend talking, so I'm like a travelling shrink. People unload their baggage onto me and I carry it off into the sunset.

I met a newfie in a hotel bar who cried when he told me he's not in love with his wife. I've met men who have been left by their women, broke and broken hearted. I've met scores of Canadians who live in this amazing country but never go out in it for fear of the bugs and the bears. Fat women have looked at me with a mixture of admiration, envy and hate and told me in a small voice they could never do what I'm doing. Old people have said that they wish they could have travelled around when they were young, but that it's too late now.

I met five people sharing a motel room who collect their benefits cheques on Thursday and drink day and night until the money runs out on Sunday, then they live on the streets until the next cheque is ready. One of the women had her kids taken away from her the week before. I've watched a drunken man beating his fists on a dumpster, heard about people who drink and drive like they don't want to live. I've met guys who say they don't care if they die, and one who did die of a heart attack and wishes he was never revived. I've had blokes tell me that they were beaten as kids or that they sometimes get themselves into fights and into trouble, into prison. This morning outside Safeway I met a wrinkled, cross-eyed man who was in a car accident and is now bored out of his mind on disability benefits with no idea what to do with himself. A man in his 50s is living at the motel where he works 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, napping when he can. He's worked there a full year with just two days off for a funeral one time. And a middle aged guy from another motel, kind, smart and philosophical, who turns into a drooling drunken fool in the evening, wasting his good brain and his good liver for reasons unknown to me. 

All these people with regrets, debts, lost and unrequainted loves, searching for meaning and belonging or finding solace in wine and beer. A younger, cockier me might have offered those people advice, thinking things were black and white and that mistakes are easy to fix. But I just listen, learning that good people can find themselves in bad situations pretty easily.

So here I am, grateful and guilt-ridden for my good fortune in life, in the middle of my big adventure, trying to make sense of the world. 

The town I'm staying in tonight isn't helping my mood. I rode 85km to Grassy Lake to find a nice but deserted campground in a town with no pubs and the only restaurant and shop closed. It's a Menninite community and all the women in their long dresses and head cloths gave me funny looks as I rode through town. I'm glad I only arrived with enough time to wash, cook and set up camp by the time the sun was on its way down. But it's been a scorcher of a day so it's a nice evening to sit out and read with just the odd mozzie to bother me, the half moon getting brighter as the sky loses its colour.