TIME FOLLOWS ME

CHAPTER ONE - I DON'T FOLLOW TIME AROUND

CHAPTER ONE

I DON’T FOLLOW TIME AROUND

According to what I remember, I met Connie Long at the Bus Terminal in Barrie.  She was being picked up by her parents, who ran the local Funeral Parlour, The Chatterton/Long Funeral Home. They offered me a ride home to Duntroon, which was not out of their way.

I wondered if there would be any lights on at the farmhouse.  We got to Duntroon and as we ascended the hill, I could see the side porch light on into the kitchen through the apple orchard.  I asked the Longs to take the second driveway as the first is right on the crest of the hill, and is quite dangerous entering or leaving.  You can’t see the cars coming down over the hill.  At night it is better but it is still not a good idea to try regularly.

We drove around the semi-circular drive behind the house and stopped by the side porch.  I unloaded my heavy knapsack I had hawked from the previous year’s fire fighting duties, thanked the Longs for the lift, their kindness, and told Connie, “I’ll see you in the school hallways”.

Under a late starry sky, I shuffled across the cool night grass, suddenly feeling the affects of this long day. Dad was waiting.  He was dumbfounded to see me after so many months away on the road.  He offered me a beer and we sat on the porch and talked.  I don’t think we ever talked that much before and have never talked that much since.  Mom came down briefly but didn’t stay.  She murmured, something like, “You made us very worried.”  And I said, “ It doesn’t matter, I’m home now.”

Dad called me the “Prodigal Son” who had returned.  He had a very loose grasp of the Bible stories and took religion with a grain of salt.  He told me once he believed in the Lord’s Prayer, “That’s a good prayer if you’re ever in trouble.”  He talked mostly about himself and how bad it had been the last few months.  He looked sideways at me holding his gaze and said, “ I want to leave your Mother.”  “Maybe you should,” I said.

It was then that I felt something that I had never felt before from somewhere deep down inside my bones. I was changed and would never be the same person I was before I took off, stuck my thumb out and hitchhiked all the way and back to Steinbeck’s mystical promised land of California.  What happened along the way is what this story is all about.  I will try and write down all that I saw and heard.  This will be as clear a recollection of this journey as possible, some parts will be clear as mud.  I am not writing this for myself.

I know the scenes that are sitting on a shelf like artifacts found in some hidden room or cave.  They sit there, and have their own life, energy and presence, always around me.  I am writing this so that others, primarily my children will know where they came from.  How out of a dream, a hallucination, a wish, a fate was chosen.

From these early beginnings having just turned eighteen a few months earlier, I set out on a path that I embrace to this day.  My plan was to live on $4 a day with the money I saved from working part-time at the midnight gas bar over the winter, while going to school.  I had $200 in total.  Steinbeck’s, “The Grapes of Wrath” was floating ‘round inside my head after studying it the last spring semester.

 I was captivated by this heart-wrenching tale about Tom Joad.  Although discouraged on all fronts to go “off traveling,” that was exactly what I did.  My mantra that summer of 1976 was to allow myself to be open and try whatever I encountered with an open heart and mind.

I didn’t know at the time how powerful this mantra would be.  I had no idea, as a completely “green farm-boy,” what incredible landscapes, crazy beautiful people I would meet, and what uncanny bizarre hallucinations I would have and be apart of.  This is a chronicle of those events that happened in time, but are not chained to any time line.