Hang On St. Christopher

(01/12/16)

After my mom left, I showered, listened to music, and paced my darkened condo while crying like a little bitch.

From there, I walked to the bus station.

We crossed the mountains in the dark, stopping at Hinton, where a younger me, my late brother, and his then-girlfriend went to Bull of the Woods, and in Vailmont, where a carload of burlesque dancers and I once spent the night on a trip to a convention in Seattle.

Catholic monks take a Vow of Stability--promising to spend their lives in the same place. Stability is a funny word for me though, because I associate monasteries with instability. Even getting to them requires byzantine travel arrangements: My last couple trips to Shasta Abbey in California have involved stops at airports in Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver, Redding, California and Medford, Oregon. Those latter two are very small although Redding Airport plays 70s hits over the loudspeaker that you forgot existed, let alone how much you loved them, and Medford has a cool little model airplane display in a glass case.

So far, I've been lucking in my travels. Only once have I had a problem when inclement weather delayed my flight from Medford enough that I missed my connecting flight and had to spend eighteen hours in the airport in Seattle, reading a Lee Child novel (I forget the name, but it's the one where Jack Reacher solves the mystery, sleeps with the tough female agent, and kills the bad guys) at a twenty-four hour newsstand while the employees politely mopped around me.

Fortunately, Buddhism neither requires, nor makes any promises around stability.

Neither does life.

When daylight arrived, the flat, wide, open of Alberta was gone, and we were trundling through corridors of snow-covered trees, creeping across the palm of BC's mountain and valley-lined hand.

I transferred buses twice before Lytton: once in Kamloops, which hugs the contours of the terrain like body paint on a swimsuit model. My next stop is where I am right now, Cache Creek. There are less trees here, and the snow has a more tenuous grasp on the scrubby ground. The countryside has widened into a series of rumpled, rocky hills, lumpy as the comforter on a badly made bed.

In any case, here I am, writing in a restaurant in Cache Creek  next to a trio of bus drivers, one of who has just informed me that one of my bags has not made the trip with me.

"Probably in Vancouver right now," he tells me. "Or maybe still back in Kamloops."

"Not Vancouver," a second driver says. "That bus is still two hours out."

"It'll be in Lytton tomorrow," the first driver reassures me. "You'll just have to come back into town and get it."

"The screw-up probably happened in Kamloops," the second drive muses. "Or Vailmont. That's an important transfer point."

"Come into Lytton tomorrow, we'll have it for you," the first driver says. "Everything gets done right here. Just not in a way that leaves everyone happy at the time."

Like I said: Instability.