I am sitting in the Swartz Bay ferry terminal. I consider this to be punishment for an incredibly stupid thing I seem to have done.
Okay, so let’s make some allowances here: every time you travel, something goes wrong. It’s a universal law. You don’t know what it will be, you just know something will happen. Still, if you’re responsible, you try to do everything you can to mitigate potential disasters.
I have tried hard to be super-organized with my trip. This is a little challenging, because I don’t know exactly what kind of tools and resources I’ll need when I’m in Croix des Bouquets, so there hasn’t been a point – and there never will be a point, until I’m there, or maybe until I’ve returned – that I’m sure I am prepared.
Anyway, I feel like I’ve foreseen everything I was ever likely to foresee, and done everything I can to get my shit together. Anything I missed will have to be mitigated by my resourcefulness, the powers that be and by ability to get by. Still, I guess the universe saw me smugly congratulating myself – or maybe I should stop trying to pin my own stupidity on an inexorable, unseen force that might not even exist anyway.
Long story short, when Cayce delivered me to the ferry terminal, I left my mobile phone in her car. I realized this after I’d bought my ferry ticket and walked downstairs, set down my bag and started rooting for my phone to call my cousin Gary in Vancouver about a ride. I turned my daypack out and sorted feverishly through the heap on the floor, and I sat there and thought about where my phone might be. And then, with complete clarity, I could visualize it sitting in the car, in the little tray on the passenger side door.
My parents, in a stroke of utter genius, got a toll-free number several years ago to cut down on the phone costs for my brother and I when we were away at school. Turns out they still have it – God knows I didn’t have any quarters for a payphone. (Hi, mom. Sorry I’m such a little girl sometimes, but I’m glad that after 23 years of this, when I decide to regress and act like a wee baby, you still react with calmness and love and make everything better.)
Now, I asked my parents what to do. They called Cayce’s mobile, and I think it is probably at her house. They called my mobile, but no one other than me is attuned to it – the “ringing” is actually Leonard Cohen quietly crooning the opening lines of “Suzanne”. The best reason I like it is because it doesn’t bother anyone – I’m the only one who notices my phone ringing. That fact was clearly working against me today, because Cayce didn’t hear my phone ringing as she drove back into Victoria.
Mom, dad, you are much more prudent and cautious than I am. Left to my own devices, I probably would have evaluated those five minutes I had left before the ferry boarding, and said “fuck it”. I would have come to the uneasy conclusion that there was nothing I could do. After all, people got along fine without mobile phones not so long ago, and it probably won’t work in Haiti anyway – I was only bringing it to make my life easier during my travel on either end of Croix des Bouquets. But you’re probably right. If there’s any way, within reason, that I can depart with the most comprehensive possible suite of tools at my fingertips...I should probably do it.
But I am actually totally second-guessing myself. Cayce got all the way back home before she got any of my messages, and the poor thing is currently driving all the way back out to the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, where I’ll be waiting for the next sailing at 7 PM. Just to deliver that tiny, devilish bit of plastic and screws and pixie magic.
Poll: what would you have done? Said “shit, guess I’d better just move on with my life”? Decided without hesitation to do the sensible, cautious thing and wait for your phone to be delivered to you?
Oh, I know the answer. You wouldn’t have forgotten the damned thing in the first place.
So, here is my completely embarrassed, wholehearted, public apology. Sorry, Cayce. You are a saint for picking me up at the airport, driving me around to run my errands, bringing me out to the ferry today, coming back out just because I’m an idiot. I’m serious. You’re a saint. I will falsify a set of astonishing miracles associated with your benevolent presence on this earth, and I will ensure you are beatified and canonized and that you become the first living person to ever be declared a saint. Unless you walk through the door in a few minutes and smack me. But even then, I’ll still be grateful.
Okay, my computer’s battery is dying, and I will post this when I can get online. It is written around 6 PM on 12 June: the day Jessie proved Ian right in his accusation that her cursory situational surveys smack of an impatient, boyish way of looking for things. Things like mobile phones, when she’s making sure she has all her belongings with her.
Update: Cayce and Rachel just brought me my phone, and they didn’t smack me, so sainthood it is!
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