Four

Hey folks,
This is the eve of my last full day in Canada. In 36 hours, the next stage of my trip will begin!

Victoria has been a completely chaotic space for me. If you're here and you're someone I love, I'm sorry that I haven't had a chance to visit with you. On the other hand, I'm grateful that I've been incredibly busy, because it's kept my mind off the niggling voice of doubt and fear.

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where I'm going. I mean, I have all those standard answers. "I'm going to Croix des Bouquets." Or, "I'm going to Haiti to volunteer." But I have no real way of anticipating what the challenges are going to be. Still -- I have no way of anticipating what the rewards will be, either. And I refuse to be so fixated on the former that I completely miss out on the latter. You know?

In my mind -- and this may not make sense, and I may prove myself wrong -- this feels like going bungee jumping. When Ian and I stopped at Kawarau Bridge so he could do his jump, I said to myself -- as I've always said -- "God knows I would never do that." Somehow, the next day, we were back in that parking lot (thanks to my sneaky sweetheart) "just to see how I felt". Even when I had paid for my jump, stood there with receipt in hand, walked up to the bridge under my own power, shuffled to the edge of the dive platform, my brain was not capable of actually, meaningfully processing the thought "I am going to jump".

When I was teetering at the edge of the platform, with that bright-milky water sparkling forty-three meters below me and the cord knotted around my ankles, I had one moment where I reacted with pure animal instinct. I'm not going to pretend I was brave, that I actually jumped. I lost my balance and fell off that platform. (Couldn't quite match Ian's fearless swandive from the day before...showoff.) From the moment I fell free until the moment I hit the end of the rope, just inches above the river, I can't remember a thing.

I can describe it objectively, because I watched it happen to other people, but I have no sense that it happened to me. There are a couple of fragmentary images I retain -- the slack rope above me as I hurtled downward, the cord growing increasingly taut -- the face of the spotter as he leaned over the platform to watch my jump, growing closer as I bounced back up -- the utter, maddening, incredible blue of the water when I was finally hanging still, upside-down, at the end of the rope.

But you know what? There is no part of my brain that can categorize the experience. Even though I took all the steps to make it happen, under my own power, and even though I did it, there is no compartment in my brain for sensations like that, for experiences that are just totally beyond my ability to foresee, to understand in the moment, to fully comprehend. I can discuss it intellectually. I am really fucking glad I did it, and it was amazing. But I reacted on the most basic, impulsive, animal level to the experience.

And it changed me in ways I don't totally understand, in the different sort of vertigo I experience at great heights now, in the way I perceive the colour blue, in my faith that I can go into something cold and experience it without trying to understand it and process it without comprehending it. I'll never go bungee jumping again. But going to Haiti is another flavour, in my mind, of the same delicious thing. I'll never replicate this experience either. (I'll never try.) And I'll come home, I know it, with my eye already roving in search of the next challenge, the next impulse, the next wild moment of utter abandon that taps into parts of me even I don't know.

Okay, less philosophical now, huh? Today I spent some time with some really wonderful people that mean a great deal to me. There are so many people in my life who are just so great. Do you ever stop and think about that? If I saw you today, hello, and thanks for making time for me, because it was really good to see all of you. To everyone I didn't see, don't feel excluded; Rome wasn't built in a day and I wasn't able to see everyone I wanted to see today either, but Rome might certainly be populated with speed and efficiency by all the rockin' people in my life.

I also retrieved my antimalarial pills, which decided to chill out in Bella for a couple of extra days without me. I'm glad they decided to join me for the remainder of my trip, and hopefully hold up their end of the bargain and keep me from coming home diseased. (Thanks mom and dad for shipping them down!) And I've stocked up on stuff: a ton of multivitamins and art supplies, for now, more stuff tomorrow!

I keep waiting for the moment of crisis and panic when I realize I've overlooked something of great import. Things are going suspiciously well. Oh, and I bought the coolest thing ever today. You're going to love this. When Ian and I were in New Zealand, we occasionally crashed in hostels that offered secure compounds to lock up our bags. When we sprang for a hostel, it was actually more cost-effective for us to get a private double room, so we didn't usually need the compounds. I don't remember why we did on this occasion -- I think it may have been on our arrival in Christchurch, when we dumped our bags and went exploring before we even checked into our room.

Anyway, that is all unnecessary preamble! For whatever reason, I was putting my pack into the secure compound and saw a couple of other folks' bags that had these personal security systems! They're made of a flexible wire mesh that stretches out to fit snugly around your pack, closing it in with the netting and locking with a padlock. It's slashproof, so it would take someone with tools and determination to saw through it! And it's designed so that you can also lock it around a solid object, just like you lock up a bike, so sneaky people can't even just make off with it and figure out later how to get into your pack.

I understand I will be staying inside a monitored, gated property, on the second floor of a building, with many other people. And I'm not bringing anything that I can't live without if the worst should happen and I lose everything. But if I can ease my mind with a little bit of extra security, why not? And also, it looks completely badass. It's shiny and it's tough.

Oh, and with due advice from Kat (in the form of "do itttttt") I bought the books I'll have on hand to fill my evenings! In addition to the thrilling "Mandeville's Travels, translated from the French of Jean d'Outremeuse" (no sarcasm, it's thrilling!), I am bringing four slim volumes:

Leonard Cohen's Book of Mercy ("You do not know how to bind your heart to the skylark, or your eyes to the hardened blue hills.")

Jorge Luis Borges' Poems of the Night ("The universe of this night / is as vast as oblivion, as precise as fever")

Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet ("We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.")

and a volume of John Keats' love letters and poems to Fanny Brawne ("I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.")

I can't tell you why I chose them. They're slim, they're beautiful, their covers are attractive. The typeface is pleasing, and the paper has a particular weight to it. And the words are breathless and flawless.

Okay, that's enough. That's nothing, and that's enough.

It's almost 1 AM as I actually post this; I am whittling down the precious few hours of sleep that my schedule has afforded me, typing in this infernal little box. Goodnight!