(Read Part 1 here)

On The Road Again

Day 2 on the road. Dylan and I officially consider ourselves hardened road veterans. With an early start thanks to the sketchy House of Nazareth, we catch our first ride before 8am: an old, bright orange VW van. I didn’t know hitchhiking could be so cliche. Dylan sat in the back seat, a slippery vinyl ledge with no seatbelt, and I sat up front. After our introductions, the twenty-something driver started talking about music. “Hey, do you guys know reggae punk? You gotta check this out.” The remainder of the two hour ride, he would alternate between telling us about a new genre of music he had discovered (psychedelic blues, Icelandic ska) and playing a few songs on his stereo for us. Dylan fell asleep in the back so I was left on conversation duty. Nearing the end of the ride, I ventured to asked him if he liked TOOL. “Naw, too loud. They’re just plain metal. But hey, you gotta check out this new underground African-jazz-metal trio I found from New York…”

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This is part one in a true series called Montreal Rock City.

The question you gotta ask yourself is how badly do you wanna see the greatest fucking rock and roll show in the fucking earth, right? We’re talking Gene and Paul live, yo. We’re talking about the most voluptuous women hanging out in the audience. I’m talking big breasteses in tight dressteses. We’re talkin’ ‘bout people passing around joints in the audience. I’m talking about fucking Detroit rock city. Shake your wee wee.

– Scalper in the movie Detroit Rock City

The Scene

I’m seventeen. It’s the summer after graduating high school. A rough summer of alcoholic hazes and sleepless nights. I sometimes get headaches when I don’t drink. The august heat makes my shitty job of cleaning car interiors even more hellish. I tell by boss that if I have to scrape one more dead bird from under the hood of a Pontiac Aztec, I’ll quit.

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Last we left him, our hero had accepted a ride in northern New Brunswick, with a 50-something truck driver named Ed , on his way north of Toronto.

Ed looked like your typical older truck driver. Three days worth of stubble, 50 pounds overweight, and a plaid shirt and trucker hat. Ed and I talked about all the usual topics for a few hours, and exchanged travel stories. I find that people usually like to reminisce about the old days when they used to hitchhike themselves. Ed told me about his first hitchhiking trip when he was seventeen in Newfoundland:

“My mom sent me down to the store to get some smokes, eh. An my buddy jus’ so happen to be standing ‘ere in front of the store with a big ol’ bottle o’ screech. An’ so we get to drinkin’ an’ — it seems like a good idea at the time, yaknow — and we decide to go for a hitchhikin’.”

“Well, I guess we got a little too into the booze, ’cause I can’t remember actually leavin’ the island, or even the people that woulda picked up a couple o’ drunk kids like us, but when I woke up… When I woke up it was a week and a half later and I was in Edmonton. I guess we had quite the bender! And the hotel room was all smashed up, and a girl was passed out on the floor with my buddy… And I tried, really tried to remember what had happened and how we had got to Edmonton, but I could only get bits and pieces, eh.”

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I was 20, and had enrolled for my third year of university in Halifax. I didn’t want to go back to school. I felt I was spending a lot of money for an arbitrary piece of paper that I wasn’t sure I really needed. I also had a sneaking suspicion that after all the nights hanging out in bars with classmates, all the lounging around in study halls and great discussions of politics, world issues and women we thought were hot, that I was somehow insulated from “real learning,” although I had no idea what that meant at the time.

On the last day to withdraw from classes without financial penalty, I cracked. At 4:45, fifteen minutes before they closed, I ran to the financial office and “de-registered” for all my classes, and got a full refund.

Fuck it, I thought. I’m finished with classrooms. I want real, tangible experience. I’m going to hitchhike to Montreal (yes, there was a girl there…).

The next day I told my concerned parents I was a college dropout, and that I was getting a ride with a friend to Moncton (a two hour drive from Halifax) to clear my head and figure out what my long-term plans were. (My real destination, Montreal, was a 12-14 straight drive. At this point in my life, I didn’t feel like I could tell my parents about what I was really doing, as the whole “dropping out” thing seemed to affect them enough)

Although fate would have nothing of Montreal, while in northern New Brunswick, I got a ride from a truck driver who was heading all the way to just north of Toronto — an offer I couldn’t turn down (as an aside, I actually don’t believe in fate in day to day life — I feel that we are all 100% responsible for our own actions and circumstances, but the appeal of hitchhiking for me has always been that your trip is very dependent on the people that pick you up, hence I believe in a kind of hitchhiker “fate”).

(to be continued…)