Welcome onto Rialta Road
Fasten your seatbelts
It’s going to be a wild ride!
Next: Detour to Cowichan Lake | TOC
Colin didn’t know if he wanted to take his shoes off before dipping his toe into the thrashing tide of Juan de Fuca Strait. There should be something ceremonial about the gesture, he thought. Not because it was being enacted at Mile 0 on the Trans Canada Highway—known parochially as Douglas Street—and marked his departure from the West Coast of BC, east to Kilometre 0 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, but because it represented a new start for him. Like putting a period at the beginning of a sentence.
Cynthia would have smiled at his convoluted way of putting things, and it would have pleased him to amuse her.
Between the two zeros, seven thousand and seventy kilometres—give or take a few—of Rocky Mountains, rolling prairie, Great Lakes, Canadian shield, and Atlantic granite, and 40 million or so representatives of differing ethnic minorities.
If she was here, she would have kicked off her sandals, laughed, and taunted. Come on tenter tootsies, he imagined her teasing. Shuck the clod hoppers and feel the earth move under your feet. She’d sing the last bit as if she was an incarnation of Carole King. She might even have composed a corny alliterative about the soles of your feet touching the souls of earth and sea, sloshing around in her pedal pushers until—Ooops!—she got a soaker.
He sighed, stooped, and untied the black canvas sneakers he’d taken to wearing instead of Oxfords since day-one of his retirement. He’d bought them specially as emblems of his new era of freedom, but was still getting used to their tight fit. He’d always been—always would be—a tenderfoot. Tentative, thoughtful, embarrassed at the very thought of getting caught in the act of being ‘abnormal.’
“Abnormally normal,” Cynthia had diagnosed once. “Weirdly conformed.” They’d laughed because, although her assessment was not exactly true, it was perfectly fair. It fit him snugly as his skin.
Pant legs rolled up above his calves, he heaved himself off the flat cube of rock he’d been sitting on and wobbled down the shingled stretch of beach toward the lapping lip of the vast Pacific. He clenched his jaws shut tight, holding in the ouches and ows provoked by the prodding, rasping gravel. Arms extended like the wings of a tightrope walker on the verge, he paused a pregnant moment, allowed the significance of his daring act to swell inside the confining inverted bowl of his skull.
“Oh gawd,” he yelped to no-one in particular, yearning for someone to be there, as he stood, poised on the brink of a body of water that girdled the world, connecting his bit of beach on the Northwest Coast of the Americas to St. John’s Harbour via the Panama Canal…
Do it!
A shiver bolted up his sciatic nerve, his spinal cord, and into the parietal lobe of his overwrought brain. STOP! the clustered cells of his amygdala urged. But Colin pushed on. It didn’t seem enough to merely dip his toes into the ocean; he wanted to get a foot in at the very least, both feet, wade in up to the rolled cuffs of his pant legs. Step by tenuous step he immersed himself until…
“OW!”
Was it a shard of glass? The poisonous spine of some fishy species? A particularly spiteful barnacle or clam? He didn’t have time to think. Colin jumped and pirouetted away from the hazard. Then, landing hard on the penetrating seabed, he yodelled again, arms flailing, as he toppled backwards into the drink.
“Argh!” he howled, emerging from his sudden baptism like a breaching whale.
Slogging back to shore, he tried not to hear the gleeful hoots of spectators on the rocks, wishing only for Cynthia to be there, because her laughter would be unbridled and loving and would make everything genuinely funny.
Next: Detour to Cowichan Lake | TOC