Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Hitchhiking Part I: We Didn't Get Murdered

The morning after: like anthropologists examining evidence of a glorious bygone era, we go through half-unpacked bags and leftover camping food while we listen to hours upon hours of tape, laughing along with our past selves from the safety of my Vancouver apartment. To summarise seems almost sacrilegious, but writing up the dreamlike story we've lived this weekend will take time. We were away for three and a half days and in that time we hitchhiked on random windy highways in Alberta and rode through the night with truckers who told us of their lives as the miles rolled beneath Peterbilts, Freightlinters, and Kenworths. We camped at Writing on Stone Provincial Park, saw a grizzly bear plodding along prairie railway tracks, endured two tense hours with a psychopath, spent a sleepless night at a truckstop diner, and awoke to the hum of our homebound truck and the walls of the still snowy Rocky Mountains, each one like a jagged young planet passing beside us. These experiences defy words and sentences and paragraphs, but we're going to try. Hitch a ride if you want, but we may have to make a few detours.

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