Cross-country move sparks a pandemic road trip
We write books and we make art because there will always be need for it
Let me start off with some advice, something that should be glaringly obvious but bears being said — do not move house during a pandemic.
My husband and I dragged our 14-year-old daughter across the country from Toronto to live in Vancouver last spring, a move that made all the sense in the world since B.C. is where work was happening on the television adaptation for “The Marrow Thieves” — which, ironically, is about an apocalyptic future after several pandemics. We agreed a new start would be good for all of us, a new adventure. We’d already dragged said teenager to Peru, Paris, all over England, the Caribbean and Mexico where she hung out with writers, thinkers, philosophers and Indigenous storytellers … so what was a little crosscountry trek to live for a few years?
When our first lease was up we thought, let’s move more into the city — the east end to be exact, to get some of the diversity and community we were missing in the outskirts. So, we found a new townhouse to rent, gave notice and packed up. And then we waited. And waited. The pandemic delayed everything — including the landlords (of ) our townhouse moving out — and soon we were on day forty-one of AirBnBs and UberEats with no end in sight, as privileged as that access is. So when the opportunity to purchase a house in my home community on the Georgian Bay presented itself, we held our breath and jumped. Our love affair with Vancouver was brief, and now we were headed home, maybe for good.
I am writing this from a motel en route to our new property. Not a hotel with a breakfast lounge and towels thicker than a napkin, but an honest to god motel. Anyone who knows me or reads my work knows I’m good with motels. I am a fan of road trips with all the grit in your bra, beef jerky wrappers in the cup holder, weird highway attractions they might include (did you know the world’s biggest Coca-Cola can is in Portage la Prairie, Man.?). But being in between houses with everything you own packed away and two dogs who think they need to protect you from every smoker’s cough and every action movie soundtrack coming through the thin walls? It’s not so great. It sucks. But at least I am not alone.
When I decided I was going to marry my husband, I had already been divorced and had a couple kids in tow. I was used to doing things on my own and I liked it that way. I remember one day watching him cobble together the most remarkable playhouse for our daughter in the backyard, a house that was the envy of the neighbourhood. Watching him make magic out of scraps (and look good while wielding a hammer) I thought “Yeah I’d marry that guy.” My criteria included not only love, but the fact that I wanted him on my apocalypse survival team. Dear reader, I truly did not think I would need to actually apply that criterion in our lifetime, but here we are.
So, I have a great partner for this road trip and all the work that will come once we arrive, the work of returning to my territory rife with thousands of cousins and what is sure to be a fixer-upper on a grand scale.
I am an introvert. I think every writer is in some way. These past few years I’ve travelled the globe with my books and can tell you the best coffee and cleanest washrooms in at least half a dozen airports by heart. When I wasn’t travelling, I was more than happy to hunker down at home. The knowledge that soon I would be working in my pyjamas with no plans to leave the house even to go to the store sustained me while preparing to speak in theatres and auditoriums all over the world. And then the world stopped. And suddenly, I was in my pyjamas for the sixth day in a row. And I started to wonder if I needed to worry about how much merlot I had gone through, the burgundy splotches on my pants spelling out ‘yeah, you do. It’s worrisome.’
I did what I’ve always done, I turned to books for solace. The gorgeous “ARIA” by Nazanine Hozar became my best friend. I re-read Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” for the fifteenth time. I spent more time than medically advisable in the tub pondering the extraordinary genius in “The Blue Clerk” by Dionne Brand only to slide into the equally extraordinary “The Dyzgraphxst” by Canisia Lubrin right after. And I wrote.
Luckily, I am in the middle of a few pressing deadlines for upcoming works so I still have some kind of structure to make me get out of bed (or work from bed, but who’s judging?). The collective anxiety and immobility of the world brought home my own anxiety with a resounding weight. I am by nature an extremely anxious person with a running prescription for Xanax and an aversion to things like phone calls since any call brings the potential for bad news. But now, everything I usually relied on for perspective was failing me — the news, friends, social media. There really was bad news everywhere. This made it both easier and much more difficult to write.
There was the day — in dealing with landlords who wanted us to wait ‘another few weeks, maybe a month’ with zero concern for anyone else who might be, oh, I don’t know, trapped in shifting short-term rentals with a teenager being homeschooled — when I wrote the most pathetic missive in my journal. I ended it, teary-eyed and exhausted to the bone, “I wouldn’t want to feel this under any circumstances, not even for research for my writing.” And then I promptly opened my laptop, sniffing and lethargic, and used it for writing. And now I am in a motel where the shower beats you almost unconscious with uneven pressure and the guy next door may or may not live here permanently with his over-sized aquarium of peeping frogs (which, apparently, my dogs also need to protect me from by barking at every peep through the wall even if it’s 2 a.m.). And I am writing. Because that’s what I do, I write. I’m able to write because I know there will be readers. We will move past this and have such a banquet of new art to consume and be transformed by when we do. I know we will move forward, hopefully with new understandings in place. Because that’s what we do, we survive.