I Am a Travellin’ Man
ANYONE WISHING TO make the case that English is a crazy language needn’t venture beyond the word “trip.” Depending on context, it can mean: a journey, a tumble, a verbal blunder, a drug-induced revery or a hilarious experience (“That Rick Mercer – he’s a trip!”).
What makes our language magical as well as crazy is that this trip that you and I are on – the one they call Life – is all of the above and more.
Take moi. I am a senior citizen. A greybeard. An elder. But it seems like only yesterday I was a hirsute hippie hitchhiking and couch-surfing across the backside of North America, smoking dope and puzzling over the lyrics of Dylan, thinking seriously (or what passed for seriously) about heading for Big Sur and joining a commune.
I didn’t. Instead, I joined the PR department of a large international oil company and spent a soul-crushing year and a half as a stowaway stumbling and blundering through the corporate underbrush. I felt like an extraterrestrial.
Dope helped a bit. At noon on most workdays, I would forswear the company lunchroom and slouch off to a nearby cemetery where, weather permitting, I would hunker down against a tombstone, smoke a joint and “take a trip.” That worked well until one afternoon a hitherto unnoticed groundskeeper sidled up behind me and yanked the starter cord on an unmuffled Briggs and Stratton heavy-duty gas mower.
Bad trip.
My oil company colleagues perused the Financial Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Imperial Oil Review. Each week, I smuggled in the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine, which I read covertly and cover to cover at my desk. That’s where, back in the ’60s, I chanced to read the pronouncement of one Jack Weisberg, a spokesman for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Calif. “Don’t trust anybody over 30,” Mister Weisberg advised. Yes, I thought, that sounds reasonable. I was perhaps 26 at the time. Eventually, my employers recognized my profound unsuitability for their purposes and cut me loose, a severance for which, more than 40 years later, I remain profoundly grateful. It was a marriage that could never have worked.
Other trips ensued. I grew my hair long, went to Europe, slept in orchards in Tuscany and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Took a trip up the aisle for another marriage that didn’t work. Got quite a bit older and a little bit wiser. Kept wondering and wandering. One day, in Barcelona, a Spaniard called me a “caminante.” What the ...? Was he calling me a communist? I looked it up. It’s Spanish for “wanderer.”
Yes, I thought, that sounds reasonable.
My life “trip” continued to unfold in delightfully unimaginable ways, with surprising cul-de-sacs, baffling blind alleys and spectacular side streets blooming out of nearly every intersection I encountered. One evening, flipping through the TV channels in a motel room in Flin Flon, Man., I caught by chance a silver-haired Canadian codger gleefully demonstrating how to roll a proper joint.
It was legendary author and TV personality Pierre Berton, aged 84. Chatting while he rolled, Berton revealed that he’d been toking up (a.k.a. “tripping”) on a regular basis for most of the 20th century.
Pierre’s instructional video was one of his last gifts to his audience. His travels, on this temporal plane at least, ended a few months later.
Not so for you and me. We still have, as another silver-haired gentleman named Frost once said, “miles to go before we sleep.”
I don’t know what you’re packing for the journey but I plan to carry
“A Spaniard called me a caminante. What the ...?”
the words of Spanish poet Antonio Machado: Wanderer, there is no road. The road is made by walking. By walking, one makes the road and, upon glancing back, one sees the path that will never be trod
again. Have a nice trip.