August 1, 2008
In the early 1990s, during my second trip to Canada, I came up with what would prove to be a madcap plan to visit a friend who lived something slightly more than a hop, skip and a jump from Ontario.
She was actually living at the time in Springfield, Illinois, and getting there meant a trip from my uncle's home town of Dundas, near Hamilton, into Toronto, which was an hour away, and then walking into the Greyhound bus station and asking for a ticket to Illinois, as you do.
Taking a Greyhound seemed cool to me, because it was what happened in movies. But it is not cool - it is, of course, the north American equivalent of travelling by National Express: Cheap and decidedly uncheerful.
I remember stopping over for a few hours in Detroit for a transfer, and some wild-eyed ageing hippy urging me read a book about LSD - think it was called Snow something or other, that I did eventually buy but never read - while showing me the knack of breaking the seal on an industrial tub of hot salsa.
But I remember even more, not long before we left the state of Michigan, being quite fearful (stupidly) of a Middle Eastern woman who was sat quietly, minding her own business, on the other side of the aisle from me. That fear racked up further, though, when she got off and her seat was taken by a large black man in grey sweats who was carrying a cardboard box. The box, and the T-shirt, had "Department of Correction" written on them: He'd just got out of the local penitentiary.
I tell this story for two reasons: One, a fertile mind nervously traversing a vast, strange place allowed a mild youthful racism to invent dangers that simply weren't there, and I always regret that.
But two: Because this story made me realise I may have been slightly right to be wary after all.
