The Faulty Memory Series, Part One: Leaving
The Faulty Memory Series, Part One: Leaving
In which a young man decides to travel, then tries to remember it nearly 20 years later.
Start at the beginning, people say. It’s both the simplest and worst advice about writing that anyone can give you. Or maybe the second worst. The worst advice would be: “Start by writing about starting at the beginning but then don’t actually start there.”
A good story, we all know, has phases that protagonists must pass through in order to grow and learn. The beginning is so important that writers take pains to wallop you immediately. The great novels, poems, and essays all have incredible first lines. Call him Ismael. Let you go now, you and him, while the evening etc. etc. There are merits to the strong start, to the beginning to end all beginnings.
I’m stalling. I don’t really remember the beginning, so we’re just going to have to deal with that and get started … here:
I think I caught the travel bug sometime during high school, which I suffered through in the second half of 1990s. I lived in rural Ontario, as far from anything interesting as it was possible to be. My home town (Bancroft) has become something of a tourist destination now, famed for its multitude of pretty lakes and expensive cottages and two—two!—Tim Hortons coffee shops, one for each highway leading out of town. When I was growing up, its tourist attractions were an annual gem and mineral show held at the town skating rink (and later, the curling rink) and the gift shop of the local sodalite mine, open Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings or something. I’m not going to fact check that, because there aren’t many Google results for “opening hours of the Bancroft sodalite mine gift shop 1990s.”
When I was a teenager, few people came to Bancroft on holiday, and barely anyone I knew had ever been anywhere on holiday. An ambitious trip might be to Toronto, a three-hour drive away. Most big weekends involved driving 100km to the nearest small city with a movie theatre to watch eternal classics such as Waterworld and Powder, which are actually the first two movies I ever saw in theatre, in order.
My barber’s husband was from England. He had the accent and everything. It was, for a side road off a side road, impossibly exotic.
Despite existing very much on the fringes of the places where things happened, Bancroft had an okay high school with a decent geography department full of bearded boozehounds who had taken trips, and had seen things. In grade nine or ten, the school offered a “travel and tourism class,” which mostly involved learning how to colour in world maps in such a way as to mimic an atlas (a thin dark border in the same colour as the whole country was shaded) and labelling world capitals. I loved it. The follow-up class the next year was simply named “Europe and Asia,” and in addition to the requisite map-colouring also featured listening to Mr. Barry, the teacher, talk for hours about trips he had taken around the world. These included dubious practical advice on not letting your car overheat while driving across the Australian Outback—turn the heat on full blast and roll all the windows down—and advice on not letting your car overheat while driving across the arctic—turn the air conditioning on full blast and roll all the windows down. Mr. Barry also explained which airlines had the prettiest staff (Air Malaysia) and which countries had the prettiest women (Malaysia or Indonesia or maybe Vietnam, he couldn’t decide), and also for a strange week or two taught us how to make clocks out of pieces of local granite, seemingly confusing his geography class with the geology class he also taught.
He also said Fiji was the most beautiful place in the world, and when he showed the class pictures on one of those old Kodak projector wheel things, I believed him.
That may be more accurately described as the moment that I became obsessed with wanting to see the larger world, not the moment I caught the travel bug. This starting at the beginning stuff is hard.
And besides, there’s an earlier beginning than this. Maybe a couple of them.
For example: our house had a world map on one wall, one of those old maps from public schools that rolled down so the teacher could point at it with a stick. We also had a wooden map of Canada that took up an entire wall in our kitchen. I would spend hours looking at these, every week, startled by how huge Canada was and how insignificant it looked when placed in its rolled-down global context.
Or this, maybe the most accurate: I remember sitting on the floor of the room I shared with my brother for 10 years when we were growing up, the family globe sitting between us, playing a game called “Spin The Globe As Fast As You Can And Stop It With Your Finger And Wherever It Stops Is Where You Have To Live Or At Least Go To One Time.” We were not great at coming up names for games. This game worked much like the title suggests, but you were allowed to re-spin if your finger landed on either Greenland or Antarctica and we didn’t really put any sort of timeline on when you would need to move to or visit the place you landed on. I was probably eight years old, and my finger kept landing on Japan.
I had never bought a flight before I bought one to Japan. There were no such things as online tickets, let along Skyscanner or Google Flights. Instead, I went to a student-focussed travel agent in Ottawa, which I only knew about because I walked past it every day on my way from my apartment to the University of Ottawa campus, where I was overstaying my welcome. I spoke to a human sitting behind a computer for hours trying to work out the cheapest and least complicated way to get to Nagasaki. Earlier that day, the final portion of my student loan had been deposited in my bank account. I had to use it on a flight before I could do something foolish with it, like pay for tuition or housing.
For $2,000, I could buy a return ticket to Tokyo, via Detroit. I didn’t even know Detroit had an airport, much less on that had a direct connection to Tokyo. At that time, working full-time as the editor of the university newspaper, I made about $400 a week. For reasons that will become clear in other stories (I was in love, she was in Korea), I needed to get to Asia before Christmas. I had lied to a professor about having a family something or other to push my final exam ahead two weeks. All that remained was spending what amounted to the most money I had spent on anything—by an enormous margin—on a return ticket that I knew I would never use half of. The debit payment had to be split into four parts, so low was my transaction limit at the time. The travel agent printed out my tickets on paper and put them into a paper folder, just like you see in Mad Men. It was intoxicating.
It was totally reckless, too, both in hindsight and in whatever hindsight is called when it happened in the past, looking forward at a decision. Foresight? Just sight, I guess. From both vantage points, this was a ridiculous thing to do. Yet my confidence that things would somehow work out never wavered, and in truth was rarely tested. “Sometimes, you just need to jump,” I want to write, “and trust there will be a soft landing.” But that’s nonsense too, to be filed along with “start at the beginning.” My jumping was a calculation, the equation for which would read happiness plus adventure divided by boredom and financial ruin, all inside some brackets and with exponents around them. If travel BEDMAS lead me to the right answer, it was the right answer only for me. I do not advocate spending the majority of your available money on a trip you have no intention to come back from. Unless of course you want to, in which case fill your books and have a lovely trip. I certainly did.
Michael and Donna, who would become my father- and mother-in-law a few years later, drove me to the airport in Ottawa through that kind of irritating light snow that characterizes Ottawa winters: everything is a little less comfortable, things take longer, but little is truly disrupted. Nor is anything made more picturesque; rather, things become grey and then brown and slushy. This was not the first time I had wanted to flee the onset of winter; it was merely the first time I succeeded.
We had driven to the airport in the family’s minivan, because I was a new traveller and had no concept of how to pack. I borrowed a friend’s enormous backpack and stuffed it with every item of clothing I owned. I was being sent with two other suitcases of Christmas presents as well, one for my friend Erin who lived in tiny Kunimi in Nagasaki Prefecture, my second stop on the trip; and the other for Katherine, my future ex-wife. Michael, the former head of a section of Canada’s secret service, didn’t need any of his secret service training to see through me. He lifted the bags into the car and winked as he said, “You coming back?” Then we laughed that kind of laugh that told him he was right and, as with everything else in that family, we refused to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth beyond small talk. Donna hugged me for a long time at the check-in counter, and they gave me $100 for the trip. I tried to refuse, this being a small fortune at the time, but they insisted, not for the last time knowing more than I did about a thing I had decided to do.
There is little more humiliating than being poor at an airport. This is true in most airports of the world, but especially so in North American airports, and doubly so in Canadian airports, where you are suddenly forced to answer questions more difficult than any posed to you so far in life. Such as: is a medium coffee and a donut that you don’t really want truly worth $9? Should you treat yourself, embarking on your first international adventure, to a pint of Alexander Keith’s for $18? And having been made to pour out the 1/3 of a water bottle you had left, can you really drop 10% of the money your girlfriend’s parents just gave you on 500ml of Dasani water?
Those may not have been the prices. It was 2006, and I don’t really remember how much anything cost at Tim Hortons; I remember only the outrage at what it cost then, however much that may have been. And maybe even that outrage is misremembered. Maybe none of these feelings are quite right. Maybe Mike and Donna were oblivious to the significance of my trip. Maybe she didn’t hug me for that long, or at all. But I remember feeling helplessly poor. And I remember a clandestine warmth, a startling generosity. More or less.
And so at long last we come to the point of this first story, before the real story—that first trip to Japan, the neon alleyways, the glowing vending machines in the rain, the deep sense of being lost and happy—even begins: I cannot promise that the details of all of these stories will be, you know, correct. They’ll be true, insofar as I’ll believe them to be true, and they’ll come from my brain, and I am remembering them a certain way. But goddamn if time doesn’t colour things. Distance from what happened comes with the complications of new emotions flowing backwards, with all manner of creeping determinisms.
So this story, and others like it, will come with a warning in the form of their name, hinting not-so-subtly at the unreliability of some of the details contained within. Welcome, then, to the Faulty Memory Series.
