Quest. It’s the first time I had voiced that word aloud to describe my travels. I’m surprised how easily it slips off my tongue. The word has the ring of knights to it, the search for the Holy Grail. In honour of the couple sitting with me along Victoria’s inner harbour, pulling up needle and thread to create dream catcher earrings as fine as spider web, the word also holds the echo of drums. Rites of passage and dream quests, where initiates enter the forest alone.
“I’m on a quest,” I tell them.
This is the last city I’ll visit on my month-long, five-city tour. I’ve travelled by train on my own from Toronto to Sudbury, Edmonton, Vancouver, Portland, and Victoria. Maybe it has taken all this time to be able to use that word. To know what it is I do.
Another couple might have thought it odd, both the statement and the stranger who voiced it. An opportunist might have taken advantage of it. As a female travelling alone, I guard what I say. Don’t draw attention to myself. Do not go out after dark, nor flash items that indicate I’m travelling unaccompanied.
It’s a matter of finding the balance between adventure - experiencing new things and new people, new ideas and new places - and safety. I’ve no urge to become a statistic. I take care that my plans are in order before I make the next step in journey – tickets, place to stay, related telephone numbers, connections - although there is always the hitch.
It’s how one deals with the hitch that is part of the legacy of quest.
What one is left with when the travelling is done.
“Satan! Take these quarters!” the man madly screamed at me in downtown Vancouver.
He stretched out his arm, pinched two silver coins between his finger and thumb, delicately out of sync with his voice and words.
I had been aware of his crossing sidewalk as if looking for someone, watched him. Made a point not to catch his eye, to avoid confrontation when he backtracked, pushed through the wide doors of the coffee shop.
He was a young man, maybe nineteen. He was rail thin, unkempt, not dirty, not as if he had slept on the street. He wore blue jeans, and a clean maroon T-shirt. It struck me as odd that his shoulder-length hair was unsnarled, shone as if brushed a hundred strokes.
But these aren’t the things that mesmerised and frightened me the most. Rather, it was his eyes. Jesus-Christ eyes. They drowned in blue. Reflected his obsessions, his personal crucifixion.
No filter between his unconscious mind – his inner turmoil - and the outer world. I couldn’t escape his eyes. Not this close.
It occurred to me as a fleeting thought that I could die here, right in this moment, in this strange city, far away from the people I love. That this demented young man could pull a knife or gun, leave me in a puddle of blood on the floor.
My coffee addiction would finally be the death of me, I thought in that way one thinks black humour at the most unlikely moments.
I had, after all, stubbornly searched out the sole Tim Horton’s coffee shop in the midst of this Starbuck’s city.
The man repeated his crazed command. “Satan! Take these quarters!”
I looked into his blue eyes.
“No,” I said. I was not Satan. I would not take the quarters. I would not die this day. He returned my gaze, then accepted my answer, dropped his arm. Continued his search, stopping at the patio tables along the street, and then disappeared around the corner.
We each have our own quests, it seems.
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This first-person account was originally read on CBC Radio. The story is derived from my journals from a train trip in 2002.