This morning was beautiful, a sunny and crisp day. We’ve been hiking the Bruce Trail every weekend for a long time, and we were looking forward to a trip to Speyside and parts north, to sections we’d never seen before. We got the usual coffee while engaging in the usual playful banter, looked at the map, and decided which route to the trailhead was best. The trail is moving east on the sections we haven’t hiked yet, so I headed along Dundas Street in that direction. The road opens up immediately and the limit is eighty kilometres per hour. The trip would be fast. As I got to speed, an animal suddenly appeared just to the right and ahead of the car, and I struck it hard.

It happened so very quickly. From the instant I saw the animal until I realized we’d hit it, a second, or less, had passed, but in the strange chronology of the mind, it seemed to take much longer, and so very much happened. While Alex and I were chatting, his head down looking at the map, I suddenly saw a coyote at full gallop less than a metre away from the front end of the car, its path perfectly perpendicular to ours. I saw its yellow-brown fur, and the reticulated pattern on it, like a tiger’s, running down the length of its body. In a microsecond, I saw its eyes, intent on the safe side of the road ahead of it. I thought I could avoid it. My foot came off the gas and hovered for another tiny slice of the second above the break, and I jerked the car to the left, slightly. But there is no median on this high-speed road, and cars were coming toward us. It would do no good. I was going to strike this animal with the full force of my car, speeding at eighty kilometres an hour, and neither I nor the poor coyote would be able to stop it, and so I simply did the only thing possible, and continued along a straight path, and ran into the side of its beautiful, wild body.

I immediately slowed, looking in the rearview mirror. I could see a small piece of the car, but the coyote wasn’t there. I thought by some miracle I had only glanced it, and it had simply run off into the fields to the north. But I suddenly realized it was still under the car, and we were still moving, at maybe fifty kilometres per hour. Just at that instant, there was a loud thud, and, as I pulled onto the shoulder, there it was, about twenty metres behind.

I was stunned. Alex was overcome. A truck pulled off the road ahead of us, and a man got out, pulling on gloves. I rolled down the window, and glanced in the mirror. To my utter horror, the coyote’s head lifted off the road, wobbling. It was still alive. The man came to the window, and said he’d drag it off the road to avoid an accident. Perhaps he didn’t realize it wasn’t dead. For some reason, I said nothing, and got out of the car to see the poor thing lurch up, and hobble, in agony, onto the shoulder, limping as though one of its legs were crushed, or torn off. I felt sick, and Alex was leaning against the roof of the car, his face hidden.

Realizing that the animal was alive, the man told me to call the Humane Society. This I could do. I couldn’t help the coyote. I couldn’t even bring myself to approach it and look at the state it was in, and the immenseness of the suffering it was experiencing and which I caused. But I could call for help. I got back in the car and made the call.

Because of the proximity to Oakville, and the state of the various services in the two cities, it took three phone calls and an exasperating voicemail trap before I spoke to someone. When I hung up, I got out of the car, and watched from a distance while the man, and now two others, crowded around the wounded animal and did what they could.

“I can’t go over there,” Alex said.

“I know.” But I could go, and I had to. There was no helping it, but I should at least look at what had happened. And so I walked slowly toward it, expecting the worst. Nobody looked up as I approached. One of them had put a blanket over its body. It was curled up as though it was ready for a nap, but its head was up, and it was alert, looking at us with its yellow eyes. Its breathing was laboured; it was almost panting for breath. Blood spilled out of its mouth freely, and the foreleg that I could see, poking out from under the blanket, was soaked with it. There was a trail of bright red blood leading right up to where it lay, and I suddenly realized that I was standing in it.

A van appeared, and a woman in uniform got out. The first man was actually handling the coyote’s head, petting it, and she warned him not to touch it. It could, after all, be rabid. But it was not rabid. It was strong and healthy before the impact. The fur was thick at its ears, and its eyes, even now, were bright, alert, beautiful, and wild, even as it struggled to stay alive.

“It’s a good thing it’s winter,” the woman said. “No pups left alone.” So it was female. “Anyone know what happened?” An older man said that someone had hit it and driven off.

“No,” I said, “I’m the one who hit it.”

She got on the phone to the police, and described where we were. Someone wondered why the police were called. The older man suggested it needed to be shot.

For some reason, I thought this woman from the Humane Society would have everything she needed in her van, and would be able to euthanize it immediately. She explained that she would never touch a wild animal so severely injured, and neither would any veterinarian. The only alternative was to shoot it.

“You should all leave,” she said. “You don’t want to be around when it’s shot.”

I simply looked down at it for a second, panting blood, its injuries dramatic. If it wasn’t euthanized, it would simply die in an hour, or two, all the while in some kind of agony I don’t want to imagine. I suppose I looked distraught, because the older man took my arm warmly and gave it a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do on these roads. And it won’t be much longer.”

And so, as they drifted away, I simply thanked the ones who had stopped, and I thanked the woman from the van, and I went back to the car.

Alex was still upset, his hands mostly covering his face. “Should I take us home?” I asked.

“No, we should go hiking.”

And so we did.

In Speyside, the trail is beautiful and tight, and crowded with fragrant cedars growing from fissures in the ancient rock of the escarpment, split from centuries of ice and rain. It snowed last night. The trail was undisturbed. Snow capped the rocks, and coated each needle on every evergreen. It was quiet, except for the occasional call of a crow, and the crack of wood in the distance.

Nobody had passed the trail here before us — the snow was pristine. The only tracks were those of coyotes, following the natural depression the trail made, moving ahead of us in what appeared to be a gallop; two animals, traveling side by side and marking the snow on our beloved Bruce Trail, hunting rabbits, or simply running freely through the forest. We followed for a while, and once, we missed the marked path and had to double back.

I loved the impression of those tracks. Here, they galloped, and here, they slowed, walking close together. They traveled along the path for what seemed like a long way. I could follow them all day. But soon, the tracks left the main trail and headed off into the trees, and disappeared from sight.

Louis About me, Alex, Bruce Trail, Hiking Coyote, Suffering

Andrea Fitzpatrick lost her job last August and foundered for a while, as she struggled with her sense of self-worth. She had identified herself with her career, whatever it had happened to be. Corporate advance, money, and social status were the things that defined her. Unsurprisingly, they were not the things that made her happy, something she only truly discovered after being fired.

It’s an interesting story. On the one hand, it was heartening that someone had discovered happiness to come from something other than the superficial banalities of one’s life. On the other hand, it was sad that there are many people, perhaps most, who must actually learn this lesson.

A belief in fulfillment

And so I am not shocked that, like me, god believers are saddened by the hollowness of so many lives lived in emptiness, fulfilled by nothing and driven by the most amoral of motivations. I am not surprised at the satisfaction believers have in their lives, filled as they are with a pursuit that, no matter what unrecognizable form it may ultimately take, at the very least seeks meaning for themselves and everyone. I am not surprised by the confidence of their beliefs, by the resistance their faith has to that which disputes it.

Of course, I know they are terribly misguided for that faith, and the details of their belief are their ultimate undoing, and no reconciliation is possible between dogmatic positions and a truly happy existence. But I say that out of a need to clarify. It doesn’t really matter, this time.

It indicates that a life of true fulfillment comes from everything that seems not to define the majority of us. In the West, most have forgotten so simple a truth utterly. It may be cliché to bring up the fact that material pursuits have replaced our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and each other, but often truth is to be discovered anew in aphorisms like that.

It’s one reason for the divide and the ultimate conflict between those with faith and the secular world they inhabit. On a larger scale, it hints at more troubling issues: the conflict between Islam and the West, as an example, and the failure of either to find areas of common values and goals.

A flow of lives

But I must recede once again to the microcosm of a single life. Unlike James Randi, who is nearing the end of his journey, I can’t look back at a remarkable life to reminisce on scores of remarkable experiences. I’m far too ordinary.

There are issues to deal with, and things that seem like setbacks, but its very simplicity makes my life deeply fulfilling. Alex and I have a circadian beat to our lives that offers happiness I could scarcely imagine when I was in my twenties, clambouring for money and sex and superficial relationships and fun, and other trivialities. There is the expanse of Bronte Creek Park near my home, small though it might seem to some, that holds a portion of my consciousness in its fields and woods and paths. There are the hundreds of books in my library, holding hundreds of thousands of pages, that fill up the corners of my barely satiable curiosity. And there is the incidental interaction with people, acquaintances and strangers, offering the opportunity to imagine the details of another life, and, if I can, if only in the smallest of ways to make that other path slightly more navigable.

I like my work and I’m considered fairly successful, but it’s simply a lucky tool that allows me to live a life away from it. There are so many better things, more important things. The breathtaking breadth of human history in front of me at this very moment, for example, or living inside the cream-coloured pages of my library. I’m staggered when I think about the billions of lives that have shaped what humanity is right now; or the trillions upon trillions of beings that have directed the course of life on the planet.

Something in me goes very quiet when the sun sets beneath the purple clouds over the peaks of houses behind us. I feel as though I’m sharing the lives of the finches that wake me up each morning as they build a nest beneath the trough under my bedroom window, which they and their ancestors have done for as long as I’ve lived here. We’ve been here many years, but we’re still apart from virtually all the neighbours. Sometimes when we come home in the car, one of their kids waves at us, though we are silent strangers to them and their parents, and it makes me smile. Alex has a swimming friend that he picks up every Sunday morning. She usually bakes him cake on Saturday night, and he comes home full. Despite our shyness, and what must seem like stand-offishness, the neighbours directly beside us invite us for an hour or two of drink and conversation every Christmas and every summer, and have always been immeasurably kind to us.

There’s so much loveliness, so much fulfillment in life that I’m surprised when I hear stories of lessons learned, like Ms. Fitzpatrick’s. What deep pleasure there is to be found in the world’s accessible corners. What meaning there is in the most straightforward of relationships. How gorgeous things are. How important we all, each of us, are, to one another, to the flow of lives beginning in the incomprehensibly distant past and that builds our story for the sake of our existence alone. How completely beautiful, unknowable, and livable it all is.

Louis About me, Believers Believers, Bronte Creek Park, Happiness, Selfishness, Strangers, Vocation

I think my personal difficulty arises when I try to find some truth to the way I find expression. For the most part, I have a near-constant sense of artificiality about my interactions with other people. This isn’t to say that I’m dishonest — quite the opposite. It seems my sense of the need for disclosure about my feelings, opinions, and so on is paradoxically behind my inability to express myself adequately, fairly, or accurately.

And of course, I have no idea why I even have a need for this kind of disclosure.

Online communication is dangerously abstract. Everyone knows the pitfalls in taking people at face value through their words. The lack of any other kind of expression, through gestures or speech, is rife with the potential to cause offense even in the most innocuous of circumstances, particularly when people are bad writers, or bad readers.

But in fact, there’s another danger. There’s a danger of losing contact with what actually matters. And there’s a danger of losing the ability to even define what matters.

When interacting with others in this environment, words seem to be the perfect distillation of a person. There seems to be no better way of analyzing and correcting, or receiving and taking joy in someone, than through their unaltered, unfiltered words. Words become people. And in the end, the only thing that can possibly matter about the people you meet online, the only thing of any substance for most everyone you’ll ever interact with, is what they say.

But of course, people are much more than what they merely say.

I’m saddened by a kind of loss today, which I hope will turn out to be a personal incentive to move on to other things, to regain the measure of what’s important. To rework my words and the words of others. To remove a level of abstraction; to build with words, and to transmit my love for words through what I say, and not how it’s said.

I am not comfortable with change, less with change that’s forced, or, on the surface, unjust. But I truly welcome each experience with some measure of expectation and hope. I try to translate the things that happen, small things and larger things, into a sensible direction.

It works, occasionally. Something else starts, or Alex, in his kind and patient way, focuses things for me, and I take direction from him. Life’s good, mostly, despite annoyances and troubles, and failings and helpless starts and stops. I live near the lake. When I feel like this, I wander down there and look out across its choppy surface, to the side I can’t see, disappearing into the blue or grey or white of the furthest visible edge of the water. There is a lot to see in the unseeable. A lot to look forward to, even in the thin line at the far horizon, where there’s no telling what will come, or who will bring it.

Louis About me Community, Lake, Online, Sadness

After reaching my Munich hotel on the very last part of the trip to Europe in September 2007, I dissolved into a state of exhaustion and depression.

My cell phone had been a thin connection to Alex for the entire trip, and that afternoon, I clung to it. I was leaving the next morning for Canada. The coming night seemed unbearable. I told him I wanted to push up the flight to that very afternoon. Patiently, his voice kind and worried, he accepted that wish, and only hinted at its irrationality.

My composure crumbled. From about the mid-point of the journey with my family, circumstances, and the realities of that dynamic, had pushed me aside from the group somewhat, a situation certainly only tangible in my mind. Thereafter, the clamouring hot fingers of panic were constantly scrabbling at the back of my neck. I had not known the sensation for twenty years or more, when, as a young adult faced with many fundamental shifts in life, I had regular panic attacks. Now, they threatened again, not quite able to overtake me, but clearly lurking on the edge of my consciousness. Helpless and thousands of kilometres away, Alex could only listen.

Munich revisited

The room was much smaller than my first stay at Hotel Uhland. It was really no larger than the combined space of two closets in my bedroom at home. And it was twice the amount of money: Oktoberfest, held on the grounds of Theresienwiese literally steps away from the hotel, was to begin the day after my departure. I had to leave the space for a while in order to regain my sense of composure.

I went to the city centre, and walked through the smoky, crowded Hofbräuhaus. The upper level was unfortunately closed, so I couldn’t view the historic photographs and other items apparently there. But a sense of the familiar came over me, somewhat bizarrely, crammed, as it was, with all manner of people but actual Germans. But the loud Bavarian umpapa band, the smell of German food, the waitresses wearing dirndls, and the enormous steins being slung onto long wooden tables was all just too familiar, taken together, not to be a comforting atmosphere for me. How strange are the things we find solace in, when home is far away.

I wound my way through the Viktualienmarkt, through small side streets, and finally to Stolberg Schokoladen, a chocolatier I had seen in a tourist guide. It smelled beautiful in there. I bought a lovely bar of chocolate with Sweets for my sweet written on the box.

I decided to walk to Nordfriedhof, the large cemetery well north of my hotel and the city centre, and unknown to me at the time, bounded immediately on the east by the Englischer Garten, which I had failed to visit. I suppose it might be considered dark and ghoulish, but I have always loved the peaceful gardens of cemeteries. This one was long and dark, and filled with large mossy monuments, and crosses tilted in shadow against the afternoon light near the perimeter walls. It is a relatively new cemetery, having been built in the nineteenth century, but it seems oppressively old. I didn’t see any names I recognized. Apparently Traudl Junge is buried there, and Paul Troost. I took many sombre pictures. The camera had difficulty registering any light beneath the trees.

On the way back to the city centre, I happened to come across der Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, the tiny memorial to the victims of National Socialism. I had never heard of it. It was tucked against the corners of two streets lined with what appeared to be the palatial residences of a lost aristocracy, now converted to a series of shops. It was a sad, small memorial, surprising for its inconspicuousness.

I returned to Marienplatz and sat at an outdoor café, where I ordered some goulash soup. Once again, I was assumed to be a native German by the waitress. Next to me, a young American woman struggled to order dessert of some kind, and could not understand the subtleties of the fresh cream and pastry she would soon find sitting in front of her. I have always wondered at English speakers in foreign countries, who begin immediately with their native language, without first asking — even in English — if the person can understand. On my two month European tour in 1984, my travelling partner egregiously made this mistake time and again.

By the time I’d finished my meal, evening was settling in. It would be dark quite soon. I would have to face the cramped quarters of my room, and the emptiness of night.

In the room, I looked at the pictures I’d taken that day. All but two were the photos from Nordfriedhof.

I consider myself a rationalist. I cherish reason, I attempt to use logic in discourse, I eschew the irrational, and I don’t accept the supernatural assertions of religion, theism, or the occult. I am ashamed of what I did next. I feel a smaller person for it.

As the forms of the crosses and monuments slid by on the camera’s view screen, I deleted each image, one after the other, until all were erased. These shapes of death would not be the last pictures I took on my European trip.

I called Alex again, and we talked about the next day, and his voice and his kindness settled me. I lay in bed with the phone next to me. I read for a while. The clamour of panic had since mostly receded. This was the final night. Standing behind me, the events of the entire trip seemed distant.

Found

On the ground in Toronto, there was a security delay. We waited quite some time while the aircraft was boarded by security personnel. We had to walk past a security line while officers checked everyone’s passport. It was somewhat unnerving. The long, serpentine line at the customs desks inched forward. The customs officer asked a few questions about my stay at an Austrian farm, which I had disclosed on the entry form. I walked through the customs area, and out the gate into the main airport, scanning the crowd for Alex.

I couldn’t see him. I waited fifteen minutes or so, then searched the area, walking around the environs of the gate. He wasn’t there. I was getting alarmed. I had no Canadian money, but, after many unsuccessful attempts, I managed to place a call with my credit card to the office, where I was told Alex had neither checked in nor called all day.

The plastic handle of my suitcase was slick with sweat. My heart quickened a little, the unwholesome but distant feeling of panic nudging the edges of my consciousness. Where could he be? Images of what might have happened to him on the road to the airport, in their ugly, quiet insistence, bubbled up in my mind.

I paced the floor in front of the gate. The crowd thinned. The display with details of my flight dropped down the list on the large panel above the gate’s doors, minute after minute. It would soon be gone. I’d be gone. I had no idea either where Alex was, or what I would do, or when I should do it.

As I turned to cross the floor again, he suddenly appeared in front of me, his familiar face breaking into the sweetest of smiles; he seemed tall, towering above me, his long arms coming out to touch me, his eyes, a brilliant blue, a long drink after a dry thirst, telling me what he didn’t have to say: You are home.

Louis About me, Alex, Germany Munich, Nordfriedhof, Panic, Travel

I had been staying in a Viennese suburb called Gablitz in late September 2007, and I needed to get to the train station quite early for my trip back to Munich. There’d been a few misadventures securing the train reservation a couple of days before, and, on my own, I’d had to navigate not just the city subway, but the bus system along the twenty kilometre route to the outskirts of town. I later discovered the trip was a wasted one, because I’d made the reservation for the wrong class. I was set on arriving at the station as early as possible the morning of my departure, hoping I’d get a good seat on the train of my choice.

My father drove me to Westbahnhof. I’d just concluded a two week tour of Italy and Austria with my family, and I was leaving for Canada the following day. I had been on my own in Munich for the first few days of this trip; I would end it by being alone there for the last two.

Americans and the world

I boarded a car that was not as modern, nor as spotless, as the train I’d taken en route to Austria. My reserved seat was unfortunately a single that was set back from a window frame, so the trip would be taken while sitting mostly beside a wall. Such are the vagaries of last minute reservations, I suppose. No matter. I would likely spend most of the time reading.

Unlike the car on the trip to Westbahnhof, this car was not compartmentalized. All the seats were aside a central aisle, with no sliding glass doors. Once on the train, I watched it slowly fill up. The passengers were mostly American tourists who spoke with that unusual flattening of the long vowels, which, when listening to a Canadian, causes them to hear the two words a boot instead of the single word about.

Accents are all relative, I suppose. Once one learns German, the difference in accents between provincial Austrian and urban German is remarkable. A speaker from either of these groups must invariably think the other is doing something terrible to the language.

American tourists have a reputation of being unworldly. Actually, the reputation borders on the sense of them being xenophobic, which makes one wonder what they’re doing travelling to all corners of the globe. Recently, we went on a wine tour of the Niagara region, and stopped at Niagara-on-the-Lake for a detour. We parked at a municipal lot and went to get a ticket. A middle-aged couple seemed to be having a lot of trouble with the machine, and looked quite forlorn. They were confounded by the fact that it wouldn’t accept their American coins. “What’s wrong with our money,” they asked, quite seriously, in an oppressive South Carolina drawl. One of our group wasn’t too patient, and made some cracks about their not having noticed the border crossing. But he was the first to smile, and he dropped in enough (Canadian) coins for them to have a couple of hours of parking.

There are three hundred million citizens of the United States. A few of them are bound to suffer culture shock when confronted with the unforgiving parking metres of Canada, for example. But the unworldliness of the American traveller is a myth.

During my many years as a waiter in downtown Toronto, I’d met literally thousands of people, a large percentage of them American, and many were well-heeled, savvy travellers with an impeccable sense of fine food and good wine. In Munich, I shared the floor of my hotel with a group of Americans that included a man who not only spoke perfect German (with a midwest accent), but carried the charming urbanity of the most demanding of European hotel patrons, contrasting sharply with the huffy gruffness of some of the Germans there. And on the corner of University Avenue and Dundas Street in Toronto, near my office, one is likely to be set upon at most times of the year by boorish German or British or Canadian tourists wrestling with an oversized map.

It isn’t the nationality of the traveller that impacts his behaviour, but rather, his familiarity with travel, and his openness to the newness of new places.

Citizen Incognito

A German businessman in his late forties took the single seat facing me, offering a clipped Guten Tag before unfolding his newspaper. There was an American family directly beside me across the aisle: Dad, Mom, two teenaged sons. Eventually, the train moved out of the station, and began winding through the Austrian countryside. I couldn’t see much of it. I concentrated on my book.

The family seemed restless, and switched seats with one another several times before even half an hour was up. They took advantage of the food service cart to fuel their impatience. What I will admit to being typical in the American tourist, as much as with the Germans, is a lack of auditory restraint. They were loud. The entire car knew of their various discomforts, and the nature of their small interpersonal relationships. The man in front of me seemed interested in all this, and paid much attention to them while reading his paper. He glanced at me and smiled.

“A little out of their element, maybe,” he said, or something like it. A year ago, my comprehension of German spoken by natives was not good. I usually had to piece together meaning from long sentences, only half of whose words I might understand, or I’d have to quickly refer to my mental translation dictionary if a rapid response was expected of me. This time, though, it would be good enough for me to smile and say, “Yes, so it seems.”

I admit to some measure of shallowness, and I was pleased that he took me for a German. My German teacher, also a native, had told me that my accent was good, and would not be noticeable as foreign to most Germans in quick casual conversation. My companion seemed satisfied with my response, smiling a little smugly, maybe, as he kept watch over our fellow passengers, so obviously foreign. And so I was happy to be mistaken for a native. I have always wanted to travel immersed, and flow with ease through the daily life of the city I’m currently in.

For an hour, my travelling companion read his paper, then folded it neatly and held it out to me, saying something so rapidly, and while chuckling, that I simply couldn’t get it. “No, thank you,” I said, holding up my hand. He rolled his eyes toward the American family, still fussing and vocal, and leaned toward me conspiratorially. His voice strained by withheld laughter, he delivered another rapid spate of idiom-laced German, and I instantly foundered. In the few seconds I had before my non-response would be uncomfortable, I tried my best to pick out parts of his sentence that were clear to me to gather meaning from the common, but it was no good. And, I had already forgone giving away my foreignness. I would feel foolish asking him to repeat himself, or to reply in English. Were I to suddenly admit to being a native English speaker, his embarrassment might be depthless at realizing he might have been speaking to the very kind of tourist at whose expense he was apparently having a few jibes.

I merely looked back at him, politely attempting to smile. I suppose he sensed my discomfort, but probably interpreted it differently, and he smiled and nodded, saying, “Well, there you have it, although it is interesting.”

“Yes, it certainly is,” I said, turning the meaning to suit my little problem. He closed his eyes and leaned back into his seat. I quickly put in my earplugs and turned up the music to close myself off from any further trouble.

The journey continued through Austria, and eventually into the mountainous southeast of Germany. I believe the family had departed in Salzburg. I dozed for a while, or I tried to glance out the corner of window glass that was accessible to me. When we pulled into Hauptbahnhof in Munich, I followed the businessman to the door. Before disembarking, he turned to me and politely said goodbye, smiling warmly.

I felt a little small at my behaviour. I hadn’t had the courage to admit to being non-German when the moment of crisis had arrived. And despite this, I was still proud, in a petty way, of being mistaken for a German.

Leaving the train, I made a straight line for the station’s interior, knowing exactly which exit to take. I pictured the corner I would wait at, with the crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to change; before I reached it, I could see in my mind the long street, Paul-Heyse-Straße, stretching in the distance toward my hotel. Other names of streets in the neighbourhood went through my mind: Pettenkoferstraße, Goethestraße, Bavariaring. Those and two dozen more had been underfoot already. I walked to Uhlandstraße and my hotel. I would have the afternoon to continue into other parts of the city.

Louis About me, Germany Americans, Austria, Europe, Germany, Munich, Tourists, train, Travel, Vienna