SOME TRAVEL STORIES

Whether I wander far from home to the tropics or just around the corner for coffee I am always amazed at the ability of my face to attract people and their stories. It's not like I have the dreaded "talk to me I'm a sucker" tattoo on my forehead. I know because I checked, twice, and some days more often depending on daily happenstance.
Having said that I would like to share with you some of those stories that I gathered over a two week period in 2009. I have removed their names from the narrative out of respect for their privacy, but in each case their stories made a difference in my life and the un-managed perceptions we all have about strangers who pop up from time to time while we journey from one day to the next.
These stories will be posted over the next few days.

True Story #1

September 3, 2009

        For the first time in my life I am going to a place called the Rain City Coffee Company. I have lived in this neighbourhood for eight years and hardly ever venture out to my local coffee shops. I'm into the first week of a five-week vacation. Now I have both time and a willingness for a new, but quiet adventure. It’s been about forever and a half since I had such a long stretch of vacation time. After a horrendously busy summer of last minute road trips, forest fire coverage with heartbreakingly long hours, and now riddled with physical and emotional stress. I pushed myself past my what I thought was my newly determined safe point, and I have redlined. If this vacation time had not already been booked I would have had to take it anyway. I am getting physically old and increasingly having to rely on Ibuprofen and other, more liquid painkillers, to get my body and mind through to the end of the day.

       In the week prior, I had asked my boss to limit my overtime and to not ask me to go out of town. It didn't really work out that way through no fault of hers but she tried, and I was grateful for her efforts.

       My upper back has locked solid, and my right shoulder spends most of the day feeling like there are daggers being thrust in it. The doctor sends me for physio, and the physio is not impressed. She has worked my back and shoulders, given me mobility exercises, and taped my shoulders so far back I now walk a bit like Frankenstein. My facial features aren't that far off either. The wrinkles of stress and fatigue are beginning to look like deep scars, but I digress.

       It's a sunny Thursday and for early September it's not overly warm. It's not that cold either, but after the previous 7 weeks of hot and dry, today seems cool. Overall it’s fairly pleasant as I stroll the two blocks from my apartment. I get an Organic English Breakfast tea and sit at an outside table. This week I'm reading Bill Bryson's “Neither Here Nor There”, the story of his European walkabout twenty years after his first exposure to the continent. Like his other books, it's a hilarious read.

       Out of the corner of my eye a battered old Chevy Lumina mini van pulls up and parks. A diminutive woman gets out with something in her hand and disappears around the corner. And you’re asking yourself why I would note this? One is because its colour of electric blue is similar to the colour of my old GMC Crew Cab. The other is because it has Ohio plates. I voluntarily spent many years of cold winter nights working anti drinking driving patrols with my local police department looking for things like expired insurance tags. I sub-consciously notice a lot of things about licence plates.

Soon the woman re-appears and walks right past me. I look up very briefly more because of the motion. I never catch her eye. She stops and turns to face me from around ten paces away. And she starts to talk to me. Not the two guys at the next table closest to her, not the people at the table next to that either. She talks directly to me.

       She’s had her ID stolen while she was in the Salvation Army shelter. She left her purse hanging on the bathroom door during a shower and when she went back to get it, well you get the idea. She’s been to the pawnshop around the corner to sell an electric guitar effects pedal, but without ID they won't touch it. An honest pawnshop is a rare thing. So she asks me if I'll go and pawn it for her with my ID.

This when I realize, it's “the face”.  You know the one, it's the one I wear that says “I'm a fool and an idiot and I will believe any story you want to tell me. So come on over here and let me prove it to you”. But today I'm having one of my better days and I make sympathetic noises, but in the end tell her I can't help her.

       But somehow the face urges her on anyway. It asks about what the American Consulate said about getting new ID. Apparently they can only access federal records not state records, so she needs to go back to the border because American Border Services has access to state records. I’m not quite sure how that works, but I have a small amount of experience with large bureaucracies so for all I know maybe it's true. The face makes small noises of sympathy. And the woman starts in on how she's almost out of gas, and how she doesn't want to go back to the shelter because of the mindset of the people there. About how shelter life can take hold of you and drag you down because of its negativity, and about how she doesn't want to be part of “that”. She's an artist, a busker, a poet, and a singer. And she tells me her name. Oh yes, the face rises to the introductions. Three minutes in and we are already on first names. I should know better, but I still carry that small spark of innocence inside that says maybe I can help! Where does innocence stop and suspicion begin in such a mind?

       And then the wet eyes start. She's not in a hopeless circumstance, just temporarily broke. She was going to pick Okanagan fruit with three Mexicans she knows, but they got there between harvests, and they had no money to stay, and the old Lumina's transmission doesn't like the mountains. After a few minutes she gets herself under control, and the rest of the story comes out. About leaving her home in Columbus for Dallas at the age of 16 with $98, her ancient Olds Cutlass (that's a car for those of you haven't heard of one), and a boyfriend with a sketchy past but who had reformed since he spent a year with the Amish. And the story kept coming about the boyfriend's supposed sister in Dallas, but who didn't really exist, and they were down to their last piece of bologna when they parked in a small church lot, and the minister who helped them find food and a place to live. The boyfriend ripped off the people he was living with, and that was almost the last she ever saw of him. And so she worked, went to college after getting her GED, floated around doing temp work, etc. She even worked for Medicare as a call centre clerk. She's almost as old as I am, but shows fewer miles.

       And the story moves on about family troubles, moving back to Columbus, living in the projects, etc. It didn't all come out at once you understand. Stories like this need time to come out, and rarely in a linear fashion. And she talks, and the face listens, fascinated, but saying little except encouraging her to keep going on with the story. And she does tell the story until its four hours later, just after 5 in the afternoon.

       I ask how much she wants for the guitar pedal, and she hems and haws. I ask how much they are new, and she tells me. I give her all the money I have in my pocket which is $20. I don't need the pedal even though I have an old electric guitar and amplifier that follow me whenever I move. In reality I'm paying her for the stories. She's a gifted storyteller. And I try and observe a time honoured but largely forgotten custom, the storyteller should be paid. The face walks away feeling like it cheated her. Five bucks an hour to tell compelling stories is not just cheap, it borders on theft.