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Mark Goldfarb was born and raised in Montreal. After 5 years South of the border, he decided he would return to the land of the tundra and midnight sun. It began as a road trip, but soon turned into a discovery of the written word: a lost highway that would unfurl the secrets of Canadian landscape, as well as his ongoing quest for that holy grail of connection and community.

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Aug. 11, 2001
Sailed into sunny Saskatchewan early afternoon yesterday. Ever notice how topographical characteristics change so noticeably as soon as you hit a provincial border? Very obvious between Lacolle,Que. and Champlain, NY. Likewise Quebec/Ont, Ont/MB, and MB/SK.

Following an endless climb through Northwestern Ontario Manitoba flattened to a pancake. And then there's Saskatchewan, still pretty flat, though with gently rolling hills, carpeted in grass, nothing else. Except, as you noted, the occasional withered barn, unpainted, tough. Solitude epitomized.

Camped out in Moose Jaw last night, perhaps a mile from Main street. Slept well, temps down only to about 14, and awoke about 5:30 just as the pale red sun rose at my door. By nine I was downtown, touring, exploring and chatting it up. Just had a great conversation with two elderly women, well into their 70s maybe 80s. One is a former school teacher, sharp as tack, smart as a whip, keenly insightful and articulate, with an open mindedness to match. Wish to hell I had her for a teacher. She was hopeful re. keeping Quebec in Canada, very savvy on First Nations issues, and concerned that the 49th parallel not get reeled in by the States. She also didn't hesitate to mention that while Canadians often harp on the fact that Americans know practically nothing of Canada, there are plenty of Canadians who know little of the USA. A lady with critical faculties, who neither gives nor takes bunk.

Aug. 27, 2001
Rap exists in British Columbia, and guess what: it’s just as bad here as it is on the east coast. Alyana likes some of it. Possibly the only music? genre from which I've never found anything to like, much less really, really like. In other words I've never spent a dime on it, probably never will.

You might be surprised to learn that the tiniest of Canadian communities -- one that lacks running water, drinking water, or god forbid a Canadian Tire -- does have a library. And in that library, regardless how small it is, there is a computer with Internet access, usually available to anyone at no charge. These rural libraries, by the way, are open longer and their employees are friendlier than in larger cities.

Sept. 13, 2001
I left Vancouver 2 weeks back and headed north, into the coastal mountains, as far as Lillowet. Home's been my tent, a campfire my kitchen, occasionally a dunk in an ice cold lake my shower.

Tuesday morning I awoke before dawn. Daylight was just beginning to filter through. A bright half-moon hung high in a clear sky, stars still twinkled and silky strands of red tinged the horizon. It promised to be a fine September day. I switched on my 25 year old tape deck. The tape deck's busted but the AM/FM works. I probably would've gone nuts long ago without it. High up in the mountains I'm lucky if I pick up CBC, lucky if I pick up anything. In the Rockies forget it, nothing but static. But in Vancouver there's plenty to choose from, and all of it utter crap. I tuned in to 92.9 KISM FM, Bellingham, Washington. This is my station, my musical salvation. Strangely enough, I discovered it 150 miles up north where it was all I could pick up. They play mostly classical Rock, with some current Rock tossed in. Lots of Doors and Dylan and some decent rockumentaries, which suits me just fine.

I snuggled deeper into my blankets, thinking about my morning cup of coffee, which wasn't going to make itself unless I got up to do it. The DJ sounds like he hasn't had his either, as he reads off the news bulletin.

This just in - a Boeing 737 has crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Possibly a hijacking.
He expresses skepticism. I second the motion. A few minutes later:

Two Planes have crashed into the Twin Towers. A third jet has hit the Pentagon. All take-offs suspended nation-wide, possibly all landings.
Couple minutes later a fourth airliner nose dives into Pennsylvania and one of the WTC towers has collapsed. White House and Treasury have been evacuated, trading on Wall Street is suspended, Lower Manhattan is engulfed in flames. The US is under terrorist attack.

Unbelievable. I was pretty much glued to my radio that day. The campground office put a small black & white TV in its office for staff and campers. We crowded around it as CBC replayed the monstrous aerial gymnastics over and over again, first from one angle, then another, and yet another, first in real time, then in slow motion. Talk about a f ___ g touchdown.

Around 2 in the afternoon I go for a long walk to explore Richmond. It's a butt-ugly city, sort of a miniature Vancouver with a gazillion stores, every major hotel chain you can imagine, and of course the ever present aggressive and impatient drivers that characterize all big cities. Today though, they seem a little less testy.

I walk into Richmond Hospital and ask where their blood donor clinic is. There isn’t. Oh. You have to go to a Red Cross Center to give blood, silly. Oh. And where would I find one of those centers? Well, she says, just call up the Red Cross and they'll tell you. Which I'd done earlier in the day and gotten nothing but taped messages and voice mail. I think to myself, things are done differently in the US, where I've given blood regularly for years. At hospitals. Not that Americans need Canadian blood. They don't. Not that they've asked for it. They haven't and probably won't. Between the 300 million of 'em they’ve got enough blood even for today's catastrophe.

Later that evening I spent an hour at a cafe watching CNN. This time in color on a” 36" screen. More instant replays and a press conference with Mayor Giulliani. Despite the fact that he's a politician, making him, in my book, as trustworthy as a wolf in a henhouse, I sort of like him. Sort of. He has a sense of intelligence and insight and humanity. I returned to my tent around 10 pm, falling fitfully to sleep around 3am.

Sept.12, 2001
Wednesday. I'm up at 6 a.m. and scheduled to house-sit younger sis’s home in Vancouver til Saturday or Sunday, while she's in Victoria. And take care of Tuff, her cat. Morning traffic wasn't as testosterone-fueled as it is normally: much less bickering and lots more common courtesy. It felt as though motorists, noticing my New York license plates, wanted to show support and compassion for a New Yorker.

As usual I missed my cut-off but found an alternate route into Vancouver. I'm finally getting my bearings around here, able to improvise, though I don't like the place any more now than I did when I first arrived. I passed the afternoon hours walking and hanging out by the ocean. When I realized I'd been three and a half hours in a 2-hour parking space. I headed back to my car. There was something on my windshield, stuck under the wiper. Not a parking ticket, but a card along with three velvety reddish-purple petunias wrapped in a damp strip of paper towel. Written on the card was the following:

We are all walking through our days a little bit numb. Everywhere, we feel like the world we knew two days ago is not the same as the one we know now. I've never met you, but I know that as sad as I am, the place you come from is one I've never even been to. I just wanted to show my support, for you must miss home in a way I cannot imagine.

That note touched me deeply.

Oct. 31, 2001
I packed up my tent in mid-October, cleaned up my car, and called it a trip. A road trip that spanned over 12,000 kilometers, six provinces and one state. By that time I'd stopped relating to anyone or anything remotely resembling civilization. You name it -- I'd disconnected from it. I couldn't for the life of me picture myself living in a building with 4 walls, much less re-entering 'mainstream society,' or the rat-race I left last December.

Nov. 17
Top of the morning to you. Or should I say afternoon, which is what it is for you. Cold night last night, down to about 3 Celsius, really clear and crisp, stars twinkling all over the place. The day you hit 16 so did we, preceded by a night of ferocious gusts that ceaselessly rocked and swatted my trailer. At 2 a.m. its invisible paw unlatched my door and flung it open like so much jetsam. Gotta give the wind its deadly due.

I'm at a library, where remnant wisps of a woman's musk are giving me a headache. I've zero tolerance for musk. Same goes for men's colognes. They either give me a headache or the dry heaves or both.

Did you know that many hospitals and clinics have classified themselves as fragrance-free zones? -- at least here in the delicate sensibility-challenged wimpy wild West. You're probably not surprised. The same trend may be occurring in the East, who knows?

Saw the movie Kandahar the other day. Newspapers have played it up for all it's worth, vastly overrating it. I enjoyed it nonetheless. I found it disjointed, with too narrow a focus. Oddly, almost perversely, I was struck by the characters' bright and multi-colored garb in contrast to the stark desert. I was equally struck by the fact that every 5 minutes (or is it 5 seconds) somebody gets blown up there, most likely by a land mine, and by the fact that even in that desolate heap of rubble and repression called Afghanistan, the spark of hope still flickers.

November 29, 2001
Thanks for Dellilo's provocative and well woven Profile of a Terrorist, in which he puts the terrorist virus on a slide and under the microscope. I like his style, the timbre and cadence of his sentences. I wonder what Freud would say if he were here today, about the driving force that is the terrorist ‘id,’ about what makes Tommy Terrorist tick. We'll never know, but it's probably safe to assume that there isn't the remotest possibility Tommy would ever volunteer for psychoanalysis, and even if he did, a lifetime of sessions on the couch wouldn't cut one nanometer through his defenses.

An unwavering willingness to die for a cause coupled with a dispassion that doesn't admit to the defenselessness and humanity of an innocent bystander is not unique to the terrorist mindset or any other martial mindset. It's an edge, yes. A ferocious and horrifying force to reckon with. But not the ‘ultimate edge.’ Historically, millions upon millions of people from practically every nation/culture on the planet have cultivated this same edge, lived and died by its code, shared their own visions of judgment and devastation. Killing sprees are not a new thing to this century. But terrorism has never predetermined absolute victory, guaranteed invincibility or proved itself the back breaker required to pulverize an enemy. Far from it. What Dellilo calls a hard edge is nothing more than standard operating procedures found in Sun Tzu's Art of War, Mercenary Monthly Magazine and the CIA employee handbook.

Dec. 12, 2001
On Leonard Cohen’s new release.
1000 Kisses Deep: Life's a crapshoot. If you want to play, you've got to pay. A dream within a dream. The wretched, the weak the meek and the powerful -- we're all dealt a hand. Ante up. Play or fold. Just remember one thing -- in real life winning streaks always end. In real life there are no refunds. In real life we'll steal Granma's eyeballs for a fix. What I get most from this song is Cohen's empathy. He knows, as you've said to me more than once, that we all have to live in our own skin, our own skeins. A thousand kisses deep. Superb lyrics.

Boogie Street: Love that smoky, jazzy sax, along with the hi-hat and the bass guitar. This is the Leonard Cohen I'm familiar with. Soaking wet, naked. The Cohen whose own skeleton grows more arthritic each passing day. The Cohen who knows that under our capped teeth and stylized toupees lies a species who lives on the edge of madness. Life is both the random and the purpose.

Jan. 22, 2002
Greetings from the Wild West, though that moniker can no longer be applied to Vancouver, if it ever truly could, much less White Rock, where there really is a white rock (in case you were wondering) which esteemed city councilors touch up every now and then with a bit of white paint, where the sidewalks get rolled up at 7 p.m., 6 p.m. on Sundays. Mind you, I've spent time in a few BC towns that do come by the Wild West title honestly, that never lost their Gold Rush character. Greenwood, Rock Creek. Small towns in the Okanagan that have no sidewalks. Or pretensions to greatness.

Vancouver, near as I can tell, is a work of fiction, an artful paint job. Smoke and mirrors. A trash or cash society that strives to titillate and sensationalize. As real as an air-brushed Playboy pinup.

Feb. 19, 2002
You resonate to 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' I, too, struggle with existentialist pains. With the 'givens' we all must face. Inevitable death -- that final e-mail (a virus no doubt) lying within my genetic code, just waiting to be opened -- versus my wish for immortality. Freedom to be all I can be and want to be -- in conflict with the structurelessness and groundlessness that ceaselessly threaten and scare the shit out of me. Ultimate aloneness -- even in the midst of deep relationships. And no particularly evident meaning to life -- in contrast with my need and constant search for one.

What kind of Catch 22 freedom is that? Save me a space in your cave.

Feb. 26, 2002
A Chinese woman rushed up to me, breathless, serious and intense, but in an unselfconscious sort of way, a basic dignity beneath it all. She sputtered some words about a Buddhist temple. Could she have some paper? And a pen? I scrounged both out of my knapsack, no questions asked, and forked them over like they belonged to her. Which in a way they did. Because it felt like they did. She proffered thanks not once but three times, her hands joined, palm to palm, close to her chest, in an intimate mudra of gratitude, prayer and respect. Her colloquial currency. Mine too, when I stop to think about it. There was something transcendent about that moment. Something undistorted and ancient but not out of place. A compressed and captured truth. Wordlessly she sketched directions on my memo pad -- her memo pad -- with a deliberateness that belied the effort. One last thank you and she was gone. Another moment of an evanescent present predicted by and added to the vortex of the past.

April 7th, 2002
It's that time of year again. Sun-shiny skies, a frothy cloud or two, cherry blossoms blooming like mad and an expected high of 15 are the harbingers of an irresistible -- I almost want to say biological -- drive to the outfield. These are the days of Spring and the days of ball that beckon boys of summer to sneer at padlocked diamonds and 12 foot high fences and no trespassing signs. My veteran pitching compadre is 3000 miles away -- a fact that does nothing to appease the phantom twinges in my right pitching arm. To say nothing of my far more talented left catching hand. My muscles and their memories seem programmed to swim those 3000 miles back to Montreal's Fleuve St. Laurent, to spawn fast balls, curve balls and sliders in the fields of my birth. Come April I'm hardwired to shag flies, scoop up grounders and protect the plate at all costs. I have a mitt. I have a ball.

I just need someone to play with.

Culled from the SENT BOX of MG, Mark Goldfarb

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