There are opportunities in this life, to quote a famous good boy turned bad, in a famous bad film. One opportunity repeated itself to me for the third straight year. The other rode in on a couple packed bicycles.
The National Novel Writing Month, in 2013, was the first time I tried to write a novel. Reach 50 000 words by the end of November, get a code allowing free publishing and distribution on Amazon, and wait for the royalties to roll in. Leave your answering machine on for calls about film rights.
I was a repeat novelist in 2014. Those of you who know me, and some of you might rejoice, some might lament, might know that The Red Path and Michael Wynne: My Youth. resulted. Two books, unalike in dignity, and not from a Shakespeare, but neither did he sell film rights.
Now, the third time at it, I roll away from this conversation, to bicycles, two bicycles, for whose riders my sturdy little family provided a port in a storm in October, 2015.
Scotland-born Gordon and Wisconsin-born Meg, riding from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, not in one go at it, were looking for somewhere to stay one evening. I was bicycling back across the Williams Lake Stampede Grounds, famous four days per year, but not open to bicycle campers as day faded to night in late October.
I thought about directing them to the grounds around the nearby longhouse, a local friendship centre building; but I worried about wee hour travelers becoming too friendly with them. Then I gallantly invited them to another piece of land over which I have no jurisdiction, namely the lawn behind my social housing apartment building; but I live downtown, and the friendlies might disrupt their sleep, and fellow tenants might complain about them.
There we were, a threesome in the dark behind my building, where I decided to find them indoor space, specifically in my and my spouse's apartment, or our daughter's apartment a floor below. these two women in my life were not home. I took bull by the horns, invited the cyclists upstairs, and the tiring cyclists took their bikes by the handlebars, and locked them in one of two hallways in the large room of caged storage lockers in the building's basement.
Mom and daughter came home, and found me, Meg, and Gordon eating pizza on our kitchen table. They happily agreed to board the guests, by now happily showered.
My kin joined the conversation already begun, about Meg's agitation, with thousands who marched to retain public services, against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker; and about Gordon's University of Glasgow studies and subsequent overseas travels. They are riding for poverty, having met while trying to ease it in Bolivia. Our daughter magnanimously offered to store their loaded bicycles in her kitchen, safer than the basement hallway between tenants' storage lockers.
The travelers slept on our living room futon that became a bed for the first time in recent memory. They awoke early, packed their stuff, got their bikes, and rode along with me, on my bike, to the intersection of the Vancouver and Bella Coola highways. They had asked me to guide them to a certain fast food restaurant, which shall not be named. I left them to rustle their breakfast, and went home. They planned to ride south to Lillooet, Vancouver, the United States, the Baja Peninsula, and Latin America, again, not all in one go.
I typed this a month later, at a public library table where four others, all young women, were clacking away on laptops. My beloved spouse and our daughter have just arrived. I keep my promise to leave this National Novel Writing Month Williams Lake write-in evening, a 6-8 PM word sprint, and go west to Carla's house on Carla's Indigenous land, for a couple nights.
My novel this year is a historical Canadian saga, of made-up people and real events. The cyclists' blog is
http://www.bikelivingtheamericas.com/
Bye bye for now.
