THE LEUTY LIFEGUARD STATION

The Leuty Lifeguard Station

The Beaches, Toronto

Thursday, January 22, 2009

"This bleak but beautiful picture reflects the bleakness of the outlook of that cold January day. Sean and I had driven up from Maryland in the early hours of the previous day to retrieve my car that had been shipped by train from Vancouver. Alas, the car was still stranded on the train, and was to be so for another few days. Snowbound in the frozen north when we should have been somewhere down in the south nearing New Orleans, we had an acute sense of displacement, of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet as the trip unfolded I realized that this is an illusion, and that wherever I happen to be is the right place to be, even if it’s not where I intended to be. It’s all about outlook: this may appear to be a bleak picture, yet I treasure it as one of the most beautiful images of the whole journey."

In many ways this is the heart of my vision - the epitome of what the whole journey came to mean for me - something that in the year that has followed has sometimes been obscured and yet I have come back to it again and again.

For reasons that I need not go into now, I decided to ship my car from Vancouver to Toronto by train. This was in a year, unlike the present, when there was record snowfall in Vancouver - such that on the day I intended to take my car to the train depot for shipping the weather was so bad that it was decided to delay it for a week or so. This together with the fact that the train was then delayed leaving Vancouver meant that when I arrived in Toronto my car had not arrived. In fact at that point (January 12) it had not even left Vancouver. I had no choice but to rent a car and begin the first part of my journey with the intention and necessity of returning to Toronto when the car had arrived.

So I drove from Toronto to Lowell, Massachusetts in the snow and spent a wonderful three days wandering around Kerouac's hometown, hanging out in the places he grew up; then on to New York to meet up with Sean who was flying in from England. We spent the weekend in NYC then headed out on the Monday, January 19 - Martin Luther King Day - heading south for Maryland following the route Jack and Neal would have taken 60 years earlier, all the way to Baltimore. January 20 was the day of Barak Obama's inauguration of course, and we got to hangout in Washington D.C. and heard his swearing in and inauguration speech. A stirring day. Then that night I got an e-mail saying that my car had arrived in Toronto, and foolishly (as it turned out) we set out at one in the morning to drive back to Toronto arriving around breakfast time. Problem: no car - it was still on the train which was sitting outside the train depot in the snow waiting for off-loading. Uncertainty as to when it was to be off-loaded - maybe the next day, definitely by the next day - they said.

So we stayed the night with kind friends in The Beaches area of Toronto and cooled our heals. Next day we took a walk along the boardwalk - where I'd actually been on my first visit to Canada back in 1997 when I visited the jazz festival there, and the kids were young. Something struck me about this lonesome building standing there like a widow in the snow. I only took that one picture that day. I love it - something about the bleakness of the weather reflecting the bleakness of our spirits; and yet the peace of the silence and stillness of the snow. Despite it all - all the frustration and uncertainty, and the feeling of dis-place-ment (being in the wrong place at the wrong time) - I came to realize we were in the right place. This is how it was meant to be. This was the right place to be.