I grew up in suburbia. I hated it.
This is not entirely true. I eventually made awesome friends in suburbia, the sun shone brightly, Dorian and I roamed the streets in the face of the SUVs, and school was easy so I was free to read and write idealistic poems and make tea and go to Trader Joe's. I was happy, but the environment was limited. The social ideal was the little Abercrombie moose and a denim miniskirt and Rainbow flipflops for fifty dollars and the biggest, best limousine for prom. When spring came and I disappeared every weekend to go paddle in West Virginia and came back having slept in a pipe, the skinny blonde-with-dark-roots Miss Hollister who sat behind me in U.S. history gaped openly. Almost everyone in my graduating class went to a school somewhere in the area, Naty Ice, fake tans and stripmall trips included. I moved to another country and have yet to look back.
When I came to McGill, this changed. I finally met the people who I knew were out there - people who hitchhiked across countries, who climbed, who planted trees, who took a year off and disappeared into East Asia, who loved the tattered t-shirt and broken-in backpack, who never bought things, who hitchhiked to Mardi Gras, who brewed their own beer, who ice-climbed and rock-climbed and slack-lined, who never seemed to have any money but had everything else in the world in a sun-tanned palm, who carried it easily, knowing they weren't special but that they were lucky. For the first time in my life, I looked up to my peers and tried not to idolize them.
When my mom was twenty or so, she forged her papers and took a broken-down helicopter to climb 7000 metre peaks in Central Asia. I am running out of time and so I'll take the Greyhound trips to everywhere and nowhere and anywhere. They're worth it all.
Spring is here and summer is unfolding and life is and will be fantastic I believe it will.
And then, you know Jack Kerouac somehow somewhere unsustainably crazily was right:
See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, …all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
