13. The Thing About Canada...

...is even when you make it all the way up to Edmonton, which is about as far North as anyone you know ever really goes, you're still about 20349850398503928058934 miles away from Alaska.

And this is not just a regular 5024809238402840218041 mile ride. It's 201402175093128503289 mile ride through the Rockies on roads that are getting colder by the day.

That are one-lane highways for ten or twelve hour stretches, and you hope you can make camp in time to break out your tent and sleeping bag and thermarest and comforter so you don't have to tuck your hands into your shorts just to stave off frost-bite.

I am at the stage right now where I would sell organs for a helicopter.

Spend many nights now having random flashbacks, some of them dreams, some of them nightmares, some of them just memories.

I'm in Spain again, and it's raining in Burgos.

I'm in Stony Brook again, setting up my slides for my first anthropology lecture. I am holding a baseball in my hand. I am saying to 200 undergraduates that there is only one definition for an atom.

My life is full of promise.

I'm in elementary school, memorizing the order of the presidents on a poster where we are lined up everyday. I am tall and I line up in the back. There are four girls who are taller than me. Girls mature faster.

I am on my way to Hunter and stop on the 96th Street sidewalk, to write in chalk, "sometimes, when I'm alone at night, I believe I can fly."

I am parodying the Harlem poet, de Silva, or de Vasco, I forget his name. Some people think I'm being original. I am not. Some people think profound. There is nothinig profound about parody.

I am in elementary school, pulling a folded sheet of paper out of my inside jacket pocket to deliver the valedictorian speech at my graduation. I do not remember what I said.

I do remember the fifth grade. Being Willy Wonka in our play. I remember making a joke about everlasting gobstobbers.

I am in Mt. Glacier national park. I am 27 years-old. It is terribly cold outside. I am alone, and it is getting dark, and I am scared. So I do not sit in my tent. I sit in my car and read the fading pages of "Don't Think of an Elephant!"

I am being punched in the face on the way to swimming class.

I am falling to the ground. Lying to the ground, there are people who step over me to reach the subway. Among those people are my classmates.

They must not be late for swimming.

I am at Stony Brook again and I am raising my hand in class. "My sister," I say aloud, "I'd save my sister and get a new wife." The class laughs.

I am still lying in the ground. The homeless man who I sometimes give spare change to does not help me. My classmates step over me. I am helped to my feet by a nurse.

"Where are you going?" she asks me.

I am crying on the street. "I was on my way to swimming class."

It is raining on my car in Mt. Glacier. It is dark and I hear the distant laughter of a campsite. There are no stars in the sky.

"Anthropologists always say you need your own definition of culture in order to become an anthropologist," I say to the class. They are all listening to me. I have their attention. "That is stupid," I say.

I am in EMT class and the professor puts up a picture of a horse. Then he puts up a picture of a bigger horse and says, "Broncho-dilator." Nobody laughts.

I remember Javier Bardem's cock and Penelope Cruz's tits from "Jamon, Jamon." It is Spain. It is raining in Spain. It's always raining.

The nurse is walking me back to school. She brings me to the school's nurse and she sees me, a welt where my eye used to be. She's seen it before, but it never gets old. She cries with me.

We hold hands and she lets me let it out.

I cannot remember Chester A. Arthur. Or Franklin Pierce. What did they ever do anyway? I know Grover Cleveland was a bachelor when elected. The only one of his kind.

I am driving from Mt. Glacier to Calgary and I don't want to go anymore. I pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car.

When you put on the ambulance siren it goes "wail, wail, wail."

I remember the man whose life I helped save. I do not know his name. I will never know his name. He was not conscious when this happened. He will never know who I am.

I lie down on the grass.

It is cold in Mt. Glacier.

It is cold in Canada.

It will be colder in Alaska.