First We Quit Our Jobs Read online

  As it turned out, the lobby was under construction, and we had to ferret our way through the mess to the elevator. Upstairs our room was pie-shaped, dark, and totally unromantic. The bathroom was functional, fluorescent, and nondescript. Even with the aid of an adapter provided by the hotel (upon request), our computer’s modem couldn’t access the phone line, dashing our hopes for news from home. The possibility of room service getting through the lobby labyrinth seemed remote, so we settled on the dining room instead. Looking out our slice of window, we saw the Sue in the parking lot and wondered why we were shelling out $250 to be in exile from her. We were homesick.

  * * *

  Until recently, when it was surpassed by the Mall of America in Minneapolis, West Edmonton was the largest mall in the world. It wasn’t just your everyday mall—it was a vacation destination, a resort, a place it took days to explore. Projecting from Manhattan how we’d feel at this point in the trip, it had seemed just the thing. But after being out in the sunshine, hiking, biking, and looking at nature for three weeks, it seemed bizarre to be indoors. Every store ever seen in a mall, plus every catalog shop, was there. Shoppers drifted in and out their doors. We realized how satisfied we were in our mobile bungalow. Despite the fact we had divested considerably compared with, say, our five-closet apartment, we felt amply filled up with things. We had learned a simple new fact of life: Fewer things produce less “thing anxiety.” Not needing to buy anything, we looked for things to do. As we wandered around for a while, the sensory stimulation was overwhelming. We decided to chill out and see a movie. After spending a day at the mall, with eight hundred shops and restaurants, a miniature golf course, a full-size ice rink, an amusement park, a casino, a chapel (there’s a mix!), several movie theaters, and a submarine tour/aqua show, we fell asleep, exhausted.

  The next morning we wanted to leave, but we had to stay. There was something we needed to do. Amidst the carnival atmosphere we yearned for a return to our primordial origins, to the moment in evolutionary time before seduction, when all was naive bliss. Scanning the endless path before us, we saw the sign:

  WATERWORLD THIS WAY → → → → →

  We followed. Below the level of the earth, a line formed. Money was exchanged for keys, suit, and a piece of drying cloth. Men and women were separated. Down a long hallway an opening in the abyss revealed a meeting of our primeval past and blessedly simple future. It smiled, wore a bathing suit, and hot yellow inflatable tubes.

  Welcome to summertime, anytime. This was what we had come for. Check your clothes and troubles at the door. No matter what the weather (in Edmonton, where it could be minus anything in winter, this was important), the swimming here at the mall was fine. The “pool,” which had no traditional shape, was entered through a gradually sloping end, giving the impression of being a “natural” body of water. It was the size of a football field, and the water was a comfy eighty-three degrees. Far above us a vaulted glass ceiling revealed a true blue sky. All around, snaking waterslides, some six stories high, spewed forth the adventurous young. At the far end was a whitewater tubing area for wimps like us. And then there were the waves. Just before a set was about to roll, a foghorn blew a warning. Heartlanders sampled the concept that they too might hang ten and be surfers. Whew, just caught a big one! People of all ages just howled with delight as they tumbled over one another. Everywhere we looked, there were smiles. The shopper pods had been broken to reveal giddy, silly, amiable people. Those Romans had known about this part—weren’t they the ones who invented socializing in the baths? Bread, circuses, and water—the secret ingredients for a happy mob. Children were loving it, grandparents were too. Everyone got in the mood screaming, laughing, bobbing up and down. Seeing this scene of bliss, we found it impossible to doubt that once upon a time we must have been shrimp.

  While we were all having our beach boy dreams, human flies lined up to hurl themselves off a platform over the deep end of the pool. Looking up, we watched as the already criminally happy bungee jumped, to the cheers of the crowd below. Feeling like a little thrill of our own, we grabbed our Day-Glo yellow tubes and went upstairs to the top of the “raging rapids.” We plunked down among the twelve-year-olds for a truly mindless whoosh through the whitewater tunnels.

  After all that excitement we opted for a little rest and a soak in the hot tub. Later we lounged about on beach chairs reading mystery novels, munching nachos, and generally thinking, Life is a beach, and other brilliant thoughts. While it was odd being in that hermetically sealed bubble for two days in the midst of summer, the water park was divine.

  * * *

  Fully marinated, the next day we headed out. Back to what was beginning to feel like the real world to us: being on the road in the RV.

  Mile Zero

  Toting our little black bag out to the parking lot and into the Sue, it felt tremendous to be home again. Back in our New York driveway, when we first were fixing up the RV, every time I’d go inside I was a little bit disappointed that it never smelled like home, not like our home smell, whatever that is. Now she did have a homey aroma. At least one of the components of that smell was salami—strong, spicy, garlicky Winterpeg salami. Every time the fridge opened, a cascade of eau de salami poured out. Just to make sure we didn’t run out, we hit a supersaver store on our way out of Edmonton.

  * * *

  CONFESSIONS OF A PROVINCIAL NEW YORKER

  I was convinced that no one outside of New York—and possibly a few other urban areas, but I wasn’t counting on them—knew anything about food. The Vietnamese meal in Saskatoon was an omen that I was wrong, but I assumed it was an exception. My mistaken assumption prompted us to pack, along with the bread machine and the sourdough starter, sun-dried tomatoes, lots of fresh garlic, dried porcini mushrooms, a little leftover white truffle oil, arborio rice for risotto, anchovy paste and Parmesan cheese for Caesar salad, chili paste, sesame oil, curry powder, frozen New York bagels (H&H sourdough, the best), and a dozen other essentials we feared we would never find “out there.” It went right past me that, except perhaps for the bagels, none of these things actually came from New York in the first place, but I was a rube in reverse. What did I know.

  * * *

  Major comeuppance: The supermarket in Edmonton was fabulous—especially the produce. Everything from duck eggs (sold singly) to bok choy and large hands of ginger, to tropical fruits and a range of berries rarely seen anywhere: gooseberries, red and black currants, black and red raspberries, strawberries, and those lovely Saskatoon berries, cousins to our blueberries. The quality and variety of products amazed me. I had expected New York to have the best of everything. The world was full of surprises. We had lots of different salamis to choose from. And ah, that simple Canadian packaging. Why did the Philly cream cheese 125-gram box look so sweet, so innocent, and our eight-ouncer so crapped up? We’d also noticed how Canadian food packaging was blissfully free of what sometimes seems to be excessive, mind-numbing labeling. I know it has its place. I can hear Susan Powter screaming at me now, but surely no one really needs to be told that butter is fattening or oil is grease. Since we had warned and labeled and identified food in America, we had become fatter as a nation. The only assumption I could make was that we were now doing it on purpose! In Canada, Sandy and I could still eat with the ignorance of children, having determined through trial and error and rigorous intellectual pursuit that lettuce was probably better for us than lard, and that fruit was a healthier dessert than cookies. Imagine, all that thinking for ourselves! And along with road French, we were able to add a few words of food French to our vocabulary. My favorite was guimauve, a much classier way to say “marshmallow,” non?

  Meanwhile the Sue had her innards lubed and her fluids checked. As New Yorkers, we were always expecting the worst kind of punishment simply for having a car. That’s how it was at home in Manhattan, where you had to beg someone to change your oil and let you pay them sixty dollars. I’ll bet they wouldn’t touch an RV for any money. So before we
left home, we’d called ahead to make an appointment for this check-up through the concierge at the hotel. Both the concierge and the nice man at Mr. Lube must have thought we were nuts making an appointment weeks in advance. As it turned out, we were a day late for our date, and when we did show up, they were so efficient, we barely had time to shop for groceries down the road before the Sue was all set to go. Paranoid citiots. (That’s short for city-idiots, as a someone I know once referred to the summer people in his beach community.) We had been concerned about finding places to camp—but this was where people camped all the time. Campgrounds were as common as subway stations. If we were in Queens, we’d have had to worry, but not out here in this part of the world!

  Back at home, on the road, I put on my favorite garment. I’d always wanted one of those safari-photographer-pockets-every-where vests. It proved to be an incredibly handy way to carry water, tissues, lip balm, the camera, and extra film. The little tortoise pin on it, a gift from our friends Liv and Willie, was supposed to remind us to take life more slowly. But after three weeks of traveling, counting miles and making time, moving had become our natural state. The stasis in Edmonton bothered both of us. It took some effort to remind each other that this was not a two-week holiday to be devoured but a new way of life to be etched. I hoped we would be able to enjoy each day as we went along and not always be on the lookout for that next place or next adventure.

  Passing a golf course/RV park, I chuckled at the combo. More to the point, it was totally flat out there. People I knew would say this wasn’t golf, it was bowling. Along the road the trees had all been planted, mostly evergreens, giving a little bit of a Christmas-tree-farm feeling. Noting odd town names was a good way to amuse ourselves since I refused to play Sandy’s counting-cows game. On the map I noticed Humptulips, Washington, and Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Sandy especially liked Sexsmith, Alberta, and said what a good trade that would be. I didn’t get it, thinking of trade as in swap. But I should have been quicker—he meant it as in a profession. My husband wanted to be a sexsmithy. I reassured him he already was.

  * * *

  Just beyond fifty-five degrees north latitude, the scenery began to get a little hilly and natural, as apparently unplanted trees appeared. After a thousand miles of totally open vistas, our vision was abruptly narrowed to a tunnel of blacktop surrounded by green soldiers standing at attention. It must have been very disorienting for a Plains Indian to come into a forest for the first time. How claustrophobic the sudden limited vision would have been. How strange not to be able to see that straight horizon line that had always separated heaven and earth. It must have been something akin to how we were feeling about our new possibilities. Ahead of us the land spread out again, and I felt relieved, as if the open space had become my familiar too. The dirt was black, and the fields glowed. It seemed as if someone had turned on the sunshine at the edge of the canola fields. Every once in a while an oil well would pop up in the midst of the crops. As we drove toward Peace River, the earth suddenly fell away, and we realized we had been on the high plains, a giant mesa. Below us were three rivers: the Peace, the Heart, and the Smoky. The Beaver and the Cree once made peace at their confluence. Now there was a tea room for tourists in a greenhouse. Across the way the vertically undulating hills gave the impression that if you could rub your hand across them, they would feel like the felt of a pool table, with ridges.

  Radio reception, something we’d always taken for granted, was now an increasingly rare treat. When we were able to pick up a signal, it usually didn’t last past the town limits. One day the lead story on the news was that the city council approved a new “Welcome to Fairview” sign. I paid close attention to the death notices. It struck me that these deaths had much more immediate impact on the daily lives of the listeners than the obituaries I read in the Times. These were neighbors and friends who had died, not cultural icons at some remove. As we traveled, the newspapers, magazines, and radio and television reports I used to gobble up regularly became increasingly irrelevant. At first I’d suffered some withdrawal when we couldn’t find The New York Times for several days running, especially on a Wednesday. I loved the Living section. I also missed the ritual of reading the Sunday Times. But did I miss the news itself? It was the first time I noticed a difference between the two. Information still filtered through to us. It was impossible to escape knowing the large strokes: Bosnia was still in crisis, O.J. on trial, baseball on strike. If something major happened, I figured we would know.

  We spent a night in a woodsy lakeside site in a provincial park. Although it was midsummer, it was also midweek and there were few other campers. It was a great relief to be on our own again. After laying in a supply of firewood, kindly provided by British Columbia, Sandy heated up the grill. I nuked an acorn squash (available everywhere, they kept unrefrigerated forever, it seemed) and steamed some rice in an onion soup broth, and when the pork chops were done, I tossed a salad in our homemade garlic dressing. We dined at a picnic table set aside for our campsite under a canopy of trees. After a short bike ride to watch the birds fish in the water, we went back to light the campfire and toasted a few guimauves. Now this was real romantic.

  * * *

  Dawson Creek in British Columbia was notable for being mile zero of the famous (it said so on the sign) Alaska Highway. In preparation for the journey we tanked up. Gas by the liter ran anywhere from 45 to 69 cents, or about $2.30 a gallon. (If you think those numbers are strange, try asking for your cold cuts in grams. I thought only drugs came that way. Or try driving a monster truck at sixty miles per hour—excuse me, ninety clicks per hour—toward an overpass with a sign that says, in English and in French, “Maximum headroom 4.2 meters.”)

  At the gas station I got out to wash the windows—a very funny sight, I’m sure: a 62-inch woman hanging by one arm on a 137-inch-high truck with a squeegee in the other hand and filthy window water running into her armpit. I noticed the fellow at the next pump also had New York plates—the first we had seen in days. This was exciting. I hadn’t sensed any homesickness at all, but there in Dawson Creek I felt an instant kinship, an intimate connection with a guy I had never seen before because of a license plate. His vehicle and ours shared, with only eleven million others, the same kind of tag. Oh, the camaraderie! He nodded toward us and was clearly happy to see a couple of folks from back home too. My blood flowed warmly toward him. Who says New Yorkers aren’t friendly?

  We immediately struck up a conversation. We were on our way north, I told him, having a great time. He was on his way south and eager to warn us how awful the road conditions were. He couldn’t wait to get back home to Manhattan as fast as he could. I withered with disappointment. My soulmate turned out to be a party pooper. After Sandy took out a second mortgage to pay for the gas, I slunk back into the Sue and wondered how I could have so misjudged my fellow New Yorker. As we pulled out of the station, I heard him yelling at us and thought perhaps we’d left something behind. I turned and saw him waving frantically while videotaping our departure. We waved. Maybe he wanted evidence to take to the Mounties when we were reported missing.

  The Alaska Highway is the only year-round overland route into the state. Built by the army during World War II to enable troop access to the North Pacific, it is at best a two-lane black-topped road. Often it’s dirt and a single lane. From this point until we got to and through Alaska, all the roads were to be referred to by name rather than number. Taking the Richardson? Heading up on George Parks? It sounded much better than taking I-95 to 287 and 87. The roads also had mile markers placed religiously along the way, making it easy to know your exact location, even if you were thousands of miles from anywhere. Our bible in this part of the world was a book called The Milepost. It listed every identifiable inch of road, by the garbage barrel here to frost heave there to landmark hotel not to be missed. We knew we were 3,351 miles from home, 1,488 miles from Fairbanks. It was still wild territory here, with very few other roads and fewer towns. We were warned never t
o lose sight of how much gas we had and how far away the next station was. As we drove, seventy-foot double-length trucks whizzed by us, bringing supplies to the North. Neither of us had ever experienced remoteness before. It was simultaneously calming and thrilling. At Mile Marker 370 we saw our first bear, a little black cub scooting out from a landfill.

  I had always thought of roads as sturdy, permanent. When a highway opened, it was forever. Even roads built in ancient Rome, England, and Israel were still intact. The road to Alaska was different. It was always shifting and movable. People and the planet battled constantly about whether that black strip would stay put. Pavement was turf in the war between ice and earth. In a good year a road could go bad in no time. In a bad year forget it. It was a constant process of give and take: People gave it their best shot, and nature took it all back. As we drove farther north, the road seemed insignificant compared with truly permanent mountains and rivers. They were the real bosses of the road crews here. A turquoise river, the Toad, followed along our side for a while, backed up by the stone-faced mountains. The little strip of road was clearly here by their permission. The mountain could eat it for breakfast any day now and wash it down with a gulp of Toad.