winnebago

This is an anecdote about watching your step.

When I was 18 I moved out of my hillbilly town to go to university in the city. I didn’t want to but I didn’t have a lot of options. My gran underwrote my student loan and I set off on the bus with a giant knapsack and a book of Daphne du Maurier short stories to last me through the ride, hoping things would naturally work out on the other end and in due order I’d be successful, popular and happy for once in my life.

Somehow it happened that school didn’t work out but I was still OK, making new friends and OK money and interested in life going on outside my front door because for the first time I could see more going on than just smokestacks belching kraft smoke, like at home.

Then just as I was getting used to it, the variety of things to do and the way a city could accommodate my weird nightowl schedule, it was over. I was living back in Still Harbour, with my then-boyfriend James, like I’d never left.

Seeing the same old stoners buying taquitos and rolling papers at the 7-Eleven, houseparties with our friends who congratulated us on the wisdom of abandoning “the big shitty” because now we could 4X4 on weekends, go fishing whenever, and all the pubs were within stumbling distance home  – “you know, really live, not like those capitalist uptight city dweebs with their overpriced condos, leased beemers and inferior weed!!”

Of course there were plenty of steps in between, it didn’t just happen overnight. In retrospect there were plenty of chances for me to make a decision one inch different and turn things around or make them go differently, had I better luck or foresight. But what matters is all of a sudden I was living in Jame’s parents’ back yard, in their RV.

James had a chance to go to California for some medical training and I quit my job to sneak down with him. But before I could do that – I was waiting for my bird’s border pass to be issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service – James was back. He pretended it was because he missed his stupid family and our dumb town. I would be the only person who would ever know it was because for the few months he was in LA he did so much coke and smoked so much weed he wore himself out and had to come crawling back home, unable to cope.  He was welcomed back as the prodigal son, his Pentecostal mother and aunts overjoyed to have their baby back, waddling around singing hymns and squealing, baking huge dinners of scalloped potatoes, creamed corn and turkey (their love for roasted turkey on dates other than Christmas and holidays disoriented me) and other heavy, discouraging Protestant food.

To give us time to “get back on our feet” his parents let us live in their RV. In the summers they used it to drive up to the Okanagan in a big sing-songy religious convoy to can fruit for the poor and camp and have wholesome BBQs and lawn bowling tournaments with other chubby retirees, but in the winter it just sat there.

So that is how at age 20 when I should have been working my way up and finding out what my dumb self had to offer the world  I was walking around frosty sidewalks with my resume looking for employment in the decaying mill town I thought I’d left forever.

That’s how I ended up saying things to dimple-grinning aunts like “Oh, so it’s a container of Old Dutch ranch chip dip that makes your mashed potatoes so creamy!” and trying to bolster the mood of a coke-weary, bad tempered boyfriend by running my hand like Vanna White over a midget-sized arborite table and exclaiming “Wow! Winnebago! This is like, the ultimate in camper trailers. We’re…so lucky.”

It’s scenarios like this, which can happen before you know what’s going on, that can make it so you find it hard to trust your own judgement and spend years working hard to undo bad errors and trying to smarten up.