HomeEmail me at jeffstonemusic@yahoo.com
Jeff Stone
PO Box 7156
Station A
Toronto, ON
M5W 1X8
Canada
Autumn,1998
Dear 1)Friends, 2)Fans, 3)People Who Have Shown An Interest In My Music, or 4)People Who Signed My Mailing List With The Bizarre Notion That They'd Win Something,
Congratulations. You win a letter.
Most of you know that I did a cross-Canada tour. Now all of you know it. I am going to tell you about my tour in a series of letters, just because I want to, and if you don't like it, then you don't have to read them, but then you get bad luck. Sort of like a chain letter.
If you are female and lonely, you can pretend that these are love letters. If you are not interested in me that way, you can pretend that they are from someone else. Anyway you look at it, my letters are versatile, as long as you have a good imagination.
Please do not skim through these notes. You will miss highly subtle sub-text. Rather, read it carefully, and discuss it in groups. Dress up in a tweed jacket and a red turtle-neck, so as to appear intellectual.
Well, I might as well start...in the middle, of course. Chronological order sucks. And besides, the movie (when I sell the rights) will be far more interesting (read: artsy) if it's all mixed up.
I was standing on the side of the country highway, just south of Milford, Nova Scotia at 1:30 in the morning, wearing a huge backpack, and carrying a guitar bag containing not just a guitar, but many pounds of disorganized organizational papers and receipts. In my other hand was a big breaking bag of CDs as well as other organizational notes and receipts.
The first thing that you have to do, my friends and acquaintances and total strangers (those of you reading mail that is not yours), is to know where Milford is. Get a map. Find Canada.
Now find the province of Nova Scotia.
Okay, now find Milford. You see it? No? You don't see Milford? Exactly.
So, there I was, in the middle of nowhere at 1:30 in the morning, lugging around at least my own weight. I had no place to sleep. I had just walked right through Milford. (A small town? No matter. When carrying your own weight, a small town is a big city.) It had taken me about an hour and a half. A tactical error on my part led to my predicament.
A little after 6 PM, I left Baddeck, Cape Breton Island. I walked for a good distance to get to a gas station on the Trans Canada Highway. When I was close to the gas station, I met up with a guy and a girl who were walking/hitchhiking in the other direction. They were from Alberta and were on their way to Sydney. I told them I was going to Halifax. The guy tried to convince me that I was going in the wrong direction, and that I should join them. I, however, knew that one does not go to Halifax via Sydney once already south of Sydney. Nice couple, though. They meant well.
I set up to hitchhike by the exit ramp of the gas station, and I had been standing there less than two minutes when a car pulled over to pick me up. I was driven much more than the bulk of the way and I was dropped off at about 11 PM at Stewiacke. The driver was in the same general neighbourhood as his girlfriend, and was waiting for her to arrive home so that he might have a place to stay that night. In the meantime, he waited in the 24-hour Tim Horton's doughnut store, and that's what it looked like I would be doing, too. There are no motels in Stewiacke, NS. Now, it promised to rain, and the Tim's promised shelter. However, I wanted to be able to sleep, eventually. I felt that I could get to Halifax that very night. I walked down to the edge of the road, and got out my sign that had "Halifax" written on it.
A pick-up truck pulled up and the guys inside offered me a ride. They said that I could hop in the back and they would drive me part of the way. I accepted. That was the mistake.
As I rode in the open-air back with the wind and night air all around me, I was enjoying myself. However, it did occur to me that if they got into a highway accident, I would disintegrate just enough while skidding across the highway at that speed that I could form my own chalk outline.
I figured they would let me off somewhere central, like a motel, or at least a truck stop. They let me off, in the middle of the night, on a multi-lane highway, a 10-minute walk from Milford. I stood on the edge of the highway with my thumb out, and quickly realized that the only ones who were going to pick me up were the police. Cars were going by at over 100 km per hour, in the dark, and there was no way they were going to see me and be able to stop. I walked to Milford to find another all night doughnut store. There is no such thing in Milford. I decided to make a call for a cab that might drive me to a motel. There is one outdoors pay phone in all of Milford. It was out of order. I walked.
I thought that maybe they'd let me sleep at the local firehall. The firehall was closed. (If you live in Milford, make sure that your house burns down during regular business hours, okay?) At one point, I decided to just sleep outdoors, and thought that church employees would be more forgiving than others to find me sleeping on property that wasn't mine. I set my stuff down and lay down for a few minutes.
The night was comfortable, but I could tell that it was definitely going to rain. I decided to keep moving.
On the outskirts of town, the bushes of a farmer's field rustled directly to the right of me. With at least my own weight on my back and at the end of my arms, I was still able to jump pretty high. I ran for a few feet, and looked behind me as I walked. The psycho killer in the bushes decided not to follow me.
Amazingly, someone stopped to pick me up after 1:30 AM, and drove me to the next town where he let me off at a gas station. The Irving gas station had a truckers' lounge. I slept on the couch there. Given my circumstances of just half-an-hour earlier, I was very comfortable with my surroundings.
The Mean Streets of Jasper National Park
The only time that summer that I had to sleep on the streets was when I was in the town of Jasper, Alberta, on the first Saturday in August. I arrived in town on the VIA train from Vancouver without a booking in either of the two hostels that are reasonably reachable from Jasper. There was nothing; no motel rooms, no hotel rooms, not even any camping spaces (not that I had a tent or sleeping bag with me). I even asked the inn-keeper if I could sleep in the stable, but there was already a husband and pregnant wife there.
Despite my lack of camping supplies, I had been offered shelter, if worst came to worst, by some very nice people whom I had met on the train. They were going to be camping and I was allowed to share their tent if I wanted. Of course, I had no sleeping bag, so I would just bundle up extra warmly.
I shared a taxi to the hostel with two girls, Anne and Esprit (not the aforementioned camping people) from the train. I begged a hostel staff member to let me stay there, but he said no because he was a Satan worshipper who enjoyed kicking harmless furry animals and stealing old ladies' purses.
I got a ride down the big hill, and I was dropped off by the camp grounds where my other train-friends said that they would be. The camp claimed to have no record of them, and in case I had the names wrong, I walked around looking for them. I could not find them. I called the Canadian Armed Forces to ask them to do a search and rescue mission for my train-friends as a favour to me, but these army people are so by-the-book....Apparently, my friends would have to be in some kind of danger, blah blah blah.
I had arranged with Anne and Esprit that I would meet them by the main road. I would be standing there, and they would be in a taxi. We were going to go to the Jasper Music Festival. I began to walk to the main road.
All summer, except for two days, it had been beautiful. Sunny, hot...no more! With no shelter to run to, it started to pour. I self-absorbedly suggested to God that I wasn't finding the rain storm funny, and He made it worse. Having been in a train since the day before, I had not showered. I thought, hey, you've got lemons, make lemonaid. I took my shampoo out of my bag and washed my hair as I stood right there on the side of the road. However, it was a bit much trying to wash the shampoo out of my eyes using a rain shower. My eyes stung viciously for a while.
I was a sight for sore eyes (my own) when the girls pulled up in the taxi. It took a lot of scrubbing to remove the big "L" from my forehead.
That night, I wandered around looking for the best bench to sleep on. I approached a police officer. I asked if there were any empty jail cells and if I might be able to sleep in one. Apparently they were all booked up.
I left my bags at a hotel bag check, and resumed my search for a place to sleep. It had rained a couple of times during the day, so the ground was damp and the air was cold. Had it just been a mild dry evening like most nights of the early summer, then I would have comfortably slept on the lawn in a park.
I lay down on a bench on the main street. I woke up about an hour later, very cold. I got up and wandered over to the closed information centre. Earlier, people were hanging around, and so I could not sleep there. They were now gone, so I slept on the concrete underneath an overhang. I woke up a while later, and walked to the all-night Subway Sandwich. I used the bathroom, had a hot chocolate, and wandered back to a different bench. I slept for a while, woke up, and got my bags from the hotel before an expensive charge kicked-in. The train/bus station was now open, so I went there, and with all my bags it looked like I was going somewhere. I slept off-and-on for a few hours in a chair at the station.
I am lucky that this is the only night of my life that I have been "on the streets". Do you want to know what the top two causes of homelessness are? Lack of initiative? Drugs? Mental illness? Nope. The two top causes of homelessness are not enough beds and not enough shelter.
Other irregular places where I slept: a ferry terminal in North Sydney, on bus seats, on trains, in the TV lounge of a university residence....
And that's what the road is like when you don't have a big budget.
Until my next letter,
Jeff Stone