Many moons ago, my wild child teenaged self hitchhiked around the province with my best friend Cathy, Clifford Olson’s heyday as someone kindly pointed out. I always joke that I left with $50. and returned with $50. We were very resourceful. I can’t imagine doing anything like that now or how I was allowed to. Well, I wasn’t, I just took off. Our poor parents. We didn’t have much of a plan, just wanted to get as far north as possible. We made it to Prince Rupert. While on the northern part of Vancouver Island, in Campbell River, we met some loggers at the pub and they bought us to camp to feed us. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I remember lots of beef and potatoes, decidedly comfort food for two hungry young roamers. Turns out it was a good idea for there I met a handsome, charming though intriguingly quiet, poet-troubadour named Max Layton, the son of Irving Layton, whose work I had been studying in English class. I was impressed, Leonard Cohen taught him guitar! We talked poetry and literature and music for hours. I always had an affinity for language and had started to seriously write verse around that time. I like to sing too and I call what I do now spoken word song. I recently got in touch with him and we exchanged books and CDs.  He’s written a novel about his logging experiences called Some Kind of Hero. I’ve been marveling at his deep, rich, plaintiff voice and evocative songs from Heartbeat of Time, especially My Mom which gave me goosebumps. I received these kind and encouraging words from Max the other day: “At last found time to read Three Blocks West of Wonderland. I don’t know what I was expecting – some gushy girlie west coast tree-hugger mushiness most likely. What I did not expect was the explosion of energy, good humour, and dead-eye-dick word marksmanship that hit me when I read the first page, and then read on, in a kind of wonderland of my own, thinking how lucky I was to have ever known you in the first place. Thinking how privileged I am to know you now. And what also impressed me was how, time and again, you connect your inner world to the larger world around you, to 9/11, for example. Frankly, I seldom read our poets anymore, so sick am I of their deliberately obscurantist prose, their self-indulgent, etiolated navel gazing. Thank God, you are the antithesis of all that, the antidote even. Your poems should be required reading, broadcast on the CBC and over a national network of loudspeakers, five times per day, as combination airfreshener and disinfectant – Raid & Glade. But it’s one in the morning here and I’m obviously getting a little light-headed. Please let me know if you’re ever out this way… Sincerely, Max.” Survivors we two. I’ve reinvented myself many times along the way. This Internet facilitated check-in with Max makes me nostalgic certainly, but it also provides a bit of a gauge of who I am at this point in the journey. So despite feeling rather defeated lately, knowing how much I’ve endured-can endure-invigorates. Carry on, happy trails, onward and upward and all that rot.