Travel in my blood

“The air is cool and dry. I smell the earth dried into dust and breathe this scent, this air; fill my lungs with it. I have been in Iran for ten days. My blood is made from the water of this place. I can feel it. How it slides through my body and shapes me.”

Alison Wearing in
Honeymoon in Purdah

God, I miss the scent of travel; sea salt smell of Halifax; dusty, acrid air in Alberta as it’s baked in summer heat. And my fingers ache to touch the old brick buildings in the narrow streets of Quebec.

I cried the first time I saw Canada’s grey, snow-topped Rocky Mountains reflect sunlight like craggy mirrors, just like I cried the first time I saw the lush green mountains of Austria.

Sometimes I even miss vomiting for hours and falling asleep on a hotel toilet seat after drinking too much in Montreal’s packed pubs. I feel guilty confessing this, but I’d do it again if it meant regaining the freedom I felt wandering downtown Montreal with no agenda or schedule, just wandering for the sake of wandering.

It’s true what Alison Wearing says: if you stay in a place long enough, the water and dust of that locale works its way through your blood and shapes you. And it leaves traces of itself in your veins, traces that make your body ache to return.

Still, travelling can be a lonely pastime.

I was leaning against a wall in a third-floor hotel room in Halifax parting the blinds to look out the window. Halifax harbour was calm. Big boats were docked. A few smaller boats cruised slowly to and fro. I watched the empty streets below and slowly scanned the hillside of Dartmouth, across the harbour. I had travelled east from Ontario by myself. And for the first time since leaving I felt wholly alone.

Now, living in British Columbia with my wife, my dog and my cat, I rarely feel alone. That loneliness in Halifax, however, slit my soul and allowed the spirit of Halifax to seep inside me.