Perry Boys Abroad: The Ones That Got Away by Ian Hough

Author:Ian Hough [Hough, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milo Books Ltd
Published: 2012-06-21T22:00:00+00:00

So my next stop was Canada. Despite droves of people having settled there, Canada was a kind of non-country, occupying very little space in the British imagination. I was to discover that, in geographical reality, it occupied as much space as virtually any country on earth. The plan was to meet a girl I’d had some great times with at Kibbutz Sde Boker, and take a trip across Canada on a train. When I received the letter from Jane, suggesting I go west and we continue our little fling, I was only too glad to oblige. It was February 1987, not the most favoured time of year for a Canadian odyssey, but that never occurred to me. Jane met me at Toronto Airport. Toronto was a big city, with clusters of high-rise apartments and skyscrapers sprawling away from the centre. Every day felt like a Friday; people were relaxed and brimming with pragmatic optimism. This was where Martha and the Muffins were from, and the city landscape resonated with imagery from ‘Echo Beach’. The architecture was space-age, the coniferous foliage plentiful and the snowflakes tumbled out of the turquoise sky like glittering fragments from an exploded UFO. The snow, the pine trees and the blue skies reminded me of old Talking Heads tunes, songs about the American government and its great cities, listened to while surveying the prairie of someone’s bed-sit back in Manchester. I’d be surveying the real prairie once the train made it to Manitoba.

There was no end to the Ontario forests and weird lagoons draped in frozen white. The sight of snowmobiles, or ‘skidoos’ as Canadians call them, was commonplace. The trains contained upper-decks composed of a glass dome to view the expansive countryside. The odd hippie or weirdo would sometimes join us in a couple of beers up there in the dome car, including one who recited Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ in its entirety. The landscape stretched to the North Pole in one direction and down to the Gulf of Mexico in the other. Romantic images filled my head when I saw names like Canadian Pacific on the sides of boxcars in isolated eastern towns. The topography changed as we headed west. Ontario’s crystalline forests became a great white desert of unending snow. We raced along the shores of great lakes. The glancing northern light was surreal in winter at this latitude; the sky was sometimes an eerie orange colour and the water looked pea-green, spangling and dancing as far as the eye could see.

One of Jane’s brothers was in the army and living in a trailer on the vast prairie around Brandon, Manitoba. We’d come through an expanse of white to be met at the station by this guy driving a station wagon with a big grin on his face. In the car he asked if we had any music. I passed him Lou Reed’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal. He smiled and reached for the volume dial.

‘I love to fuckin’ crank this shit!’ he whooped.

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