20 years ago today - Less than a week to go....

20 years ago today – Author’s preface, part 2

Feb 26, 1991: Toronto in winter. It’s the perfect time of year somewhere far away from here.

I can still walk home through the chaos of a winter storm – the streetcars not running on Dundas St because of downed wires, -12 C (+6F), wind and the icy sting of blowing snow. My head is on what is happening around me, but my heart is already in Lisbon.

Plodding slow steady progress along icy sidewalks and the Dundas St Viaduct over the Don River the magic around me begins to grow. There is strength beyond vulnerability, joy beyond fatigue.

Last week, when the weather was finer, I saw two women with luggage in tow, heading out in the morning with all the other commuters. But is was obvious on their faces, when compared to the grey, resolute appearance of the others they passed, that this was no ordinary day for them. Of course not. They were not going to work—they were about to start a journey, an adventure that they would never forget. Just knowing this, their eyes were more keen and alert and their inner light was glowing visibly.

Is that the way it will be for me a week from now? I can never seem to remember where I was or what I was doing any certain day last month, but I can always remember the smallest details of what I was doing on any given day during my past travels. I am thinking at the moment that I am only alive when I am traveling, when my life is full.

Today my ‘aliveness’ feels like nervousness. The past month has been difficult. I have lost a third of two years of savings in the past two weeks. All the relationships around me suddenly seem strained and undependable. I am wondering if these are bad omens or simply a test of my determinations. You can stop testing now because I am leaving for sure, if only to get away from this endless winter.

But not all the news is bad. Ed Rose, my friend in Providence RI has offered to buy my 2100-piece Tiffany wisteria lamp, by far the largest and labour intensive piece of stained glass art I have ever made, for a handsome fee of $2500 US, and the owner of the restaurant Il Papagallo (The Parrot) has offered to buy my stained glass parrot for $150. Things are starting to look up.

Regardless, my ticket to Lisbon via London is paid in full and non-refundable. I have finalized my schedule of preparations, things to do each day before I leave. I am saying my goodbyes and making a list of addresses for sending postcards. I have photocopied many pages of the Spartacus Guide for gay bars, saunas and meeting places across much of Europe. I am not sure how willing Michael will be to checking them out but I am bringing them anyway.

Michael has finally purchased his ticket. He gives me the willies the way he leaves everything to the end, always waiting for a last minute bargain. This is all too important for me to take such a risk, but he has much more experience traveling and buying tickets. His family is scattered around the globe and his boyfriend lives in Washington DC.

He will arrive in Lisbon two days after I do. I wish he was on the same flight but maybe this is my chance to check out some gay nightlife while I am alone. We have finalized a meeting place and time in Lisbon at the tourist office on the Ave de Liberdade. That’s the main tourist strip with all the big hotels, but this is an off-season, still too early for spring getaways when the weather will be warmer, so it should be easy enough to spot him.

I hope nothing more goes wrong before we leave.

20 years ago today - packing list

From February 21, 1991:

Packing list for my year-long cycling trip:

3 pr cycling shorts
1 pr cotton shorts
1 pr long cotton pants (light weight)
1 pr long nylon cycling tights
2 pr underwear
1 swim suit
3 pr socks
1 pr cycling shoes
1 pr running shoes
1 belt (with hidden compartment)
1 money belt
2 cycling jerseys
2 T-shirts
1 short sleeve cotton shirt
1 long sleeve cotton shirt
1 sweater
1 neck wrap (kafia)
1 light weight jacket
1 plastic rain cape
1 helmet
1 cap
1 pr sunglasses/case
1 pr reading glasses/case
1 pr cycling gloves

1 handkerchief
1 watch
1 wallet

1 Miyata 1000 21-speed touring bicycle (with from and rear pannier racks, toe clips and foam handlebar padding)
1 bike pump
1 Kryptonite U-lock
1 water bottle
2 rear panniers
2 front panniers
1 handlebar bag and detachable rack
1 detachable battery operated bike light (also used as a flashlight)
1 odometer
1 altimeter
1 sleeping bag with cotton liner
1 waterproof cover for sleeping bag
one foam sleeping pad
3 bungee cords
one tire repair kit (tire irons/sandpaper/patches/glue)
2 spare Presta-valve inner tubes

1 spare brake cable
1 spare derailleur cable
1 pedal wrench
chain tool
1 set of Allen keys
aluminum wrench set
spare bolts, nuts, lock washers
spare brake pads
spare batteries (for bike light)
waterproof lubricating grease
WD 40
cleaning rag
tooth brush (for cleaning bike parts)
spare plastic bags
elastic bands
needle and thread
canvas patching kit
Swiss pocket knife
scissors (small size)
saddle bag for tool
plastic plate/cup/fork, knife and spoon

contact lenses
spare lenses
contact lens case
saline solution
disinfectant solution
tooth brush/holder
toothpaste
soap
laundry soap (liquid)
shampoo
eye drops
sun screen
Polysporin sauve
deodorant
bandaids
nail clippers
Immoduim
Ibuprofen
Aspirin
nasal spray (so I don't snore)
vitamins
spare toilet paper (emergencies)
tissues
case to hold bathroom sundries

cash
US$ (sewn into lining of pannier for emergencies)
traveler's cheques
passport
credit cards
birth certificate
maps
guides
Canon camera w. zoom lens/case
8 rolls of film
lead-lined film case
journal
writing paper for letters
pens
notebook for itinerary
photocopied pages from Spartacus guide (gay bars, clubs, etc, for key cities)
Portugese/English dictionary (small)
Spanish/English dictionary (small)
French/English dictionary (small)
novel

also (to be disposed of at Lisbon airport): 1 large cotton duffel bag (for packing the panniers into during the flight to Portugal), and foam plumbing insulation tubes and packaging tape for protecting my bike frame during the flight

Total weight not to exceed 28 kg.

80 months

I'm still walking over 13 and a half years after I was first diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. That was when I had just turned 43. I set a goal of walking without the need of a scooter until I was 50. By the time I reached that goal, there were promising signs of treatments and cures, so I set a far-reaching goal of walking without need of a scooter until 100 months past 50 (58 and four months). Last Thursday I reached the 80-month mark.

Walking is getting pretty dicey at times, especially in crowds and uneven terrain. Last month I was unable to see a play I wanted to go to because the theatre was on the crest of a steep hill and the local bus would drop me off two blocks down the hill. I need sidewalk ramps at each corner but going uphill some of those ramps that I could do a year ago I cannot do now, even with a cane.

I will probably need a scooter within a year so, the way things are going, just for my own safety, but that might mean losing the ability to get rides in friends' cars or even visiting most of them. I feel like the "incredibly shrinking man" or at least in an incredibly shrinking world.

I have set a goal of walking at least a km at least 100 times this year, just to help push the envelope. Mostly, I have been walking to work, but there is one ramp in front of Harbour Centre where I work that is almost too difficult for me at the end of my walk. I bring my cane along each time now, just for that one ramp.

Sooner or later I'll either fall or I'll keep my ability to walk distances going for a year or so longer. I see no reason to get a scooter until it's absolutely necessary, in spite of the risk. Besides, they cost $6000 and aren't covered by my extended insurance. My condo has removed disability access and the City won't enforce an accessibility agreement the condo signed in 1994. Sometimes it's hard to 'trust the process'.

So far I have walked 1 km or more 11 times this year so I am still on target. One never knows. If I can keep up my ability a treatment or cure may come along in time. But for the moment it seems prospects are dimmer than they were six years ago because pharmaceuticals will not release cures. I try not to focus on that. Life for the moment is still good, and likely better than it will be in the future.

Motivated writing

Since I have decided to do my "20 years ago today" blog starting in early March, I have been researching like mad through my diaries and notebooks from the time and writing the blogs to be posted on the appropriate days next month. Then I search for images on Google maps that will substitute for the photos from the time that I seem to have lost. It has been very exciting and exhausting too.

It is amazing how much I remember and how much I don't. I am able to expand some areas of my daily journal I wrote back then, while other seemingly important events I hardly remember at all. But the more I get into the memories of my big trip, the more the emotions flood back. Not all of them were positive. All my other cycling trips came off trouble free for the most part, for the three to nine weeks they lasted, but not this one. From the first day there were troubles and challenging moments, worse than in any other trip.

I have also adjusted to dealing with my present disability by not dwelling on the past, by living in the present, and I am now constantly being reminded of what I can no longer do, how much I have lost. I need to crawl inside the events to write about them well, but each time I am at risk of slipping into depression about my present state. I am handling it well, keeping involved and detached so far, but I tend to sink deeper the farther along I go.

As it absorbs me, I am left with little energy for anything else. Other times when I have been fixated on my writing, I cannot talk about anything else, and I have learned that most of my friends have little interest in what I write and they probably don't want to hear me talking about it all the time. In my mind my life becomes restricted, unvaried and I become very boring. I am always afraid the writing takes too much out of me and leaves me like a shell. On the other hand, my mind quickens and life has more spark. I am never lonely when I am writing, even though I rarely socialize with my friends.

I am into the third week of the trip now. I am still in my first country, Portugal. I am not sure if I can keep it up for a whole year but having a head start on the postings will help. I am doing them as a MS Word document and will cut and paste them as the days roll along. As the days slowly brighten and the spring nears, so nears the start of the blog. My excitement is growing.

20 years ago today – Author’s preface, part 1

Jan 29, 1991: the book fair

I was at a book fair today with Michael. I went to hear an author named Bernie Howegate, who has written a book called “Tales of a Travelling Man” about eight years of traveling around the world on a ten-speed bike, a journey that began in the Magdeleine Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence ten years ago.

He was interesting and funny. He spoke more about the places he visited than the cycling itself. After the reading we went to meet him and get him to sign a copy of his book for me. I couldn’t hold back from telling him about our plans. I described how we had planned the route we expected to go and our itinerary, including how far we expected to go every day and what we would be bringing. He took in what I told him with a slightly bemused look. When he signed my book he wrote. “To Ken – bike riding is a great experience. It’s the people you meet, not the mileage you cover.”

20 years ago – Introduction, part 2…

Our plans started to go off track about a year later. Saving money was not a skill that Seph savoured. There was a 4-digit number of dollars in our savings but only $20 of it was his. When his restaurant laid him off in the fall, he decided to focus on his acting career, although he had never had a paid role, justifying it by saying that taking another job would interfere with his ability to attend possible future auditions. So I pulled the plug on our joint account arrangement and gave him back his $20. I was committed to the trip and he’d have to save enough to go with me on him own.

But other parts of our relationship were failing too. We had agreed to an open relationship, after he started fooling around with other men, and his wanderlust for sex was overwhelming his wanderlust for travel. At the start of 1990, I told him I wanted a break from our sexual relationship, although we still shared my house and bed, but I became a closer friend. We still cuddled, cycled, took long walks, and ate meals together but that was as far as it went. Several months later I overheard him telling mutual friends that we had broken up. When they asked him when it happened, he said I broke up in February and he broke up in May.

In the last months before departure, when it was clear the Seph would not be joining me, I was able to entice a member of our gay cycling club, Michael Silk, to take his place. That would cut the loneliness factor and accommodation bills, but everything else seemed to go wrong. The Canadian dollar had plummeted against most European currencies (this was before the Euro). Seph had overspent the limit on the charge card I had acted as a guarantor for to establish his credit rating again, and the bank put a hold on $2000 of my funds. At the last moment, David went back on his word and asked that I repay the last of what I owed him in spite of our agreement. He said his job was in jeopardy and that he needed the money as a possible buffer when I was gone, but as soon as I left he spent it on something else anyway,

It wasn’t the most joyful travel launch ever. A temporary assistant had been hired to replace me already so I was out of a job for a year, and David had arranged to rent my furnished room to soon-to-be tenant. I probably couldn’t afford to travel the whole year and that gave me dreadful nightmares of returning to Toronto homeless and penniless to live with my parents in the bleak, icy suburb of Malton all the next winter.

I also had been seeing another fellow since Sept had left, and that wasn’t working out either. On one of our last dates he finally took me to his home to spend the night. He wasn’t the most forthcoming with me. His ex-lover roommate hadn’t broken up with him as long ago as he said, probably even in just the past few weeks, and the scene turned pretty ugly. His other idiosyncrasies kept surfacing and I began to think he might have serious mental health issues. I was still a bit hung up over him when I left, but part of me was also relieved to be rescued by that big silver bird in the sky.

Twenty years ago doesn’t really seem that long ago, but it was. It was the age of technological dinosaurs, and I was one of them. This was before the general public had phone cards, cell phones, international ATMs, no on-line "couch surfing", Internet cafes or even e-mail. I let my friends and family know where I expected to be six weeks ahead of time and they wrote to me c/o “Poste Restante”. Sometimes I got what they sent but I never knew how much of it. It frustrated me to think that some letters weren’t reaching me, but it scared me more to think I was receiving everything when I found nothing waiting for me.


PHOTO: Me (background) and Michael Silk (foreground), Jan '91

20 years ago, in Toronto - Introduction (Part I)

Yesterday I got the idea for an exciting writing project to keep up my blogging and my story-telling skills. I think my best blogs have been stories about my past. I am going to try my most ambitious project ever. It has me totally psyched at the moment, in spite of the hundreds of hours it will require.

20 years ago today I was beginning my final two weeks of preparation for the biggest trip of my lifetime, year-long cycling trip through Europe and Asia. When the anniversary of the start day arrives on March 5, I will begin a "20 years ago today" day-by-day account of that 49-week trip. I have the diary I kept during the first half of the trip, and a notebook on distances I traveled each day and people I met along the way.

The rest of the details are in my memory banks, which have been stored in the incubator of my imagination for the past twenty years, where they have slowly crystallized into fiction. Memory, after all, is just a broken series of flashes, glimpses of what truly happened. It takes fiction to connect the dots and make sense of it all, even if the result is distorted and filtered. But this is what I do know.....

The trip was two and a half years in the making. It had not been my idea at first. It was the brainchild of my boyfriend at the time, Joseph. We had met in the Gay Pride parade in June of 88, the year that I marched with Toronto’s gay outdoors club, Out & Out. More accurately, I rode my bicycle beside those who marched because I was part of the cycling group. It was my cycling shorts that attracted Seph – as I used to call him. He was wearing a pair too, and he told me he was looking for someone to ride with. With that twinkle in his eye, I thought he was just giving me a line but it turned out to be true.

But he had competition. Another young lad named Ron had met me earlier at a pre-parade breakfast, and he was determined to sink his teeth in me before the day was out. He was skinnier and not as cute as Seph, but he definitely horny. But I wasn’t really interested in either of them. They were both more than ten years younger than me, and I was focused on a pre-arranged rendezvous in the beer garden with a mesmerizingly handsome man named Paul, who I had also met earlier that day.

The beer garden was in Cawthra Park, at the end point of the parade route. By the time we got there the whole park was filled with celebrants and the line up for the beer garden was half way around the block. I joined the line pointlessly, in the hopes that I could still find Paul somewhere in the crowd. But Seph and Ron grew restless and hornier and began pulling on my opposite arms as though I was a wishbone. Frustrated and disappointed over Paul and not wanting to start a fight by choosing one of the boys, I decided to leave.

Later I met up with Seph because he lived two blocks from my house. Things went better than I expected and I ended up sleeping at his place. That’s how it started. We fell into being lovers with surprising ease. We began doing almost everything together, but more than anything it was the cycling that kept us together.

Seph had had a dream to do a year-long cycling trip through Europe for a while. I had already cycled in Greece, France, the US and the Canadian Rockies in previous years so I encouraged him to do the trip. I taught him what I knew – how to plan a route and how to save and budget. To help him stay on track, I encouraged him to find extra evening work. He didn’t want to spend time apart from me so we both took jobs as waiters at the Pantages Theatre, that was showing “The Phantom of the Opera” extravaganza at the time. (Remember Garth Drabinsky?). We also both became door-to-door canvassers for the United Nations Association, though the commissions weren’t rewarding.

At first, I didn’t think about joining him on his trip, even though he begged me to. I had a full-time, permanent position in the planning department of the City of Toronto that I would not be able to regain if I left, and I also co-owned a house with a business partner, David. He had lent me he front money to purchase my half of our house and I had agreed to make monthly repayments to him. These were walls preventing me from joining him, but he was free of such obligations.

But to my delight, my walls proved to be mirages. My employer was willing to hire temporary staff to replace me for a year and David said he was fine with me not making repayments for the year if he could charge me a year’s interest to the monies I still owed him. I was definitely enlisted on the trip. Seph and I opened a joint bank account with the agreement that we would do our best to add to it without keeping track. Everything was full steam ahead and for the first few months it seemed to be on track.


PHOTO: Me (left) and Seph (right), July '89