From: MacSorely’s Great Adventure
After the troopers let him go, MacSorely found a bus terminal and got a ticket to Seattle. In Seattle, nursing a headache and pain from his nose-break, he bought another ticket to Vancouver with the last of his cash. He played for change with the battered guitar which once again had survived and made enough to buy a dried-out turkey sandwich, a cup of coffee that tasted like aluminum, and two packs of unfiltered Camels. He had some change left over. He gave one pack of Camels and half his remaining take to a bum with the shakes and piss-drenched pants. He settled down to try sleep in a hard, plastic, puke-green seat. Sometime in the night somebody got stabbed and the police came, but MacSorely was too out of it to get the details. The police didn’t seem all that interested, and he wasn’t questioned. He slept some after that, trying to keep an eye open, and rode out on the Greyhound in the morning. It took little time to get to Canada and Vancouver, other than a wasted hour at the border.
The Canada customs people were interested in his cuts, his crooked nose and black eyes, but when a thorough search of his belongings and person turned up no drugs, the car-crash story seemed to satisfy them. The other people on the bus frowned at him when he got back on, annoyed at him for holding them up. He was too beat-up to care. One older guy turned around to display a disapproving scowl and MacSorely stifled his more violent impulse and just stared him down. Soon enough the sour face swiveled back toward the front of the bus.
He arrived in Vancouver, Shangri-la, ringed as it always is by water and snow-capped mountains, glad to be back in Canada with his battered face and broken heart. His big trip had come to nothing. Here he was: divorced, out of work, out of graduate school, no more fellowship, and nowhere to live. He had no money, no place to go and no way to get there. A woman he had fallen for was 2,800 miles west on an island, no doubt lying in the arms of that bare-assed piano player. The daughter he loved was 2,800 miles east, in the care of a woman hurt and angry enough to kill him.
He sat on a park bench by the ocean, smoking the last of his cigarettes, full of loathing for a life that had become aimless and worthless. In the fading late-day sun he waited for something to happen, smelling the salty air from the harbour. When it grew dark, he rolled out his sleeping bag and fell asleep trying to think of what he might do next. Nothing came to mind.
MacSorely woke just before dawn to find he had been robbed. His guitar was gone. His pack, with his clothes, his books, his journal and hand-written manuscript, and the last traveller’s cheque were gone. He was left with his sleeping bag, the clothes he had slept in, his boots, his wallet with no money, thirty-seven cents in his pocket, and the impending dawn.
The sun cleared the mountains and the eastern horizon of the city and shone into his unblinking eyes, warming his face. He breathed in. The air smelled of the sea: fish, salt, seaweed, water-logged wood, rotting something, birds, and the water itself. Life.