My passport picture at twenty three, taken just before I left school forever.
I knew I wasn’t the half-dazed, feather in the wind airhead she was. I was unusually meek and circumspect and slow to come to any life-changing decision, prone to pondering all sides, which my mind, supremely rich in examples, would list in columns of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’. It was the Socratic method, which I applied to the smallest decisions. But such a tidal wave of consonant feelings and resolves, so numerous and swift, carried me away. I was one hundred percent committed in an instant and showed it with pure enthusiasm and joy.
I forget whether we clasped hands or hugged but the three of us, strangers moments before, were a solid trio and our trip together was a certainty. The emotions of this sudden partnership kept us talking excitedly for several more hours. We each explained, in the most intimate details of our private affairs, exactly what we had to do before we could leave, even down to the money we could each collect to take on the trip. I told them I’d have to speak to all my professors, tell them I was quitting school, my reasons why, say goodbye to my grandparents, make a quick trip back to Niagara Falls to drop off books and collect a few things and most important, wait another ten days till the end of the month for my next bursary check, some seven hundred dollars, and cash it, or rather steal it, for this next chapter of life.
Deirdre was also waiting on some severance check from the post office and said it would take her two weeks just to pack a backpack, give away her other clothes or find a friend to store them and empty her apartment. Barbara was ready to go, sick of living with her mother all her life. She only had to buy a backpack and fill it (as we assumed we’d all be hitchhiking). She could be ready in two days but promised to help Deirdre in her spare time and also check out ways to get out West through car dealerships. It was mid-afternoon when we parted. I’d forgotten about my classes that day. They were meaningless now. Barbara and I left, promising to phone Deirdre the next morning and every day after and meet that weekend. We strolled out hand in hand. I promised to take Barbara to lunch.
Barbara even stayed over that night at my new place, all excited, to sleep with me on the same, strange conditions as before, pants on, shirt off. I started wondering if she had a crush on me, as a second night like that was uncalled for, except she said we should talk to Deirdre together, first thing next morning. We squeezed into my single bed, turned out the lights and talked for hours, imagining what our new life would be like. Sometimes we punctuated our talk with hugs when anything sweet was said. It slowly dawned on me that she was insecure, or at least nervous, the only one of us without a destination, leaving her home nest for the first time and out into the wide, wild unknown world. This is why she slept with me, for reassurance, which I gave her in every way I could think of, telling her she could stay with me in Berkeley where I had dozens of friends and would introduce her to every one of them till she found someone or some lifestyle that suited her. The ironic, or perhaps prophetic thing was that I did hook her up with a college friend, well before we reached Berkeley, by the strangest string of mishaps, detours and unexpected coincidences imaginable.
Our conversation lasted hours, well past midnight. It was long and quiet in that thin walled room, our faces only inches apart. But it faded even more, to whispers as we grew tired, then a few more hugs, wordless conversation, then sleep, in that single bed. Perhaps it was just the excitement of our fast-approaching adventure, and the pills, as we split one in half and tried it that day, after lunch, to see what it did. Over the next two weeks and many visits our plans congealed. We looked in a university gazette and found a fourth partner, another male student wanting to go West and a car rental dealership that had a vehicle it needed in Vancouver. The date was set. ‘Iacta est alea’. The dice were cast.
I paid one last visit to my Grandparents, (eheu, the last in every sense). I explained to them in detail all my reasonings for this move, for quitting school. They listened carefully, gracefully, and at the end my Grandfather gave me his blessing and a ‘good luck’, a parting I shall never forget, his last, elegant words to me. He never had the education or book learning I was lucky to acquire, but as a human being he had a noble intelligence and sterling common sense, so much so, even my father always listened to him with deep respect.
While at the University of Toronto, I was spending a great deal of time in that tall, ugly, library, (the Robarts) and reading widely, about eight hours a day, as I had no friends, no social life or coffee shops like the ones in Berkeley, where reading books and studying new subjects, either for a degree or for yourself was a pleasure. Most of the books I read during those five months were beyond the purview of my courses. I’d recently read that David Rhunken’s Latin prose was some of the best, so I read his life of Hemsterhuis and his essay ‘De Doctore Umbratico’ (the scholar in the shade, i.e. academic bowers). In this work he tells us that whatever is valuable in books must be relevant and applicable to the wider world, that books written about books about other books are pedantic garbage and the men who devote their lives to such study live wasted and deformed lives. The core worth of the best classics, besides their sheer beauty, is that they are an enchiridion (a hand held knife in Greek) to life, a mirror and a guide. That’s not at all the way the classics were being presented or treated in my classrooms.
They were grist for dissection and the subject of lengthy, trivial commentaries which were supposed to be the product of my studies as a graduate student, articles for glossy university publications which were supposed to reflect the steady advance of knowledge down to the tiniest details, and prove the relevance, the significance, the intrinsic worth of these institutions and justify their continued endorsements. But these scholastic journals, to me and most others, except for a few specialists and contributors, were the most unreadable abortions published, such trivialities, technicalities and the English language mangled to express such trash. ‘How many times did Shakespeare use the word ‘why’ and did it increase or decrease in his later plays’? would be a fair example, translated to the text of Euripides.
By coincidence I was just starting my course on the Latin novelists. We sat at a small table a few hours a week and I would translate for him passages out of Apuleius or Petronius and listen to his comments, or ask questions, informally. I remember he burst into tears the day I told him I was going to quit the university, as if I were the last star in his long teaching career. But we’d been reading Petronius and I came across this beautiful poem:
Linque tuas sedes alienaque litora quaere
O iuvenis. Maior rerum tibi nascitur ordo.
Ne succumbe malis. Te noverit ultimus Hister,
Te Boreus gelidus securaque regna Canopi,
Quique renascentem Phoebum cernuntque cadent
Maior in externas fit qui descendit harenas.
Translated:
Leave your home and seek out foreign shores
Young man. A new order of things will be shown to you.
Don’t give in to hardships. The farthest reaches of the
Danube shall know thee,
The frozen North, and the secure realms of Egypt,
The far East where the sun rises, and the West where it sets.
He becomes a greater man who sets his foot on foreign shores.
This was my clarion call. I fit as many books as I could (all little pocketbooks, about twenty I think) and a few clothes into my backpack, and with eight hundred dollars in my pocket I set out and traveled four thousand miles in the next two weeks, to Vancouver then south to Berkeley. My bohemian days had begun.
From the beginning of that year (1977) I began to let my hair grow long. It was now shoulder length, straight, brown, and very fine. For a coat I wore a silvery gray, formal hip length jacket with a soft exterior like felt. It had lapels and had been tailored to fit me. My father got it for me for some dressy occasion, but now I was wearing it every day and it was getting a bit worn. What I liked about it was that it had two wide, deep inside pockets in the liner and two more outside so that it could conveniently hold four duodecimo-sized books, which it almost always did.
A pair of blue jeans and sneakers invariably completed my outfit. In retrospect I must have looked like some character from an early Bob Dylan song. But I didn’t feel or think of myself as odd at the time. I was just another poet/ intellectual/ bohemian and Berkeley was my proper destination.
