On the Reef

The sky was one of those unreal shades of blue. It looked like a water colour, blurry and highlighted and the wisps of cloud tricked my eye into reversing its perspective and I imagined I was looking at a beach with waves endlessly seething over the tops of the trees. This was the park I'd been warned away from. "Too many bums.", said the man behind the counter at the train station. I had four hours to kill before the passenger train left for Ottawa and I didn't want to stray too far away. I put my bag into one the lockers that ran the length of the terminal and walked across High Street despite the ticket seller's warning. I guess he didn't consider me a bum and maybe I wasn't, in the truest sense of the word. I worked where I could and saved what I could, knowing that one day it would run out and I'd have to go home.
The town, at the time, was a curious mix of old and new. Parts of it were as dilapidated as a building can get before they'll condemn it but parts of it were under construction. There was work here but I was tired and the summer was coming to an end. I'd had a good run but the last two weeks had chewed through more money than I could justify.
"Some people will hide on the other side of the tracks and pick it up as it leaves town. Some go as far as Montreal." The man at the ticket counter had told me this while I made a show of my desperate finances.
"Oh yeah?", but I found the money and with apologies to Kerouac and whoever else might care I just couldn't see myself humping along side a freight train trying to throw a fifty pound pack onto a car and pulling myself up after it. The thought of getting caught somewhere along the line and getting turfed off didn't thrill me, either. This country is huge and I had no intention of walking the length of it. I could find work in Ottawa and the money would come with it.
This is where I have to tell you about a personal little philosophy of mine. It might help you understand why I never got on that train and why I haven't been home since.
I uses to think that the world was full of two types of people. That the future roared towards us all threatening either extinction or survival, depending on who you are. Some of us are built to ride the waves, surfing over the expanses that envelope people, commodities, technologies, civilizations, government and war, while others like to swim through the tide and feel the pull of all those things as they kick their legs, fighting for their lives, thrilled by, and afraid of, the undertow. I was thinking about that, looking up at the sky, in the park beside the train station, when a girl asked me for a cigarette. She was masked and incomplete but I heard the sound of the ocean in her voice and I asked myself whether I wanted to swim or if I wanted to surf. She lay down beside me on the grass, that day, and I haven't moved a muscle since. Tell me, what does that sound like to you? I guess I really can't tell, anymore. I guess I just don't care.