By Lucy

It’s probably a bit early to be writing a travel blog, but I have so much I can say and only so many times I can chat the ear off people at work, enamored with my tales as they are.

I’m in my 28^th year of walking this Earth, newly minted as Lucy. My hatred for my birth name has been long and slow burning, starting with every time I had to correct someone when spelling it. It was confirmed when I had to start using it on legal documents as an adult – half the time, even government websites reject the hyphen while insisting I write it “exactly as it is on my birth certificate”. Well, Mr Government, you can have one or the other, but not both. It also doesn’t help that it’s both my parents names put together, which is perhaps the most literally expression of naming a child, but I dislike the way it underlines my parents belief that I am merely the sum of their whole, as opposed to my own person.

This also led to an annoying vignette where Air Canada kept deleting my hyphen while I was trying to book my plane tickets, and demanded I write my name exactly as written on my passport.

Wanderjahre is a German phrase for when someone attained journeyman status and wandered around looking for work for a bit. It literally means “wandering years” and is the old-fashioned equivalent of a gap year. Which is not quite what I am doing, but it is short and snappy.

I’ve always had a wandering heart. People might ascribe it to the fact my parents took us on a few vacations, to far flung places in Europe as opposed to the stereotypical sunny beach resort, but I don’t see that as part of it. Firstly, because my parents made it quite clear me and my brother were only there on sufferance, although I’ll regale you with tales of my abusive childhood later. Secondly, because when you are so abused, anxiety is your only friend and routine is your ally. Waking up in a new place every day, unsure where you would be going or what you would do while there, what to eat, what the locals are speaking cuz you are a small child that speak only English… the list goes on. Needless to say, my childhood travels did not endear me to travelling.

No, I’ve always had the kernel buried deep within me. I think it was one of the things I was fascinated with about He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named – he seemed travelled and worldly. I look back now and I know that this was not the case. The summers we spent biking around town, him showing me new little places he found tucked away while entertaining me with tales of being a free-roam kid on the streets of Toronto, merely showed me how I might indulge something instinctive to me. At one point before I even met him, I packed up a suitcase, waited til midnight and walked an hour out to Younge street to catch the Go bus to Toronto. I was inspired by Journey’s song – “she took the midnight train going any way”. I waited maybe half an hour – ironically, having just missed the one bus, and not waited long enough for the next one – before I chickened out. I was thirteen. A cop drove by and expressed concern for me, but refused to drive me home and called me a cab instead. No one asked how old I was, and I was back in bed before two. My parents have never heard that story either.

By the time I was eighteen I had managed to save up nearly ten grand, pocketing all my allowance, money for birthdays and Christmases, and occasionally hustling at high school. My parents paid for a new, ten year passport – there was a plan for a vacation that never materialized. I had a guitar and a level of skill with it, and a plan to buy a plane ticket to Europe and busk my way across it after I graduated.

This didn’t come to fruition, and it’s hard to say whether I think it would have worked or not. Cancer had reared its ugly head, as expected, but even expected cancer is unwelcome. I went to college, but finished only one year before the combination of things forced me to drop out. I had abandoned my dreams of busking across Europe because the logical thing seemed to be staying here, tending to my ill health and building a future. I kicked the can down the road – once I had a good job and a house, I could go on nice, safe, middle-class vacations like my parents.

I refuse to say any of my decisions were particularly bad. Hindsight is 20/20. If the economy was good, if it wasn’t for the rapidly accelerating housing market and the cost of living crisis, my choices might have been perfectly adequate ones. Like most millennials, I realized too late that the way life had worked for the baby boomers was not going to work for me.

A few things changed in the last year. One was that I gave up waiting for He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, the smallest and most insignificant choice. I could always find a way to justify my plans to him, so he didn’t matter much, and he never made plans to keep me in his life anyhow.

The second was Rich, my new best friend and platonic life partner. He holds me to account better than anyone. He’s also made significant changes in his life this year, so it’s been an inspiration to be changing alongside someone, even if the changes we’re making aren’t the same. (I also started this blog partially so I wasn’t rambling at him every thought that crossed my mind, except I make him edit it anyway, so now he just gets a double dose of me. Hi Rich!)

The third was my new career as a trade union carpenter. I’d resisted for a long time, because I despise contract work. There’s only so much the extra pay gets you when you compare the weeks spent off work, looking for a new contract. I wanted millwright, because machines come easily to me and being in a shop would mean consistent hours. I took the leap, finally, because I wanted something different – because what I was doing wasn’t working.

The fourth, not the least, nor the biggest influence, is the Vagabond. My muse, and I’m sorely tempted to copy his style.

The carpenters union spans the continent. You get job calls in your local union, but some locals with not enough people for calls will post what we call “travel cards”. They pay for your hotel and food, called a live-out, in addition to your wage and the cost of travel.

To this day, I still don’t know why the Dryden job was thrown my way. They don’t usually post job calls in the Sisters in the Brotherhood group chat, and I’d never heard of travels cards before. Even once I had been convinced to apply, I figured they’d never call me.

Until they did.

I fell in love with Thunder Bay. I never wanted to stay in Barrie, although my original plan was to move to Toronto and be a fashion designer. I had some aspirations to move back to Nova Scotia – just to do something else, be anywhere else. I never wanted to live in the big city, although I have no love of the countryside or camping either. I had recently joined the Barrie Native Friendship Centre, being voted onto the Board of Directors (I have since resigned) and going to all the events. The Fort Williams First Nations is next to Thunder Bay and accounts for a quarter of the population. The Fort Williams Historical Park employs a full-time carpenter. Thunder Bay is the biggest city for an eight hour drive in any direction – everywhere in the middle of nowhere. One of my biggest complaints for Barrie is how often things end up being in Toronto because it’s ‘easier’.

I was falling back into old habits, and I might have settled back into my old patterns, when I met the Vagabond.

He only said it once or twice, but it echoes in my head. “Feeling ambitious, girl?” Even before the first day of work, he had me pegged. The easiest way to get me to do something is to double dog dare me I can’t – I’ll do it just to prove you wrong.

It wasn’t enough, to just move to Thunder Bay, get an apartment and wait around for jobs in town. The Thunder Bay local covers everything in Northern Ontario, from the Manitoba border in the west, to the Quebec border in the east, from White River all the way up. Northern Ontario is eight hundred million square kilometres and less than a million people. It’s mostly travel cards. I learned in Dryden, there’s a whole network of them, and you can make a living that way, travelling from job to job, living in hotels or renting rooms from the network of people who know what it’s like. When your friends can be reached in an instant on the internet, and Amazon offers free two-day shipping, what better time or place to be a nomad?

I went in all the way. I’ve been paring my stuff down to just what will fit in a 4 by 5 foot storage locker. I already sold a fair bit of my furniture before renting this room, so the bed’s not mine and the dresser’s not mine. I’ve got an address to put on my driver’s licence, the only requirement to transfer into the Thunder Bay local. I’ve got plane tickets booked for England in February, couch surfing across the UK, and next winter I plan to take six months to utilize the Working Holiday visa in New Zealand. Who knows where I’ll go after that?

So come with me on this unorthodox journey, and hopefully I’ll inspire at least one of you to live a little more adventurously.