Oh Canada or "Let's Get Out of this Country"

Day one, the planes.

The flight leaves at 7 AM. My roomate graciously offers to take me there, saving some cash and headache on the SkyRide. Parking in the garage for 7 days would feel like pissing money down the drain. I can't swing it anyway. So I arrive at DIA at approximately 5:20 or so, bleary eyed from the Devotchka show and not much sleep. I see my uncle and cousin getting their boarding passes at the counter and I head for a self-check kiosk. One swipe of the passport and a checked bag and I'm on my way. Naturally, I'm sure I've overpacked.

On the plane, I'm sitting pretty far back. We've got a hop to MN St.P and then on to Thunder Bay, Ontario. It's my first trip into Canada and I'm excited for a passport stamp. I made a goal last year of one new country every year and I hope to be able to keep that. Someday, all 7 continents will be under my belt, even though I have never been a world traveler until recent aspirations have taken over. This flight will be easy as I'll be asleep, and it is. The next one, however...

I see my father for the first time in over a year at the MN airport and I realize how much I've missed him. We've gotten a lot closer over the past year or two and he has been with me through very thick and very thin, always encouraging me along the way though we won't see eye to eye on religion or politics. 'I'm his son and I have my life to live' has been his philosophy and always with respect.

We get on a small commuter plane for the journey to CA and I keep feeling how lucky I am to be going. My father and some of the other men in the family have been doing this trip or one like it for years. I have never been able to go, until now.

Our seats are spread all over the plane but as we will be stuck with each other for the next 6 days in the middle of nowhere together, no one seems to mind. There will be plenty of time to catch up in the boats, with fishing poles and sunny days ahead. There's a heat wave on in Armstrong Canada, the mid 90's. They're miserable. Sounds like normal to me, without giant mosquitos of course. The seats are that smooth and inexpensiveleather, now worn with years of travel and the wear of skin-oils and counter-cleanser maintenance.

I gaze sleepily out the window when I look up from my Copper Nickel from time to time. I begin to see giant pillars of cloud float by. It occurs to me I won't be able to photograph them through this hazy airline plastic window. Perspective becomes important to note here as it's not the cloud-stalks moving, it's us. We shift it, we skew it, turn it on it's head in order to just realize and feel perspective. It's what we must do. Sometimes we have such a simple nature, it's impossible to resist exporting it on others.

Plumes of air, water and the eventual condensation pull upward like malformed bellows of the slow giants. I think I have seen something like this before, in the sky's opposite, the water. It reminds me of clouds of kale and pillars of seaweed, seemingly unanchored. Some appear fixed on the floor, mirrored in the lakes, floating at the great meniscus of air.

We glide past them, my perspective shifting back into the physical realm.