Overland 2: On the Road and Off My Rocker

My 1974 passport photo when my hair was beginning to grow out after I’d taken a scissors to my head in a friend’s bathroom hoping to look like Ziggy Stardust. When I emerged my friend said, “It’s probably not a good idea to cut your hair while high.” I laughed. But started growing out my hair.

The night before we left, I was too excited to sleep. I said goodbye to my parents in the driveway then Margaret’s parents drove us up to Winnipeg for a cheap direct flight. The four of us shared a hotel room near the airport.

I barely slept so boarded the plane exhausted.

The flight felt long and stuffy. I couldn’t sleep. Margaret’s meditation course changed locations before we left, so we spent a night in an all-women’s hostel in Lucerne, Switzerland. I stared at the ceiling. This was my first experience with jet lag and I had no idea what was happening. I once read that a common technique used in interrogations — and torture — is to disrupt the subject’s sleep. I’d gone three nights with virtually no sleep so by the time Margaret and I took a four-hour train ride and then a taxi to the the small town of Livigno in the Italian Alps for her school, I was entirely out of it. Had anyone asked, I would have confessed to being an alien spy from planet Mars seeking to snack upon human brains.

Fortunately, no one asked.

Turned out, there was no school. No classrooms. No dormitories. There was only a large hotel. This was where Margaret’s meditation course would take place. While she registered and checked in, I sat on the powder blue suitcase my parents won at the church bazaar, utterly exhausted.