Oui Oui, C'est le Vie, Dans Le "Mont Royale"

From Union Station in downtown Toronto, we took a GO train to Oshawa. Just before boarding our train with her, Al's Katimavik patch initiated a conversation with a girl who used to be a transient traveler. She told us a few of her stories, and talked about some others in GTA who had built a dual-story house out of old pallets as means of squatting. The more I hear of these people, the more I'm drawn to their kind.

After we got off the train, the girl convinced her brother and mother to let us ride with them to the next onramp to the 401. They dropped us off at what seemed a really nice spot. We signed and non-signed for about 2 hours, trying to withstand the rain in hopes that people would be more likely to stop. A cop stopped at one point, and told us we had to relocated to the other side of a fence about 4 meters away if we were to hitch, and then drove off. Still, no luck, and yet, more rain. We decided to walk a few blocks to a pedestrians tunnel beneath a bridge, and stayed there for 2 hours. I sat on the walk and read while my clothing sat on a laundry line I had tied up nearby. After it stopped raining, we went back to the onramp.

Within the hour, another cop had stopped and offered us a ride to the next truckstop East. This was great. Cop's in the US, we would later find out, don't do this for hitchers. They hassle them and threaten them with arrests, etc. From the truckstop, we had only to start markering up a new sign when two women asked us if we wanted a ride. They were a fairly butch lesbo couple, each in their own truck, hauling some scrap aluminum flooring which they had planned to reweld their trailer floor with. Wow...talk about manly women. They were headed further than what we needed, and were going through Belleville anyway, so we got a ride right into town where we intended to be.

Al ate at Denny's while I assembled some cold hotdogs from my backpack. It got dark quickly, so we made our way down to the trainyard. We tried to catch some shut-eye, but without mosquito spray, it was pretty impossible to do anything but swat around all night. It was pretty intense. We waited from 1pm til around 2 am, and then our train pulled in from the West. We boarded the adjacent decks of 2 loaded 53s, and began crawling out East in 10 minutes. The ride was rough, as it always is, but with earplugs in, I was able to catch about 15 minutes of sleep at one point. In 6 hours, just after it had begun to get light, we began to pull into Montreal operating yards. We threw off our packs and then jumped off in transit in what must have been the middle of the intermodal yard, and waited in the ditch for some yardies and a bull to pass, then tore accross 3 or 4 tracks towards the highway.

We were bushed, but after eating my powdered Pop Tarts and finishing off my hotdogs, we continue down the highway into Montreal. It took us about 2 hours to walk into town, where we navigated our way into the downtown via transit. I called up a friend to let him know we were in town, and headed to his place, where we would crash for 2 days. We did some shopping and laundry and caught up on sleep. On our second day, we met up with Al's friend for some a beer and some ultra-fresh sesame bagels in the depths of Mont Royale park. It's a city park where people actually love to go on Friday nights and Saturdays, and they have drum circles, etc, etc, and it's generally more successful than many city parks. He also took us to an outdoor produce market near where we were staying, in order to dumpster some stuff. I found some tomatoes, two green peppers (which our host used in his spaghetti), and a perfectly good cantelope (with a thumb side nick in it's side) that was the sweetest I've ever tasted. Before heading home, we stopped in at some restaurant I can't remember the name of for a poutine (my Montreal mecca). We returned home for a low-key evening of planning our next move en route to Cornerstone in Illinois.

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