Pearls from Sand

Charles and Winter and I stood, an uncertain heap of travelers, on a sidewalk in an Edmonton housing development. Thunder mumbled overhead, and it began to rain. We were a twenty-minute drive from the airport and another twenty from the heart of the city. In brief, we were nowhere that counted.

“I don’t see the car,” Charles said, setting down the overweight suitcase. Our Uber ride purred off.

“It might be somewhere,” I said, meaning to be hopeful and only succeeding in being obvious. Of course, it was somewhere. If it was not in the immediate vicinity, however, it was of no use to us. Charles had rented a car on Turo, a car-sharing app, weeks before our trip to the western provinces, and this was the address where we were supposed to collect it.

Said car never materialized. The house was locked with the drapes drawn, and the owner did not answer his phone. The Turo help-line did answer but proved unresourceful. Turo was equipped with concerned phrases and refunds; the only thing they did not have was an alternative ride for us. 

I fed Winter snacks and tried to prevent her trespassing more than was necessary while staying small and quiet on the porch steps. When a husband is stressed and trying to make emergency arrangements, wifely laments, vaporings, and suggestions are less than a contribution. I guessed this and tried not to feel sorry for the harried agent on the phone with Charles. Charles, aggrieved, was expressing himself in exact and plain words.

There were no more rentals available at any company. Charles arranged for another Uber ride, and we trekked into Edmonton to eat sushi. The sushi was good although Edmonton itself proved a disappointment. I had persuaded myself that it would fill me with its distinctly northern atmosphere. Instead, it merely felt suburban.

Reciting the details of our search for a rental car would be tedious and hard on the blood pressure. Suffice it to say that a day later (a day we had planned to spend reveling in the Rocky Mountains) after multiple reservations canceling, no rental availabilities anywhere, Charles’s account getting flagged, phone numbers not working, and aimless wandering in the massive Edmonton mall, we were limp with frustration and still stranded. In the first hour of no rental car, Charles had expressed his disapproval of the situation in forthright terms, but as the search progressed in complications, he grew calm and fatalistic. I knew things were desperate.

Why do I like traveling? I asked myself. I could taste the stress, and I had recurring, vague flashbacks to a dozen other travel snarls in my past. This one felt different. This time I was not on my own in a foreign country. Now I had a husband to figure things out, but the flavor was the same.

Charles contacted a friend who used to live in Alberta. She connected us with her sister and brother-in-law whom we knew slightly. These people promptly volunteered a spare vehicle that they owned, explaining that they could load it onto a trailer and deliver it to our hotel. We hated to bother anyone, but resources were failing us so rapidly that we were ready to do something extreme.

Relieved beyond words, we accepted the offer and set our minds to enjoy the mall. We were sitting on a bench eating cotton candy rodents when the driver called us to let us know that he was on the road with our vehicle in tow and would be there in five hours.

Five hours! Horrified, we stared at each other. We had understood that the vehicle was coming from an hour and a half away which I had thought was plenty far enough to make anyone drive on Sunday afternoon. Now someone who barely knew us was making a ten-hour round-trip to lend us a vehicle.

Finally, Charles shrugged. “He’s on his way. We can’t stop him now.”

There was nothing to do except swallow our pride and accept the favor. This was aided by the knowledge that we had no other options, but we felt sick, nonetheless, and even a little sicker because we were glad it was too late to turn him around.

The next morning, we rose at four-thirty, aching to be on our way. The sun climbed the sky behind, and the foothills ahead swarmed up to meet us. Our own car! The freedom of it made us merry. I didn’t even read, gazing about instead and drinking in the rolling landscape. It was less than remarkable, but I was eager to be impressed. Within a few hours, the first of the mountains expanded up into our horizon, and we were in ecstasies.

Charles received a voicemail from one of the rental agencies that afternoon. A car was available, had been available since three o’clock the previous afternoon. This was about the time that our friend had started on his way to deliver the vehicle we were now driving. We had not been notified.

For the next half-hour, Charles was speechless with disgust, and I had plenty of time to think it all over. It was tempting to assume we had escaped calamity by not being able to travel the previous day. I could hear my mom saying, “Well, God must not have wanted you to be on the road that day.”

Perhaps we would have been eaten by grizzlies or trapped in a wildfire. Maybe we would have perished in a car crash, and God in his mercy had prevented us from attending our own demise. This is the popular assumption under such circumstances, I understand.

Believing as we do in an all-wise Providence, it is so comfortable when we can ascribe all our trials to some ultimate salvation from an unperceived danger. If not that, perhaps there was some timely lesson that God wanted us to learn. A lesson is second best to miraculous preservation but still tenable. Faith is worthwhile with proceeds like this.

 With no forthcoming evidence to support these ideas, this was not a working theory. I was forced to conclude that the rental car tangle happened because of untrustworthy people, mismanagement, lack of deliverance on promises and advertising, plus a general disregard for tourists who trusted the system. As a result, we could not maintain our schedule, were deprived of the vehicle we had chosen, and had to spend a little more money than we had planned.

“Man,” Charles said, still ruminating, “You’d think we were in a third world country.”

“No,” I considered. “In a third world country, we would at least have the option of bribery.”

In North America when the system fails, we have no back-up because the system is everything. It provides for us. It offers us deals and comfort. It is our security. It is god.

We are, however, denied recourse to dishonesty. Dishonesty has no place in our system, and we can only fix the system with another system. When that fails, it’s the apocalypse all over before.

Well, well. We were allowed to resolve our third world country-like issues with a third world country-like solution­. Hospitality and overwhelming favors from strangers came to the rescue. I punched down my western pride once again and accepted the humbling fact of a magnificent gift from someone from whom I had no reason to expect it. That’s my religion and the source of my faith.

Deeply grateful once again for our lovely, borrowed Suburban, I snuggled into my seat and hugged my legs. By now, the mountains were growing more and more difficult to distinguish through the white glare of the smoky skies. They were as Moses with a veil over his face. We saw through a glass darkly, trusting that there was glory to be revealed, but it wasn’t revealed. I tried not to think about what we were missing.

Why do I like traveling? I asked myself again.

The west was undergoing a heat wave. The thermometer in the car climbed and climbed, and the aqua river streaming beside the road was profoundly beautiful. We stopped for a break. While I disposed of trash and performed other house-keeping rites of travel, Charles took Winter down to play in the water. I joined them a few minutes later, and, discovering that Winter was already damp and sandy, I poked a toe into the water. It was glacial in temperature.

Not choosing to wade, I settled down on a rock to monitor Winter’s activities. She did not mind the cold water at all. At home, we can barely coax her into deeper water at the lakes we swim in. A dangerously swift river of arctic temperature was apparently much more attractive. She tripped on a rock and tumbled head-first into the current. We snatched her out. She came up gasping, hair streaming in rivulets of water down her cheeks, and desired more.

Why do I like traveling?

I crave the struggle of it.

Travel is a metaphor of broader life. I hereby make it one. Travel reduces you to the essentials: the next meal, a place to sleep, lugging belongings about that you cannot do without, the way through this maze of unfamiliar routes, transportation cattywampuses, watching the money slip through your fingers in heart-stopping amounts. If one thing goes wrong, you can be catapulted into a crisis in a moment.

If you boil travel down to what it really is, you find a surprising amount of discomfort and inconvenience. (I do differentiate between travel and luxury vacations.) I have the Asian subcontinent to thank for breaking me in, but even in North America, the most padded passenger seat becomes a drag after a few hours. The people that truly love to trek about this world are those who have somehow accepted the fact that travel is mostly miserable and know that the fun of it is in the challenge.

For me, traveling is a concerted effort directed at achieving what often turns into an underwhelming experience of more of the same old world. All of this I embrace for the delight of the occasional unexpected discovery and the calm pleasure of encountering a part of the world that is home to somebody else. I learn so much about myself in the concentrated drama of travel that can be lost in the slower undulations of life at home.

Why do I like traveling?

Hold on. This is going to be good. 

It’s all about the journey.

We corralled our dripping child and marched her to the car for ministrations. I brushed some of the sand out of her creases, dressed her in dry clothes, and hoped the remaining sand would be formed about with pearls. She did not appear to mind.

Lest there be confusion…

We had a lovely trip. The rest of it went flawlessly. We visited an older couple that Charles grew up knowing, as well as his cousin and her family. At both homes, we were overwhelmed with hospitality and the making of good memories.

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What a happy family were we.