It is cold and has rained twelve days straight,
with more to come, 22 days of rain in 23
is what I will come to experience.
My hands have been so wet and cold
pushing the jogging stroller that I spent
the last forty kilometres pushing with one hand
while hammering the other against my thigh
to keep the circulation moving.
I am staying at a hotel, courtesy of a man
I have never met who has used his points
to help out a complete stranger along his unusual quest.
All of my kit is scattered around the room
in every nook and cranny drying. I have the
temperature pumped up to 26 degrees.
Still, I brave the cold downpour, walk into
Grand Falls looking for food and better gloves
than I have been wearing (there is a difference,
I learn, between ‘water proof’ and ‘water resistant’),
which I find at Canadian Tire, not just waterproof,
but acid-proof too. They aren’t the warmest gloves
for traveling in this weather, but they work fine
with cotton gloves as liners. When I return to the hotel,
I add my newly dampened clothes to those hanging
from the nooks and crannies and take a
thirty-minute shower under water as hot as I can stand.
In the morning after breakfast, I stand in the lobby,
staring out at yet another downpour. The young woman
behind the desk smiles at me in her east-coast manner.
I smile back, pull my hood over my head, and step into the rain.
