Where do you live?

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Owen and I rushed across north America, from Montreal to Canmore, to make it to an all-staff meeting at his new job. I being the most curious person ever to ask all the wrong questions did not realize that getting here on Monday the 25th would mean that even if we immediately found an apartment we probably would not be able to move in until the 1st of June.

"Holy crap," I thought to myself, "where the hell are we going to live until then?"

For Owen there was an easy answer to this question: We would live in a tent in a campground.

For me there was an answer which was equally as simple: We were going to be homeless.

Camping and homelessness share many qualities but the main difference is that when you are camping you have a cook stove or firewood and all of your possessions are not filling a Subaru Forester like a 3-D Jenga game. We looked like gypsies. The car was full to the gills and there were two bikes heaped on the roof. If we slammed on the breaks, or were in an accident, we would be buried in an avalanche and it would take some equivalent of the jaws of life to liberate us. Maybe my sister's husband Byron could just stand on the pile of wreckage and have an auction. It would look like a garage-sale got hit by bomb.

Homelessness has always been one of those things that while being a reality is what happens to other people. Poor people. Drug addicts and old hookers. We were pretty and young (well Owen is young, I'm youngish.) How did I suddenly find myself with no address?

I went swimming at the hot spring on Sulphur Mountain yesterday (after climbing Sulphur Mountain). There was this little boy I dubbed Splasher. He was shy and kind of nerdy but he we hit it off. When Owen and I were changing I was walking around the locker room looking for a swimsuit spinner. Splasher was walking out with his dad and the little man asked me where I lived. Hell. How to answer that? Could I say KC, MO? It might sound sound foreign and sort of cool but I definitely didn't live there anymore. Should I say Montreal where a lot of my stuff is but where I've only ever spent about 4 or 5 weeks? Should I say Canmore where my socks and underwear are but where I literally live in a tent by the river and have no address, no shower and running water?

Where do I live? Such a simple question--until I thought about it. When you're having an adventure where do you live? Where do you live when you're out living?

For the last 8 years I have known where I lived. I lived in Kansas City. I knew that. I wasn't particularly happy and was desperate for an adventure but I knew exactly where I lived. Then I moved to Montreal and for a few days I lived there. I could prove it. I had possession there and an address and a few friends who could vouch for me. Then I got in the car with a bright-eyed art-lover who radiates with youth and freedom and I drove across North America to a beautiful mountain town where I have no visa, no job and no address other then, "the green tent beside the Bow River."

So standing there wearing only a green towel I had not felt particularly exposed until a wee man in a stripped oxford and tiny little khaki pants asked me where I lived. Clayton? Auckland? Lawrence? San Diego? Kansas City? Montreal?

"I live in Canmore, Alberta," I said.

"Oh, that's where I'm staying. I have to be there at 9, that's when I go to bed."

Genius, little boy, genius. When did the verb 'to live' get an address? This might be why so many of us are unhappy...why I was unhappy...Confined...Boxed in.

We don't need to be addressed and localized. People are nomadic to their very core historically and maybe genetically. We need to start asking, "where do you stay?" When the droll exposition of conversation with new friends starts we should say where we stay and then tell them how we live.

Since I left Kansas City I've stayed on Lake Huron, Lake Superior, Indian Wells and Canmore in the Rockies. Since I left Kansas City I've really felt like I'm living and I since I met Splasher I don't feel homeless anymore.

I stay in Canmore. It's kind of odd and counter intuitive but I don't have an address and I absolutely feel like I'm at home.