A2 - Sunday, April 18, 1982 - North Shore News

Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

RESTLESSNESS. What causes it? Is there a cure?

It strikes me that the
single most expensive illness
around is the itchy foot.

For openers — let’s not
get too profound too quickly
— the entire travel industry
depends for its daily bread
on the impulse to set out for
the next bend in_ the
stratosphere.

If people weren't
naturally restless, travel
agents would never have
evolved. And that would be
a shame, folks in the travel
business

just

being as = mar-

vellously idiosyncratic as
they are.

Of course, without

wanderlust, there would be
no human history as we
know it. History is but the
record of a fantastic mass
odyssey out of the mist into
an unseeable future.

A lot has been whiten

about the “invisible hand”
which was once believed to
Steer the free market
economy, but it is the “in-
visible foot,” if you ask me,
that truly determines our
fate.

Look at our language. It
can't be an accident that so
many of our strongest, most
Stirring phrases relate to the
sole and its cravings.

To make a pilgrimage. To
crusade. To march to the
beat of a different drummer.
To hear that lonesome
whistle blowin’. To be next
of kin to the wayward wind.

I can remember being so
small I could hardly walk,
but the wail of a steam loco-
motive out there running
across the Praine under the
moon was enough to make
me start climbing walls, so
badly did 1 want to gel going.

An expensive disease

It created what seemed
like an actual physical ache,
a longing to be wild and free
and all of that. But of course
we grow out of these in-
fantile stirrings, don’t we?

I keep waiting.

When I was a teenager, it
seemed every ballad singer
around knew exactly how to
coax that longing to hit the
road into a fire that blinded
me to the calculations in the
textbook in front of me.

Like every other male
child in North America, if
not the entire world, |
always wanted to be a cow-
boy. The quintessence of
cowboyhood was that you

got to drift.

And then, in the late
Fifties, Jack Kerouac’s
eopochal book, On The

Road, appeared, and that
became the mythology of my
generation. You had to get
out there and start moving

Boating tragedy
claims N. Van trio

TWO YOUNG North
Vancouver men missing
since Good Friday when the
boat they were in with four
other local fnends capsized
at Ruby Lake. near Pender
Harbor, are now presumed
dead

A search coordinated
under the joint direction of
Squamish RCMP and _ the
local coroner failed to locate
either Glen Allan Scholes,
aged 19. of Todd Michael
Riesco, 18

The body of 19 year old
Mary Anne Yzerman had
been found within about 200
feet of the shoreline

The three other people
who had been in the 1? ft
runner boat bernie Morton
Karen Ritchie and Marae
IS and of

were all
Mary's Hospital
suffering

Almas all aged
North Vancouver
taken to St
Scchelt

hypothermia

from
and were later
tcleascd

farsd out for yourself tot
as litte as 20 Conts

Buy @ used book and
anyoy bowes of
ontertanuneont

Weo have the largontl

sere fon Of uso art
Docks or fhe Nott: Soto

Pacific Books
1135 Lonedate
North Vancouver

960-2121

An RCMP spokesman told
the News the search had
been hampered by the depth
of the lake, estimated at at
least 200 feet, and that the
boat the six were in could
not be found either

The fmends had gone to

Stay in a cabin owned by one
of their parents They had
boated a couple of miles
across the lake to attend a
party being held on the
opposite shore and were
making their way back when
the boat sank some
after 11pm

ume

Pitch-In’S2

May 10-16, 1982

Da ee en
Rn a

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COUVEE
WY TE ce ee wm te fe
vecth Tae te apy
sth g er Fea bb ee ered bead ote ow
bora coat ad bem Mpg
peo ds

OMY TAO or
669 GOO pager 24

oozan/ide

realty coor

ae
oo. Aunique expericnce
in waterfront Hving

shelter
sound dovesonentin 300 acres of land
only 400 dinutes from downtown Van-

nt bet

Feary
of oth ott Phar se SPae re Ba

call Joy Anne Mar Kensie

an outstanding tax
and a

Vacpre bervwe Pod Lae
eoow teh. beet - tune

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Yn

and be.

It seems so quaint now —
wanting to be. But it was a
buzzword among my peers,
summing up some blend of
Zen and existentialism
(whatever either one of
those meant). One of the
ways to be was to get out
there On The Road.

In fact, Jack Kerouac
turned out to be the
chronicler of an era that was
almost over, not the apostle
of the hippie age, as he is
often taken for.

His was the literary task of
recording the final stage of
human wandering before the
advent of the awesome mass
planetary transportation

system we so casually refer- |

to as jet travel.

I'm not exaggerating the
scale of the change that has
occured.

I do a fair amount of
travelling — England twice
last year, Southeast Asia,
The Bahamas — which is
probably more mileage than
Kerouac logged in his entire
career.

The point is, world
poverty and near-Depression
aside, there are now millions
of human beings winging
around the planet at any
given moment, as if a hive of
mechanical bees had been
surred.

I guess this is humankind’s
response to the eternal
problem of the itchy foot.
Hop a jet. See the universe
in ten minutes. Get home
fast.

What has been eliminated
is 99.9 per cent of the angst
of getting from A to B, which
used to be the essence of a
journey. I suppose there’s a
loss there. Maybe Kerouac

wouldn't

Riter.
It's lonely out there on the

Stratospheric Trail but I can

approve. Or Tex

hear those Pratt and
Whitney turbofan engines a-
blowin’. Hit me one more
time.

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Patios and pools etc.

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We can refer you to many jobs done by us on the
North Shore

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Telephone: 434-5927
or 253-8866

by

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FOR THE FINAL TOUCH
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call 987-2966

1374 Marine Drive North Vancouver

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