JULY 1 - CALGARY - 0 KM

I wake up to dishes clamouring in the kitchen. The air mattress next to mine is barren, the spare room door flung open. The sound of slippers on the carpet. It’s Ben, carrying coffee and creamers.

“You’re up early,” I grunt.

“Made breakfast.”

“You made me breakfast?”

In the kitchen is a platter of pancakes and a bowl of fresh fruit with toast and confitures.

“You know we’re not riding today?”

“Still, it’s a big day.”

“Stampede?”

“It's also Canada Day,” he says.

“Woah,” I pause. “That snuck up on me this year.”

“I love me a little Independence Day,” he says, passing the butter and syrup via Lazy Susan.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a shit friend at any point during this trip,” Ben says, mid-meal. “I know I’m capable of that.”

“Why the sudden need to apologize?”

“Who says it’s sudden?”

“Why the need then?”

“Why the trust issues, can’t I just apologize retrospectively?”

“Yeah, man.” I collect myself. “I guess I just don’t want to confront whether there’s anything I myself need to apologize for.”

I hit a cafe down the street. To clear my head. Canadian flags hang like blinds over the windows, snuff out the sun. In my journal, I write: One hundred kilometers on a bicycle is called a century; one kilometer is called an eternity. "Corny," I think to myself. "Get out of here with your corny ass." Then I cross it out.

A skinny middle-aged man enters the cafe. Immediately he starts making noise, hollering at someone behind the counter. I look up from the page: a t-shirt slings over his shoulder. He's wearing nothing but sandals and ripped jorts that ride up halfway between his knees and crotch. He skips up to the counter and scream-sings his order in a way that defies sobriety or sanity, making a spectacle of himself. The barista, unphased, asks him to wait his turn at the back of the line, and to put his shirt on. Inexplicably, he does both.

He queues while flailing his arms, shadowboxing something visible only to him. Prematurely, he shouts his order once or twice but returns to throwing quiet jabs and uppercuts when he realizes he isn’t yet at the counter. When he arrives at the front of the line, he sings his order—truly just belts it—but it's all seemingly nonsense. The whole cafe looks on, beholding while pretending not to. The man then climbs onto the counter, first by hoisting one knee atop it, then the next, until the barista shouts for him to get down. Inexplicably, he does.

Someone behind the counter hands him a cup of tap water, which he guzzles on the spot, then puts the empty cup back on the counter. Another gives him a cookie from the oven in the back. No money changes hands, no bank cards flashed over a reader. He skips back toward the exit, singing and screaming something unintelligible, spilling cookie crumbs along the way. Once outside, he squeezes himself out of his shirt and spins it overhead like a propeller, storming down the sidewalk, stumbling into pedestrians here and there. I worry he’ll touch my bike, locked to a rail, but he meanders off uninterested until he's out of sight.

The cafe carries on as normal. A mother spoonfeeds her newborn; an aproned man sweeps the floor. The hum of hurried life resumes, though maybe it never stopped. I pause, bewildered, then write: madness is vindicating, the absurd regenerative; their existence disproves the restraints to which we think we're bound. I exist in a free world, only because I share it with the insane. Given the possibility of insanity, I know I'm free, in knowing that there are choices that lie between me and the ends of my own mind. The world is freed by madness. Forget cops, forget the military; the world is free because of the crazy and the damned—

Then I turn the page. Realizing I forgot to post to Instagram this week, I post to Instagram, and forget about the passage I'd been writing.

Erin gets off work early. “I wish I could’ve finished the day,” she says, driving us to Stampede Park. “Not going to lie. I could’ve used that time and a half.”

She’s all decked out in her cowgirl getup; Ben and I both have our hats on, as prepared as we'll ever be. He, in the passenger seat, fumbles through Erin’s country music playlist on her phone while she searches for parking in a panorama of jacked up F-150s with truck boxes in their beds and disesel guzzling SUVs that hardly fit between the yellow lines. Since pulling out of the driveway we’ve heard a lifetime's worth, at minimum, of yee-haws and yah-hoos from wasted tailgaters and day drinkers rallying into the evening. I wonder, momentarily, who thought it'd be a good idea for us to come here. Then I get over myself. Whether this will be a worthwhile experience or purgatorial misery depends, mostly, on my willingness to commit to accepting rather than resisting it.

"My boyfriend calls this place cowboy comic con," Erin says. "Because there aren't any real cowboys here, at least not anywhere in the grandstand. It's basically, like, a cosplay festival for rednecks and oil riggers and rodeo roleplayers."

"Hold up, you've got a boyfriend?" I laugh, incredulously.

"Well," she sighs. "It's pretty much, like, transitional at this point."

"What's that mean?" Ben says.

"It means he's moving out, soon."

"Soon?"

"Do you think I can fit in that parking space?" she asks.

"Wait, what do you mean soon?"

"Like, he's already moved back into his mom's place—wait, did I say boyfriend? I meant ex. Like, we're not together anymore, basically."

"Must've been a recent thing then?"

"Oh my God," she yelps. "A parking spot right by the gate? Talk about getting lucky."

Before the chuckwagon races, I queue for a bucket of mini donuts at concessions.

Mid-order, everything pauses for the playing of Oh Canada over the loudspeaker. Everyone stops; fountain pops fizzle half-filled, freshly scooped popcorn bags sit idle on shelves. I'm not sure if it's some Canada Day stunt, why everyone stops and holds their heart, or if it's just what goes on here, multiple times daily, for as long as this thing goes on. I search for something to look at while the anthem plays, something material to which I can affix my attention. That's when it really hits: my gut, below, protrudes further than I've ever seen it.  I've accomplished the incredible feat of riding a bicycle thirty-five hundred kilometers while somehow gaining weight. I take my donut bucket and beer from the vendor's hands when the anthem is finished. I can feel the warmth of the cake through the plastic, the chill of the beer through the aluminum, my fingers wetting from the condensation. A starting pistol fires, and I smile.

On our way out, two plastered men fistfight while waiting for brisket. They take it to the floor and wrestle in mutual headlocks until four cops separate them. Huge cheers from the crowd turn to boos as the police escort them out. A circle of phones overwatch, bathing the men in the glow of camera flashes held illuminated. The scene smells of bacon grease and deep fryers and mulch and horse stables. A Nickelback song plays from overhead speakers as we push through the crowd, becoming increasingly innavigable around beer garden entrances and midway games and food stalls advertising kettle corn and funnel cakes and chocolate squid and cheese fries. At least two pools of spilled vomit are stepped in before we're finally out.

Behind our car we find a woman, blackout, popping a squat, emptying her bladder. When she sees us, she zips up and stumbles back to her friends eight or ten cars over. Ben sends me a look that says, "Never again."

Ben's on his phone while we sit in bottlenecked parking lot traffic and Erin makes small talk I'm not drunk enough to maintain. No more country music on the aux, just the absonant noise of engines and crowds dispersing. She turns on the radio: an animal right's activist talks about how two thoroughbreds were euthanized after the morning’s rodeo. As we pull out of the lot I watch a teenage girl run full speed out of the park exit clutching a giant stuffy to her chest, followed by three sweaty carnival game operators trying to catch her. The only stampede I'll ever care to see.

Erin is first to bed, then Ben. I sneak off to the balcony for a cigarette, searching again for mountains under a waning crescent moon. Then a firework screams into the sky, bursting red, lighting the horizon a brighter shade of black. Lights and colours multiply. Explosions echo between homes and sloping hillsides. Then they distill: mountains on the horizon, arching like a crown on the skull of the earth.

All these sights, these sounds, those bright and icy peaks in the distance, these hopes for what they mean, stand between myself and a dreadful silence. The moment that I step into this silence, it will mean that the road has finally ended.


          JULY 2 - CANMORE - 94 KM