last summer

L had always wanted to go to the Thousand Islands.
F and I, we only needed a destination, a few days away from Montreal.

It was one in the morning.
F and I took turns to scan the stretch of road around the bus station for signs of our taxi.
L left his passport in his ghetto apartment.
He would be here in two hours.
The Kingston bus station consisted of a large concrete platform and a Tim Horton.
The other girl waiting for a taxi was buried under her bags. She travelled alone; she looked a little tense.

Twenty hours later.
I was peddling away in the dark on a deserted forest highway.
It wasn't exactly part of the plan.
The plan was to bike 30 km, from Gananoque, Ontario to Alexandria Bay in the state of New York,
where our lodging had been booked.
The path we choose looked lovely on the map, following a paved highway
that crossed several islands joined by the very scenic Thousand Islands Bridge.
The view from the bridge was breathtaking.
The only drawback: we couldn't really bike on the bridge,
we could barely move our bikes along the narrow footpath
that maintenance workers used to get around.
Struggling with blobs of spider web, I walked my bike over the bridge,
filled with a mixture of pain and awe.
Pain, because the railing of the footpath had sections of extrusions
which constantly bumped into my legs and hips,
leaving me with some major bruises.

By the time we trekked across the first of the two bridges, the sun had already descended into the river, burning the water red.

Let's go back to that deserted highway.

It is the old two-lane highway which got replaced by a parallel four-laner.
There are farmhouses scattered here and there,
but none of them looked inhabited that night.
Our only light source, a thin crescent moon, sometimes emerged from the clouds;
its milky light reflected off the white paint stripe that marked the highway well into the distance.

You know how every trip gets condensed into one defining moment, one scene that comes to mind every time you think of it?
Well, that was the scene for me.

The highway, the trees that melted into the night, the suggestion of presence of light and the occasional cluster of fireflies.

We could have continued all night.

Tracing the Appalachian Mountains, from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, all the way to Tennessee.