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AS THE TRAIN left the Bronx northward on the bridge over Pelham Bay, I peered out the window on my right. I got a glimpse of the most rural landscape I had seen in several years. If I’d been looking in the opposite direction, I would have still seen the signs of the city, urban landscape and tall buildings jutting upwards.
New York has plenty of green spaces and beautiful landscapes. But there was a greater sense of an open landscape here that I reveled in as we began the journey out of the city and the rural landscape of New York State began to reveal itself. Prior to moving to Manhattan more than ten years ago, I’d lived in a small town in Ontario, Canada. My back yard had been wilderness. And, as the greener, more rural landscape rolled past, I felt an odd sense of comfort, despite the anxiety that compelled me to be on this trip.
I had to get to Gail. She needed a friend now more than ever.
A flight to Burlington, Vermont, would have been about an hour. But I couldn’t do that. I became a permanent resident of the US more than six years ago and am a fully-fledged dual US and Canadian citizen. But I had let my passports expire, and, living in a city with a world-class public transit system and more taxis than you can shake a stick at, I had never bothered to get a driver’s licence for the State of New York. I couldn’t even imagine trying to learn how to drive in a big city like that. I hadn’t been much of a driver before, either, apart from the occasional tractor, quad or snow machine in the rural north.
With a quick call to Mack, my literary agent, I’m sure there would have been a way to fly, even with an expired ID. But I was still behind on my latest deadline, and wasn’t about to reach out to him and provoke his wraith.
So I purchased the train ticket.
The Vermonter train left Pennsylvania Station at 11:30 a.m. and performed nineteen stops on its way to Essex, Vermont, in just under nine hours. From there, I’d take a transfer to an Amtrak bound for Burlington, where Gail’s uncle was in the hospital.
The only clincher in this plan was the fact that the train arrived in Essex Junction at 8:18 p.m. And, according to a quick Google search, sunset in that county in Vermont would take place at 8:17 p.m. during a full moon. Which meant my transformation into wolf form would be happening as we pulled into our last stop. And I had no plan for how to handle that.
So, I did what I often do. I acted first, determined that I would figure something out along the way.
It’s how I ended up in New York, after all. Hitchhiking into the city with a dream of fulfilling my dream of being a writer.
Yep, I often acted the way that I wrote. A man with a basic plan or idea; a rough outline, and the belief that I’d figure it out somewhere along the way.
It seemed to work out okay for my novels.
And, so far, it served me well on the life journey.
So I wasn’t as nervous as I likely should have been.
After all, I had eight hours to figure it all out.
As I returned to gazing out the window at the landscape, I kept experiencing fleeting memories of the night before as experienced by the wolf-part of my mind.
Running through the underbrush of the forest-laden hills of Central Park, and the accompanying sense of pure unadulterated joy.
The satisfaction of quenching a deep thirst by lapping at the cool water at the edge of a lake.
Pausing to sniff the air, aware of the nearby sound of a human shuffling slowly down a trail just a few yards away, and, at the same time, the wail of a siren echoing from somewhere behind the safety of the park.
Clips and short memories of various moments are pretty typical of most of my nights as a wolf. I have often wondered if my wolf form has visions of the things I have done during the previous day, or any idea that it has another form as a human.
The retrospective clips of the night before were interspersed with flashes of the memory of Gail’s cool-green eyes staring back into mine on the night of our first date, of the intensity of her passion in those same eyes when we were in the clenches of making love.
Similar to the fleeting glimpses of my experiences as a wolf, those special memories of moments with Gail were distant, and further muted over time.
Both were similar in their almost dream-like existence.
Before leaving, I had tried to call Gail several times. It kept going straight to her voice mail, which suggested that her phone was still dead. I left a couple of messages. One to let her know I got her message and was planning on coming to be with her. A second one to let her know I had booked a train ticket and was on my way up there.
I hadn’t bothered leaving any other messages before rushing to the train station. I instinctively reached down to pat my pocket for my mobile phone, thinking I should try to reach out and call Gail, then remembered I had decided to leave it at home. I don’t like having things on me that I could easily lose track of when in wolf form. All I had with me was a backpack filled with a few changes of clothes, minimal toiletries, and a thin wallet with some cash and the single credit card I had used to purchase the train ticket online with.
As the countryside became more rural outside the train window, I was reminded of the encroaching deadline to figure out a proper plan on what I was going to do when the clock struck “moon-rise” and I began to turn into the proverbial pumpkin.
I needed to figure out a plan.
END OF SNEAK PEEK of Stowe Away