Jonathan Wexler - The New Weather: Post-modern Adventures in Love and Travel

This is how I remember it. A weekend away from a stressful job as a technical writer at a cutting edge special effects software company. A three hour drive south of my home, Montreal to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

I had been there before the last time because I had spotted Mount Washington on the Internet as the tallest mountain in the North East and sped strait-away. Many people are unaware of the majestic nature around them, and I had been unaware of the beauty of New Hampshire with its craggy rock strewn ridges, lush forests and spiking Presidential Range.

What a contrast to the computer code and sharp UI designs I see everyday.

This was going to be just a relaxing weekend away, until it hit me like a ton of bricks.

I was going to just spend the night at this hostel-like place called the Appalachian Mountain Club I had heard about the last time I was in New Hampshire in my attempt to hike Mount Washington. I just wanted a bunk room, and perhaps some casual socializing. I like to meet people, to get out of the somewhat conventional milieu I am apart of in the medium-sized city of Montreal.

Mostly I wouldnt get close to anyone I would meet, just talk about casual things, no commitments, but a chance to communicate, often across national, ethnic, or whatever else kind of divisions.

I never got close with anyone, that is, until 4 am one morning.

She burst through the door that November and proclaimed: Theres a fox by my car!

She thought I was a staff member at the Appalachian Mountain Club since I was wandering around so early in the morning and so asked for my help.

Ironically, even earlier that morning I had wandered into the library at the lodge and among the myriad of nature books admiring flowers and fauna, I had perused an album of photos taken around the lodge. Lots of wandering souls, temporary refugees from the urban landscapes of Boston, New York, and countless American suburbs around New England and beyond. But among those pictures, I had seen the fox and so it seems, he had been a regular visitor to the lodge and so I told this girl, I dont think its dangerous.

Needless to say me and this girl, who looked somehow exotic and a bit out of place here in New Hampshire, had made acquaintance. We had breakfast later that morning and hiked nearby Mount Jackson. It was both of our first winter hikes and we were both awed at the beauty even the wildlife was out in droves on that sunny matin; we had the grey jays eating from our hands.

I followed around this laughing, bouncing, beautiful girl with wild curiosity through the trails, over icy cliffs and past half-frozen rivers, to a modest four-thousand-and-some odd-foot cliff over-hanging the White Mountains.

It was an auspicious moment to start a love affair.

So our love affair had begun although we had not even kissed that night by the fire at the AMC. She would come to visit me in Montreal, and I to Connecticut. We would make love and get to know each other quick.

All this as a prelude to Cuba.

We liked music and candles and staying home and leftovers and talking, and being quiet and shy and being physical often.

It was uncomplicated then.

It was laughter and innocence and the way it is supposed to be with no complications: family ties or job obligations, taxes, political affiliations, or religious ceremonies.

It was wholly divorced from modern civilization, and yet it beat to 50 Cent and eventually, Reggaetn and Harry Bellefonte singing Hava Nagillah. Well, you could already predict that it was going to get complicated.

We were going to Havana. Since she was Spanish, though American, she had to come to Canada first, and in a sense, been smuggled into Cuba though the border personnel in both Montreal and Cuba knew full well that she was American, as that was the passport she was carrying. Perhaps because her passport indicated that she was born in South America made it easier to crossover into Cuba she was in the know.

That is, she could empathize with the emotional struggle of the continent never being privy to the kind of emotional and political emancipation, both of oppressed peoples, labour, etc, in North America Latin America, it seemed to me, had been totally stifled by a combination of dictatorial Catholicism and landowner suppression, not to mention racial suppression still, she told me, you cannot get hired for certain jobs unless you have more prominent European features.

All this to say, in Cuba, they welcomed her in.

On her way to Montreal from the United States, she had picked up holiday paraphernalia. It was Christmas and Hanukkah, and we were to celebrate the holidays and the New Year together. All in prelude to the drive to Havana.

Why a drive to Havana?

Well, it all comes back to Morn.

There is a place called Cayo Coco in Cuba that is a virtual Canadian Colony. A little over two hundred miles from the United States able to eaves drop on the alien culture over broadcast radio it is a resort beach segregated from the rest of Cuba by a special border. This border exists since Coyo Coco is a nature reserve and tourist zone so only certain Cubans can enter this keeps the demarcation line between the Capitalists and the Communists alive.

Curiously, Coyo Coco is close to where Christopher Columbus first arrived when landing in the new world.

I had been to Cuba before as a simple tourist and even made it to Havana for a one-day-tour via prop-plane. But this time I was travelling with her and it was different. She was Spanish speaking allowing me to be privy to much more of what was going on, and with her we were able to negotiate the vagaries of renting a car and crossing the tourist border into the real Cuba.

The trek was conceived in a flash and was largely chemically induced. We had gone para-gliding that afternoon; thats where you get a parachute strapped to your back and get pulled 3000 feet up by a motor boat, and then are let go gliding through the air to the ground below in about fifteen minutes.

Having never been airborne in that way before, I became aware of the atmosphere and felt like I was attempting an escape. I could sense how thin the skin of the Earth really was from 3000 feet up.

It was a rush.

Lucky had brought us together that night our animist deity. Lucky the fox had only three legs one having been lost, perhaps, because of a trappers clamp.

Lucky was timid and dainty, as far as foxes go.

He had brought us together that night, and he knew what he was doing, I still manage to believe after much struggle.

Or did he?

Lucky didnt know us.

He didnt know about my German Jewish grandmother. He didnt know about the history of the Inca or Spanish Imperialism, or the impetuous tendencies of Spanish women or the psychosocial clashes inevitable in Canadian-Peruvian domestic home life.

Lucky went on instinct and his was right at least for a while.

Inevitably we ended up doing a lot of shopping in Connecticut. Groceries, furniture, books, more groceries.

Bobs Furniture, CVS, Trader Joes, Target, and a myriad of different supermarkets all of which I forget the names for.