Travel

J. D. Carpenter’s American Odyssey

DAY 31 — LONDON, ONTARIO: When we reached Customs at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, Michigan, we were confident that we would have no problems. We had not exceeded the limit for alcohol (a bottle of 8-year-old Booker’s bourbon from Frankfort, Kentucky, and a case of Labatt’s Blue from Duty Free) or cigarettes (two cartons of Export ‘A’), nor had we bought much in the way of clothes (a couple of blouses and three pairs of flip-flops for Karen, a pair of sneakers for me), but when the Customs agent told us we would have to submit to a “random” car search, we suddenly remembered the driftwood.

Dean Wilson, our Atchafalaya Swamp tour guide, had given us a large piece of bald cypress driftwood, which we had been carrying with us for the last week. Even after we discovered that it was infested with ants, we sprayed it with Off! and kept it with us. When it started to smell, I encased it in a plastic garbage bag and we kept it with us. However, when the unfortunate young woman assigned to our “case” removed the still sodden contents from the interior of the Jimmy, just about everything within a twenty-foot radius suddenly smelled worse than a week-dead armadillo on the side of a Texas highway. “What is this?” she asked me, and I said, “It’s a piece of bald cypress driftwood from the Atchfalaya Swamp south of Lafayette, Louisiana.” “Well,” she said, “you can’t take it with you.”

An hour later, back in Canada, the Jimmy smelled much better, and by the time we reached the home of our friends, Jane and Whitey Hamill, in London, Ontario, we were much relieved that the driftwood had been disposed of. And we were so happy to have home-cooked food again that we consumed an alarming amount of Whitey’s expertly barbequed steak and Jane’s pasta salad and garlic cheese bread, and the next morning an equally alarming amount of bacon and eggs and toast and jam. Not only was it good to eat home cooking again, but it was good to be with friends again. Complete strangers had been very good to us during our travels, but now we were home.

Tags: American, American Odyssey, language arts

About the author

J.D. Carpenter's Campbell Young novels have been nominated for the Arthur Ellis Award, appeared on national bestseller lists (The Globe & Mail), and received critical acclaim (The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Edmonton Journal, Maclean's, Quill & Quire).