Inexplicably, Canadians are into Coronation Street. I gather this from CBC radio, which reports on Coronation Street viewing parties, called “Ping Parties”.

In case you don’t know, Corrie is the longest-running soap in Britain (I think). It’s set in adenoidal Manchester, and apparently it’s grim up north. As is traditional in British soaps, most of the characters are deeply unattractive and whiny, and their lives are long strings of misery relieved only by trips to the pub, where they fight. Periodically, British gossip mags show the soap stars dolled up in “At Home” interviews, but they cannot be glamourised. For example, Gail one of the longest-running characters on Coronation Street, is a nag and looks like a camel. Far too many articles have been written about how the Americans like their escapism to be aspirational while the Brits seem most comforted by schadenfreude, but clichés stick because they’re true.

I watched Coronation Street every evening when I was at school. So did everyone else. Finish dinner, clear the dishes, bring the tray of tea and biscuits into the fire just as the elderly theme tune started at 7.30. I haven’t followed it since my Leaving Cert, though last I heard they had graduated to serial killers and scandalous affairs. When the CBC played the opening music last night, I started to fret about my Maths homework.

The most entertaining part of the Canadian absorption in Coronation Street is that they clearly can’t follow it. On last night’s show, they played a snatch of dialogue and then invited listeners to call in to tell them what they were saying.
   “I think it’s ‘goshad’,” said one presenter.
   “No, it’s ‘gooshit’,” said the other, “Though I have no idea what that means.”
Luckily, Canada has plenty of ex-pats to enlighten them. “She’ll be gutted“ the character had said. Meaning, she’ll be upset, emotionally devastated, have her insides torn asunder.

I wonder if they’d hire me as a simultaneous translator? I speak four English languages pretty well…

Further reading: Wikipedia entry on Coronation Street.

When I arrived in Bangkok, I was determined not to stay at the Khao San Road. The Khao San Road is what Piccadilly Circus was to soldiers in the Great War: sooner or later, if you survive, you’ll meet everybody there. During the day, dazed and jetlagged foreigners dodge the tuk-tuks and the taxis, bumping backpacks. Newbies are tempted by the tailor shops which advertise two suits and five shirts for two hundred dollars—hand-tailored, sir. The windows are plastered with photos of lumpy, sunburned tourists in their poorly-fitting purchases, which belie the testimonials in Danish, German, Dutch, and English.

At night the area is closed to traffic and hucksters bark their pirated DVDs, marijuana t-shirts, chopstick sets, orange juice and knock-off Diesel gear. On Sri Ram Bhuttri, vans set up mobile Red Bull cocktail shops beside the blaring CD stands. There are fried-spider sellers catering to those who need a quick dose of exotica to dine out on back in Lewisham. Young locals arrive to gawp at the falangs, though many of the clubs and bars have a no-Thais policy.

It’s a freakshow. Some timid visitors pick through pad-thai-with-egg before burrowing back into the nearest internet café, but elsewhere every possible variant and combination of tattoo, piercing, sun damage, hairstyle, strange clothing and bared skin parades the street. Ancient hippies with waist-length hair trawl near English skinheads. New Age mamas are serene as their toddlers play with the bongs, but they scoop them up when the Chrish-tian missionaries appear with their white smiles. American frat boys can’t believe their luck with all the fake ID and international press cards for sale. Sometimes glum young monks show up, waiting out the end of their retreat like military service. It’s on the Khao San Road that the international phenomenon of Bad Israeli Pants reaches its height.

It’s a horror. It’s irresistible. If you want to travel in Southeast Asia, and Nine Days of Splendour and Elephants is neither your style nor your budget, you will wash up on the Khao San Road at some point. The bucket-shop travel agents are rude and efficient. A girl who has never had the money to leave Bangkok for a holiday can get you a visa for any of the surrounding countries in two days, or book your “trekking” in Chiang Mai. There are ATMs, money-changers, tourist police, cheap airport minibuses, even a branch of Boots that heavily promotes its morning-after pill and STD tests.

Of course, I was too good for the Khao San Road. I have the sort of notions of being a Traveler, not a tourist, that irritate me so in other people, mainly because it’s central to the pose that everybody else is just a tourist. (And self-styled Travelers are so damn annoying. I want to shout “Get a job, hippie,” at every rugged, misty-eyed one of them, including myself.) But it’s ingrained, this unattractive smirk at those who order sausage and chips instead of som tum with fermented crab, this condescension towards those who think Koh Samui counts. Sometimes I want to smack myself for being a snotty cow.

So it served me right that my decision to stay in Bangkok’s Chinatown rather than the Khao San Road scared the daylights out of me.

The push factors for my trip were far stronger than any great pull to travel. My husband and I had separated. Since it was my decision and my fault, I didn’t think I deserved sympathy, so I didn’t talk to anyone about it. It didn’t help that I was his employee, and dependent on that job for immigration status in the US. We bore it as well as we could for six long months, but when we couldn’t stand it any more, I had to leave the company. My six-year visa allowance was running out; no one would hire me, I thought, with just fifteen months left. So I cooked up the plan of traveling for a year, as cheaply as possible, so that I could reset that allowance to the beginning. I would go back to New York as soon as I could, I thought. Now that looks both less likely and less appealing.

I have never felt more alone than I did the night I arrived in Bangkok with a year to fill. I had insulated myself from reality in New York, but it was hard to ignore it here. I knew no one. I couldn’t read the street signs. There wasn’t a westerner in sight. I couldn’t cross the street; the traffic ploughed right through the pedestrian crossings. I didn’t know how or where to get food, so I ate the Kit-Kats I’d brought from London. Stray dogs growled and snapped whenever I went out. I started to count how much I had left and lost.

But somehow it seems pointless to stay miserable without people to mirror it. My cautious exploration radius grew bigger every day. I ticked off all the attractions and faced every Bangkok scam listed in my Rough Guide. When I made it all the way up to the Khao San Road, I was joyful. It was a freakshow, but it was familiar. I wallowed in the second-hand bookstores and cappuccino houses and spent hours on email. It felt like cheating. I told myself, my bossy, condescending capital-T Traveler self, to just shut up.

Tim assigns my chores in the morning. After I moved the latest pile of green logs to the woodpile and helped to jack up the sagging cabin, I was to sweep the pine needles off the roof. “Are you okay with heights?” he asked. Fine, I lied.

I managed to get up the ladder. Then I stopped. The pine needles were slippery. I sat on the ridge and pushed the broom six inches, then yelped as the duff slid off. Tim took pity on my scaredy-cat antics and followed me up. It was fine, he showed me, not pitched steeply at all, and once I cleared a path through the pine needles, the roof-tiles were nicely grippy. Then he stepped back onto the extensible ladder, which slid right to the edge of the slick deck. He hung on to the roof with one hand and held a corner of the ladder in the other. I had to wiggle off my safe perch to reach out and retrieve the ladder. He got down safely, and the shock treatment had me fatalistically strolling across the roof for the rest of the afternoon.

The beavers are thriving on Kedey Island and Fitzroy Harbour. At night their tails slap the river as they bring down the trees like rapacious Scott MacNealys. Only oaks are good enough: they turn their snouts up at the basswood that grows like weeds.

The fecund beavers have polarised the hood, and I am entertained by reports of the debate. String ‘em up by their buck teeth, says one side: the country-born, the Albertans, the tree-huggers. Don’t upset the fluffy animals! says the equally well-established colony of pinko freelance writers. “It says in Cottage Life that beavers don’t like loud rock music,” I offer helpfully, but so far we haven’t got around to dosing them with Creedence Clearwater Revival. Inertia is with the beavers, and with luck they’ll make a log bridge by spring.

Kedey Island is about a sixth the size of Central Park, but the human inhabitants are nicely varied. I got to meet some as they closed up their cottages this Thanksgiving weekend. The next-door neighbours are a Thai-Cambodian family now from Ottawa, determined that their boat won’t be ice-bound this winter. I scored a dinner invitation when I dredged up Sawat dii khaa in greeting, much to my own surprise. Behind this cabin lives a pair of sisters who have been coming here since the 1930s. This year they coped with their stolen lawnmower by rowing the replacement back to the mainland for the winter. There’s a retired Chemistry professor from Alberta, a right-winger who clashes with the colony of writers and artists. The Helferty family place has a Dodge straight out of Havana in the back yard. It was marooned on the island in the Fifties when the ice melted early one spring, and has never left. Further down there’s a beautiful old camp owned by a woman who worked in what used to be called Silicon Tundra, the Nortel-Alcatel-Corel corridor a short way down the highway. A Chinese family putters about the only cabin on the tiny island next door: they retired this year, Molly says, so they can start enjoying the damn place at last. Murray, the Toronto writer has been coming to his wife’s family’s cottage for twenty years. He warns me about the mean German Shepherd in the place next to his.

Then there’s an abandoned cabin that calls to my new building instincts. Carved into the outhouse wall in beautiful serif script: “Edward Kedey, 1915”. The carving may be an island feature, or maybe a cottage tradition that’s new to me. The beams that hold up Tim’s cabin are a palimpsest of the visitors since the thirties. “Les Swamp Girls, été ’98”. “John D. 1986 England.” He’s carved his name near the top of the second beam. I haven’t signed this wooden guestbook yet.

On Friday I went to Montreal to sit a five-hour French exam for my Canadian immigration application. The TEF is a tedious business indeed, especially when you haven’t used French in thirteen years. Once upon a time I spoke good French, thanks to painful stints as an exchange student and jeune fille au pair while my friends were whooping it up as Gaeilge at Irish college. A country of the chic and the golden-limbed is no place for a gawky fourteen-year-old from the armpit of Ireland, and for her part, Anne, my evil penpal, made it clear that Limerick was not worthy of her argyll cardigans and natty little scarves.

It was worth the torture to learn how the French summer en famille. Her family owned a farmhouse on an island off the Vendée, and twenty or thirty aunts and cousins filled it for the month of August. It’s true: French mealtimes, at least for that sacred month, are an event, not a snatched, mindless scoff. We Irish and British had no food culture to be proud of back then, but here was a country that did not run its day on fifteen cups of tea, two Kit Kats, and a plate of chips. I was still a fussy eater, and was fascinated by the attention they gave every salad, each piece of fish.

While evil Anne took windsurfing classes I tagged along with her aunts to the market every morning and tried to follow the vivid discussions on ripeness and freshness. At dinner I swallowed the escargots and the jugged hare without chewing, trying to hold my face still. On one outing I shot a pheasant and almost fainted; I’ve never eaten pheasant since. I fell deeply in love with Benoît, Anne’s 22-year-old cousin on a break from his military service, and pined for him over the crêpes. He and his brother Laurent headed out to les discothèques with a jeepful of gorgeous women every night. Stuck at the children’s table, I scratched my oozing bites and seethed.

French concerns, as expressed in Friday’s test, don’t seem to have changed since then. There were several questions involving labour strikes at the railway station. A long comprehension test on the sad decline of les vacances in France. I sorted recipe steps into the correct order. I wrote a suitably aggrieved letter to an imaginary newspaper protesting in fractured French that English was not the only language worth knowing in the modern world. (It was that or debate “Should access to culture—books, cinema, and theatre—be free?”) There was a painful piece on mondialisation, or globalisation. I waited for the multiple-choice rant on American pig-dogs and the absence of weapons in Iraq, but they denied me the joy.

My oral exam was severely compromised by the discovery just beforehand that Hugo the receptionist was Ecuadorian. We had bonded by telephone the week before as I persuaded him to register me for the test a fortnight after the closing date, and he was now thrilled to learn that I knew his country fairly well. Before I could stop him he replaced every French word in my head with a stream of excited Spanish. For the thirty-minute test I had to rent an imaginary flat and persuade a friend to try a new home-concierge service, and throughout I sounded like a Madrileña with severe lead poisoning.

The reward for having every ounce of French extracted over a five-hour period was getting to spend the rest of the day in Montreal. The last time I was there was a daytrip eight years ago, before I’d learned how to travel. All I did was eat an obligatory crêpe in the tourist district and head back down to New England. But ooh, Montreal is fab! I didn’t realise until I got there how much I’d missed a big-city fix. (Oat-uh-waw, bless its paisley brocade vests, doesn’t count.) Over a Moroccan lunch at a street café I ogled the parade of babes and imagined myself back in Brooklyn.

Montreal’s bagels and smoked meats are better than New York’s, not that New York will believe me. In the old Jewish quarter the bakeries are still owned by old-timers, but the bagels are made by Cambodians—and they get it. Mordechai Richler would be proud. On Friday evening they were still dropping them out of the ovens while groups of Hasidim strolled to synagogue.

The junkshops and pawnshops are full of deals and finds. Their Central Park has a hilltop view of the city. Bikers weave between the buses and the skateboarders with the right level of anarchy. The two-dollar chocolate tarts would draw tears of joy from a parsimonious gourmet. And Montrealers make smoking look really cool.

There’s a glorious mix of languages on the street: French and English drowned out by Farsi, Spanish, and Urdu. In the stores there’s a little handshake protocol with the staff as our language modems figure out whether to offer French or English. I’m a Nowhereian, and I like to be surrounded by other outsiders. The friction of cultures rubbing together heats up a city, and that energy can’t be faked. I was still high on it when I canoed back to the Kedey Island cabin under a full moon, listening to the beavers and the wild geese.

I can’t think of a more unassuming, appealing genius than Darwin, who retreated from the world physically but engaged in vigorous correspondence. He was humble about his workhorse brain compared to the brilliance of friends like Robert Huxley, and forever anxious for approval, whether for his table manners or for The Origin of Species. His love for his children, his wife, and his friends glows from his letters and was evidently reciprocated. But it is Darwin the reader of whom I am fondest. “He read,” says his biographer Irvine in Apes, Angels, and Victorians, “not to be critical, but to be entertained, agreed with, stimulated to feeling.”

It’s comforting to share a weakness with a genius. I read widely, but find it difficult to articulate why a particular book is good or bad, despite a degree in literature. I drop books I don’t like rather than examining why, for example, novels by Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood annoy me. Otherwise I’m willing to jump into whatever world the author creates. The books I read hold unexpected conversations with one another and I listen in with delight, but rarely debate. At college I struggled with literary theory, though I turned out dutiful drivel like “The Haemosexual Subtext in Dr Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde “ on demand. Intellectually, I grasped (at least at the time) structuralism, post-structuralism, feminist theory, New Historicism, and all the rest. Practically, they seemed (at best) like tools for writing essays, not tools for reading. I could never learn to read with critical distance, and the only tools I wanted were a good lamp, a notebook, and a glass of wine. And perhaps a footstool.

Mysterious but welcome weather in Ottawa: 22°C in October! All the better to make my transition to rookie builder, though so far I’m just a fetch-and-carry slave and a puny one at that. I am learning several new terms, a few of which I can use in sentences. Yesterday I moved a giant woodpile and demolished an old outhouse with a crowbar. Today I assembled a complicated Malaysian wheelbarrow and got ready to move the washhouse fifty feet south to make room for the glorious winter cabin. My trusting nature comes in handy:

Q: But how do you move a washhouse?
A: Oh, you just jack it up and push.

Tim is learning to fell trees and stalks the property in chainsaw chaps and hardhat like a Village People refugee. I haul and dig and get my first fix of CBC radio, which I couldn’t get at Lake Superior. It’s a delight after years of threadbare, grovelling NPR in the US. The kind of radio I like only gets produced with government funding, it seems. Fine by me. I’ll happily pay taxes for decent news and arts coverage, on radio at least. (And I’m enough of a pinko to consider contributing towards healthcare for all children while I’m at it.)

The geese were in fine form on the river tonight, flying back and forth in lopsided formation and honking monogamously. On the opposite bank the neighbours were chopping and mowing and playing. There are at least four million giant dock spiders in and around the cabin, but apparently no mice on the island, which alone is worth the canoeing. It feels decadent to leave a bag of sugar on the kitchen table.

I have come up with a plan that Adam Stein deems “sufficiently asinine” to meet his approval. This verdict is from a man who bussed across China during the SARS epidemic, so I am proud.

Ranger Tim owns a log cabin on Kedey Island in the Ottawa River. It’s a beautiful cottage, built by a retired cop from Ottawa. Not surprisingly, the ex-Mountie didn’t manage to get the logs to fit as perfectly as the Finns who built the Beaver Rock camp in the 1920s, and so this cabin is not exactly winterproof. In fact, Tim clocked it at 26 below in the kitchen last February, with the small woodstove going full blast. I would start weeping and shedding extremities at those temperatures, but then, I am not Canadian.

So I am going to help him to build a small winter cabin before the Ottawa freezes, which should be any minute now. I’m considering it a second autumn. He doesn’t have a job. I don’t have a job. We have copies of A Pattern Language, The Timeless Way of Building, and several worrying titles along the lines of Fun Projects With Your Chainsaw. He just bought an outboard motor, a secondhand chainsaw, and several boxes of woodscrews. I bought steel-toed safety boots. I am all set for Cabin Girl: The Sequel.

Kedey Island is almost civilisation. Just across the river is a village that could be in rural Connecticut, and the bright lights of Arnprior are just six miles away. The Pilates-and-Pinot-Noir yummy mummies of Ottawa’s Glebe are forty-five minutes away. But when you can only leave the island by boat, it feels closer to Laos than London. Water comes from the river. You chop wood to stay warm. You “flush” the toilet with ash from the fire.

When I arrived from Ottawa yesterday morning, I paddled the groceries across by canoe and then helped prime the pump to squirt Ottawa River water into the washhouse. No more sweet Lake Superior water; this stuff runs brown and silty. The well stinks, so we ferry drinking and cooking water across from a kind neighbour’s house. My tasks so far, other than bringing order to chaos, evicting hundreds of spiders, and making large pots of soup, are mysterious. I will be “chinking”. I will be digging a trench to sink the waterline. I will be splitting wood. I will be…um, sitting on the sofa playing hooky with my laptop while Tim goes to Canadian Tire.

My mother used to deal with my unrewarding hair by stuffing it into a cardboard tube on top of my head and cutting straight across for a Björk bowl. I saved my sister Claire from those horrors and spent hours plaiting her hair and painting her nails when she was little. These days she is Red Adair to my beauty disasters. She herself is groomed and glowing, and now freshly-LASIKed too. I am dishevelled after months in the wild, and wearing the same outfit I wore the last five times she saw me. So she takes me in, plonks me on the Corbusier ponyskin lounger with a stack of People magazines, and rolls up her sleeves. I’m a project.

She plucks my eyebrows by the kitchen window (we vowed to give up waxing after The Incident, when she accidentally removed most of her left eyebrow). I am not brave enough for Epilator torture, unlike her, so she gives me her boyfriend’s razor (“He won’t mind!”) to shave my legs, which have run wild and free since my last visit. Then we try to dye my hair back to its natural brown, covering the brassy red that has plagued me since Mexico. I am too cheap to go to a hairdresser, so she limits damage at the back while I hack at the front with a nail scissors like a teenage girl in an asylum. Then I play with her makeup box, a candystore of blushers and glow powders and fancy lipsticks. Brow gel! Benetint! Cheek Dew! Oh my.

We go and play in her wardrobe. I am reduced to fashion by proxy these days, and am thrilled to get to try new miniskirts and mod tops. I curse at the old Seven jeans I lent her when I left New York: not only can I not fit into them, I can’t imagine what shadow of my former self could. Did I steal them from the Hilton sisters? I know these jeans are So Over anyway, but I don’t enjoy the evidence that the over-thirty sag ‘n’ spread has begun. I curse again at Claire’s shoes, which are two sizes larger than mine so that I clomp around in them like her step-kids.

Finally I pick out a highly glamorous outfit for our big night in. I am leaning on the kitchen counter, reading a magazine and waiting for Claire to heat up the Vietnamese takeout, when Glen passes through.
   “Whoops, I nearly swatted ya on the ass just there,” he says, “You look just like Claire.”
That makes me very happy. Though the truth is I feel like a drag queen.

The day I left Lake Superior it snowed out of a clear blue sky. Great clouds of steam rose off the lake. A falcon devoured a crow, scattering feathers. A fine russet fox trotted down the trail ahead of me. Ten feet from my cabin, a bear answered a burning question with a large pile of scat, sprinkled with mountain ash berries like a Christmas dessert. The snowshoe hares wore new dots of white on their foreheads. For the first time ever, I cried leaving a place, not people.

The park staff welcome 30,000 tourists a year, most of whom arrive with plenty of gear. That’s why I got nervous when Ranger Tim’s overloaded trailer was enough of an attraction to draw hoots and snapshots from the remaining staff. I’d spent two days helping to pack it, but I’m slow to diagnose eccentricity unless others point it out, and it was now too late to back out of this freak-show jalopy. Tim guided the photographers around the special features: the outboard engine roped and clamped to the side, the ten-speed tied to the back, the jonboat ingeniously nesting inside the 14-footer, the stove ingeniously nesting inside the jonboat…

Eventually we said fond goodbyes and I wedged myself into the passenger seat among boxes of CDs, pillows, laptops, snacks, and extra clothes, grateful it wasn’t snowing inside. We waved at the lake while Tim drove around the turning circle, revving for a climb up the gravel hill. There was Beth waving halfway up; we stopped to say goodbye. Bad idea. The wheels spun and spat gravel but could not persuade the trailer uphill without momentum. Sheepishly, we enlisted the little crowd to push.

I named the trailer Juanita, after the patient but unpredictable brown mule that walked the length of Peru with travel writer Dervla Murphy. Our Juanita had an alarming tendency to swing like a pendulum when a roadbump or a gust caught her: unchecked, the waves would oscillate larger and larger and threaten to flip the car into the ditch. The first time it happened, we wobbled first into the middle lane and then right over to the side. For lack of a better idea, I shut my eyes and pretended it wasn’t happening. The second time the tires screeched and I thought, quite seriously, that at least my last summer was a good one. Tim soon learned to control the wobbles by driving very slowly and not braking, but it was already four o’clock in the afternoon and he didn’t feel like wrangling Juanita on little sleep. We begged shelter for the night at Ranger Rick’s place in Sault Sainte Marie, just an hour and a half down the road. Ocean’s Eleven and rye seemed the better part of valour.

This just in: Canada is very large and very empty. (Though not yet very cold, praise be.) We drove for twelve hours the next day and didn’t even touch either end of Ontario. To compare, it takes eight hours to drive the length of France. Tiny Ireland is three hours left to right and five top to bottom, and it might take half that if the country had a decent road. We drove through hundreds of miles of fall-bright hardwoods, punctuated by Tim Horton’s donut shops. We drove through small, resonant towns: Blind River, the “town in North Ontario” that Neil Young warbles about in “Helpless”. Deep River, the hometown of Naomi Watts’s character in Mulholland Drive . Petawawa, the military base of the two Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan that day.

I refuelled on truck-stop poutine (fries with cheese curds and gravy), a Québec special. 400 grams of fat can’t help tasting good. Poutine, it turns out, is very close to the Cheese Chip that Friar Tuck’s used to serve up in Limerick while we watched the Saturday night fights on the steps of the Redemptorist Fathers.

Juanita behaved, mostly. I learned to let go of the passenger door and enjoy the ride. After a while, we even got used to her shimmies.
“Hey, Juanita likes Texas boogie. She’s shaking her booty.”
It was late when we got to her last stop, Fitzroy Harbour on the Ottawa River. Tim has a cottage on an island in the river, and Juanita was to rest at the government dock overnight before being unloaded by canoe the next day. But he couldn’t get the towbar off the trailer hitch; the ball was too tight to lever off under the weight of the load. So he unclipped the trailer hitch altogether. Juanita was delighted with her new freedom and rolled steadily downhill towards the river. Tim scrambled, but she was far too heavy to haul to a stop, and seemingly determined to have a swim. Two feet from the bank, our pride was saved when a small upturned boat checked her ambition.