Just What She Carries

I’m in a hostel in the middle of Jasper National Park. It’s after dinner and a few of us are gathered around a fire, talking and drinking. It’s bear country but we reckon it can’t kill all of us, the fittest will get away. Natural selection.
A woman is talking. I watch her face in the glow of the flames. It’s an interesting face.
‘I’ve been on the road for sixteen years,’ she says.
Sixteen years! Christ, these days, I’m struggling after two hours.
‘I was in Chile for a few years,’ she continues, ‘but I would like to return to Guatemala.’
She makes and sells jewellery. When she has no money she barters for her board, doing odd jobs. She has just what she carries.
I wonder what stories she could tell. To have seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands. Every day a new horizon. Every day a new challenge. Life as an adventure.
She pulls her shawl around her and tells us that she was offered a job in Jasper but she’s not sure she could settle down, fit back into ‘the system.’
I wonder if I could opt out of the system too, the straightjacket that makes us cogs in a machine, that tames the natural animal in us, but first I need to secure a pension that will pay for medication and care when I’m old and sick.
Someone hands me a joint. Fireworks go off in my head and I don‘t think of anything any much anymore.