About two months ago, while I was downtown fishing pennies out of the various fountains around Victoria, I came across a dirty looking bum sleeping in an old refrigerator crate. Although I was physically repelled by this raving transient, I felt an uncontrollable urge to approach. The putrid stench of rotting cabbages and ground coffee attacked my nostrils as I got within four feet of the man, but my legs would not respond to my brain's protest. The derelict gave me a wide, green-toothed grin, as his madman's laugh rode the wave of his three dollar scotch breath. He motioned for me to sit in his homeless man's palace. His free hand rooted deep into his urine-soaked khakis. After an extensive, probing exploration of his nether regions, he produced a crumpled length of lavatory paper and handed it to me with a crooked smile.
"What is it?" I asked him in a whispered awe.
"'Tis a map it be," he replied.
"A map?"
"Aye! A map. Found it one December morn while I be washin m'hair in a public toilet. Treasure Laddy, that map be leadin to treasure!"
And with the words of treasure still ringing in my mind, the man kissed me on the lips, punched me in the face, and dissapeared down a dark alley, laughing for no discernible reason.
Putting the distressing encounter out of my mind for the moment, I placed the map in my back pocket and headed for the local ice cream social for a cool glass of root beer. Locating Mountainous Mike's Molehill of Malts had become a skill I could proudly say I'd mastered within the few months I'd been frequenting the place. That is to say, I could've found Mike's with four blindfolds and a cat strapped to my face. But by some kind of divine intervention (or maybe I just wasn't looking where I was going,) when I turned the last corner, I found myself standing not in front of the local hangout, but in the shadow of a massive corn silo. Of course, there was no way of knowing rightly that the silo did in fact conceal sweet corn within its thin metal skin; that, my friend, was an inkling I had to chalk up to the little man in a green suit I saw greedily inhaling steaming corn grits by the handful. I don't remember this ever being here, I thought to myself. I performed an entire 360 degree location maneuver, hoping for at least one recognizable building. And it was in this maneuver that I came to the understanding that indeed I was not in any familiar part of town. As it turned out, I was not even in the same country. I had stepped from the relatively safe and comforting streets of a small Canadian city, into the vast and unknown void of rural farmland.
