ABSTRACT
In 1966 I boarded a Greyhound Bus in Toronto for an almost three-day journey. I was bound for Florida to stay with my aunt who was estranged from my Catholic family, in part because she had married a divorced man. In recent years I have joked that this trip was my family’s attempt to get rid of me. It does seem extraordinary in this age of increased Western awareness of the dangers facing (certain) children and young women, that my parents would send me off with little money, on a trip which involved stopovers in bus stations in some very rough parts of the USA, to arrive more than two days later, after midnight, at the other end of North America, to meet a relative no family member had seen for about five years! But I was a would-be itinerant worker, going to the goldrush land and boomtowns around Cape Canaveral for summer work. My parents’ endorsement of this adventure perhaps came because of their own background as migrant workers, from working-class families in a chronically economically depressed part of Canada: my mother had travelled from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to Boston to be a domestic servant; my father went to Europe in the armed services during World War II; then they both moved to Toronto, seeking employment. For them my trip was not extraordinary.
