ABSTRACT

In 1966 I boarded a Greyhound bus in Toronto for an almost three-day jour-

ney. 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. More

recently, I have joked that this trip was my family’s attempt to get rid of me. It

does seem extraordinary from the vantage point of the intense awareness in

Western societies in the early twenty-first century of the dangers facing (certain)

children and young women that my parents would have sent me off, with little

money, on a trip which involved stopovers in bus stations in some very rough

parts of the United States, 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 gold-

rush land and boomtowns around Cape Canaveral for summer work. My par-

ents’ endorsement of this adventure perhaps came because of their own back-

ground as migrant workers, from working-class families in a chronically

economically depressed part of Canada: my mother had travelled from Cape

Breton Island, 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.