A vision

You might think I’d have been more surprised, asked a few questions about OJ’s suggestions – or chucked it right out the window – but, truth is, I’d been expecting it. The past four or five years I’d had this growing, insistent hankering for getting back to America, and rich girl whose uncle works in immigration fantasies aside, I’d figured a hike across a trans-border wilderness would be the way to go.

I’d been researching it. I’d been reading of people who had tried and failed; gotten an insight into the technology they were using (helicopters, infrared and laser sensors, triggers in the ground, drones and planes, border guards on horseback, cameras in trees, etc); and scoured satellite images of forests and mountains that straddled that imaginary line along the 49th parallel.

It wasn’t going to be easy. All the stories, naturally, were of people who had been caught – drug smugglers, immigrants, criminals, all further increasing security – not people who had made it and who had rushed online to advertise the route they’d taken and tell others, “go here, this is the one, you can just waltz right in.”

I couldn’t help but smile at the irony: that it was 9/11 that had caused all this American border paranoia, and now here I was, at the behest of the man behind the whole thing, needing to circumvent all these increased measures in order to arrive at the truth of that day.

I had thought, in all those weeks and months of research, and in my simple boyish longing for adventure, that it was nothing more than a desire for old friends, and to see once again places that had been important in my youth, that was driving my irrational quest to break into America. Each of the past five summers I had put it on the table before me – “do it; do the mad thing,” I’d tell myself, “you don’t want to be on your deathbed not having done it, for the sake of security and not taking a risk, just choosing the safe option like everybody else” – and every year something would stop me. A job offer or a bad dream. A lost passport or a weird ‘sign’ from some passing stranger in the street – seriously, two years before, when I was thinking of it stronger than ever, some drunk guy near Peckham had screamed in my face, “try it, lad, and you’ll end up in jail: you don’t fuck with America” – and so I’d let it slide, all the time thinking (and hoping) that there would be a right time and that right time would reveal itself to me.

Well, I figured, I guess the time was now.

Though after so many previous occasions when I’d felt it was the right time, I tried not to rush into it. Resolved to sleep on it. Left myself open to mysterious stinky tramps screaming the answer to my future on random streets in the middle of the day.

In the event, the answer came in a much more pleasant way than that.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m one of those guys who has visions and dreams. Maybe you picked up on that, the way I didn’t freak out when I had that vision in the sky during OJ’s first phone call, that he somehow weirdly knew about, and was maybe even directing (I’ll tell you more about it later).

Thing is – maybe it’s a bit odd to be talking about this – whenever I’m about to do something potentially life-changing, or desperately need an answer to a question, some clue as to how to make a decision, I either have a dream or, on rarer occasions, a full blown genuine real ‘vision’.

It’s pretty groovy, to be honest: I fair loves ‘em. And many is the morning when I wake up disappointed at just having had ‘standard dreams’, when I’d figured something special was a-brewin’.

But, whenever I need ‘em, they come: and this time was no exception.

I slept early that night, and was sleeping good, when I was suddenly awakened at around 5am.

I opened my eyes. I was in my room – could see the outline of the bedroom furniture, a little crack of dawn’s early light shining around the curtains, and my covers, the pillow, my hands – but I could also see…something else. I was, at the same time, elsewhere. It was as though another reality was being superimposed over my usual surroundings.

I closed my eyes. The ‘superimposed reality’ became everything. I was in it as realistically as I am sitting here now typing at this computer.

I was sort of floating around a town, a disembodied spirit, gently swooping down streets, turning corners, following roads.

Everything was in perfect detail. The cars, the hedges and fences around the houses, the trees and lawns and mail boxes.

It wasn’t England, that was for sure: it was North America.

I opened my eyes. Once again, I could see both realities. I was entirely conscious of being a body in a cosy bed in Leeds, and also of being a man who was right smack bang in the middle of a real, genuine vision. One that seemed useful. One that seemed like it might be an answer to the question of whether I should embark on this mad scheme to break into America or not.

I closed my eyes again. I went deeper into it, satisfied that I knew what was going on, that this weren’t no mere hallucination or waking dream or hypnagogic state.

I carried on floating down streets, investigating my surroundings, looking more closely at things.

I could zoom right in on the fences and the houses. See chips in paint, screw heads in numbers on doors.

It was pretty ecstatic, the feeling of it: to be consciously aware of what was going on, and to be that disembodied spirit so calmly and casually cruising around this other reality.

After a little while I thought to ask a question: okay, I’m in North America – but where exactly?

A few seconds later, I turned a corner. Went past a few buildings. And saw in front of a whole bunch of flagpoles, with flags fluttering atop them.

The flags were Canadian. There were four tall ones in the middle of a circle of around a dozen smaller flagpoles.

I had my answer. I knew in that instant I would be buying a ticket to Canada, and soon.

Like, as soon as I woke up.

I opened my eyes. I felt incredibly happy.

I went back to sleep.

And when I awoke again, some three hours later, I got immediately online, noticed a weirdly cheap one-way ticket to Vancouver, departing the next day – really, honestly, bizarrely cheap given that it was the middle of summer and I was flying at such short notice – and it was as simple as: click, click, buy.