ACCOZZAGLIA

It was the first dream I can recall where the entire progression happened entirely in Canada. I’d honestly thought this would have happened years and years ago, but last night was undoubtedly the first.

From the starting point, where I was stranded on a small, two-lane arterial highway in rural southwestern Ontario, abandoned by a driver in some kind of car, I put two and two together and realised that I was somewhere near Lake Huron, nowhere near anywhere substantial. There weren’t many trees, and it was decidedly an agricultural region, ostensibly where corn and sugar beets were harvested. I found myself there during an unusually dry, hot day, probably in early June, were I to guess.

Eventually, though, I made my way to a nearby town — a population perhaps nearing 10,000, maaaaaaybe — which retained a notably dated quality. The architecture of the town’s one hotel and the interior of the adjacent family diner appeared as if nothing had changed since the early Trudeau era. I couldn’t determine whether I was inside a very old Swiss Chalet or simply in a family-owned eatery which resembled one of those old cafeteria-style restaurants.

Nevertheless, there was a television on somewhere in this place, this much I recall. I’m unsure whether I actually saw it, though. The dining area appeared to be a black hole for light, even though the dominant colours were sand, avocado green, dark wood veneer, macrame, and rusted-orange glass-and-wrought-iron chandelier — the kind one might have found hanging in a gloomy grocery store’s cheese section in, oh, 1974. So, no, it wsn’t really a black hole in the most literal sense, but these depressing hues exsanguinated nearly every ray of the bright sunlight which managed to anemically crawl through the restaurant’s smallish windows — which were already halfway covered by uninspired curtains.

I walked over to one of the windows to see a row of cars parked close to the building; the two-lane highway ran parallel with the southeast horizon (southeast, because somehow I knew it was mid-afternoon, and the sun did its part in giving away exactly where I was looking out), just beyond the parking area. While I didn’t look at the cars, nearly every one of them had the much older “Keep it Beautiful” plates affixed to their front bumpers. I remember one of the plates starting with SB or SD something or rather, followed, of course, by the numbers. Maybe one of the cars was an older Malibu Classic from around 1980. I’m not really sure, except it seemed two-tone brown.

In fact, the more I think about it, the only cheerful colour I could see was the radiant azure sky itself.

Then, I want to say that I ran into a friend or someone else in the empty bar area, which wore a musty, stale smell. Each table had all the standard place setting, replete with pale yellow water glasses. I remember walking up to the pay phone, which inexplicably had the 1990s-era Bell Canada brandmark emblazoned on the façade. My calling card seemed to work, though I’m not sure if I got through to whom I was phoning.

Anyhow, when I walked out of the establishment, I managed to find my way down a small side road in this town, whereupon I found a car that supposedly was for me to drive. So I did. And I recall driving for a long while, much of which seemed to be an undulating prairie flatness. Eventually, after what seemed to be days, I crawled into a small aboriginal village, which resembled more an American reservation than a town in what was probably sourthern Alberta. The road was rocky gravel, and seemed to almost belie the fact that I was much farther north than what the scenery implied. Also, it was eerie in that there was no one outside, and it was so quiet that my tires seemed to shatter the silence.

So, I found my way to the north end of the village where the road continued as a rocky, even pitted route, forcing the little car I was driving to take it very slow. It was terrain more apropos for a 4×4, but I kept going. The sun kept getting lower in the sky, hitning that it was probably after 9pm before I climbed up a tiny incline onto a black lip.

The lip was the beginning of newly-laid black asphalt. Suddenly, I was presented with an unnervingly smooth stretch of two-lane highway before me. There wasn’t a single vehicle out there. But this wasn’t the weird part. What was strange was that as soon as I levelled out on this road surface, the entire climate and scenery changed with it.

No longer was it the prairie, but a valley between mountain ranges that one might expect to see in the Rockies. The humidity picked up appreciably, and the sky suddenly resembled a mottled display of moisture-laden clouds, dappling the countryside with recently-falled showers. The setting sun projected an eerie orange-and-grey hue onto the clouds. It almost mimicked one of those overdone scenes portrayed in an art bazaar oil paintings one can buy for $24.95 — tacky frame included.

But it was gorgeous. To my right, I could see an old, unpainted barn, adjacent to a nearby house with its lights on and a truck parked next to the porch. The barn, though classic in shape, was astonishingly shallow in depth — so much so that it looked more like a cross-section of a barn at 3m of depth. Were a wind strong enough, I’d swear it’d topple the three-storey edifice with little fanfare.