Mike Wilson

Since Katie asked, I'll tell you the story of Mike Wilson. The story starts like this.

Marcia and I drove from Saskatoon through the Rockies, where we ran into some very bad weather. We crawled along slippery mountain roads behind a long line of large trucks going roughly 30 kph for what felt like 3 hours. This made the trip take much longer than we had anticipated, so we stopped at a rest area just outside of Salmon Arm to catch a couple of hours of sleep.

At roughly 4:30 in the morning, I was woken up by this blonde woman knocking on the driver-side window. I rolled down said window, and the woman said, "Hi. Are you Mike Wilson?"

Now, you need to remember something here. I was fast asleep 5 seconds ago, and I really didn't have any sort of grasp on this situation. So the best I could manage was a confused, "What? No, sorry, I'm not Mike Wilson". I realize now that this was a mistake. Why was she looking for someone she had never met before in the middle of the night at a rest stop in the middle of goddamn nowhere? It was probably for something illegal, and my curiosity is just KILLING me.

Anyway, once she realized that I was not who she was looking for, she got a little flustered. It seemed like she actually expected me to be Mike Wilson. I had trouble making sense of this at the time, and it really doesn't make any more sense now. The mystery woman mumbled something about Mike being from Saskatchewan, and how she noticed our license plates, and then she hopped in her car and drove away.

I know this sounds like a dream, and I would be tempted to doubt the truthiness of this story myself, but Marcia was there and she remembers it exactly the way I do, so there you go.

Marcia thought that the woman was a prostitute, but I don't. I think it was a drug deal, and "Mike Wilson" was probably some sort of code. I should have responded with something like, "Yeah, I'm Mike Wilson. You must be Mary Jane." That would have made this story way more interesting. But like I said, I was pretty out of it, and now I'll never know for sure.

And that, my friends, is the story of Mike Wilson.

T.