Li'l Andy chronicles the pit-stops and hangovers of his 10,000km tour of Le Canada.

Seeing Leonard Cohen just before you load up the van for a cross-Canada tour has to be a good omen.

He was wearing sunglasses, black suitpants and in shirtsleeves. The only person who could make a park bench in Parc du Portugal look like a throne.

I began with my standard ice-breaker: "Is it Saint Christopher or Saint Anthony that's the patron saint of travellers?"

"Saint Christopher, but he isn't anymore--"

"He's been decanonized?"

"Yeah, they kicked him out of the club... but there's still some good ones: Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes."

And here I was, just about to embark on the showerless, gas-swilling Tim Horton's buffet that is touring in Canada. Did ol' Lenny know? I asked him if he had any advice about the tour.

"Get as much sleep as you possibly can," he offered. Here he left a pregnant pause. "Those words will be ringing in your ears."

***

As you drive north on Highway 17 from Ottawa to Sudbury, the roadside vegetation changes to bid you something between a welcome and a warning. The friendly trees disappear. Orange-and-black striped rock breaks through the soil like a tiger's back.

The Townehouse in Sudbury. By day, a place to drink for broken men and a few alcoholic women; by night, a place
to drink for what artsy types there are in the city. As we play "Video Poker Blues"--a song about a man falling in love with the digital striptease girl in a lottery video machine--a man in a baseball cap and paint all over his clothes pounds back Molson Canadian, alone at his table. Classic Ontario good ole boy. We finish, and he begins heckling.

"Hey! You write that song?"

"Yes, sir."

"Your mind's fucking twisted. You got a twisted mind!"

Northern Ontario: where the hecklers pay you the best compliments you've ever heard.

We play "The Sun's Comin' Up (but my bottle's goin' down)" to finish our first set, figuring it's right up this guy's alley. The second verse goes:

"Everyday a new pedophile moves into our neighbourhood / And everyone gets all excited, they say, "Damn! My kid looks good!"

The good ole boy keels over with laughter. In my head, I sing the Degrassi Junior High theme song: "Hey, I've got a new friend!"

Having a between-set Moosehead on the 'terrasse,' the good ole boy sits down with us.

"Man, I can tell where your mind's going when you sing a line, man. I know what you're gonna say next. I'm a writer, too."

Snob that I am, I hit my inner panic button. Is this heckler going to ask me to write music to one of his songs that he's got collected in a Hilroy scribbler? Or worse, demand to step up on stage while we strum blind chords to some non-existent song that he's penned?

Josh, our Telecaster guitarist extraordinaire, asks him his name, where he's from. His name is Mike. Mike Grant. And he's working up here to make money to support his ten-year-old daughter, who takes expensive courses in ballet, modeling, figure-skating. etc. She lives with his ex in Gatineau. You can tell in an instant that Mike would humiliate himself at a million menial jobs for his darling daughter. And he'd grab you by the throat for taking a sip of his beer.

"But my plan is to move down to Gatineau, y'know, so I can start writing again? I could write down there."

My brother Will is the only one bold enough to ask what he writes. Novels? Poetry? For a newspaper?

And then Mike Grant comes out with a miracle.

"I wrote the poem to the Unknown Soldier. Laid the wreath with the Prime Minister there. That's going pretty far back..."

Now even more baffled, Will ventures to ask, "You mean you wrote the poem that's on the monument to the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa?! The one etched into the memorial statue near the--"

And then Mike Grant, good ole boy heckler of Sudbury, launches into a poetry recitation, cigarette in one hand, a bit of verse in perfect metre and perfect formal rhyme schemes, so flawlessly and ferociously that there can be no doubt in our minds that he isn't bullshitting us--he wrote the thing. Stunned, we marvel at him in the same way you would if you met a tow truck driver who had actually written "In Flanders Fields."

Two days on tour, and two chance meetings with Canadian poets, one idolized and one hiding out in the late-night taverns of Sudbury. This isn't everyday life, but there's poetry everywhere.