Three buses to get there. The first one was a twenty-four hour ride. Time. Time for everything. Time to rest, time to think, time to take a bathroom break when the driver tells us we have fifteen minutes. Time to take a lunch break when the driver tells it's time for that. These last few weeks had offered none of that, no such structure.

But now, here in Dawson City, all that structure was gone again. This is still frontier land. Everyone knows what time it is, and what year it is, and that it doesn't matter in the least.

The northern prairie in this hemisphere is flatter than you can believe, but when you least expect it there are rolling hills, ravines, forests. Travelling that far in such a short amount of time was like going between worlds. I left a midwest farmland one day and arrived in a taiga wilderness within seventy-two hours. Truth is, farmland is wilderness too, but whatever you aren't ready for is all the more wild. Those cities I had travelled through were wilderness enough for me, and this was just like them in the sense of unknown surroundings.

Every stop on that trip, someone would get on and someone would get off. Sometimes the bus was nearly empty and sometimes nearly full. Most people would try to stake out as much space for themselves as they could, not wanting to get too close to anyone. But there are some socially driven people who can't do that.

A sixteen year old girl got on in one of those small towns. The bus station was actually a gas station, and the only store in town. I know she was sixteen because she told me. Her eyes darted for the first available seat when she climbed on board and the driver told her to sit down. He had to, otherwise she would have stuck with him the entire trip and talked the whole time.

She saw several empty seats near the front, and a few rows back she saw me and sat down in my row. There were three seats together. The one I was sitting in was against the window, facing north for most of the westbound trip, and the one beside me had paper bag with remnants of my lunch in it, adn the third seat was the aisle seat, which she sat in.

She sat down, looking at me so directly that she looked astonished by everything. She looked around, up, acroos, under the seat in front, checked out the arm rests. She stood up and looked in the luggage rack above, stumbled when the bus started moving, faltered as we started to take to the highway, and then sat down again. Her ticket was still in her hand, and her beaming face, clean and undecorated looked at me again.

She had dark hair, softened in colour by some highlighting. A slightly round face with a large smile and large teeth that all seemed to fit in spite of themselves. She had a slightly dark complexion that absorbed a few freckles.

This was the kind of town that didn't bother having fasion except as a form of protest against living here. Her appearance was the Monday Morning Best of this sort of neighbourhood. Everyone wants to be in their favourite clothes and their favourite mood at the same time, no matter who they are.

"Are you going to Edmonton?"

"I'm staying on after that."

"Where you going?"

"Dawson City."

"Oooh. Wow, that's far."

I laughed, honestly, but just a little. Far is relative for sure. "Yes I guess it is. I got on in Manitoba."

"Oooh. It's gonna take me seventeen hours to get to Edmonton."

(I have seventeen hours of this...) "Me too." (Oops, maybe I shouldn't have said it quite like that.)

"Hahahaha! Ya I guess so eh! Haaa, my auntie did this once, she said it took forever and she read comic books the whole way. She read all of them three times. And they stopped at all these places and every place they stopped she bought candy. My cousin is gonna take me shopping at this big mall when I get to Edmonton."

"That sounds nice. Did you bring anything to read?"

"No, I just got my phone with me though, so I'll probably be texting a lot."

"Oh that's good, you can let your family know you're ok that way."

"Yeah my gramma was really worried, she says there was this guy that was riding on all the buses and he would kill people and eat them, and then the bus driver wouldn't even know because he couldn't find them, so nobody noticed for a long time." Now she looked a little frightened. I sensed a bit of panic. "I think he's still out there. Like a Freddy Kruger or something! OMG!"

She actually said O. M. G., but now at least she was laughing about it. This girl was her own entertainment and I was trying to be as boring as possible. But. Somehow this part of her journey and this part of my journey overlapped. She was starting out on a short trip. I was winding up a long trip. Truly though, my trip wasn't at an end yet. Dawson was the next stopping point for me, and hopefully the last one in this realm, but there was so much left to become certain of.

"My auntie said I should go. She said it would be good for me or whatever. I don't know. My gramma didn't want me to go. I couldn't decide if I should go, so I just went."

"Well, I guess you decided."

"I don't know though. What if she was right. Maybe it will be all weird."

"You'll find out soon enough. I'm sure it will be fine."

Now she looked even more worried. "I don't know howcome some people just know things, like what to do and everything. What if I shouldn't go? I don't know how I'm supposed to know. I've never gone anywhere."

"Your auntie hadn't gone anywhere until she went somewhere either."

"She always does stuff though. I think some people are just good at doing stuff."

"Maybe. But soon you'll be in Edmonton shopping."

How does one become certain. I don't think it's done. One is, or one isn't. The fact that I was on my way to Dawson at all meant that the end was certain to me. I thought about this while prairie fields passed by my window, taunting me with a glimpse of a season. Fields like these are defined by their annual function, and yet here I was passing them by in a moment. What an insult to these places, to only see them in such a tiny view of their existence. In a moment they produce nothing, but in an annum they produce what the cycle of life gives them.

"I never seen a mall like that before! I can't wait! I dunno what I'm gonna buy though."

"I'm sure you'll find lots of things to buy. It's a big mall, but most of the stores are just like everywhere else."

"Ya? You think so? I don't know. I heard there is one store that only sells chocolate. Like, not even other kinds of candy, and no drinks or anything just all these kinds of chocolate. That's so crazy!"

"Sounds like a fun store. I guess you can spend all day shopping."

"Ya, my cousin is going to take me the day after I get there. I think it's going to be all day but I don't know yet. I hope I brought enough money. I hope I don't get robbed. I heard that people get robbed there. But whatever. My cousin goes there all the time and it's ok. I'm so excited."

The bus came to a stop again at yet another small town. It wasn't dark out yet but the sun was getting low. Every stop mattered because it was hard to say whether the next one would have any services or not. My new friend went inside, presumably to buy candy. It was a brief stop so everyone got off and on quickly, and we hit the highway again.

"I got a crossword book. Do you like puzzles? I'm gonna try em."

"Oh that sounds fun."

"Ya, ok. Legendary stories. What does that mean? Ok. It's... one, two, three, four, five spaces. Let's see... fairy tales. That doesn't fit though. It should be fairy tales. Why doesn't it fit?"

"Sagas. Or maybe epics."

"Oh! Hahaha!" Her laugh here was genuine, and she threw her head back in amusement. "Ok now s-a-g-e-s..."

"S-a-g-a-s."

"Huh? Oh it's an a. Ok. Books of maps."

"Atlases." Now she had me playing along just to try to end the game sooner.

"Aaatllllassse... oh it doesn't fit. Wait. Um... one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven digits. It can only be seven."

"What?"

"Seven digits."

"Seven letters?"

"Ya."

"Seven letters. A-t-l-a-s-e-s."

"Oh ok. Is that right?"

"Yes, that's how you spell it."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Ok." She didn't seem to believe me, but she wrote it down anyway and then put the book away.

It was starting to darken on board, so I leaned back into a sleeping position and waited for silence. She pulled out her cell phone and looked for something to do with it. I made plans for Dawson then. Big plans.