Alphonso

Alphonso was born in San Sebastian, Spain. I landed in Madrid and rented a car to go exploring the Basque Country in the north after mapping out a beautiful circuit that took me through Castille Y Leon to the Basque Country and then south through Navarra and La Mancha.

It was a rainy February and I had already visited Segovia, Burgos, and Bilbao when I decided to stop for a couple of days to visit San Sebastian hoping to go for a swim in the sea by the Bay of Biscay. After getting settled in a quaint little apartment downtown I went hopscotching around the puddles of the cobbled downtown streets exploring and looking for sundries when I happened on the most curious of shops. Sitting in the shadow of the Basílica de Santa María del Coro was a tiny shopfront that sold only one item: rubber ducks.

Rubber ducks were nothing new to me and I had seen them in souvenir shops in cities all around the world, but never before had I seen a shop that devoted itself to selling just that and nothing else. Given what I knew about upfront costs and overhead, I couldn’t quite piece together who might have conceived that a store specializing exclusively in the sale of rubber ducks might turn out to be a lucrative business venture, but there I was standing in the store perusing the myriad of ducks they had on display. They had Statue of Liberty ducks, Batman ducks, German alehouse lady ducks, brigadier general ducks, nurse ducks, police ducks, princess ducks, you name it if there was a rubber duck idea to be had then it had already been thought of and manufactured and placed in that store.

It was just too weird, so I pulled out my phone and sent a quick message over to my mother to see if she would like to have one. “Of course!” she replied.

To be a good souvenir, as I was in Spain, I thought it should have a Spanish flair to it and the two that caught my eye were the flamenco dancer duck and the matador duck. Eight euro later and I had my duck – el matador. But now, although I figured it would make a nice souvenir, what the hell was I going to do with it.

I had come to swim in the sea and as it was February and only about 8 degrees outside, and raining on top of that, there weren’t all that many folks at the beach. Had there been, though, they would have seen a grown man shivering and cold playing in the waves with his rubber ducky.

Eventually, it was time to leave San Sebastian and I was only about halfway along on my journey by car through Spain so I ended up placing the rubber duck up on the dash by the windshield. When you spend countless hours at the wheel of a car by yourself your mind can wander off to all sorts of strange places. You sing along with the radio and have conversations with yourself which, for the sake of seeming normal at least to myself, I call meditation. Needless to say, me and my new rubbery co-pilot, Alphonso, had many conversations while exploring the Spanish countryside.

When I returned to Canada, I presented Alphonso as a gift to my mother before affixing him to the dash of her car where he stayed ever since. “Never fear the road ahead,” I told my mother. “Alphonso knows the way!”

Years passed and when the Covid-cloud that had been hanging over us in Canada began to fade away even just a little bit I bargained with my mother to take her car out on the road and drive it across the country. Many scoffed at the idea of any kind of travel suggesting that it just was not the right time, but my mother encouraged it. I told her that with the expectation that travel restrictions would ease by September that I would drive the car from Vancouver to Montreal and then fly to Europe. Before leaving Canada, I would fly her to Montreal and then she could drive the car back to Vancouver. After spending four months pent up in a short-term rental in a basement apartment in Kitsilano, my mother, an avid traveller herself, teared up and said, “thank you! I need these little carrots dangled in front of me to keep life interesting.”

Any trip across Canada begins to creep into the 40+ hour range to make the drive depending on how quickly you need to get across. That is a lot of time with just you and the scenery and the hum of the engine. There is time to think, time to let your mind wander, time to connect with the wind and the air in some of the most remote places. It is also time to spend with Alphonso.

For every kilometre of the journey, there Alphonso sat on the dashboard in his position as co-pilot. He kept watch over the car during all of my stops. He only failed me once taking me the wrong way down a one-way street in North Bay, but we emerged unscathed. We had some trouble getting the car started when the mercury went over 40 degrees in Kelowna, but the car would always eventually start. We sputtered into Toronto with some of the sparkplugs misfiring but Alphonso just said to give the car a bit of rest and she’d start again just fine and she did. As I travelled through the Rocky Mountains his eyes grew wide with wonderment just like mine. When the sky opened over the prairies he could see across the plain all the way through every cloud that hung low between where we were and where we were headed. And when we hit the shield and the forests grew thick Alphonso spotted every inukshuk along the journey to help us find our way. He never needed a bathroom break, never complained about my driving, but the dirtbag never once ponied up to pay for gas. That’s what you get, when you buy an 8 euro rubber duck in San Sebastian. Cheap bastard!