Past Calgary the speed limit is 110km/h, a speed my old van must have freaked out upon seeing. This is where the trip gets good though. We crank up the speed and new rattles announce themselves. I let out an audible “whoa” accompanied with a grin, the grin you’ll find on your dad’s face when no one is around and he’s whipping donuts in a snowy parking lot.
The prairies are my parking lot and 110 is my snowstorm. We’re heading to Newfoundland.
I grew up in Northwest B.C. and first felt the pull of the East Coast as a teenager. I was curious about the monstrous size of the country I called home. Could I call all of it home? What’s it like to drive on the other side? I decided to go university in Newfoundland, because it was far away and cheap. I would find the answers.
The winds aren’t favourable on the prairies, the old van is a sail on a flat inland sea, pulling us cross ways to the north, I grip the steering wheel and will us East, there is nothing up there we need to see.
In a short time the prairies fade away and out of the bug gut stained windshield the Canadian Shield looms, the great blue whale of Canadian geographic features. It doesn’t swallow us quickly, doesn’t even try to snap us up like the Rockies would, the Shield just sits there and lets us drive right down it’s throat and across its massive, barely beating heart.
Late at night we stop for gas, the van is tired after the days work. So am I. There’s a little bit of fluid that leaks onto the floor mat from somewhere up in the gas pedal region. I take a bit between my two fingers, rub them together and smell the bitterness of whatever the fluid is. Something from a yellow bottle, my dad bought me extra before I left. It’s stored in the van’s medicine cabinet - a dusty milk crate in the back.
“This place is huge” I think, as I fill up under the buzz of the gas station lights.
I find a place to sleep just a little ways down the road, a quiet campground on Lake Superior.
I take off my shoes and walk down to the shore. The wind is whistling off the lake, providing freshness for my deteriorating travel outfit. My mom used to read us a book about Lake Superior called Paddle To The Sea, I can’t remember much except for images of the great, dark lake I’m standing in front of. I walk out into the water. It’s dark outside, but the bottom is clear. I don’t feel like I’m standing on the Earth, I feel like a cell living on the floor of an infinitely huge cave.
Walking back to the van I can hear the clicks of its metal cooling, twitching on the edge of sleep.
Still more Shield the next day. Around noon we stop for lunch at a picnic area by the lake. When we stop the silence is always a surprise, shutting the van off is like shutting off the 21st century, at any minute I could turn the key back 1000 years. I’ve heard stories of what a pain in the ass it was to build this section of the railway - all the labour of the mountains in the west but with less scenery. Out here I suspect they kept the shovels digging so that the sparseness didn’t crush them.
The power of the Shield sneaks up on you, it only gets impressive as you immerse yourself deeper into it. It’s a secretive land with its endless unexplored lakes and thick stunted trees that make you feel like you’re driving inside an endless, natural prison. A feeling that becomes more hopeless when you remember that there is nothing around for thousands of kilometres. I feel like we’re going nowhere, that we will never get to Newfoundland and that we can’t even turn around and go home to anymore. Distance is not measured in kilometres here but in states of mind and levels of sanity.
Night comes again and we’re still on the Shield - the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, a provincial Jupiter.
We pull into a rest area and the van is happy to be left alone for the night. It idles all funny before I turn it off, like an injured athlete rolling around with a sprained ankle. My dad once said something about letting a machine cool down before you turn it off for the night, I should treat the van with more respect if it’s going to get me across.
There’s a low whine of mosquitos and blackflies at the windows of the van.
I lay on top of my sleeping bag, it’s hot and muggy. Four straight days of driving now. I take huge breaths, exhaling with an aggressive sigh. Too much to think about.
Five minutes later I’m running naked around the rest area. Shaking off the sedentary days, jiggling the poisonous glue of road food sitting in my stomach.
You never hear about people moving to Newfoundland, I think as the thrill of running naked wears off and it becomes just a run. Maybe it isn’t real. People from BC move to Toronto and sometimes Halifax, but not Newfoundland.
I think about how many people I know, none of them are from Newfoundland. I don’t know enough people.
The next day the van and I slash our way off the Shield. We’re near Ottawa and we’re going to Newfoundland again.
“HA, we’ll do it.”
The van doesn’t like leaving the two-lane nostalgia of the Canadian Shield, we’re back on four lanes now and the increase in speed means the return of the rattles. This time they’re more threatening.
The St. Lawrence is easy compared to the Shield. There are people everywhere and destinations to be reached, distances are measured in kilometres once again.
Stopping for gas is uncomfortable, I try a few courtesy words in french, which in actual fact is begging for forgiveness.
The deal, as laid out by Trudeau in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is: “in exchange for the reality of English domination, the English will be taught just enough french in school to embarrass themselves should they ever set foot in Quebec.”
The St. Lawrence is wide and not flowing in either direction.
The cradle of Canada, pretty boring.
We drive by the Nova Scotia sign in the middle of the night. Its kitschy lighthouse sending an important signal - you really can drive across the country. That lighthouse is for the Atlantic Ocean. Businesses have exotic names out here like Eastern Audio, Atlantic Glass and Jungle Jim’s.
All sense of adventure is gone tonight, I know we’re close, I have a job to do, I’m a hit man hired to take out distance.
Later, I drive across a jetty, unusual against the rolling hills that have marked the last four or five thousand kilometres. A few miles later the signs are in Gaelic and English, this must be Cape Breton. The gaelic is more jarring than the lighthouse from earlier. I’m now closer to Ireland than B.C.
The van sounds worse tonight. There’s too much of that radioactive fluid pooling up in the floor mat. It cakes my shoes, I wonder if I’ll soon require this tonic to survive.
I find what looks like the edge of a farmers field and back into a little spot in the trees.
I’ve never had to apply any grit to driving, that’s for stuff like high school sports and working outside in the snow. But now it’s different, in a few hours I have to get up and keep going. I sleep sitting up in the front of the van tonight. It’s not as comfortable, but it’s not worth it to make a bed in the back. Plus I want to feel tough, a vagrant who doesn’t care where he sleeps.
It’s foggy in the morning, the grass is green but the scenery looks malnourished, stunted like the Shield, and tormented by the weather.
Arriving in Sydney I can see the ferry terminal in the distance. The scene should be familiar, I grew up down the street from a ferry terminal. This terminal is different though, I trust the boats in my hometown, I know where they’re taking me.
This boat is taking me somewhere that only exists in theory, I have yet to see proof. I’m on the deck as we leave Cape Breton, a week driving across the country and now I’m on a boat to get to another part of the country.
The ferry pulls in to Port Aux Basques in the morning. I drive off the ramp and touch down onto the tarmac of the ferry terminal.
I’m awestruck by this new place, I don’t feel like we’ve left the boat, I feel Like we’ve boarded a bigger boat, one whose freeboard is made up of rock cliffs and whose deck is kept clean by the wind.
“This is still Canada?” I wonder, “We’re still in Canada? Do other people know these guys are out here? Have they been getting enough food and water?”
We pull out of Port Aux Basques and continue. A couple hours down the road the van starts rattling, it jostles me to life as everything inside is vibrating like a rocket re-entering the atmosphere. There’s a quick BOOM and we’re way beyond rattling, now it’s like being inside a jackhammer. I can barely hang onto the wheel and it takes all my effort to jerk the van to the side of the highway.
I turn the key off and sit in silence for a minute before getting out.
We’ve blown a tire, we’ve more than blown a tire, we’ve blown a tire so bad that there’s only a few rags of rubber left clinging to the rim.
Like most of the trip, this is a lonely stretch of highway, just grey sky and green forest. I’d been pushing it all along, testing the limits of what my old van could do. I was waiting for somebody to drive by and scold me, ask me what I was doing so far from home and so unprepared.
Getting it fixed takes some time, and after the episode I decide to crawl into the bush and spend the night, a quiet place for both of us to brood.
We camp out on the old Newfoundland rail bed, two worn out travellers atop a famous piece of failed infrastructure.
I can almost hear the van complaining as I sit in the rain and wind, the arms of a thousand alder trees clawing at us.
The ticking of its cooling metal is a lecture, a loud fuss about all the fluid leaks and high speed shudders it’s had to put up with for the past week. To top it off there was today’s waiting for a tow truck on the side of the highway in a foreign land.
The trip had been so glorious in my minds eye, now it feels endless and is becoming hostile.
There is a new level of darkness here, it’s complete and shapeless. Even looking down there is only brackish swamp water pooling up amongst the stunted trees.
The morning sighs itself into existence and I turn the gruff old van on. It doesn’t start so easy. I can’t tell if it’s real exhaustion or just an act of defiance shouted into the nothingness of rural Newfoundland.
We crawl off the abandoned railroad and keep going down the highway.
I have no idea what we’re going to do once we get there.
The Newfoundland interior passes by, I keep focused on the coast. It has to be better than this, nobody would want to live here. The country, once astonishingly big, is now maddeningly big, I want to curse but I don’t know to whom.
The distance signs dip lower and lower. Suddenly we’re inside 100 km to St. John’s and I start scanning for signs of the city. The highway changes from two lanes to four and I still see nothing.
I climb over one of the many contours cut into the rock and there it is, way in the distance - civilization. Houses everywhere, ugly industrial parks and way, way far away is that little chunk of castle at the top of a hill, it might as well be the Eiffel Tower, the great bookend of Eastern Canada.
I keep driving, all my senses are ramped up, getting glimpses of the tower, it’s close now and I’m panicking, where do I turn off?
Irrational fear wells up inside me, I don’t know where I’m supposed to stop, I don’t know where I’m supposed to live. I don’t know why I came here at all. I need to get to that tower but I’m driving away from it. The van and I are stuck in unison, afraid to leave the highway, I can’t turn the wheel and I half expect my companion to take over and turn the wheels for me.
I’m scared of missing the whole thing, I picture the highway ending as a boat launch and us just driving down the ramp and into the Atlantic.
I swerve off at the next exit and instantly the visions disappear.
No more irrational fears, I’m going to take a look at this old tower at the top of the hill. The van relaxes at the red lights like a jogger doing a cool down. My anxieties subside and my brain decompresses, limp into the bottom of my skull.
St. John’s is real, Newfoundland is real. I tap the steering wheel and the dashboard, and say “yes yes yes,” to the van as we cruise through the residential streets. We made it.
We’re going to look at this tower.