Though it has been a little over a month since I left Ontario, it feels like so much longer. Like so many journey’s, this one could be interpreted as a retreat, whereas in my mind it is an advance.
Leaving my newly minted wife and step-children in the driveway of our home is the hardest thing I have ever done. I spent most of the first day’s drive choking back tears as the enormity of the situation began to weigh on me. It is one thing to plan in abstract to uproot your life and leave your family behind in search of prosperity but the reality is painfully sharp.
As I traveled north towards to North Bay I was struck, as I always am with the dichotomy of nature beauty that surrounds these highways and the devastation that is necessary in order to build the roads. The long-in-the-making expansion to the 400 highway continues to cut and blast a swath through the dense forest and rock that is Ontario. While in progress the land appears wounded, though the finished product soon seems as if it was there all along.
In North Bay I visited an old friend I had not seen in 20 years. We spent the afternoon catching up and reminiscing. Even in the hard-scrabble city of North Bay was showing signs of prosperity being eked out in resources and commodities. As I continued to travel north and west, prosperity was grow with each town I passed. It served to reinforce the wisdom of the choice of this journey as Ontario’s future, or at least southern Ontario is bleak. I moved on in the late afternoon to Sudbury after a leisurely six hour driving day and checked into my hotel. I would regret not pushing further soon enough.
The most notable feature of the hotel was the stream of security personal moving in and out of the building. I discovered they were not employed there but staying there and had been for months. Something big was happening in Sudbury but I have no idea what.
Traveling west to Sault Ste. Marie I found the continual change in the landscape to be striking. Sudbury seemed hewn from the hard layers of shale, surrounded by scrub-brush. As I moved past Sault and headed north, the mountains grew up, surrounding me with forest and cloud. The sunny weather of day one had abandoned me, leaving drizzle in its wake. More than once the road dipped between peaks, dropping me into cloud and fog. I slowed and squinted at the wall of white hoping nothing would decide to walk out. Between those dream-like moments I was witness to some extraordinary things such a semi and trailer that had apparently run off the road but settled into ditch so perfectly as to appear as if it had been parked there.
During this stretch I enjoyed a nice lunch at a diner outside of Wawa, evening partaking in a fine home-made lemon meringue pie. As I walked out to the car it seemed to me that the exhaust pipe was hanging a bit low, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary at a glance.
Little did I know how right I was.
10 minutes later, there was a snap and grinding of metal against asphalt. I pulled over on the small shoulder, trying to get as far out of the way of the single lane as I could, knowing that semi’s would blow by me at 140 km/h. In the drizzle I laid down under the back end and immediately saw the problem. The strapping holding the muffler to the frame had sheared one of the bolts, and the muffler was dragging. Not a huge problem, but a not a good one as the entire exhaust on this car is a single unit. I was in no position to simply pull it off and live with the noise, I had to get it fixed. Without even a bungee cord to re-attached the strapping I carefully turned around and slowly headed back to way. I stopped at the Ford dealer outside of town who took one look at my injured import and told me to get lost. Risking losing the whole exhaust I drove all the way back into town, the pipe bouncing and scraping along the way.
I found my saviors at Canadian Tire there, and for that I am eternally grateful. The kindness of strangers was another of the unforgettable things I would witness. How do you properly express your thanks to a mechanic who, through ingenuity and generosity, saved the trip? He bent and welded a piece of framing steel, securing the exhaust back into place. An hour behind schedule and with great relief I continued on to Thunder Bay, completing a 13 hour drive. My right ankle had become swollen and sore and while in the Bay I bought a brace, along with other supplies.
The Bay displayed itself as another marker in the road of growing prosperity. Even the land itself seemed to become richer and more alive as I now turned west, topping out of the mountains and out into the prairies, leaving the red rock and earth behind.
I made the mistake of stopping in Kenora for lunch, not knowing the road into town would take me a full 45 minutes out of my way. I had passed through Dryden earlier, driving by simply one of the largest industrial sites I had ever seen. It dominated the landscape with buildings nearly a kilometer long, and tall stacks belching white plumes into the air.
Approaching the border of Manitoba the truck 300 meters in front of me slammed on its brakes, and a black bear loped out from behind it and into the woods, the first wildlife I had seen. The greenery of Ontario dropped away, melting into yellow browns of the prairie. The shoulders were littered with coyote and fox road-kill, though I was lucky to see a live one lope down a country road. Overcoming the massive geography served as a constant reminder of what I was leaving behind, and the chasm growing between us.
Hundreds of massive bushels of grain were left out to rot at farms alongside the highway.
Winnipeg was a hub of development, buildings springing up alongside the outer rings of its surrounding highways. One blight of land stood out as carrion birds circled massive bulldozers as they pushed around tons of garbage; the local land-fill. Regina would be my last hotel stop of the trip and I pushed on, eating lunch in Brandon Manitoba.
Development had exploded in Regina, so much so that my hotel was buried amongst the shells of new hotels springing up around it, leaving me to search for it in frustration. This would be my last night on the road as tomorrow I would move on to my birthplace, cross two time zones, and finally come to rest in a new home.
The trip from Regina to Saskatoon was relatively short, and uneventful. I chased the sun from morning to rise, basking in the beautiful weather. I though often of my wife and kids the initial pain of leaving now a constant ache. Crossing into Saskatchewan was a continuation of landscape, not the jarring step out of the mountains leaving Ontario had been.
Saskatoon is my birthplace though I have only returned twice. I cruised through the city, amazed at even its growth and searched vainly for familiarity. The final leg of the journey now felt the longest as the miles seemed to drag between Saskatoon and Lloydminister. An oil town, Lloydminister sits on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, with a tall red obelisk at the middle of two signifying the border. I stopped outside of town and emptied the jerry can I had filled in Sault Ste Marie into the tank, no longer needing it. I also gained 2 hours that day as I traveled from Manitoba to Alberta.
Edmonton had been a childhood home and nostalgia clings to me still though I have been here over a month. This trip has truly been a rite of passage, the immensity of Canada’s geography humbling but rewarding me as I traveled. The climb out of Ontario was both literal and metaphorical, as I have already begun to build a new life in Alberta, even has my former home declines into recession.
This first battle has been fought but the war has only begun
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