Charles Gordon - The Canada Trip

OTHER BOOKS BY CHARLES GORDON

How to Be Not Too Bad
At the Cottage
The Governor Generals Bunny Hop

Copyright 1997 by Charles Gordon

Cloth edition published in 1997
Trade paperback edition 1998

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Gordon, Charles, 1940
The Canada trip

eISBN: 978-1-55199-470-3

1. Gordon, Charles, 1940 Journeys Canada. 2. Canada Description and travel. I. Title.

FC 75. G 73 917.104648 C 97-930189-0
F 1017. G 73

Set in Bembo by M&S, Toronto
Maps by Tom Sankey
Printed and bound in Canada

The Cranberry Tree by Enid Delgatty Rutland, originally published in Where the Highway Ends, Stories and Rhythms of Flin Flon (Brian Kinsley, ed., Ottawa: Flintoba Enterprises, 1995), appears by kind permission of the publisher.
Excerpts from Sarah Binks by Paul Hiebert are taken from the New Canadian Library edition and appear courtesy of the Binks Family.

The publishers acknowledge the support given by the Canada Council for the Arts and by the Ontario Arts Council for their publishing program.

A Douglas Gibson Book

McClelland & Stewart Inc.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M 5 G 2 E 9

v3.1

For the Business Manager. Where next?

INTRODUCTION:

15,539 Miles of Good Road

We are back from three months on the highways of Canada, driving 24,863 kilometres, which is 15,539 miles to you old-timers. We saw three moose, five whales, a bear, many chipmunks, many people taking photographs of chipmunks, two antelope, a caribou, six rabbits, a statue of a giant goose, a statue of a giant sheep, three coyotes, a deer, elk in the woods, elk in parking lots, a statue of a giant lobster, a seal, two baseball games, a big-horned sheep, two jazz festivals, a pretty bad hot-hamburger sandwich, two icebergs, three luxury hotels, eleven roadside motels, fourteen bed-and-breakfasts, four resorts, 127 highways, two oceans, two casinos, thirteen ferries, and a submarine.

We can tell you about the Chteau Lake Louise and the Prestige Motel. We studied the continental reach of poutine, the Persian and the Denver sandwich. We visited the homes of Anne of Green Gables, Margaret Laurence, Ralph Connor, Louis Riel, Paddle-to-the-Sea, Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, Husky the Muskie, and the Regina Manifesto. We saw hundreds of Germans and Japanese, dozens of Americans and Brits, and some Canadians. We visited nine provincial legislatures, six art galleries, and one public library. We saw enough of Canada to realize there are ten more books in the parts we missed.

You could write one of them. In five years, a great chunk of the population of Canada, the leading edge of the Baby Boomers, will take early retirement. Many of them will also take to the road. Those with good sense will take to the road in Canada. In some ways, this is a book for them not a guidebook, but a record of how it feels to see the country. Maybe it will inspire others to start their own journeys. I want to read their books.

This one began with a little trip in the late winter, sort of a limbering-up exercise to get ready for the big one that would begin in June. The little trip took us from Ottawa to Toronto to North Hatley, Quebec and back to Ottawa. While we were doing it, we thought about the big trip to come. It was in North Hatley over a candlelight dinner at Manoir Hovey, that Nancy asked:

What do you want me to do?

We already knew that she was coming along; we had both arranged leaves from our respective jobs. Now we had to decide her role. I would be writing and trying to find huge Canadian insights and to spot moose beside the road. I would be trying to avoid colourful characters, figuring theyve all been done in four-minute documentaries on the TV news. Would she, my wife of thirty-one years, get stuck with all the driving? Or when I was driving, would she have to write down all the witty things I said, if any? She was uneasy. We had driven long distances before Ottawa to Kenora several times but never anything like this.

You could be the business manager, I said.

This didnt surprise her. It didnt take thirty-one years for Nancy to figure out that the smaller details of existence, such things as do we have any money and is there a place to stay tonight, are among the areas in which I dont excel. So she would take charge of those areas and I would try to find some other areas to excel in, such as ending sentences with prepositions.

This could be good, I said. In the book I could call you The Business Manager. You know how writers like to create characters and give them clever names.

No, she said.

Oh well. Maybe I could come up with a clever name for myself. Norman Mailer used to do that. In The Armies of the Night, he was Aquarius. Dalton Camp, in a very fine book, Points of Departure, actually got away with calling himself The Varlet. But I couldnt think of anything offhand. In thirty-some years of daily journalism I had got out of the habit of even using I. This was all going to take some getting used to. Maybe I could give the car a funny name.

The Eastern Townships is a good place to contemplate a drive across the country. It is a beautiful part of the world, of course, and, if not a microcosm of Canada, at least a place where many of the important elements interact. It is in Quebec, but the English are here, speaking their language. More and more of them speak French, however, and it is now a shock to hear a clerk in a store say to a customer: Im sorry, I dont speak French. I have heard that said in North Hatley and it probably wouldnt have been any shock at all twenty years ago.

One of the reasons the idea of travelling was so appealing is that we, like many Canadians, have huge gaps in our knowledge of the country and its geography. The extended Gordon family cottage at Lake of the Woods is largely to blame. Like many Canadians, we put all our vacation time into the cottage, time that might otherwise be spent getting to know the rest of the country.

Of course, even given the time, Canada is not an easy country to get to know. Transcontinental train travel has all but disappeared. Airlines make it cheaper to fly to London or Miami than to Winnipeg or Halifax. The climate doesnt help matters. Desperate to get someplace warm in the winter, many Canadians blow the family travel budget on Florida or Phoenix or Hawaii, depending upon which part of our country they inhabit. Many factors conspire to keep Canadians from knowing Canada.