The drive across the country took six days. I left Seattle on a Monday night after picking my son up from school and spending the afternoon with him, the dog and I making good time to Spokane. I was pulled over, speeding through eastern Washington, but the state trooper seemed to take pity on us driving to Maine and let me off with a warning. We didn’t see much once we got past the mountains, driving in the dark across the plateau. We stayed at a soulless roadside hotel; they allowed dogs, which was enough.
We logged 710 miles the next day, ending up in Glendive, Montana. I called my parents from the road and my father said he and a friend had stayed in Glendive, Montana, in the late sixties, and he called it the kind of place you could imagine as being the hell created for you for eternity if your sins were bad enough. I’m not sure I’d put it in quite that category, but it wasn’t a place to stick around. I got pulled over again on the way in – this time for roll stopping through a right turn on red – and Officer Mills of the Glendive police department also took pity on us, said we should get some rest after a long day on the road, and we did. We stayed in a roadside motel that had seen better days but was clean for all of that. The refrigerator didn’t work, so I kept my dogs raw dog food outside to stay cold. I had a good steak at a dive bar, ate half of it, and kept the rest for treats the next day.
Wednesday saw us powering through 750 miles, from Glendive to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. North Dakota largely ignores the concept of speed limits, and on the long straightaways I put the cruise control on 95 miles an hour and listened to agricultural talk shows and country music on AM radio. We stopped every couple of hours for the dog to walk around and catch a tennis ball and eat bits of steak. I stuck to dried apricots and beef jerky and water. We hit traffic around Minneapolis, and finally pulled up to the suburban house where I had booked an Airbnb. The owner, an older woman with grown up kids long moved out, had two dogs – one elderly and blind from birth, the other newly acquired, a rescue, both of them curious about this well-traveled furry mixed breed with me. My dog marked a couple of chairs, but the owner understood, and together we cleaned it up. We talked for a watching television. I don’t own a television and don’t watch it even when it’s around, so it was disconcerting to see network prime time – a couple of hours of strange programming which seemed to presage the end of the world, programs about secret government antiterrorism squads and solving conspiracy theory driven crime. I tried to focus on the conversation – talking about children, and divorce, and parents as they approach their final days – but the television kept making me think about what Americans watch and how it shapes our thinking about the world. The shows seemed designed to inflate and inflame imaginary fears.
From there, it was a hectic day – not many miles but deadlines, the first in many miles. We drove to Milwaukee, punctuated by a rest stop visit where the dog frolicked in some tall grass and then lay down on a sunny walking path while I had a contentious call with one of the companies I’ve been consulting for. The call was probably overdue; the company was falling apart, riven by disagreements among partners who couldn’t see eye to eye, and I had to be transparent about my place, my expectations that this was going to be a failed venture, and that I needed to start looking for something different, and that I was already looking actively. It lasted longer than I had hoped, and we were scheduled to catch a ferry just after midday. The dog didn’t want to get back in the car but I coaxed him in with the last of the steak. We made the ferry just barely – the last car in line – and I walked the dog for a few minutes before the horn sounded and we all boarded. I had to leave him in the car while the high-speed catamaran jetted across Lake Michigan. I did some work in the lounge and had a beer and thought, I can’t drive any more today.
The dog was shaking with fear when I got back in the car and while waiting to disembark, I looked up the nearest hotel with a restaurant that took dogs, and booked a night. The dog didn’t even want to drive the fifteen miles to get there – he wanted the drive to be over – but we made it and stopped, early for us at around four in the afternoon. I checked in and then took him for a long walk, but he was nervous and shaky even after that. I gave him his supper and then went to the restaurant, where I called my parents and had a plate full of vegetables and some chicken. It occurred to me that in eight cross-country drives, this was the first one where I hadn’t stopped at a fast food place. I felt better than I usually did, even though I’m still smoking and need to stop. I went to bed.
We got up the next morning, another shortish day ahead – just 450 miles to a city an hour before Toronto. The dog again wasn’t happy about getting into the car, but he did, and we made it to our friends around 3:30pm, this time punctuated by another call with the failing company which itself was punctuated by a hailstorm. That actually seemed to calm the dog, as we were stopped at a gas station parking lot while I took the call. He slept, curled up in the back seat, as the hail roared on the roof of the car and I occasionally spoke into the conference call, voicing my doubts and becoming increasingly non-committal.
My friends were from Edmonton, and they live in a classic suburban house, on a quiet tree lined street on the side of the slope of the escarpment that runs from Lake Ontario up to the forested cottage country of southern Ontario. The dog and I had time for a long walk around the neighborhood, and he chased squirrels – oddly, jet black squirrels there, meandering nervously around the falling leaves of early autumn, searching for acorns until they noticed my dog skulking, and then they would turn hard and shoot straight for a tree while my dog poured on his speed in chase, never catching them, almost intentionally missing them before they found their tree and climbed up towards safety.
I had run the department that one of my friends had worked in when I had been a banker in Alberta; she’s Russian, and she made me a bowl of borscht with sour cream when I arrived. It felt perfect, even though a bit stereotypical for a Russian woman to offer borscht to a tired traveller. Her husband came home a couple hours later and we talked endlessly through the evening. They had a hot tub and an indoor jet pool, and we climbed in around 11pm and stayed in for a couple hours. The warm water and conversation – languid, ranging from parents to work to relationships to history – was almost foreign after being on the road for so long, surrounded by AM radio and strangers and distant chit-chat at diners and in gas stations. I was too conscious for it – I was too aware of how my personal bubble had shrunk to the cabin of my car and the singular constant awareness of the emotional state of my dog – but she made cocktails of gin and homemade kombucha, I brought out a 40 year old whisky, we ate a lovely meal and snacked through the night, and I slowly regained my human sociability.
We all slept in a bit the next morning. We took the dog for another long walk, this time to the top of the escarpment, Toronto and Mississauga and their strangely shaped skyscrapers off in the distance, the sun blazing off the lake, the leaves beginning to shine gold. I left around eleven in the morning – the latest departure so far – strangely not hungover in the least, although my friend’s husband, who is not Russian, seemed a little worse for wear. They were going to go to Toronto to buy stereo equipment for their house, gigantic for two people, slowly filling up with stuff, the stuff that I’d been shedding since I’d left my ex-wife, since I’d become myself again. The dog got into the car with a little less hesitation but no enthusiasm, and we drove off.
It was Saturday morning, and there was no traffic. I was finally out of AM radio land and in a Canadian audio paradise of indie rock and high Canadian content. We drove through the GTA at high speed, only hitting some traffic on the Don Valley Parkway – and these essentially Canadian memes came rushing back, little references that form the backbone of Canadian troupe comedy acts and CBC news reports. The brands on the stores – Loblaws, Canadian Tire, Petro Canada – all marked this as different from America, but also the roads, well-maintained, with consistent signage, and the suburban sprawl, with just those touches of thoughtfulness around landscaping and road layout and building touches that separate them from the ruthless, commercial landscapes of the States. Canada somehow feels like it was laid out by human beings, for human beings; the US feels like it was built by human beings for units, for an undifferentiated mass that was viewed as subhuman by the capitalist overlords who wanted only to exploit the users of buildings and roads for their income and their credit.
Driving through Canada made me happier than I had ever been in the American portion of the trip, and it had me thinking about how much I had left America behind in the past eight years since I first headed north to Edmonton. In talking with my dwindling circle of friends in the Pacific Northwest, I’d chalked part of this up to the current administration and the endlessly dark undercurrent of current events, but in reality, my alienation runs far deeper. I’m just done with those societies which seem to disregard the basic humanity of the average person – let alone the humanity of the lower classes or the underclass – and most of America has just given up.
It’s reflected in the buildings, the roadways, the food. The restaurants: the fast food and “fast casual” and “aspirational casual” restaurants that recycle the same garbage that now makes my stomach feel like a grease trap and kills my desire to move my limbs. The idea that eating well, with fresh vegetables and not much meat, is somehow a marker of being an arrogant bastard, instead of being just a decent choice. The ingrained habit of government to view transport as somehow a form of creeping totalitarianist socialism instead of being an enabler of everyone, with cars glorified to the point of ignoring the dehumanizing scale of the resulting developments and shopping malls, reducing humans to being just problems to solve in what is viewed as the real goal of moving cars from one grouping of buildings to another. Architecture itself is now essentially ignored, with discount stores and Amazon fulfillment centers being the reductio ad absurdum of the trend: simple metal boxes with optimized connections to roads, scrubby trees thrown in as a zoning-driven afterthought.
It’s not that other places aren’t harsh in their own way – the English, for example, are uniquely good at hardwiring their class distinctions and class hatreds into their landscape, with their casual cruelty reflected in dense working class neighborhoods with parks which reflect the ideals of their lords and masters and which descend into places of barely disguised violence – but America, with its aspirational culture and aversion to admitting to its own deeply held divisions between the rich and everyone else, with the fear on both sides, of losing what the rich have and of the poor fearing never being able to get rich, with its uninhibited acceleration of labor and capital, somehow drives towards the extreme with that much more efficiency, with dwindling few moderating points. Moderation is, really, the hallmark of virtue; even where it exists only as a light touch, it still reveals humanity and softens the edges of the march towards whatever future dystopia we are creating. America lacks moderation, and so its landscapes lack any pretense of virtue.
But I shouldn’t be that blunt, and I have no right to generalize that way. What I really realized, speeding on the 401 along the Ontario lakeshore, was that America only succumbed to its full potential in its march west, as it grew away from its origins and created its national character in concrete and corrugated steel, in cloverleafs and parking lots and the grim creations that rim each of them. I’ve driven from east to west about as much as I’ve driven west to east, but it’s a different experience. And prior west to east drives were really just extended vacations, long breaks traveling from national park to national park – which are devoid of most commerce, which are just islands of Rooseveltian progressivism (both of them, Franklin Delano as much as Teddy) in a wider sea of Eisenhower and Nixonian hellscape. Also, I’d driven east to west alone at least three times before, but this was my first trip west to east alone – the first time I’d had a chance to absorb the matrix equation of the landscape in isolation, albeit with the signs reversed, instead of focusing on the discussion of politics or jobs or relationships or food that I’d have with my ex-wife or my high school friends. Having the dog also forced me to get out every hour and a half or so and listen and smell and observe what he had available to him, for exploration and peeing and private spots to poo.
We stopped an hour away from my other friends in Ontario, at a rest stop on the 401. The rest stops in Ontario all have quiet, tree-lined seasonal picnic areas off to the side, away from the fast food palaces and dozens of gas pumps, where the dog could range and chase and play, and where I could walk and smell clean air and listen to the bristle of crisp leaves on the trees getting ready for that gust that would take them away from their branch and into the autumn sky. The dog ran happily, he pooed and marked trees, he found a puddle from the last night’s rain and slurped happily. He lay down defiantly about a hundred feet from the car as we got ready to go. He wasn’t quite on strike, but it was close. Why are we getting into a car, he seemed to ask, when Canada has what we need? And you like it here too, I know, he said with his eyes. Why are we driving any further?
Because my passport has an eagle, not a maple leaf and the seal of the Queen. But I’m trying, puppy dog, I’m trying hard. We’ll get somewhere else, I promise.
My friends in eastern Ontario – he’s an old banker, originally from a mining town in the wilds of northern Ontario, she’s from Quebec City – are almost off the grid. Not entirely; they talked about how they own their utility pole, and how they got suckered into buying a generator that uses too much propane and isn’t really necessary – but they live what can only be described as an alternative lifestyle on an acreage in a rural area halfway between Toronto and Ottawa on an arm of the lake. It’s a lovely area, slowly blossoming with wineries (yes, Virginia, Ontario has more than just ice wine in dark blue bottles for duty free) and cideries and craft breweries and nice restaurants. Their rural existence speaks to their independence – and their authenticity, which was her word and was the correct one, and I truly appreciate people who can find the correct word. The fact that she’s Quebecois and still could find that word made me love her all the more.
The old banker is looking for a purpose, and after a lifetime on autopilot chasing the norms of Toronto’s Bay Street, he’s wondering what he can reformat his life into. We have that in common, although we’re also very different in our ways. My dog once nipped a hole in the old banker’s pants when he visited our house in Edmonton, but this time, he was well-behaved – the tall grass and overgrown soybean field and tall reeds by the water probably helped.
We went to a nice pub, the Country Canteen, for supper, where Toronto and Ottawa tourists loudly and glamly clashed with the locals, who were weathered and mellow and quiet. We had to wait awhile for a table and went to a brewery outside of town, where the beer was fantastic and an old VW Microbus was parked as a kind of advertisement at the entrance. I watched the sun set as the air turned cold, realizing that the time for shorts was now past, and thought about the next steps in my life. I’m not ready for a rural retreat; my meaning isn’t in a place like this. I’m not a carpenter, and my writing isn’t of the Rachel Carson or John Muir type. I revel in the absurdity of people with people, people with their creations; nature isn’t absurd, it just is, and language – as perhaps the ultimate human artifact, albeit like music, an artifact without evidence after it is uttered – is a lousy way of trying to exalt it. Better painting, or photography, or Maya Lin style grand landscape.
The next day – Sunday, the last day – we got up early and had yogurt and granola and fresh fruit. They gave me apples from a nearby orchard as fuel for the trip. The dog got into the car, again reluctantly. We fueled up on a First Nations reserve – a good 12 cents cheaper to the litre – and we were off. Finished Ontario. Zipped through Quebec, crossing the Saint Lawrence River on a new toll crossing just up from one of the older Quebec Hydro dams. A walk and a coffee and a cigarette just east of Montreal, and then the border, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine.
Home, of a sort. Where I came from. The way life should be, as the sign says after you cross the river bridge and enter on the interstate. Home with new eyes, with a dog that probably only knows home as a place where I am, where I feed him and play ball with him and take him for walks which are pretty much the same every day, where he marks the same bushes and sees the same trees. He’s indifferent to which trees, as long as they remain constant, and as long as I’m with him.
I’m not indifferent to which trees, or to which buildings, or to which roads and bridges. They all are markers of the people who built them, who tore down the original forests and planted the new trees, who paved across the land in their different ways and with their different intentions. But Maine is a bit of home, and it’s a new beginning, now, 43 years after my first beginnings on this earth.
The dog happily jumped out of the car in Scarborough, and after inspecting my parents’ house, found a warm spot next to me on the couch as we watched a baseball game, and fell asleep.