notes from the road

just me and an empty old tin of of players regular

As long as you point the vehicle on the spectrum of north you can theoretically go on forever, so that’s what I’m doing. Driving up the east coast of Canada without a plan. I landed in Halifax a week ago, got my bearings with friends on the south shore and now I’m following the coastline up — Atlantic to the right — as far as it will go. I’m guessing Cape Breton, PEI, maybe even Newfoundland or Labrador. I will actually look at a map if it comes down to it but for now I’m content to just drive in the general direction of Santa’s Village or Lapland. I will try to avoid Russia if possible. I do need to fly back at some point and get the boys off to school.

The Honda Civic was rented to me by a guy named Drifty I met on the internet because the other cars were booked out weeks in advance. Despite the sketchiness of the App, the hand off was seamless. The car was waiting for me at the airport parking lot where he texted it would be, key fob sitting in the cup holder and get this: the doors were unlocked.

I’ve now discovered most of the Airbnb hosts up here don’t bother with lock boxes either. Keys are so fiddly. Human memories are porous. People are mostly good. Where’s the security in handing out the same code to a thousand strangers? Instead it’s like an ad hoc pay-in-advance province-wide trust system. Like those wooden honour boxes you see at road side farm stands except you order your half bushel of sweet corn in advance off the internet.

Much like Canada itself, the shocking thing about this unwieldy, disorganised honour system is that, for the most part, it pretty much works. And when it doesn’t work people feel genuinely bad. Not British you-stepped-on-my-foot-on-the-tube ‘Sorry’ (which actually translates to ‘fuck off’) but properly sorry. When Canadians apologise we mean it, goddamn it. We also hug strangers hello and goodbye, which takes some getting used to, but once you do, it’s quite nice.

Both my sons are at summer camp in Ontario for the whole month of August. In the evenings, I write them chatty post cards and letters in long hand, take a pic on my phone and email it to the camp’s info@ address. In the four years they’ve been going I’ve never once received a reply. The more I pester them to write back during the school year, the more stalwartly they ignore me while at camp. But yesterday something exciting happened! The camp sent through a grainy photo of three boys in a small sailing boat. Look:

In the photo, my elder son is clearly identifiable. Bright orange life jacket, long ropey arms like his Canadian grandad’s. Look at him playing skipper, I thought, then realised my mistake: There’s no pretence in the image. My son is, quite literally, is skippering a sail boat. His impossibly man-sized body is hiked out over the Starboard deck. He’s facing windward toward the bow, tiller in one hand, main sail line taut in the other. Beside him giving a thumbs-up is Diego, the son of close friends from London. Diego flew across the ocean from Mallorca via Madrid for his first year at camp.

You might wonder why a boy from a glorious island in the Med would be dispatched to spend August in the backwoods of Canada? It’s because sadly humanity is incinerating itself to ash. The heat in southern Europe is hellacious this year. Oven-like. Forties. I was in Spain for the last three summers and the sea was like diving into a cup of soup. All the locals who can leave, do. Diego’s parents are mountain biking in Norway.

The third kid in the sailboat is my younger son. I say this but in truth I don’t know because his face is obscured by the boom. Probably it isn’t him and I’m lying to you. If it was him, he’d be whacking his brother with the rudder board rather than following the chain of command. While I know this, I still want to believe it’s him because cleaving to this happy delusion, even knowingly so, cements a deeper truth in my mind, which is that both boys are happy and healthy at camp and I have no reason to feel guilty for driving north without a plan.

The Jedi mind trick of willing oneself to believe the impossible in order to see the world from a more cheerful (possibly deranged) perspective has become an essential modern survival skill. Perhaps we have passed through the end of history and the age of uncertainty into a new era wilful delusion and baseless human optimism? The Age of Manifestation, let’s call it. Whatever. I’m stoked.

It took me the better part of a week to realise that when strangers here say, ‘You from around here?’ They don’t mean ‘here’ as in Halifax, Lunenberg, Mahone Bay, Antigonish or even Nova Scotia as a whole. I’d say, ‘No no, I’m from Ontario.’ Or ‘No, I’m from the UK.’ But these answers just prompted further questions. Finally I realised my fellow native Canadians were asking me if I am, in fact, Canadian myself? Once I switched my answer to ‘Yes,’ everything got easier. I’d forgotten how Canadian Canadians are, especially at the moment. How lovely and strange it is to be reminded of this over and over again. The preponderance of flags!

The size of this country almost unfathomable — and this is especially true for Canadians. In order to live here a degree of denial is required. If you pause to think too much or too often about the vast hectares of uncleared cedar swamp on which Homosapiens have never set foot and/or the crumbling, bus-sized ice floes, an unpleasant vertigo sets in. The mind struggles to contain the possibility of cardinality of infinite sets. The numbers going up, up, up. The winters are a bit like this too, an endless torment of ice and slush. Even in high summer it is still winter somewhere in Canada, or at least it is for now. There are some things in life you just have to live through or drive across in order to understand.

I have a vague childhood memory of being outdoors in a long row of school children, standing on a roadside shoulder facing north on the Main Street of Cobourg, the town where I grew up. We are standing side by side, arms criss-crossed in front of our bodies, sweaty palms linked at the wrist. It’s hot out. A photographer from the local paper is there. We were, I believed at the time, making a human chain of kids across the country — I believed this to be God’s truth but surely it can’t have been possible? It must have been part of some kind of rolling coast to coast charity initiative from town to town. Maybe Earth Day, the Terry Fox Run or the guy in the wheelchair who came after him. It doesn’t matter now. The point is, we were lied to. It was the early 80s, no one cared about childhood. The great middle class sport of competitive worrying hadn’t been invented yet. Our parents were too busy getting divorced and planning how to fritter away the last spoils of the post-war boom.

I just got an alert on my phone saying the crew of Air Canada’s on strike. All direct flights cancelled for the foreseeable future. Maybe if I drove to the top and just kept on driving I could make it home in one piece? Up the south coast and over the bridge to Cape Breton, hop a ferry to Baffin Island and keep going, cut across the melting ice floes of the Artic Circle and the True North Pole then swing back round to Greenland, Norway, eventually leaving behind the wilderness for the crumbling, post-enlightenment capitals of western Europe. At some point, obviously, I’d have to trade in the Civic for a dog sled, an ice breaker and eventually, a Eurostar ticket. The point is I could get home just by driving north and then south again. I won’t but I could.