We had driven a grand total of 2780 mi (approximately 4470 km). Yes, quite a feat, we thought. That is, until we looked at our maps and realised that we had a further 4330 mi (6970 km) to go. It turns out that Canada's quite large.
So we'd like to dedicate this episode to the road, that never-ending black and yellow spiderweb that has helped define our nomadic existence this year. Let's talk about driving.
It took us three months to drive from Canada's west coast to the the Albertan interior (1180 mi, or 1906 km). Our plan was to drive from Calgary to Tofte, Minnesota to visit some friends of old (and new, for Steff). The distance was 1250 mi (2010 km), and we did it in four twelve-hour days.
Over the course of these four days, we encountered three significant character trials (like a fairy tale!) pertaining to long-distance driving: overcoming mind-numbing boredom, surviving Midwestern border crossings, and persevering in spite of baffling distances.
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| We prepare for our journey by gifting Willie with a new fuel filter. |
We had been warned about the Canadian prairies. We were told by numerous reliable sources that a man could watch his dog run away for three days in Saskatchewan. But we had 120GB of music on our iPod--we thought we were set...
...And we were, for at least six hours. We sang along quite cheerfully to five or six albums, then we played everything on shuffle for a few hours more. At about this time, our voices and our stamina began to dwindle, and we realised that for all the hours we had been driving, we had had nothing to look at but a seemingly infinite sea of wheat. In the first half hour, it was gorgeous. Midas himself reached out and stroked Canada's central landscapes--but he'd gotten too handsy. All that gold got to be a blinding and mind-numbing burden. The infinite stretches of industrial monoculture made Steff's eye twitch. Its vastness was terrifying.
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| It was beautiful. At least, at first... |
We played every road game we knew, and invented several more ("Aha! New roadkill! 10 points!"). Just when we felt we couldn't stand it anymore (somewhere around Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan), we discovered that we had Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on audiobook on the iPod. That bespectacled, magical adolescent coaxed us into his fictional wonderland, and rescued us from the doldrums of the prairies. awe were now driving in a timeless void. We could go for hours on end with unbounding energy. In fact, for a lot of North Dakota, we actually thought we were at Hogwarts, battling it out against the most dangerous dark sorcerer known to wizardkind. Just casually. Without Harry, we'd have given up at Climax, SK (perhaps not the worst place in the world to stop).
We interrupt this paragraph for a side note on Climax. According to Wikipedia:
"The town features in the board game Trivial Pursuit, which asks what features on the reverse of the town welcome sign; the answer is: 'Come again!'"
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| A corner! |
Surviving a Midwestern border crossing was significantly less simple. As you know, we had been bitten before at borders (see "When the Going Gets Tough", 18/5/11), so we thought a smaller crossing might be our best bet. We chose Portal, North Dakota. Well-prepared we were, too: we had every piece of documentation we might need at the ready, and then some, in a schnazzy black folder. We were conservatively dressed. Steff drove, to minimise confusion: the car's in Steff's name, but Nancy usually drives; Steff has a US passport and an unmistakably Kiwi accent; Nancy has a NZ passport and an American accent; we both reside in NZ but have been in North America since February. It's all too much for your average border guard.
We pulled up at our crossing booth. It was going well, we thought, until we were asked to drive over to the office and come inside. Once there, we were separated, searched, and interrogated in a small room by four large and intimidating uniformed men.
"If you're an American, why are you traveling in Canada?" they asked Steff menacingly, before confiscating her car keys. She asked for them back, but was informed that she wouldn't be needing them. Nancy's bag was emptied, and her journal was read by one of the officers. Then the two of us were made to wait. Two hours passed. We weren't sure what we were waiting for or why we were even there. We asked to use the bathroom, but were told we weren't allowed to move until the inspection was over. Inspection? We weren't told about an inspection at any time. Upon our release, we were informed that a bottle of prescription medication was broken during the search. That's strange, we thought to ourselves--that eyedropper bottle was well-wrapped and stored safely in our first aid kit to prevent it from breaking. Nancy told the officer that the medication was not only worth NZD$100, but that it had been extremely hard to come by and was ordered from Australia. His response? "You're in America now. We have everything here."
Surviving this crossing is still something of a mystery to us. We kept our mouths shut while we were, as Arlo Guthrie put it, "inspected, detected, infected, neglected", and ultimately rejected. We said nothing while they took our keys, drove, and searched the van. We remained silent when we were faced with the chaotic state in which they left the van. But we weren't happy about it. We were frightened, and we didn't know why we had been detained.We didn't know our rights, and we were certain that it would've been a lot harder for us if we had kicked up our rightful fuss. We suspected that we had been preyed upon by our bored, twenty-something male border guards for being two young women traveling in a VW. Further, as one Canadian friend told us, "it's obvious what they're looking for if you're coming from BC!" (indeed, they very closely inspected all of our loose-leaf teas).
We felt violated and powerless, but what, if anything, could we do about it in post-Patriot Act USA (readers, we're open to suggestions here)? We drove on.
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| This was our view for three days. |
And on and on and on and on. But, it turns out, persistence certainly pays off. Days of driving yield many changes. People change (busy, urban Calgarians are vastly different from slower-paced, conservative, but well-meaning small-town North Dakotans). Gas prices change, although this change is less often a well-received one. Nothing is indefinite. Not even wheat fields. After three days of prairie land, Minnesota provided us with extremely welcome change in the form of forests and wetlands. Most importantly, the odometer changes. Although it may not have seemed as though we had gotten anywhere (especially when we compared our provincial navigation maps against those of all North America), the odometer was always a comfort to us at the end of our day. The constant, albeit subtle changes observed throughout the day are what truly make us forget about the driving.
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| Did we ever make it to the ocean? Not quite. |
Once we reached Lake Superior, all that driving paid off, instantly. Not only were we in excellent company, safe, well-fed, and comfortable (many, many thanks to our hosts, Irene and Phil), we were on the shores of the world's largest freshwater lake (if Michigan-Huron is counted as two individual lakes). Allegedly, if the water in Lake Superior were distributed evenly across the Americas (North Canada to Cape Horn), the entire landmass would be inundated in a foot of lake water.
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| Nancy and Irene in Grand Marais, MN |
The Quest Quotient by Nancy Howie and Steff Werman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thequestquotient2011.blogspot.com.
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