Route of the Matter

In The Road across Canada, from 1963, Edward McCourt described a section of the Trans-Canada Highway in Newfoundland and Labrador as “an endless succession of iron-surfaced washboard, gaping potholes, and naked rock — a shoulder-twisting, neck-snapping, dust-shrouded horror.” There’s still satisfaction in the line: we can be glad it’s McCourt having his bones shaken and bladder squeezed rather than us. Later, in the coastal village of Rose Blanche, we’re relieved to find “a Venice in miniature — if you can accept a fish-packing plant for a doge’s palace and a rowboat for a gondola.” Driving the same stretch sixty years later, Mark Richardson notes the road is now “wide and smooth,” surveyed in such a way that it would “only take 45 minutes to get to Walmart.” As for Rose Blanche, there’s no sensuous portrait, no noteworthy tidbits (although it’s the birthplace of Jimmy Buffett’s grandfather!), no satisfying denouement or juicy descent into hotel hell. Perhaps that’s progress for transportation — but not for readers.

It’s the delicious sour suffering of travel that makes the triumphs sweet. Without it, a travel story never gets out of low gear. Richardson took a trip from St. John’s to Victoria, that was simply too easy, with none of the disaster or intrigue one desires in a tale from the expansive yonder. It was a journey through the tedious Land of Blah, where “every other interchange offered Tim Hortons, McDonald’s, and Burger King, all looking exactly the same.” Never mind that we don’t get a glimpse inside one, never meet anyone who deals with the thousands of people who drive the highway, never talk to another driver, never even take a wrong turn.

Part of the problem is that Richardson has done this all before — and not long ago. Canada’s Road, from 2013, focused on the same route, and Richardson now draws on his earlier title liberally, citing a similar clutch of early and mid-twentieth-century travel accounts, reusing many of the pictures, and relying on contacts he made back then. Granted, his latest trek was meant to animate a history of cross-country road trips that were largely publicity stunts for automakers and auto clubs, but at least those journeys, however contrived, entailed some misery: isolated wilderness, inclement weather, and bad or non-existent roads. Richardson stands in awe of past outings, but his journalistic reticence — along with the success and the steady ride of the modern Trans‑Canada — makes his own venture as risky and as interesting as walking a tightrope painted on the ground. How much ink can a writer squeeze from a slab of asphalt? Given that it poses no great challenge and garners no great respect, why make the drive again?

The 7,700 kilometres passed by in a blur: a few days in Atlantic Canada, two days in Quebec, a day each in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Richardson was joined by a potential foil, his British pal Peter, who is given just bits of dialogue from coast to coast. Even still, the most memorable line of the book is from Peter, who sat in the car as Richardson surveyed a crash site near Carberry, Manitoba. “I don’t care,” he grumbled. “Please — can we just go?”

Just going may make a traveller’s day easier, but it can render a travel book so lifeless that not even a flood of facts can resuscitate it. We’re given smeary Reader’s Digest versions of Canadian history. Early on, the tone is set when we read of what the pair might have experienced at the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site in Nova Scotia but didn’t: “After all, Peter lives in a country where such history lurks beneath every rock.” Likewise, the companions drove to but did not actually visit the Anne of Green Gables Museum in Prince Edward Island. Having not read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic, they assumed “the many comparisons with the fictional Avonlea would have been lost on us.” Besides, Richardson explains, “the place was crowded, especially with visitors from Japan, many of whom wandered, looking slightly confused, around the house of Montgomery’s birthplace where she lived until she was two years old ($6 for entry), Green Gables Park ($8.50), and the homestead ($6).”

If Richardson found misery somewhere, it was in the cost of it all. Although the trip was paid work — it informed a series of articles for the Globe and Mail, and the vehicle, a prototype Lexus SUV, was comped by Toyota — money was a distracting preoccupation throughout. It’s a rare page that doesn’t dwell on some $300-million stretch of road here, a $16-million improvement there. Much of the book reads like a feisty speech for a shadow minister of transport: $1.5 million for moose radar in Newfoundland, $1.7 billion for road repair in Quebec, $17 million for an animal tunnel near Banff, a motel that “should have cost $100 but charged us twice that.” Mr. Speaker, when will the madness stop?

Richardson may be right about the unifying nature of the road, but he doesn’t pursue the thesis convincingly. Only with a retired farmer in Ernfold, Saskatchewan, population eighteen —“We’ve always felt here that we’re kind of close to civilization, and it’s because of that highway”— do we get a sense that the Trans-Canada carries some broader, national meaning. Elsewhere, the essence of the highway system is boiled down to bloated infrastructure projects, towns that wither on the vine, and car accidents. So much for the past, so much for the present day, and so much for the road less travelled.