The man is tossing his son into the air and catching him on the way down, and the child is laughing hysterically, obviously frightened out of his wits. The man keeps throwing him higher into the air and catching him at the last minute, the boy’s head swinging closer and closer to the ground each time. We watch with resigned fascination until we arrive at a stop sign a few metres from the border, beside a placard that reads Canada This Way, with an arrow pointing behind us.
We are driving into America.
Border crossings always unnerve me, which, as Merilyn says, is an odd and tiresome thing, because I have crossed this and many other borders in my life and ought to know what to expect. I have no particular reason to expect to be unnerved. But to me, crossing a border is a harrowing experience, perhaps because I grew up in a border city—Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, Michigan. The saying in Windsor was that the light at the end of the tunnel was downtown Detroit, and it was meant as a positive thing.
Every year before school started, my parents would whisk my younger brother and me through the tunnel to the United States because everything was so much cheaper on the other side. They’d drag us up and down Woodward Avenue, into all the really cheap department stores, with their dark, uneven hardwood floors and sticky, glass-fronted cases, buying us cheap shirts and sweaters and pants and socks and windbreakers. At a designated spot between Woodward Avenue and the Detroit Tunnel, my father would pull the car over and my mother would frantically cut the price tags off all the pants with a pair of nail scissors, pull all the cardboard stiffeners out of the shirts, stuff all the bags and tags and cardboard and tissue paper and shoeboxes into one of the shopping bags, and toss the whole thing into a garbage pail practically within hearing distance of the customs shed. Then she would make us put on all the clothes we’d just bought, to hide them from the customs official, who, if he spied an overlooked price tag or caught the whiff of new denim, would yank us from the car and make us take off all our clothes and then arrest my parents. In my family, “duty” was something one paid if one were caught wearing two pairs of pants.
Now I watch nervously as the guard comes out of his tiny kiosk, pistol jutting from a little holster that looks like a miniature leather jockstrap, and leans over to ask what the hell I think I’m doing, trying to get into the United States. What business do I have going into his country? Because things are cheaper there, is that it? Well, buddy, things aren’t cheap in America so that foreigners like me can come in and buy everything up. Do I imagine that Americans work as hard as they do at keeping prices down for the benefit of non-Americans? I can think of no answer to such a question. In fact, it seems like sound economic theory to me. All of us in this line—they should turn us back, close the border. We’ll ruin America. Besides, the mouthy literalist in me wants to add, I don’t like your country. I think your country is too big and plays too rough, like a sulking adolescent with divorcing parents, and I am certain my thoughts are written all over my face, like price tags sticking out from the collar of a brand-new flannelette shirt.
“Where are you coming from?” the guard asks politely, taking our passports.
“Ontario,” I say.
“Vancouver,” Merilyn says, simultaneously.
“Oh,” I say, “you mean today? Yes, Vancouver.”
“And where are you going?”
“Ontario,” I say, stupidly.
“Seattle,” says Merilyn.
The guard looks at me. “I mean we’re taking the long way home. Down the coast, and”—I feel Merilyn’s elbow jabbing me in the ribs; she has warned me about saying too much at borders, it’s the first thing they look for—“through Seattle,” I add lamely.
The guard smiles and hands me our passports. “Welcome to America,” he says.
IT’S THE twentieth of December. Merilyn has spent the past three months as writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia while I stayed home in Ontario looking after, in reverse order, the gardens, the house, the cat, and myself. We’ve both had time to get used to being alone, a rarity for a couple who usually eat, sleep, and write in the same house. We’ve probably become rugged individualists, more American than Canadian. I flew to British Columbia so that we could drive home together, thinking the trip home would give us time to rediscover our communal selves before settling in for the winter.
We could head back straight across Canada, but the weather is making us cautious. High winds have been buffeting Vancouver, with heavy snow causing power outages and trees falling like drunks in Stanley Park and across the city’s streets. Climate change is making Vancouverites freeze in the dark. No snow on the Prairies yet, but Saskatchewan and Alberta are known for sudden changes in weather. And everyone expects a white Christmas in Ontario. Even if it doesn’t snow, the Trans-Canada will be cold, icy, and treacherous. Driving home through the southern reaches of America seems to us a better bet.
The terrors of the border are balanced, too, by the appealing thought that we’ll be able to just get lost for a few weeks. Not lost in the literal sense of not knowing where we are, for we are travellers in an age of cellular phones and wireless Internet access. No, I mean lost in a more ancient sense, the way Thoreau meant lost when he advised packing a few vittles in a sack and disappearing into the woods for a few weeks, “absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” Or in Paul Theroux’s sense: after a trip to Africa, he wrote, “The word ‘safari’ in Swahili means journey—it has nothing to do with animals. Someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.” For the next month or two, we would be on safari.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit asks an important question: “Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration—how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”
Well, one way is to take the old self into unknown territory and see what happens. To lose ourselves in America.
MADLY, without forethought or direction, we are speeding into America. It’s the week before Christmas, the day before the winter solstice. Any other year, the children, and their children, would be getting ready to come home. I would be baking shortbread and unpacking ornaments. Instead, I’m sitting in this little green Toyota, feeling restless. Restless for stasis.
We left Vancouver in a rush, anxious to be on the road, deciding at the last minute to head south, away from the snow, instead of east. The back seat is piled with coats and bags of shoes and what I could salvage of my office. “How will we convince customs that we didn’t buy all that stuff in the States?” Wayne moaned, already anticipating crossing back into Canada. So I packed up most of my things and shipped them home, but I refused to be parted with the manuscript I’ve been working on for months. “Come on, who’s going to think I bought that?”
I reach back and jostle the bags and the box that holds the novel. Establishing a little order, is what I tell Wayne, but really, I just want to touch my things. I set a small jar of hand cream, a handkerchief, and my asthma puffer in the handhold of the passenger door. I open the glove compartment, which Wayne oddly insists on calling a glove box, and straighten the emergency manual, the car registration, our passports. I add the mileage book, the small pad I bought to keep track of our expenses, a new Sudoku, my Palm. The novel I’m reading and my notebook go into the door pocket.
I gather the various state maps and brochures that arrived just as we were leaving, and arrange them under my seat. I dig a highlighter and a Sharpie out of my purse and clip them to the MapArt book that condenses the continent of North America to a series of neat, brightly coloured squares. Across the first few pages, a yellow line rises up out of Ontario to flatten across the Prairies, the Rockies, and British Columbia, coming to a stop at Vancouver—a record of our drive west in September, 5,001 kilometres, door to door.
I rest my hand flat on the open map and look out the window, suffering a moment of horizontal vertigo, the kind of dislocation that comes in a moving vehicle when