The Road

Yesterday

We drove back from Stratford yesterday. At one point we were rerouted by our Waze app. I don’t always trust the app. Sometimes it takes you an unnecessary route just to save three seconds but this time we had a hunch, and it turns out we saved minutes not seconds! And what minutes they were. Turning off the freeway, we meandered down some hilly side roads lined with trees. No one was speeding or furiously passing. It was all very orderly and quiet. There were birds swooping overhead. There was a little lake with boats and another lake with no boats. There were stop signs where you stopped before you continued. There was a place that had chicken and duck eggs. Another place that had firewood. I’m always tempted to stop and get those things just because they have them but this time we didn’t. We just wound our way through farms and acreages, some with grand houses and others with very simple ones that had wooden porches with things hanging over the rails. I felt like I was a tourist in another country. We could’ve been in France except for the road signs. It was a genuine outing that started out as a dreary, often unnerving, seemingly endless push along the 401, dodging angry drivers and giant eighteen wheelers in our tiny defenseless car. We still ended up back on the freeway, but the detour was, well, a detour.

It reminded me that there is always something outside my frame of reference, something surprising, sometimes lovely and green. It’s hard to believe, speeding along at 120 K, swooping in and out of danger, acting as if flying through the air at top speed in a metal bucket is normal human activity, that there are cardinals chirping nearby and ducks laying eggs, and kids paddling boats, that there is sky and it’s actually got some pretty cloud formations that remind me of The Simpsons. If we had a mind to stop, we could. I’m making it sound more pleasant and romantic than it is, but it was more pleasant and romantic than the En Route Timmy’s.

I once, out of pure fear, drove from Toronto to Niagara on The Lake along the lake, avoiding the freeway altogether, and the Sky Bridge which I cannot cross because of my desire to drive off it. It was, as you might guess, a long journey, but it was full of pleasant surprises. Who knew there were people living there, some of them sitting on benches? Who knew about the charming little shops and the lakefront parks? Who knew it would take five hours instead of one and a half? There are always trade-offs. People speed, I assume, because they need to get somewhere in a hurry. But do they really? Are they brain surgeons rushing to deal with an aneurism somewhere? Are they bank robbers? Test pilots? Not normally. If you look into the cars as they pass, it’s just people on the move. People like you and I who have fallen into place, the place being a freeway; the idea being to save time. But, as I say, there are trade-offs. Saving time has its cost.

I acknowledge that I will forget everything I thought yesterday and end up getting to Stratford and back just as fast as I can. Because I don’t want an ‘in between’, or as little of it as possible. Even when I fly, I try my best to do something other than be aware of it. I don’t want to experience what it takes to get somewhere. I just want to get there, and it has made me who and what I am. Driven. No in between. Here, then there. And with every passing year I become less and less interested in the how I get where I am, only that I did.

I saw The Odessey at Imax last week. My impatience could barely let me get through a three-hour film let alone a ten-year journey. I have become a victim of the instantaneous. If I could turn off the highway, if I could off-ramp now and again, I might be able to recover something of my past, of my youth when I would lie on the living room sofa with my head upside-down and study the ceiling for hours. There were secrets there, stories woven into the skip trowel patterns and I took the time to try and find them. Just as there are things at the side of the road for any interested traveler to stop and notice, which yesterday, by accident, I did. Thank God for Waze.