I was 15, sitting on my bed in our little 2-story farm house just outside of Toronto, reading a book when my mom appeared that the bottom of the stairs. “Sar. Can you come to the stairs and talk to me?” She yelled.
“Ok” I got up and went to the stairs. When I got to there she said “Do you want to drive to Victoria with Jac?”
“Yes!” my answer was immediate.
It didn’t matter when the trip was going to be.
Or how long it would take.
Or what I would need.
I wanted to go.
“Great” said my mom. “She is going out to meet her birth father for the first time and I want her to have company. You will need to pay for your food and accommodations.” No problem, I thought. I had money saved from babysitting, and even a little left from working the past summer even though it was already late March.
I am not sure how long it took my mom to realize what she had done, but once the question had been asked, there was no going back. She had asked me if I wanted to go, that implied permission. However, after Jac left that day I know my mom started to think about things. She realized that in her effort to help out a friend, she had just agreed to let her daughter drive across the country with a woman who is known for being scatterbrained, in an old K-car that really should not be trusted to drive across the city. There may have been some hope in her mind that my school would tell me there would be too much work for me to make up. But the reality was I was only in grade 10, and I was a good student, so each of my teachers gave me a project to do and sent me on my way. My mom had no choice but to say goodbye and leave me with instructions to call at least every other night.
And we were off, driving north on our way out of Ontario. This would be my first trip of anything even close to this far. I had visited places about 4 hours away from my home, but I had never been any farther. I had only once left Ontario, when I was 6 years old to go to Buffalo, New York, and let’s face it there are many places in Ontario farther away than Buffalo. Now, I was on a 3 week journey across the country.
Jac’s K-car was beige. The passenger-side front door arm rest had been chewed to bits by her dog, who was also coming with us. And the seatbelts only worked for the driver’s seat and the middle of the back seat. The car had occasional problems with overheating, but nothing that turning on the heater doesn’t fix. Thankfully, it was early spring and not mid-summer.
The drive north took all day. We drove through the woods and hills of northern Ontario, and had to search for new radio stations every couple of hours. By the time we went to sleep -- in the car, at a gas station -- we still had not made it out of the province. We were getting close to the boarder, but were not quite there yet.
The next day we made great progress, even though the minor changes in landscape did not make that clear. We drove through Manitoba and Saskatchewan and into Alberta where we stayed in a motel in Medicine Hat. We got lost approaching Winnipeg and missed the turn that would have taken us around the city, instead we drove right through it. That was the only change in scenery all day. The prairies really did continue on forever, or at least it felt that way. With no big hills, forests, or rock faces to divert the road and view it felt like we were looking at the same endless, beautiful landscape for hours. We stopped once in Saskatchewan, to let the dog go for a run, and to date that is still the only time I have touched foot in that province. Signs announced our exit from Saskatchewan and entrance into Alberta late in the evening, and shortly thereafter we turned in for the night.
On the second morning it did not take long before the Rockies became visible as a line on the horizon and I was beyond excited. Mountains, real mountains! I loved to ski, and even though I knew there would be no time for skiing on this trip just seeing the Rocky Mountains in person was exhilarating. I watched as they drew nearer and nearer. I was mesmerized by the forested sides and bare peaks, and as we approached their sheer enormity overwhelmed me.
We passed by Banff and stopped for a bit in Lake Louise, but we were in a hurry. The roads in the mountains amazed me. The turns, the steep cliffs, I am actually thankful now that I was not a driver when I first travelled those roads. At 15 I still had the trust of a child in the safety of a car. It didn’t think anything of the winds, or the difficulty of the turns, and I thought that the runoff zones for trucks were ‘such a cool idea!’
That day we would make it most of the way through the mountains and would camp in Rocky Mountain National Park, BC. As we were entering the park a group of mountain goats decided to camp out on the road, causing us to wait for our turn. The scenery, those mountains, they entered my soul and I knew then that I would need to see more things like them, more scenes equally amazing.
From there, the next day, we made it all the way to Victoria. We crossed on the ferry in the evening, and that was the first time I had ever seen an ocean, or smelled salt water, or boarded a boat of that size. We drove on, parked, got out of the car and walked up to a café type restaurant! On a boat! Seriously! I was in sensory overload, mountains and ocean in one day, both for the first time in my life!
In Victoria we found a cheap hotel and Jac called her father. They agreed to meet the next morning and I would go with her. I also called a friend. She was a former teacher, but she had moved to BC to fight the logging in the rainforest. I had totally admired her the year before and we had kept in touch after she had moved out to BC. Now that I was in Victoria we had agreed to get together, and I was going to spend a couple of nights at her place to give Jac time to get to know her father. So the next morning, after their first meeting, which went well, I made my way to Cheri’s place. She lived in a beautiful house in Victoria that she shared with a number of like-minded environmentalists. One of the roommates was away for a few weeks and I was given his room to crash in. It was beautiful, with wooden beams, a big bed with a down duvet and a fireplace in the room. I was in heaven.
Visiting with Cheri was possibly one of the most ‘BC’ things I could have done. She was a vegetarian environmentalist and she took me to many of the cafes and other places frequented by that crowd, which let’s face it, is a very large percentage of the young population in Victoria, and BC in general. One night we spent in her house with a bunch of her friends planning an information session for the people who live near the rainforest on why they need to be protected. While choosing slides and putting together the materials I was drinking beer with Cheri and her friends. I felt so cool and grown up.
That visit only lasted a few days before Jac and I headed up the coast of Vancouver Island to spend a night camping near the rainforests, another first. Since we were camping near the beach I decided to go for a swim. It may have been April and COLD but this was my first trip to an ocean and I had to go in. I loved it! I also went on a tour to one of the rainforest covered islands to a place with a hot spring. The boat tour to the island also looked for some whales for us to watch. A wonderful afternoon. We did come across a pack of orcas and stayed with them for a while; they were so graceful. There is a magnificence in watching large animals in the wild, that is just not there in zoos or parks. At home I had seen deer but this was something else. Maybe it was the ocean, or the surroundings, or the fact that the excitement level on the boat was huge, but watching them left me speechless.
Eventually we had to pull away and let another boat head in and made our way to the island. There, I walked through a rainforest. Not a pine forest. Not something reforested. But a forest that was dense, with undergrowth and a canopy. The kind of place I had only ever read about or seen on TV. What struck me the most however was not the forest; it was the house of the island caretaker. He had the coolest floating house I had ever seen. It was a 2-story house that floated attached to the dock. It did not look like a silly house boat; it was a beautiful wooden house. In the living room there were 2 windows in the floor under which he had placed some chains that grew algae that the fish ate, so you could sit on the couch and watch the fish.
Talking to the man who lived there fascinated me. He told me that the roof was covered in solar panels and in 2 years he had only once had to use his backup gas generator for electricity (remember this was 1994). He also had great stories about the travelers he had met. His house was a bed and breakfast. Once he had had a couple in who asked him when the hot springs were turned off a night. I was shocked; I did not realize that people could be so ignorant of natural phenomena. They are hot springs, not a Jacuzzi, even I knew that! He tried to explain this to the couple, but they seemed convinced that they were turned off at some point, so he had simply told them that yes, at 11 pm he turned them off, and he turned them back on a 5 am. I knew that when I left that place it would be one I would never forget.
After that we stopped in Victoria again on the way back for Jac to visit with her father again and then we were on our way back across the country. It was just as beautiful on the return trip as on the way there. Sadly we were again in a hurry, now needing to return to work and school, so we made it through the mountains in one day, without a chance to stop.
The trip was uneventful until we hit a snow storm while driving from Manitoba into Ontario. This was the kind of spring storm that I think can only happen that far north. I had never seen anything like it outside of mid-winter, and usually then we would not choose to drive in it. In fact, it had come on pretty quickly and I didn’t know it but Jac was looking for a safe place to stop and wait it out. She was following a plow/salt truck, but even still at one point the car spun out and hit a guard rail. Now, only being 15, and never having driven (at least not on the road) I did not understand how much this shakes a driver, nor did I understand the tension she had been under to that point and so it was frustrating when we didn’t continue. Once we had entered Ontario I just wanted to get home. But as soon as we came to a safe place to stop we did just that.
The next morning things had cleared up considerably and we were on our way again. However we had only been driving an hour or so when someone forced us off the road. This freaked me out a bit, I mean that only happens in movies right? Not that he hit us or anything, but really! He pulled over with us and told Jac that one of her rear tires was wobbling badly. Again, not yet being a driver I did not understand the significance of this, so when our speed slowed from about 100kph to 40kph I was irritated -- the way only a teenager can be! We were supposed to arrive home that night. I was running out of money and needed (in my 15 year old mind) to be back at school. But 40kph it was.
We, within an hour or so, made it to a truck stop, where I would learn a very important lesson. We stopped in for breakfast (which helped my mood considerably, hungry teenagers are never fun to be around) and Jac started talking to the truckers. Now you need to understand that Jac is a very petite woman, so watching her walk up these big truckers that she didn’t know freaked me out a bit. But it turned out to be really worthwhile. They, of course, knew all the nearby guys who fix vehicles and the one they directed us to even happened to have a perfect rim to fit her old clunker. We were back on the road again and moving at a normal speed within a couple of hours.
When I arrived home I couldn’t stop talking about the trip. It had been fantastic, but I had caught the bug that would afflict me for the rest of my life (as far as I know, to date anyway). In 3 weeks I had seen more than in all the 15 years of my life to that point, and I now needed to see more, do more, try more, experience more. I would just have to figure out how to do it, and how to pay for it…
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