Part 1 (1/2)

BREAKFAST AT THE EXIT CAFE.

Wayne Grady / Merilyn Simonds.

PREFACE.

WE didn't set out to write a book. We were in Vancouver, intending to drive back to Ontario in our green Toyota Echo, and we decided to take the long way home, down along the Pacific coast, across the southern states, then up the Atlantic seaboard. It was to be a holiday, an excursion. It was just before Christmas 2006, and we were keen to avoid driving across the Prairies in winter. We were naive. We were curious. We wanted to see the mountains of Was.h.i.+ngton and the forests of Oregon, the deserts of California and Arizona and New Mexico, the canyonlands of Utah, the arid farmlands of Texas, the troubled cities of Mississippi and Alabama, the exhausted plantations of Georgia and Virginia, the great, wind-beaten banks of the Carolinas. We thought this would be relaxing, a break from our writing lives.

We should have known better. Put two writers together in a car and keep them there for a couple of months, and it's more than likely you'll get a book. But what kind of book would it be? Both of us grew up, for the most part, in southern Ontario, close to the American border, although neither of us had travelled much in the United States. What we knew of America had come from America, not from our own experience of that country. We knew what Americans looked like and sounded like; we knew how they acted and sang and wrote. What we didn't know was what they were like at home.

We had no itinerary, no agenda. We didn't stick to the interstates, as Larry McMurtry did when he wrote Roads; we didn't drive only on smaller highways, as William Least Heat-Moon did in Blue Highways. The routes we travelled were blue and red and white and yellow on the maps, solid lines and dotted lines and sometimes no lines at all. We didn't tell anyone we were coming: we were neighbours who were dropping in unexpectedly, wanting only a cup of coffee and some conversation.

By the time we got home, we had driven more than fifteen thousand kilometres; travelled through twenty-two states; put on twenty pounds each; replaced half the car; slept in mom-and-pop motels, boutique hotels, dreary motor inns, the car; eaten in diners, cafes, bistros, five-star restaurants, chain eateries, food courts, the car. Our favourite meal of the day was breakfast, because eating breakfast every day in a restaurant is one kind of proof that you're on the road. And everyone else in there is travelling, too. Part of the reason we chose the t.i.tle of our book is that the places we had breakfast took on for us a kind of iconic status. Like America itself, they became, for a time, our home.

John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, his book about driving the rim of America, wrote that ”people don't take trips, trips take people.” He was right. This trip not only took us into America, into the heart of the neighbour we thought we knew, but also took us into ourselves. Throughout the book, Wayne speaks in his voice-his sections begin with W-and Merilyn speaks in hers-M. The result is a conversation and a twinned meditation, too, as we each engage with the landscape we're travelling through as well as our own interior geography.

We discovered that a marriage between two people is not unlike the sometimes uneasy truce that exists between two countries that have lain beside each other for a long time. We each came to that in our own way, and that, too, was part of the journey.

1 / MEGALOPOLIS, USA.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON looms across the border from British Columbia at the end of a long line of cars and buses. As we await our turn at customs, we watch a man playing with his young son on the wide stretch of gra.s.s between two parallel roads, the one we are on leading into the United States and the other disappearing behind us into Canada. 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, gla.s.s-fronted cases, buying us cheap s.h.i.+rts 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 s.h.i.+rts, stuff all the bags and tags and cardboard and tissue paper and s...o...b..xes 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+rt.

”Where are you coming from?” the guard asks politely, taking our pa.s.sports.

”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 pa.s.sports. ”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 Th.o.r.eau 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 un.o.btainable 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 antic.i.p.ating crossing back into Canada. So I packed up most of my things and s.h.i.+pped them home, but I refused to be parted with the ma.n.u.script 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. Establis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.senger door. I open the glove compartment, which Wayne oddly insists on calling a glove box, and straighten the emergency manual, the car registration, our pa.s.sports. 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 you take your eyes from the landscape, then look up, miles later, uncertain where you are. The last thing I saw was the low grey obelisk jutting out of the gra.s.s beside the car as we inched toward customs. It looked like one of the posts that surround the old prison quarry back home where convicts once did hard time. In the gra.s.sy stretch between the twin roads moving into and out of the two countries stood an oddly Grecian monument, Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity carved on the side facing us as we headed to the United States. I turned and craned my neck to see what drivers heading into Canada would see: Children of a Common Mother. How strange, I thought. Canadians were brethren as they entered the United States, kids when they returned. What kind of Faustian bargain were we making, crossing this border?

”There's a plaque, too. I'm going to go read it,” I said, jumping out of the car as Wayne looked on, aghast. ”Don't worry, I'll be back before we move another inch.”

The bra.s.s plate was framed by two women, each extending her country's coat of arms to meet in the middle. An eagle and a rampant lion: a scavenger and a predator. The scavenger I understood, but Canada, predatory? Not exactly how I think of my country. Where was the beaver, that amiable, trepidatious rodent that warns his fellows, then dives for cover at the faintest threat?

The words flanked by the women were optimistic: More than a century old friends.h.i.+p between these countries, a lesson of peace to all nations.

I peered at the two women. They were hardly more than girls. The American was fine-boned and pretty. In one hand, she cradled a cornucopia overflowing with vegetables and fruit. The Canadian girl was muscled, as if the sculptor intended to carve a man, then thought better of it and added b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She was lugging a huge sheaf of wheat, her arm clearly broken in some agricultural mishap and poorly set.

None of it fit. Our two countries were brethren, or children, or women: which was it? And what kind of friends are we? Squabbling kids who trade loyalties like baseball cards? Men who, like Wayne, play hockey together for years without ever knowing the names of each other's wives?

No, I thought, as I headed back to the car. The plaque had it right. It's a women's friends.h.i.+p. Never an easy thing, especially if one of them is outgoing and pretty.

We've left the monuments behind and are zipping over the tidal flats where the United States and Britain drew their final line in the sand. Here, the distinction between one country and another seems arbitrary, inconsequential. The landscape refuses nationality. The same sandy loam sifts on either side of the border; the same clouds scuttle overhead. The birds, looking down, recognize no boundaries. Even I, staring out at the low bungalows along the roadside, at the cars that pa.s.s by-the usual mix of American cars and imports, as many BC plates as Was.h.i.+ngton State-have trouble discerning any difference.

Yet there is a difference. Not out there, beyond the winds.h.i.+eld, where a steady drizzle is fingering horizontal lines across the gla.s.s, but in here, inside me.

”What do you love about the States?” I ask Wayne.

”The New Yorker, baseball, Star Trek, bourbon, L.L. Bean, John McPhee, Amazon.”

I rhyme off my list: The New Yorker. s.e.x and the City. The Coen brothers. Richard Ford. Martin Luther King, J r. Sweet potato pie. Oprah. ”And what do you hate?”

”Reality TV, Coca-Cola, Homeland Security, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Rifle a.s.sociation. And you?”

”The CIA, the bomb, aerial spraying, Tommy Hilfiger, Ugly Americans, the fact that they think they own the world. Oh, and Oprah.”

How on earth will we ever see past all that?