The roads that bind
TransCanada Highway is a potent symbol
Summer is for road trips and Canada has a lot of roads. The pre-seatbelt family station wagon adventures of the 1970s have been superseded by more sedentary sojourns on the nation’s highways in the minivan, with children immobilized by safety constraints, but able to take liquids and be entertained, thanks to the two great automotive innovations of the 21st century — cupholders and videoscreens.
With Canada’s sesquicentennial just ahead of us, next year will no doubt involve many paeans to the railway that united the country in the 1880s. Yet it is the TransCanada Highway (TCH) that has brought more of Canada to Canadians than the railways were able to do. It was launched, suitably enough, by a federal- provincial shared funding agreement more than 60 years ago in 1955, with a goal of having the gaps filled in the transcontinental highway by the centennial year of 1967. The TCH was, in fact, all linked up by 1962 and so complete in a sense, though almost half its 7,750 kilometres remained gravel roads, yet to be paved. The paving is long complete now, but there remain stretches that need to be twinned. (An “undivided highway” is really an oxymoron, so perhaps the “H” in TCH is still not entirely deserved.)
Railways give rise to a certain romance, with poets and historians rhapsodizing about how the ribbons of steel wrought a country out of the wilderness. There is truth in that, but roadbuilding is rather more onerous, requiring more complex engineering, and the value to the ordinary person is so much greater. Expansive asphalt avenues open up vast possibilities of freedom, linking the great emptiness of Canada to its cities, and making it all accessible to rich and poor alike on roughly similar terms.
Only a minuscule number of Canadians have driven the entire TCH from coast to coast, but it is a concrete — in some places literally — reminder, as close as the nearest on-ramp, that indeed we are a dominion a mari usque ad mare.
This year’s travels have taken me from one end of the TCH to the other, from Newfoundland’s Avalon peninsula to Abbotsford, B.C., though I have not driven the whole distance — not even a significant fraction of it — but rather motored along various parts.
In April I couldn’t drive the “TCH” — the only province, I think, where the road signs describe it as exactly that — out of St. John’s on the desired day because a storm dumped a half-metre of snow, in late April! I suppose the TCH must be encountered at least in part in a blizzard. Eventually the storm lifted and I began at the beginning — the hockey arena in St. John’s is called “Mile One Centre” — and drove seven hours west to Deer Lake. At dusk there was a full-grown moose in my lane. I saw it from a distance and was able to slow down to avoid it. No harm done, and an authentically Canadian experience was had, though one is mindful that many indeed suffer grievous injury from untimely meetings with the moose.
In Ontario, the TCH does not plot its course through the highly populated south, as if to insist that Canada is a northern country and the national highway ought not to meander south of the 49th parallel. I drive through the Ottawa Valley every summer, with its invitation (thus far declined) to venture into the beginnings of the Canadian north, toward the lake head, and then onto to the vast prairie.
More picturesque is the TCH through my hometown of Calgary, on to the Rockies, where Castle Mountain stands between Banff and Lake Louise, like an enormous sentinel protecting — with limited success — the natural treasures from us teeming masses. Into British Columbia, the TCH loses its highway character, the great summer bottleneck choking off access to the Okanagan. It reflects the astonishing engineering required to put a highway — or a railway — through the mountains. These sections of the TCH were the most difficult to build and followed some of the paths cleared for the CPR almost a century earlier. Indeed, the last spike at Craigellachie is modestly marked at what serves as a convenient rest area on the TCH.
The TCH then turns south and at Hope enters the Fraser Valley. I suggest the westbound lanes should be signed Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter; Dante is suitable for a province which advertises itself as “supernatural.” Hope of wide open spaces, hope of open roads, hope of escaping gridlock, hope of affordable housing — all that diminishes as TCH crawls toward Vancouver.
In that, it reflects not only our history, but our present moment as well. Happy motoring!
RAILWAYS GIVE RISE TO A CERTAIN ROMANCE, BUT THE VALUE OF OUR TRANSCANADA HIGHWAY IS SO MUCH GREATER. — FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA