A FAMILY AFFAIR
Book chronicles highs, lows of cross-country adventure in close quarters
By the time the Palmer clan was ready to leave Cornerbrook, N.L., the wheels were starting to come off.
Not literally of course. But Michael, his wife Catharine and three young children — Andrew, 9, Ryan, 8, and Jenna, 6 — were on Day 34 of an ambitious nine-week tour across the country in the family van. They had spent a busy five days in Newfoundland and Labrador and were rushing to catch the Port aux Basques ferry. But, for the sake of sanity, Michael and Catharine decided a quick stop at a Costco was in order to pick up a DVD for the kids for the eight-hour crossing to Nova Scotia, as the collection they had brought from home had already been pored over. It was raining and Michael Palmer — who says his “hand still quivers” when he replays the episode in his mind — now acknowledges that taking three young children into a Costco to buy one DVD while on a tight schedule to catch a ferry was not the wisest idea.
“By the end of it, they were upset that they could only pick one movie,” Palmer says in an interview with Postmedia from his Calgary home. “I had Jenna hanging off my leg. Ryan was sprawled on the floor, upset. Andrew was asking a thousand questions (of) my wife Catharine. It was a very big scene and the cashiers were looking at us as if we were the worst parents.
We were trying to drag our kids out because we had to catch the ferry. It was pouring out. I was just looking at Catharine and we were half-laughing about what a scene it was; about the drama.”
It’s the first scene that Palmer recounts in Chapter 1 — dubbed An Ending Fit for the Beginning — of his book The Corduroy Road: 17,000 Kms, 63 Days, 4 ABBA CDS, 3 Kids (Borealis Publishing, 450 pages), a sprawling travelogue of the 2013 cross-canada trip the Palmer clan undertook. Of all the many experiences the family experienced, temper tantrums at a Costco may not be the most profound. But it serves as an early reality check for readers who might be swept up into the romantic promise of dropping everything, throwing caution to the wind and taking your kids on a nine-week vacation. In fact, it will probably resonate with parents who are amid COVID-19 self-isolation with their own homebound brood. Entertaining bored and irritated children in close quarters is something a lot of parents can probably relate to at the moment.
“I’ve never thought about that,” Palmer says with a laugh. “But there would be some comparisons for sure.”
Still, the catalyst to the Palmer trip was actually the direct opposite of self-isolation. The idea was to get the children out of the house and out of their comfort zones; to whisk them away from the excessive screen-time and drudgery of everyday life to weeks of real-life adventure in the Great White North (with a few excursions in the U.S. as well). Palmer, who works in accounting and finance for an oil and gas company, has written books before, including a thriller called The Leaf Cutter and a historical non-fiction book of his grandfather’s experiences in a Japanese POW camp in the Second World War called Dark Side of the Sun. But initially, he had no intention of chronicling his family’s cross-country adventures for anyone other than family members, who he planned to keep upto-date with a daily blog. But when he went into bookstores to try to find some research material about cross-country treks with the family, he found it was not something many have written about.
“I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should write a book about this,’ ” he says. “But then I thought, ‘Will there be enough entertainment?’ Would there be enough drama to draw in the reader? So I was on the fence. But within the first day or two of driving, there were funny kid incidents, stuff happening and drama. In a nutshell, I thought that, yeah, I could definitely write a book. There would be no shortage.”
The trip certainly provided many highlights, some positive and some not: The boys taking a ride in a bush plane over Georgian Bay, whale-watching in Newfoundland and Labrador, more kid meltdowns in Sault Ste. Marie, parking disasters in Quebec City, a near-death experience in Kalamazoo, Mich., when a box-spring mattress flew off a pickup truck on the interstate. There were also the spirited in-car ABBA sing-a-longs, at least for a while.
“By the time you are driving the car and past the four- or five-hour mark, the kids start to get antsy,” he says. “They are hungry. They want to get out of the van. We coined it the ‘crazy hour.’ Often, around that time, I’d pop in ABBA to get some positive vibes back in the van. The kids would bop along to the music so it really helped a lot. But after a week ... it was a bit of overkill.”
Seven years later, Palmer says he thinks the trip had a lasting impact on his children, who are now teenagers.
“Now when things come up in the news that happen in Canada, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we were there!’ ” Palmer says. “It really made them appreciate the world that was beyond Calgary. When you can see whales breaching in the ocean off Newfoundland, or go to the Mint and see how they print money in different denominations, or go to a Blue Jays game at the Skydome in Toronto or watch the high tides in New Brunswick. There was a lot that they took in and I think it gave them an appreciation for what is out there.”
We coined it the ‘crazy hour.’ Often, around that time, I’d pop in ABBA to get some positive vibes back in the van. The kids would bop along.