home, but I refused to be parted with the manuscript 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. Establishing 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 passenger door. I open the glove compartment, which Wayne oddly insists on calling a glove box, and straighten the emergency manual, the car registration, our passports. 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 grass 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 grassy 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 brass 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 friendship 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 breasts. 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 friendship. 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 pass by—the usual mix of American cars and imports, as many BC plates as Washington State—have trouble discerning any difference.
Yet there is a difference. Not out there, beyond the windshield, where a steady drizzle is fingering horizontal lines across the glass, 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. Sex 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 Association. 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?
“Good travel is like good reading,” Wayne says. “It sucks you into a world and holds you there.”
“Long enough for us to really see?”
He shrugs. “That’s the idea.”
I uncap the highlighter and set the point on the map, on the city of Vancouver, then drag it half an inch south, past the border, the first indication that this line might, at some point, become a unifying circle.
WE stop for a late breakfast in Fairhaven, a settlement on the shore of Bellingham Bay that was once a village in its own right but has been swept into the greater urban embrace of the city of Bellingham. It is a quaint little place, its brick buildings recently sandblasted, its pitted woodwork filled and repainted. It has a persistent, nineteenth-century look about it. Rather than allow box-store malls to suck the life out of its core, Bellingham passed a municipal design bylaw requiring new buildings to be constructed to look old. The instant nostalgia seems to be working; even in late December, in the rain, Fairhaven’s quaint streets are swarming with shoppers. The storefronts along the main street are filled with Christmas goodies: gingerbread men, old-fashioned sleds tied in red ribbon. A recipe for mulled wine is posted on the window of the wine shop in front of which we park the car.
We ignore the seasonal frippery and head for Village Books. We’ve been here before: it’s an establishment worth whipping down from Vancouver for, its shelves burdened with books, both new and used. On either side of the door, plaques embedded in the red brick advise: A Room Without Books is Like a Body Without a Soul (Cicero) and Some Books Leave us Free and Some Books Make us Free (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
“What does that mean?” Merilyn says, puzzled before the Emerson quote.
“Damned if I know.”
Heading for the nature section, I buy Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone and Ann Zwinger’s Wind in the Rock, both about the American desert, which I am looking forward to seeing. In the mystery corner, I pick out Michael Collins’s Death of a Writer.
“Do you carry Canadian books?” I ask the man behind the order desk on the second floor, a pleasant-looking bookman with short, greying hair and studious glasses. His card says he is the Consignment Coordinator.
“A few,” he says. “Lots of Canadians come through here, and we go up there, too, of course. But fiction, nature, books about Canada—there’s not much interest.
