On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock by Dave Bidini

Author:Dave Bidini [Bidini, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781551996752
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2011-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

U. S. A.

“When I was young I had an old guitar

That I learned to sing and play

From a book I bought on how to be a star

Written in the U.S.A.”

Stompin’ Tom Connors, “Ripped Off Winkle”

Leaving Canada, Das Bus barrels doggedly south down the white highway, leaving thousands of miles of freakish landscape at our backs. For anyone who’s ever done a west-east run of the country and ended up travelling through the U.S.A., you can’t help but notice how the geography flattens and pales and greys once you pass south of the border. This isn’t so much a reflection of the terrain to the south as it is the incomparable strangeness and diversity of the Canadian land. Before this tour, I promised myself that I wouldn’t fall prey to writing endless paragraphs about the majesty of my native soil, but sitting here looking at the moonish, blue snow-fields pooling into the magenta sunrise, I have to express a word or two about how astonishing this country is to travel over.

Canada is a triptych of visual delights. To start, there’s the Rockies, and they scare the shit out of you. There’s nothing you can do to prepare yourself for the shocking size and pointedness of the young, towering range. Speaking while in their midst is to voice the feeble titterings of a mouse-person. Whenever I’m among them, I experience the same kind of sensations that I felt as a kid, back when anything that was larger than me seemed frighteningly monstrous. However absurd, there lurks a very real fear in the back of my mind that, like the Thing in the Fantastic Four, one of these glacial behemoths will wake up and grab our puny vehicle, sputtering gamely between its slopes, and crush it with a stony, oversized fist. Part of this fear, I think, stems from the fact that the first time we travelled through them, our car broke down, stranding us in Rogers Pass. It wasn’t like being abandoned in a big city, with bars and movies and casinos, or in a prairie town, with farmhouses and diners and bingo parlours. It was way weirder; the falling purple light of the day, the silence of the empty highway, and the mountains looming above us, displeased and unimpressed. While we stood there with the hood open gazing at our troubled autoworks, Martin took off into the woods. When we found him hours later back at the motel up the road, he told us that he’d climbed the nearest mountain looking for fauna and wildlife and places from which to sketch the scenery. Sure he did. Had it been me, I would have peeled down to my underwear and pounded the craggy rockface, gladly accepting whatever fate was cast upon me by a force far greater than mine.

After the awesome Rockies, the prairies come like a vaudevillian gag. I can only imagine the conversation between migrant workers in British Columbia in the ’20s: “You mean to tell me that on the

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