Western Canada is full of people who drive to places. On the Prairies, if you ask someone for directions to somewhere else you are more likely to be provided with an estimated time from here to there via automobile than you are an estimated distance in miles or kilometres. To travel from Regina, Saskatchewan to Kamloops, British Columbia, by car takes approximately seventeen hours of driving at an average highway speed of one hundred and ten kilometres per hour.
Seventeen hours is a long time for sober introspection.
open your eyes, put it in drive
get on the road and just go
Regina to Calgary is eight hours on Highway 1. If you have enough discipline you can make the entire trip at one go, save only for fifteen minutes at a gas station midway to refuel and get another cup of cheap roadside diner coffee that comes in Styrofoam cups and tastes in an oddly satisfying way like gasoline.
The highway on the Saskatchewan side of the provincial boundary is rutted and worn out, haphazardly mended with irregularly-laid patches of asphalt. The highway on the Alberta side is smooth and wide and welcoming. The small prairie towns along the highway are unmemorable and indistinct. So is the scenery. A poet might tell you that the plain and the sagebrush have songs of their own. He has never driven this highway in midafternoon.
city lights turn to tree lines
and national park signs
Calgary is the last large city that you can pass through travelling east to west following the Trans-Canada before you reach Vancouver on the coast. Situated in the foothills, it likes to think of itself as a gateway of sorts to the Rocky Mountains. After the dim and the quiet of the open prairie interrupted only by grain elevators at irregular intervals along the railway for hundreds of kilometres, the lights and noise of the city are jarring and unnerving, and they make your teeth hurt.
Leaving the city it takes less than half an hour to reach the mountains properly. A small hamlet - no more than a gas station and restaurant with a handful of houses, really - called Dead Man's Flats serves as the milestone or roadside marker which tells you that you've arrived. Having been on this road on more than my share of occasions, it almost feels like home.
Another half-hour further on are the gates to Banff National Park, the oldest such park in Canada. This is much of what lures tourists to our part of the world, this formalised acknowledgement that you are somewhere wild. It is full of cheap tarnished glitter in the form of souvenir shops and expensive hotels and restaurants, and you can hardly move for fear of treading on someone else. It is safer to remain in one's vehicle, and drive straight through; not for fear of the wildlife as the park warden would have you believe, but rather for fear of being crushed by an oncoming horde of gawking tourists.
mountains approach, more winds in the road
and the air turns to falling snow
It's easy enough to forget about the clutter when the snow starts to fall and the tourists retreat from the highway into the Banff townsite. The steepening curves in the road are hypnotising, and it feels like the world belongs to you, if only because there is no-one else around to claim it in your stead.
miles away, just up ahead
it doesn't matter what
any of us is looking for
we'll never find it because
it's not even there
high beams showing falling rock warnings
and construction work slowings
Much of the Trans Canada highway is built in the shadow of mountainsides that could give way at any moment in a shower of rock. To prevent this, the steep banks that mark off either side of the roadway like a riverbed are laid over with heavy steel mesh, to hold the rock firmly in place on the mountainside where man dictates it should belong. Occasionally there will be a hazard sign marked in white: "No Stopping for Next 2 Kilometres", in block capitals, where falling-rock hazard is deemed to be severe.
Summer driving through here is slowed by the construction work that takes place for most of the season, in between the winter before and the winter that follows. Traffic piles up as it is slowed to a standstill by delays; everyone would do well to remember and avoid travel then, but everyone seems to forget. Delays last for hours, and I can only feel sympathy for the poor sods trapped without shelter in the sun without benefit of air conditioning.
the engine blazes as the elevation raises
but the dynamite walls contain us
The Coquihalla Highway cuts through the mountains of interior BC, a man-made pass carved deep into the rock with dynamite. From a distance or from above it looks like an angry scar cut into the mountainside, and it spans what feels like thousands of kilometres. At the time when the federal government decided to go ahead with the project, there were massive protests from environmentalist groups nationwide. Now, no-one seems to care.
The first time I saw it I was a cynical twelve on a family trip by car from Edmonton through to Vancouver. The me that was felt that it would be inappropriate to be awestruck by the scenery, and instead noticed only that the side of the road was littered with pieces of blown-out tires and overturned semi trailers. The artificial canyon it sits in made me feel claustrophobic, and I was glad when the highway flattened out and I could breathe again.
everyone's watching for animals crossing
through the part of the glass that's defrosting
In an effort to preserve the natural habitat of the wildlife in the interior, the government saw fit to oversee construction of "wildlife overpasses", bridges overtop of the highway covered over in grass and scrub and bordered on each side by six feet of diamond-mesh fencing. These and the high fences that have been erected on either side of the highway to prevent animals from straying onto the road minimise risk of animal-vehicle collisions; they've kept the yellow signs that depict leaping deer for old times' sake.
By the time you hit Kamloops deep in the heart of the interior the exhaustion has set in, and you can hardly remember what it was again that motivated you to drive from there to get to here in the first place.
open your eyes, put it in drive
get on the road and just go
city lights turn to tree lines
and national park signs
mountains approach, more winds in the road
and the air turns to falling snow
the engine blazes as the elevation raises
but the dynamite walls contain us
Lyrics to "Dynamite Walls" copyright Hayden Desser from his album Skyscraper National Park, released 2000 on Hardwood Records.
Prepared for E2 Quests: Songs and Lyrics. CST Approved. | 
