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Vacations are a popular topic of discussion among Canadians, whether it’s due to the long winters, the humid summers, or the simple desire to get away from it all. Some people, when imaging their ideal vacations, conjure up images of sunny beaches, tropical islands, and other relaxing environs. Others might prefer cultural landmarks, major international metropolises, or destinations of historical importance. I prefer highways.

In a time where the automobile is rightly viewed either as a necessary means of transportation or a quite unnecessary evil that pollutes and diverts resources better spent on public transit, this probably doesn’t make much sense. They are sentiments more at home in the 1950s and 1960s, when society was still in love with the car and, in many cases, people were quite in love with them too. I’m not a big car lover either, to tell you the truth, but I’d still take a day on the highway over one at the beach any day.

I’m not talking about the 401 or the Queen Elizabeth Way, mind you. I’m not even referring to the Autobahn, although I wouldn’t mind paying it a visit one day soon. I’m talking about the two-lane highways, most of which were built in the early to mid 20^th century, that today serve to connect small towns with other smaller towns but which, in their day, were the only way to get between big cities. Most of these have been rendered obsolete by their larger cousins, those numbingly impersonal superhighways that are differentiated only by the number of lanes they feature and the speeds that they permit. That irrelevance, however, is what makes them so interesting.

These old highways are, first and foremost, a compelling history lesson. If anyone doubts that small town life in Canada is dying they only need to visit any of the small towns that are connected by an old highway. Most of these clearly enjoyed better days, with humble residential districts and quaint downtowns that have been boarded up, closed down, and in some cases wiped right off the map. The influence of the car is unavoidable, too, as the most common sight along the side of these highways is the defunct gas station, which actually outnumber functioning ones by a substantial margin. Hubcap stores, another anomaly of a bygone age that you can only find on the sides of these highways, add yet more texture to this mosaic.

Motels, not franchised ones like Super 8 and Comfort but genuine, Psycho-quality motels like the Pond Motel in Carleton Place that is literally a low-rise and gravel parking lot planted next to a swampy, grey pond, theoretically offer respite for you and your fellow travelers. Defunct rail-yards, empty commercial plazas, and curiously prosperous bingo halls with information billboards like the one in Norwood that reads “Norwood loves you, Glenda” round out a landscape that, for a city dweller like myself, is as foreign as the moon itself.

Like the moon, these highways can be a dangerous and forbidding landscape. On superhighways like the 401, if you fall asleep at the wheel you’re gently reminded of the task at hand – driving - by the dull shuddering produced when your wheels cross the grooves that line the sides of all major highways. On small highways, falling asleep at the wheel is often a death sentence, and for that reason it happens much less frequently. The roads are also far less linear, a result of the fact that when they were built their engineers couldn’t blast their way through the landscape as they do today. Instead, they’re defined by the shape of the land they traverse, by its twists and turns, its gentle inclines and declines, that together making driving a more challenging, more dangerous, but also eminently more enjoyable experience.

But the best part of these roads, aside from their ever-changing pitch and the seedy motels and roadside hubcap stores that frame them, is their inescapably social character. That probably sounds like an odd way to describe a road, not unlike describing a cat as tall or a house as friendly, but it makes perfect sense once you’ve driven one of these old highways. On major highways, driving has been deliberately re-cast as a purely mechanistic operation, an exercise in getting from point A to point B. On an old highway, on the other hand, driving is a team sport. The police, of course, are the other team, and these old highways encourage a kind of fraternal co-operation that would make an elementary school teacher proud. It is common for drivers to reach an unspoken agreement to share the burden of leading the pack, which exposes the lead car to the dangers of a speed trap or a police car laying in wait. This risk is, however, mitigated by the requirement, observed by virtually every car on these older highways, to flash oncoming drivers with your high-beams as a friendly warning that a cop is ahead. I’ve tried doing this on major highways and have received nothing but puzzled looks and, occasionally, honks of frustration from drivers who must think I’m trying to blind them.

My favourite old highways in Canada, for what it’s worth, are the Crow’s Nest Highway linking Hope and Penticton in British Columbia and Highway 7 connecting Ottawa and Peterborough in Ontario. The Crow’s Nest, which was rendered obsolete by the infamous Coquihalla toll highway, clings to the side of the Pacific Coast mountains as it winds up and down through snowy passes, alongside creeks, and through mining towns, anchored centrally by – for my family, at least – the Mr. Frosty restaurant in Princeton. The last time I drove the Crow’s Nest, I was crestfallen to see that the Mr. Frosty had been replaced by an antique store, driven out of business by the Tastee Freeze franchise that had been planted across the street, and I’ve made a point of taking the Coquihalla, as dull and impersonal as it is, every since. In Ontario, I recently discovered Highway 7 after years of taking the 401 from Ottawa to Toronto, and unless I find myself in the middle of a blizzard I’ll never the seven’s big brother again. It is, in the truest sense of the term, a pleasant Sunday drive, even if it takes an extra hour or two. If anything, that’s part of the fun.

Cars are rapidly becoming the cigarettes of the 21^st century, a socially and culturally stigmatized product whose users must pay a variety of financial and social penalties. While drivers haven’t had to face the kind of overzealous social bullying that smokers have been subjected to in North America in the past few years, their day in that unpleasant spotlight is rapidly approaching. This is to the good, I think, if only because it’s clear that cars have played a major role in global warming, a threat far more lethal than second-hand smoke could ever be. The downside is that, like my beloved Crow’s Nest Highway, the small highways that crisscross our country are about to disappear, whether as a result of purposeful planning or through simple neglect. They are both monuments to our past, when drivers shared a social bond and the term road rage didn’t exist, and museums of alternately endearing and appalling small town eccentricities. Get out there and enjoy them before it’s too late.

Toronto, January 29th, 2007 - 1,128 w.

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