There is a highway running North from Vancouver that winds through my life like a Celtic design. It used to be called the Squamish Highway and today it is known as the Sea To Sky Highway. It connects North Vancouver to Horseshoe Bay, Squamish, Whistler, Pemberton and Lillooet. I lived in Squamish in my senior year of high school and many are the miles I have logged on that cliff-hugging ribbon of asphalt.
As a driver and as a hitch-hiker, in all four seasons, I made it my own. Once in a while a boulder would roll down the mountains and land on an unsuspecting motorist and this was always in the back of my mind when navigating up the Howe Sound by car. Dotted along the way, then and now, are wide spots where one can pull over and take in views of the Sound and the Gulf Islands.
The view is something of world-class beauty for those travellers who have never seen it and a timeless wonder to us local inhabitants. The vista never looks the same twice. A thousand smoky shades of lavender-grey in the Winter become sparkling jade, molten turquoise and brilliant quicksilver in the other seasons. It is obligatory for Vancouver residents to treat their out of town guests to this drive, if at all possible.
There used to be a little passenger train one could board in North Vancouver that ran parallel to the highway on the water side. The price in the Seventies was six dollars to Squamish and the view was more spectacular yet. The rail cars had green enamel painted wooden benches etched with generations of sweet-heart’s initials rocking drunks to sleep with the gentle sound of the beer bottles rolling back and forth underneath. You could still smoke on board in those days. In fact, it was recommended. Nay, it was essential.
I have driven the Squamish Highway in U-Hauls, a 1956 Morris Minor, a 63 Corvair, a 67 Acadian Beaumont, a VW Camper Van, a Raleigh 10 speed bicycle, two different Suzuki Vitaras, a Suzuki SX4, a 72 Datsun 510, an 82 Toyota pick-up, a 73 Toyota Celica, a 67 Pontiac Parisienne, a 2020 Mitsubishi 3 cylinder 78 Horse Mirage and an ex-Canada Post Step-Van. Over the years I have supplied the soundtrack for this matchless drive via my own lungs, eight-track tapes, cassette tapes, AM Radio, FM Stereo, CDs and MP3 players.
I have driven it when three sheets to the wind, stone cold sober, cold, stoned, happy, sad, angry, choked by tears, in states of spiritual bliss and every other way in between. I have pierced through fogs so thick that headlights were dangerous. I have driven it through rains so hard I could hear dislodged rocks tumbling down off the Coast Mountains along debris chutes and bouncing off the roadway and into the sea. I have driven it in snow with and without snow-tires or window glass and I have driven it in rubber-melting Summers.
North up that same road beyond Squamish and ten miles before Pemberton, a hiker named Rino Persiani found my estranged father's body off the highway on a logging road one fateful Summer day in 1978. His car was parked a hundred feet away and he had been dead for days. I insisted that the Pemberton RCMP take me to the location of his suicide. I was twenty and just newly married.
The site was marked only by the discarded gloves of the coroner and blood-stained earth. I constructed a monument of stones over a poem and a harmonica he’d gifted me as a child while the big constable cried silently. I had to drive his haunted car back down the Squamish Highway to North Vancouver. For many years after that, I avoided the road.
The situation was many times complicated by the fact that my father had grossly mistreated my mother, myself and both of my sisters. For some part of each of us, it was the first day we ever felt safe. Underneath that asynchronous emotion was the loss of a father. Underneath those two layers was the insidious, misplaced guilt that is the mould spore of suicides.
Eventually, I made difficult but purposeful drives to begin to overcome the hex that had been put upon the Squamish road by the tragedy. I went back to the scene and searched in vain for the missing monument I had made by the side of the logging road. The first time was a cold rainy day and the only familiar things were the hum of the high-tension power lines and the rustling of a river hidden by trees. Somehow, a partial peace came to me and when I left in the drizzly dusk, I went with the knowledge that there were happier miles to share with this road in my future. I returned to the actual site only once more to do another needed healing.
Once time I towed a fellow's car from North Vancouver to Squamish behind my truck on a rope at night. We had about four plies of manila and ten feet of space between our vehicles. The trick was to let the guy behind be the brakes for both vehicles and to only work the gas-pedal. In that way, the tow-rope stayed taught. The front car supplied the headlights and gas and the back car supplied the brakes and brake-lights.
It was imperative that both men trust each other absolutely. Both our lives were in each other’s hands and feet. This was made easier because we didn't know each other very well at the time. After I had trusted him in my house, my first wife eventually went to Squamish to live with that man. I left her, she left the country and he got deported shortly thereafter.
After my divorce, I was still young and once, while heading South on the Squamish Highway, I had been thinking about how I would have to work on my social skills if I wanted to ever find another mate. I never could flirt worth a damn and I have a certified disability when it comes to dancing. A friend of mine in Texas came to mind. He was a guy that all the girls were crazy about. He made flirting look easy and had a Steve McQueen cool confidence to back it up.
I cast my mind back to the high school days when we had run together and tried to see if I couldn't recall some vignettes of the master at work. Firstly, I remembered that he was bold. Women liked that. He always told them what he innately knew that they wanted to hear and rarely, if ever, told them the truth. They seemed to like that, as well. He used his eyebrows and other facial expressions to decorate his speech. They really liked that, as I recalled. By contrast, I always told the truth in a monotone voice with a deadpan expression and then only if encouraged to talk. It was a Mr. Spock buzz-kill to the majority of women.
My reveries were suddenly interrupted by the sight of a white Volkswagen Beetle Convertible looming ever larger in my rear-view mirror. It came right up close and I could see that the driver was a beautiful young woman with long flowing hair the colour of Czech pilsner. She looked, by her clothes, to be somewhere between upper-middle class and rich. Probably a West Vancouverite, I reckoned.
She stayed in my slipstream and I could clearly see her face in my mirror. She had lips painted the colour of wild roses and her skin was the colour of Dutch butter-crust bread. She wore silver hoops in her ears, a turquoise bracelet and had on pretty sunglasses. She wore a blue and white horizontal striped shirt like a Baltic sailorette.
I sped up a bit and increased the gap between us. I needed time to process. What was most unsettling to me was how she had instantly appeared as soon as my mind had turned to the subject of romance and I had wished for a woman. I now know that the Universal Earth Mother showers us all with life and love, but back in those days, I had been programmed that the Father God works in mysterious ways and that his devil never slept. Bob Dylan had taught me the spiritual difference between what we want and what we need. I was listening to a Bob Seger song at the exact moment the mystery woman appeared. Against The Wind, to be precise.
“Let the cowboys ride against the wind...,” sang the cassette and that made me bold.
Since I couldn't speak to the lady, I opted for practising the facial expressions. When far enough ahead that I was sure she couldn't possibly see what I was about to do, I looked right smack into the rear-view mirror and pursed my lips into a big sweet kiss.
It felt bold to do and I was just about to process my euphoria when that young woman started beeping her horn, blowing me many extravagant sweeping kisses and downshifting to overtake my little pick-up truck. She must have had the visual acuity of a red-tailed hawk! She flew past me and settled in front about the same distance I had maintained in the beginning of the adventure. Now, I knew what those warning labels on side-view mirrors meant about objects appearing smaller than they really are.
At the next pull-out, she hove to, set the hand-brake and knelt on her front seat facing backwards beckoning me to her in-drawing open arms! I can still see her silhouette against the misty Gulf Islands and a sea like molten pewter. Did I stop? Let me say, only, that when gauging my levels of fear, anxiety, embarrassment and perplexity since that event over forty years ago, nothing has approached that mark. I am older now but still running against the wind.
fin