We were in a camping van recently, my family and I, recreating a road journey of over fifty years ago. It’s rare such things happen. You always mean to do such trips but usually never do. Life kind of gets in the way or runs you over. Half a century ago my father decided to immigrate to Canada from NI. He had a teaching post offer in the plains in Saskatchewan in a tiny hamlet called Piapot. So with his young wife and two toddlers (My Mum and brothers are shown in photo above) they headed out westward, where so many have gone before. All of them in search of something better, I expect. Later, he moved to Maple Creek a larger town nearby with proper shops. On his holidays his persistent restless urge got the better of him, so he set off on an epic journey across Canada and The United States in a large car with his family.
It was this journey, which took us across Canada to Vancover
and down the US through loads of national parks, that we redid in 2010. It felt epic driving a massive camper van
through country you associate with movies.
Coming from a small island the vastness of a huge continent is heady
stuff. The campervan rattled and shook
as we drove and handled like a small house on a trailer. As before, there were five of us but there
were changes too. I was merely an
embryo on that first journey and my Dad had died five years before the
trip. He has left a huge gap in all our
lives and he was the missing passenger on our journey. He would have loved it. The lakes, glaciers,
forests, plains all unfolded before us.
Then, when delight or weariness got the better of us, it was time for a
nice cup of tea in our campervan. Elbow
to elbow with my brothers for the first time in three decades felt like
revisiting your childhood as an adult.
Only this time around instead of fighting we enjoyed the closest company of all, family.
There were challenges, my eldest brother’s boots (which had
smell one cannot begin to describe), my mum’s skin reaction to mosquitoes (huge
swollen pus filled protrusions), a hernia and more (don’t ask!). But it was all great! The open road, a huge campervan and total
freedom. We saw real live wild bears in
the forests, swam in glacier lakes, explored and have photographs to prove
it. I’m so grateful for all of it. In Maple Creek the school had been preserved
as a museum, so my Dad’s classroom was there exactly has he had left it down to
the posters on the door and exercise books.
There was even a picture of my Dad, looking so young, with his class
beside him. Strange sadness as well, as
if we were close to him, but he was gone, out of reach, despite our longing.
Piapot was different, the whole prairie area has suffered
economically and there has been a huge exodus of inhabitants to the bigger
cities. So Piapot, which had always
been a tiny hamlet beside the Trans Canadian Railway line, had shrunk still
further. The school here had been disserted
for years with grass growing waist high around it. Peeping through the front door everything was still there desks
neatly lined up as if it had been left just yesterday and not a few
decades. It felt strange, as if we as a
family had been transported back to the same spot 50 years earlier in a time
machine. Then, as my brothers stood shoulder to shoulder next to the train
lines, a huge endless train trundled past and sounded its horn. It completed the miracle and we were all
awash with the past, delighted to have caught this exact moment on the wind. There is a photograph of my Dad with my
brothers next to the same railway crossing and you’ll never understand it – but
we were all there, every one of us, together again at that spot. It felt like, this is the moment that we had
come so far for.
