Driving is a metaphor for life; I told my kids when I was teaching them to drive. You never know what’s around the next bend in the road.
Pay attention to what you’re doing and follow the rules, I said, and explore new directions; find new paths that will take you to your destination. Whether it’s a physical destination or a place in your imagination, life happens on the back roads.
Here in New Brunswick, we have many remarkable destinations, and with almost 20,000 kilometres of highways and secondary roads crisscrossing the province, even more ways of getting to them. You can drive the entire length of the Trans-Canada Highway – 7,821 kilometres from St. John’s, N.L., to Victoria, B.C. – almost two and a half times and still not leave New Brunswick.
And this doesn’t even count long-forgotten woods roads like the one I’m driving now near North Lake and the American border. All back roads are great, but a rarely travelled woods road like this is the genuine article. Any back-road devotee will tell you that.
Back roads force us to slow down, pay attention and notice the details. Driving them is about just heading off in a direction and letting the universe take you where it will. Half the time, when I’m on these roads, I don’t even know where I’m going. I just drive and see where I wind up. On this day of Thanksgiving, surrounded by the dappled colours of hardwood ridges that stretch far across the border into Maine, I’m heading for a place in my imagination.
As I trace my route along this hardwood ridge on my map, I notice that the international border becomes a squiggly line just before it slices through North Lake and Grand Lake. With the border closed due to the pandemic, it seems odd that I could not cross over into America even if I wanted to. The feeling is as foreign as the country I thought I knew – the country to which I owe a significant part of my heritage.
No wonder the view is so good! There used to be a fire tower up here, and this was the road in and out. Steering carefully around a large rock, I think about the hundreds of times I’ve crossed the border. One of the last crossings was to visit friends in New Hampshire and the Robert Frost Farm in nearby Derry.
It was about this time of year when in drizzly rain, I tramped across the field behind the great poet’s barn following the rock wall that inspired one of his most famous poems, Mending Wall. The line on my map delineating the international border reminds me of that wall and how it cut through the oaks and maples on Frost’s property.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, / And spills the upper boulders in the sun; / And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”
Continuing down the hill, I notice a couple of partridge step out onto the road. Stopping the car, I let them pass, hoping they’ll fly. I love the thumping sound they make when they take off. It’s an iconic sound – the sound of nature taking flight.
As I watch the birds disappear into the woods, my gaze turns towards New England. So does my imagination. Looking past Katahdin to the far distant horizon, I see myself walking in the drizzling New Hampshire rain. Surrounded by the dappled colours of oaks and maples, I am tracing Robert Frost’s steps along his bouldered wall.
You never know what’s around the next corner, I think, as the thumping sound of partridge wings breaks the silence. It’s an iconic sound – the sound of the universe taking you where it will.
