In the second article of this four-part series, freelance writer and photographer Liz Beddall shares her experience travelling in her Subaru Forester, transformed into a dwelling on wheels, on a journey across Ontario and into the Prairies.
Cool people with cars buy audiobooks.
The thought crossed my mind this February while driving my 2018 Subaru Forester home for the first time from the Etobicoke dealership where I purchased it. This bright-blue SUV, my first vehicle, had been financed to fulfil a specific summer fantasy of living in it while driving across Canada and experiencing its great outdoors.
Soon after, a lengthy non-fiction book downloaded, I headed on a late winter trip to visit my family in Ottawa. I listened as the deeply voiced narrator read me a passage about highway hypnosis: a fascinating state wherein the mind breaks free from the body, which continues the task of driving almost robotically. It is something experienced by long-distance motorists.
It had occurred to me while listening to the audiobook that, in many ways, highway hypnosis was an analogy for my life. An anxious person since childhood, prone to worries and all-consuming fixations, I often felt that I existed in a similar state of split consciousness: physically present while my consciousness was somewhere else entirely.
If life was, in fact, a highway, as musician Tom Cochrane proclaimed in song, I’d been driving it, half awake, all night long.
But, on this early June day, I was awake and staring through my dusty windshield at the towering grain elevators of central Saskatchewan. Behind me were 3,000 kilometres of highway snaking to ɫɫ, the home I’d recently cut ties with for a five-week journey of finding myself.
I was now in the small town of Lashburn, located on the Yellowhead Highway near the Alberta border. It was the childhood home of my mother, whose enthusiastic voice could be heard over my Subaru’s speakers as we FaceTimed. She was directing me through the community with all the confident authority of a New York City tour bus guide. “OK, if you turn your attention to the left,” she said from her Ottawa apartment as I drove down Lashburn’s main street.
Prior to my memory tour with my mother, she and my father had asked for a recap of my first eight days on the road. They wanted to know how my vehicle-dwelling journey, from ɫɫ through Northern Ontario and then northwest across Manitoba and Saskatchewan, had gone.
I recounted the raccoon drama on the first morning of my trip, when I woke in Algonquin Provincial Park to find the creature eating through a week’s worth of food. From there, I heavy-footed it more than 1,000 kilometres to Rainbow Falls Provincial Park, on the northern shore of Lake Superior.
My Forester, apart from handling flawlessly on the first long day of driving, performed perfectly as my resting place for the night — and a sanctuary from the mosquitoes and black flies — I told my parents.
Driving the Trans-Canada Highway across northwestern Ontario I was unencumbered by the big city worries that encompassed my life a few weeks earlier. Instead, I made impromptu stops at roadside artisan stands and pulled over to stare at an idling moose and baby fox.
Behind me in my SUV was everything I needed to live. My photography equipment, clothing, cooler and cooking needs fit amazingly between the wooden legs of my specially designed car-to-camper frame. It sat atop my Subaru’s flipped-down back seats, with the structure’s flat surface offering a spot to roll out my mattress and throw some pillows each night.
If I needed a face wipe, Advil or granola bar, I’d only have to park, lift open my SUV’s hatchback and I’d have access to two large Tupperware containers. One housed dry goods and cooking gear; toiletries filled the other. On the Subaru’s roof, a cargo box provided additional storage for clothing and other supplies.
I recounted to my parents, still on the phone from Ottawa, how I flipped my car when I arrived at a campsite, transformer style, from a place to store all my needs into a dwelling-on-wheels. I could prepare dinner on my travel stove, stretch out to sleep on an actual mattress and make my morning Americano with a single-shot espresso maker.
At my next stop, in Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park, about 30 kilometres west of Thunder Bay, I allowed myself an embarrassment of time to set up my home and campsite just so. I discovered a joy I’d never encountered before in the act of meticulously organizing my new home and finding the perfect spot for each of my possessions. The curved interior space between my storage and sleeping frame and the Subaru’s back wheel, for example, became a tiny library where I could arrange my books.
It was at Kakabeka that I was reminded of my mother’s love of camping, a passion she’d worked hard to also instill in her children. An anxious woman herself, I understood now why she’d spent hours prepping the campsite after shooing us kids away to play on the nearest beach.
During those precious moments she was, like I was now, in full control of her universe: transforming a 12-by-30-foot campsite into a kingdom where the rules are decreed exclusively by the queen. The best direction to face our family car, the perfect bag to store our towels, they were her decisions.
By the time I reached Caliper Lake Provincial Park near the Ontario border with Manitoba and northern Minnesota, I decided this life was for me. I watched as a setting sun turned the dark waters of the lake ablaze in a golden hue. With the help of my Jackery, a portable generator that I could charge using my car’s auxiliary outlet while driving, I’d caught up on hours of work as loons called to each other from across the water.
“I envy you Elizabeth,” my mom said over the Subaru’s speaker phone as I told her and my dad about my journey. “You’re doing something I’ve always wanted to do.”
I believed her. Now approaching her 80s, and camping less because of its physical demands, I’d felt my mom take special interest in my wild and weird carventure since I announced it. I remember on that winter trip home after buying the SUV that she went with me to buy my camping gear and carefully inspected my Subaru — perhaps imagining what it would be like if she was making the journey.
She was equally delighted as she rode with me, thanks to the power of FaceTime, through Lashburn. She described her teen years as I stared out the window at a small brick building that once housed the local school. I could hear the sadness in her voice when I told her the church where she and my father were married was now boarded up.
After her tour of the town, we ended our call and I continued driving into Alberta. With a sense of nostalgia still filling the Subaru, I was reminded of a time when I was younger and my mother, in an off-the-cuff moment, commented that she would have loved to have become a bus driver if she hadn’t gone into medicine.
Driving, it turned out, was something we both loved. It offered the same escape from our worries as camping; when our anxieties turned to calm as we set up the perfect space. In the car we also found a place where we could be free from our worries. It was a rare opportunity when we could feel peace of mind on the road of life.
In Hillsdown, AB, about 20 kilometres east of Red Deer, I saw the mountains for the first time. They were in full view and calling to me.
Next Week: We follow along as Liz Beddall heads drives along the Icefields Parkway in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.
