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My wife and I were driving through Western New York. Our eventual destination? The small town of Lewiston, the home of my late father-in-law’s widow, officially to help around the place but, if we were being honest, to simply be around.
The afternoon sunlight draped itself over the trees casting freckled shadows onto the grass that ran to the edge of the highway’s shoulder. The fields we drove past were still green but beginning to turn a burnt butterscotch and the woods were dressed in orange and yellow.
Summer had passed, just as it always does, and now fall was beginning to end, just as it always does, and we were surprised by this dazzling seasonal transition, just as we always are. We were exhilarated by our proverbial “scenic fall drive.”
Some will object to our setting foot in the United States. What can you say to these folks except that your family doesn’t stop being your family because of how the American public votes.
Each season has its charm, but nothing compares to the fall drive. Car trips in the summer can be glorious. You cruise along country roads or on broad highways past greenery under blue skies. Often, you’re on holiday and it feels like summer will go on forever.
Yet while summer days seem to lump together in the memory, every beautiful sunlit fall drive is distinct and singular. They stand out. I can still recall a drive my family made when I was a child in the 1970s through the farmland outside London, Ont. I gazed out the window at a landscape that was done up in orange, rich yellow and gold, muted greens, browns and tans under bruised blue skies. It seemed as if my world had been illustrated by Charles Schulz.
Each fall drive calls back to the ones that preceded it. Perhaps that is what makes them irresistible. Autumn’s beauty heightens your sensitivity to the poignant promises of life. If you get the right day, the right road, the right weather and you are with the right person, there are few trips as enthralling.
Of course, the following day it rained. One of my duties in Lewiston was to take my father-in-law’s 2012 yellow Mini Cooper Countryman for an extended drive. His wife did not drive it, and she wanted to make sure it stayed in running order.
As I backed out of the driveway, I saw my wife, a mother, now a grandmother, standing on the front lawn looking like an eight-year-old waiting for her father to come home from work. I drove his Mini through a downpour along the I-90 highway and stopped at a Valu Home Centers to buy a picture hanger and a stud finder which I later failed to use with any success.
This, I suppose, is the other sort of fall drive, the sort you make driving someone else’s car because that someone isn’t around anymore. The sky is a dusky grey and the scenery sodden and intense. You fumble with the car’s climate control in a Valu Home Centers parking lot and then drive to your relative’s house. It rains heavily. Visibility is difficult but it is not hard to see that some day you won’t be around, and someone will be driving your car through the rain.
The sun reappeared the day we returned to Toronto. We drove through Niagara, a drive we’d made 100 times before. Canada is full of beautiful fall road trips. You can drive the Cowboy Trail in Alberta, the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia, Yoho Valley Road in British Columbia or the Gatineau Hills in Quebec. To me, the fall drive on the Niagara Parkway along the river and on the region’s fruit-stand dotted side roads is particularly special. Of course, once you are on the Queen Elizabeth Way, it’s a nightmare. It’s as if NASCAR decided to throw a traffic jam but that’s another story.
We arrived home. As we got out of the car, I noticed that while the sun was bright, there was a distinct chill in the air. We’d been caught out once again. Autumn rushed cooly by.