Illustration by Drew Shannon
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A long-time friend once said that people keep fewer traditions than they used to. He did not mean the grand ceremonies, with speeches and programs and someone assigned to cut a ribbon. He meant the smaller customs: the repeated pleasures that ask for no justification beyond the happiness they provide.
One of these was the Sunday drive.
The phrase has not aged well. Today, a “Sunday driver” is a nuisance, a rolling obstruction in a world that measures virtue by speed. But in Revelstoke, B.C., Sunday driving (at least when I grew up in the 1960s) was not a failure to get somewhere quickly. It was the point of going out at all. Maybe it happened in your part of the country, too.
After breakfast, my father would announce that we might as well take a run somewhere. That was usually the extent of the plan. My brothers and I climbed into the back seat, my mother settled in beside him and the road decided the rest. A family friend, Gordon, often came along. Years later he told me what those trips had meant to him.
“Your dad never drove without making it fun,” he said. “We never knew where we might go or what we might do.”
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That was precisely the charm. One relative called it “crop checking,” a rural expression for drifting about the countryside with one’s eyes open. We might go east to see how construction was advancing on the new Trans-Canada Highway over Rogers Pass. As each section opened, ordinary motorists gained views of mountains and glaciers that had once belonged mostly to railway workers. My father, a Canadian Pacific locomotive engineer, seemed to know every curve, grade, siding and story. Passing trains were greeted as though we had a duty to acknowledge them.
Other Sundays carried us up Mount Revelstoke, through the 21 switchbacks to the alpine meadows. The car worked hard; we children worked harder at appearing patient. Then the forest would loosen, the air would sharpen and the meadows would spread ahead of us with their wind, sun-warmed flowers and huckleberries. We returned home purple-fingered, sleepy and faintly scratched, with no accomplishment to report except having gone.
Sometimes we drove “down South” to Arrowhead, a village at the head of Upper Arrow Lake that now lies beneath a reservoir. To reach it, we crossed the Columbia River on reaction ferries – unpowered barges that used cable, current and a modest understanding of physics to move themselves from shore to shore. I did not then think of them as historic. They were simply part of the day’s entertainment, as marvellous as cherries bought in the Okanagan or a roadside bouquet gathered for our Mother.
Looking back, I see that those drives were an education disguised as idleness. They taught geography by repetition, history by anecdote and family affection by proximity. We learned where the ceremonial Last Spike had been driven, where the railway entered the pass, where the highway was changing the province and which bend in the road might produce a view worth stopping for. More importantly, we learned that a shared journey did not need to justify itself by becoming efficient.
That may be the hardest part to recover. Modern driving is crowded by haste, suspicion, fuel prices, safety campaigns and the uneasy knowledge that unnecessary mileage is not a neutral pleasure. Those concerns are real. Yet something is lost when every trip must be defended as practical. Roads do not exist only to move labour and freight. They also connect people to place and to one another.
An elderly friend once told me, still indignant years later, of being stopped by the RCMP on the Yellowhead Highway and instructed to go faster. “Can you imagine?” he said. “They didn’t have enough to do but tell people that?” His outrage was comic but it contained a principle. A country worth crossing is also worth seeing.
The Sunday drive did not vanish all at once. It was crowded out by busier calendars, faster traffic, more anxious habits and perhaps by our embarrassment at pleasures that appear unproductive. But I think it can still be practised, even modestly. Take the long way home. Visit a place you already know. Go slowly enough to notice what has changed since last month. Bring someone whose company matters.
Canada is a remarkable place in which to live. It should not be consumed only through windscreens at highway speed. It deserves to be seen slowly, spoken about while being seen and carried home in memory.
Tom W. Parkin lives in Nanaimo, B.C.