20 January, '08

New York is behind me, by ‘miles and inclinations’. For a good part of the last three days I have kept the front-right tire glued to the white line in the middle of the highway as mile after mile of tarmac, concrete and snow stretch and shrink and gain perspective in a thin trail aimed at the horizon. New York to Boston to Quebec City to Montreal to Toronto to New York. Two thousand five hundred kilometres, sixteen-hundred miles, all in a beige minivan, all with ballad and anthem and ditty emanating from the two working speakers, all with fine company and bad food, all with the unremitting desire to keep moving, to—feeling like Moriarty—pursue imminence, to crave what’s ahead, always ahead.

Most of the driving was done at night. The headlights on the rental were feeble—a torch with weak batteries—illuminating a length of road too short to allow for adequate response, and therefore me at the wheel craning my neck at the windscreen, studying the white line, hugging the white line, worshipping at the church of the white line until it levitated from the road, came over the bonnet, past the windscreen wipers, skirted the eyeball and lodged itself next to the optic nerve. Following—no, chasing—the white line become a religion and driving prayer, accelerating like chanting ohm until absolution explodes in cosmic fury: absolution behind the wheel the holy state, the perfect speed, where cars are passed in a gentle weave, the camber of corners and the chassis merge and harmonise and the car drives itself and the meditative Zen of it all makes the lights of small towns lose definition and the hulking number of remaining miles topple like a slot machine.

And so one night of such driving, with red eyes and an aching back, we crossed the moonlit tundra of south-eastern Canada, the sides of the highway encroaching on the car as four-lane America gave way to two-lanes, all the time the air outside falling colder until the windows of the car were slick ice and the bubble of warm air around us felt fragile in comparison. This is how we arrived in Quebec City, thrust into traffic lights and intersections and buildings after six hundred miles of highway where the warning signs about moose conjured cervine spectres in every shadow and dark, silhouetted trees lined both sides and grew soft into the darkness.

When we arrived, in the very early morning, the temperature was minus sixteen. When we woke, the sun was out and the temperature was a tepid minus five. The part of Quebec City that is old comes replete with churches, grand arches, Romanic columns and cobbled pavements. All of these were witnessed by Jon*, Toby and I whilst wrapped in as many layers as movement would allow. Minus six, you see, even with a light breeze, causes the body to leak warmth so quickly that within a minute all that is left is that which you can catch with folded arms and head bent forward. We did not, do not, have the right clothes and thus dashed from site to sight and then to a coffee shop for warmth.

Aside from the beauty of Quebec City—said churches, arches, columns and pavements were, indeed, stunning, though after seeing EuroDisney’s imitation it is difficult to see them as anything but a thin façade—what most struck me was the frozen sea. In my last transmission I talked, briefly, about the alien nature of the landscape in Oslo. In Quebec City, this alienation was even more profound. The city sits at the edge of an inlet fed by the North Atlantic Ocean. In winter, parts of this inlet freeze over, creating landscapes so solid and still that without prior knowledge I would not have known that beneath the ice and snow lay salt water. A frozen ocean is, in the limited scope of my experience, as cataclysmic as rivers turning blood red or the earth finally giving way to the oppressive weight of gravity, events so holy and unholy they emanate a sacred aura, transforming the familiar and tame to the alien and wild.

***

Included with our rental van was a GPS unit: a calculator-sized screen personified by a soft and stuttering feminine voice, resembling—as Jon noted—Clarice from Silence of the Lambs. Clara as she became known, the eponymous descendent of Foster’s character, attached herself to the dash and thenceforth the cabin rang with the peal of her directions. Clara’s usefulness, however, is difficult to gauge. By some dint of technology, Clara was usually about six seconds behind the actual location of the car. Thus, her directions sometimes came six-seconds after their usefulness expired and we had departed on some other course. Throughout this ordeal Clara did not remonstrate nor snarl. Even when the blunders were mine she silently—obediently—recalculated the route and changed her instructions. If there was admonishment, it was silent. If there were repercussions, I did not notice.

Before maps, travellers would have consulted the stars and read the myriad cardinal signs present in nature. Before Clara, the traveller would have consulted maps and paid attention to road signs. With Clara, the three of us listened only to music and watched only the cars in front. Thus, when Clara was errant we were lost. Sans global-positioning we were floating in space, errant and clueless travellers.

Clara is representative of one of the great fallacies of technology. Most of it, when you really consider it, is of negligible use. There is very little about a cellphone, for example, that redeems its obnoxious presence. The only time I have really needed, needed, to use my cellphone was when my car broke down in the Wanganui back-blocks. Of course, in that instance, I was out of range and the device was useless.

***

Today we begin the long stretch home, skirting the great lakes, driving through mile after mile of semi-industrial, semi-residential squalor, all of it testament to our species’ profound ability to transform the landscape, to build and build and level and level until everything is uniformly drab, uniformly human, and not a bit natural.

*see Jon’s perspective on the trip at knotstiedinstrings.wordpress.com

See photos from the trip at:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2129706&l=a82e5&id=585700346

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2129787&l=74ceb&id=585700346