A 1950s Canadian Road Trip
“Nothing
behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
Jack Kerouac: On
The Road
In our popular mythology the road trip is a
metaphor for the series of life changing events we need to experience. Usually
they take place just before adulthood; so some indigenous cultures have
initiation rituals where the transition is permanently recorded by way of scars
or tattoos, we get into a car and drive. The journey’s distance and duration
aren’t fixed; the point is that at the end the protagonist’s life has been
changed, for the better. He or she is wiser now.
In the 1950s two people took a road trip to
Toronto and one of them photographed it. The album was printed in Victoria but
it was bought sixty years later in Montreal so we can’t be sure where they left
from. Most of the photographs look like they were taken on that ubiquitous road
that criss-crosses North America: mountains in the distance, motels and diners
lining the sides; for all we know we could be in North Ontario or southern
Arizona.
But the real subject that holds our
attention is the woman. Looking to be in her mid to late fifties, she
holds more or less the same pose
in each photo, not because she doesn’t have the imagination to think of another
but because the photos and her role in them are purely functional. They want
photos of the places they visited along the way, and a reminder that they were
there but nothing more.
The theory is that this was their first
trip across Canada, and possibly in their first car. She looks to have been
born close to the turn of the century and it’s easy to forget that people from
her generation had their youth taken away by two world wars and a depression.
It isn’t uncommon to read of people in Britain and Australia who couldn’t
afford a car until the economic boom of the 1950s. Even when they had the
money, time wasn’t always on their side. Anyone old enough to have people from
this generation for grandparents remembers perplexed conversations about
leaving lights on, why having a bath every night was normal and explaining that
cars these days didn’t have a choke.
Coming into being at the beginning of the
decade that really gave us the contemporary road saga, his little album is unaware of the stereotype. This
is a road trip without any great revelations because of course they only happen
in the world of fiction. Real road trips in Canada and Australia involve days
of unchanging scenery, pulling into motels around sunset with frazzled nerves
and short tempers and falling into conversations with strangers in bars about
nothing at all. In films the conversation ends with the protagonist staring
into his beer and realizing what he has to do. In real life he yawns and says
he must go to bed now, ‘cause it’s a big day tomorrow with another 500 kms of
low hills and dry scrub ahead.
I suspect this is only one from several
albums Belchers of Victoria B.C printed from the road trip. Even if it covered
a relatively short distance – Ottawa to Toronto for example - there ought to be
more photos from the rest of the journey somewhere. Not that we need them. The story here is enough.
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| ROAD TO NOWHERE |
