Andrew Prine
A former Incite editor-in-chief lives on a prairie, mounts mountains, and crosses the dateline in search of adventure. Here’s a short piece about the first leg of his round-the-world trip:
Photo courtesy of Andrew Prine
On the morning of my 22nd birthday, I woke up shivering, stiff, and glad to be alive. It was the 14th of September, and though summer was still going strong in south-western Ontario, autumn had painted our Saskatchewan campsite with a hard frost. By the time I’d made it back from the composting toilet, the sun was just starting to creep over the tree line. Its raw, red rays lit the icy tall grass like torches. Despite the startling beauty that the sunlight revealed, I couldn’t help thinking, “fat load of good you were last night.”
Chris, Angela and I, running from summer-long brush-ins with the real world, had been on the road for eight days. We christened our carriage with a day trip from Sarnia to Point Pelee, and, after one last night at home, sallied forth. Driving up and west along the Great Lakes, we’d been impressed by the rugged, wild, and stereotypically Canadian beauty, but the prairies at harvest time hit us even harder.
Ontario extended a lot farther past Thunder Bay than we’d expected, but when we finally made it to Manitoba, the transition was surprisingly abrupt. As if sanded bare, the hills, lakes, and trees that had bordered the highway since Sarnia suddenly disappeared. We’d set aside four days for the prairies before making for Calgary, Edmonton, and the Rockies. Hoping to give our faithful steed, a beige 2001 Pontiac Montana affectionately known as Chuck, a little something to cut his teeth on before tackling the Western Cordillera, we thought we’d try the Cypress Hills, one of the relatively few elevation changes to be found on the great plains.
The rain had held off since half-way up Lake Huron, but when we arrived at the park, there was a price to pay for our good luck with the weather. Cypress Hills was under a fire ban, and though we had enough peanut butter, bread, and apples to make it through the night, we’d been looking forward to making a hearty pot of campfire chilli. Since our gear would also have to serve us in Australia’s tropical north in just a few weeks’ time, we’d packed light. Without fire, chilli was out of the question, but chilly we did get.
Not long after sunrise, awake, alert, and eager to regain feeling in our digits, we packed up our campsite, skipped breakfast, and thought we’d take the scenic park roads across the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. Unfortunately, the fire ban also covered internal combustion engines, so after a few roadblocks, breathtaking lookout points, and close calls with escaped cattle, we finally admitted defeat and left the park by the route we came in, returning, embarrassed, to the Trans-Canada.
A few more hours of driving brought us to the home of our Calgary hostess, Chris’s sister, Natalie. Glad for a chance to shower, shave, and sleep indoors, we decided to postpone any birthday-brations until we were better rested. Sympathetic to our plight, Natalie assured us that there would be ample opportunity for revelry at a University of Calgary Engineering event to be held just two nights later.
The goal for the evening was to board converted school buses, drive out to rural Alberta, and drink a bar dry. The unlucky sports bar in Okotoks that was their victim, filled with throngs of young, rowdy engineering students, was something of a new experience for me, but it wasn’t without some comforting familiarity; I was, as always, one of the worst dancers.
Stepping out to get some air, I also witnessed a fairly unique attempt at courtship. A young man introduced himself to two women smoking in the parking lot and offered to show them how he earned the name “Indiana Skywalker.” Laughing, the girls agreed. The man walked to his car. After a few moments of rummaging, he returned carrying a fedora, a whip, and a light sabre. Whatever can be said of his ultimately unsuccessful performance, it certainly didn’t lack originality.
The next day, after a somewhat late start, we drove to Drumheller, climbed the world’s largest dinosaur, stopped at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and rekindled a long-dormant childhood passion for palaeontology. It meant we’d have to face a night-time trip into Edmonton, something we’d been hoping to avoid, given the state of Chuck’s headlights, but we had absolutely no regrets.
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