Made the long road trip from New Hampshire to Toronto yesterday. The drive was supposed to take 9 hours. It took me 13. Part of it was an unplanned, nearly hour-long stop at a roadside garage in Quebec, just over the border, to get my car window fixed. It had come off the track and was stuck about three inches open, and it had begun to rain. . .the mechanic, a gentle, patient man with very weathered hands and a little more English than the girl at the front desk, deftly fixed it. Albeit a long break for a very animated conversation between him, the girl, and a man who came in with a briefcase, on an unknown topic that seemed very important. My French is non-existant enough that I couldn't make out what it was, but I finally had to reluctantly interrupt to let him know that I had a long way to go and needed the job finished. . .
That part of Quebec, just over the border, is incredibly beautiful, with a sparse, flat, severe beauty. The transition from Vermont mountains to paper-flat Quebec farmland is fairly abrupt. The landscape starts looking more "Canadian", in a way I can't describe. Then just over the border begins long flat fields of corn, dried to brown now it is nearly winter, and bent trees bowed over in long submission to the prevailing winds, like old ladies with a permanent stoop. The farms are marked out by a cluster of barns and houses, with a characteristic blue-green roofing, in the midst of the fields. Little shops and auto repair places, like the one I stopped at, occur with regularity. It is a wild, beautiful, character-ful place. Driving along listening to soulful French tunes on the radio only added to the atmosphere.
The border crossing was so remote there was only one station open and two cars ahead of me. My passport wasn't even asked for. The customs officer, obviously battling between his desire to be friendly and his need to keep an official formidability, told me in response to my inquiries that yes, there was an information booth there, but that it was only open in the summer.
The rain began just over the Quebec border, and continued the whole way to Toronto, with more or less severity. In Montreal and for a ways beyond it was so incredibly forceful I began to think on the evening news we'd hear that Montreal had been washed away in a monsoon. We were forced to slow to a crawl by blinding sheets of rain pounding on the windshield and great lakes of water filling up the roads. The whole rest of the drive was a long and undifferentiated nightmare of going on and on in the rain, the cars spraying it up in white mist on the highway so visibility was severely reduced. Still I kept to about 120 km/hour (75 mi/hour) in a desire to arrive as quickly as possible.
It's difficult to describe the feeling crossing over the Canadian border. Like coming home. I was so happy to see Canada I pumped my fist in the air and blew a kiss to it. It does feel like home; I'm an alien in my own country and at home here, though I don't belong. Hopefully that will change. . .