The Campaign, Part 1

“Detroit is a haven for suckers,” I said, and threw my soccer referee jersey into my bag. Everything except my work clothes was packed. My American flag was rolled up and tucked in the passenger seat of my car for strategic deployment at the Windsor Canada Day parade. “Yo,” I called down the stairs, “I admire your gumption, but Detroit is a haven for suckers.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t had your car stolen twice you’d stay. You did seem to like it before that.”

He wasn’t wrong, really, but I had no time to discuss it, the parade was starting in an hour and missing the Mounties would start the trip off on the wrong foot. I had stayed in Detroit an extra week to make sure I made it to the parade. As I zipped up the last bag and took it downstairs, I had a terrible vision of the new car being stolen out from under me.

Crossing Matty Morun’s blue bridge to Canada was out of the question, he had done so much to frustrate the political process in Michigan. I took the tunnel, listened to the annoying right-wing talk for the last time, and parked facing the river.

Standing at the parade with my West Indies Cricket Team sun hat on, I waved at the Mounties and the giant inflatable mounties, laughed at the Canadian Navy sailors literally pulling their boat down Wyandotte Street, and stood as in awe of the all-girl equestrian troupe from Thunder Bay as the Windsor Trinidadian-Jamaican Society dancers were of my hat. Even in a parade celebrating their adopted country, old loyalties run as deep as a six from Kieron Pollard.

Southwestern Ontario is beautiful country, even though it’s mostly farms. I had been through it twice before, though not yet alone. Once I was dressed as the famous hockey player, drunk driver, and donut magnate Tim Horton and at the wheel of the twice-stolen car with my friends the Statue of Liberty, Justin Bieber, and the Queen of Canada. The other time, I was driving a loaner with the girl I knew I would love forever sitting next to me.

Quebecois country music is the best country music not played by Johnny Cash. Whether or not I’d hold that opinion if I actually spoke French is a question I’m not especially interested in answering during this lifetime. Fortunately, stations out of London and Hamilton play it all day for all the francophone truckers who ply the preferred highways of the North American car industry. The early sun speckles ethereally through the trees lining Ontario Queen’s Highway 401, and tickles Her Majesty’s slightly-more-geologically-interesting route 403. I got lunch at Her Majesty’s ON-Route truckstop on the side of the highway, mostly because government-sanctioned bilingual puns deserve everyone’s support always.

Crossing into Buffalo, I knew I was going to get hassled by the Customs officer, and I was right. I suppose that when you accidentally make a joke to one of them once about being “la Migra,” you consent to the thorough inspection of your car every time you return to the United States.

Knowing I’d be taking the (boring) 95 down the Eastern seaboard, I had assumed that the most beautiful road I would drive was Queen’s 403 to Buffalo. The country around Niagara Falls is glacially carved and an appropriate gateway to that impressive little tourist trap. Driving New York 17, the Southern Tier Expressway, I realized I was wrong.

I was wrong because the setting sun’s color wash is kinder to scenery than any other. I was wrong because I had no real memory of New York 17, the last time I’d taken it I was ten and going to my grandfather’s funeral, and I came up from New York that time, not down from Buffalo. I think, though, that I was wrong mostly because I expected the pleasant familiar to be superior to the unknown.

At the eight-or-nine hour mark of the drive, I was reminded by the engine that when your car is pretty new, and the first time you’ve pushed it real distances (other than a jaunt up to Flint to eat at your principal’s Japanese Street Food Farmers’ Market Stall) is a 550 mile ride through hilly country, it’ll let you know that it’s feeling the drive. I was just outside the town of Liberty when I decided to stop.