STORIES FROM THE ROAD: CANADA & EASTERN USA
Before my father died, he spent months planning a road trip around Eastern Canada so he could take my brother and I to all the places he once called home. His plan was to tell us stories along the way, introduce us to old and new family members, and instil in us a love for a part of the world we hadn’t seen in many years. I had just finished college and was a few months away from starting university so had spent the start of the the summer working in a high street store, saving money and counting down the days for our trip to start. Nothing else mattered in my world that Summer. A week before we were due to fly my father was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and everything changed forever. He quickly deteriorated and by the October he was gone. I was devastated and struggling to comprehend what had happened. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the stories he was going to tell us, and how they’d died with him. When someone close to you dies, everyone tells you that with time, the pain will ease but in those first few months it was unbearable for me. I thought I would never feel happy or normal again, and so I promised myself I would go on the road trip for him.
What started as a way to deal with grief slowly became my life’s purpose. Every job I got was to save money for my trip, every relationship I entered I sharply told them I wouldn’t be around for long as I was planning to journey off and who knows when I’d return, every book I read, every map I looked at, all of it felt like preparation for a journey of the soul that I had to complete. I was, and sometimes still am, a dramatic romantic and believer firmly in sentimentality (still true) and marking important days so I decided on the 10 year anniversary as the most important time to complete the trip. 10 years as it happens is a much longer time than a 19 year old thinks it is, and so much can change. Thankfully, people were correct and the pain does ease and by the time a decade had rolled on the road trip felt more like a celebration of life than a tool to run away from it. With a global pandemic in the middle of that decade, not every stop on the original road trip plan existed anymore so I set to adapting the original plan to a new journey that was both mine and my fathers. It included parts we’d initially not planned to see, people I’d found online who were distant relatives and just for fun a stop in Salem, MA to check out the Witch Museum. If you’re gonna do something, at least have a bit of frivolity in it, right?
I could write 100 stories from this trip, but perhaps the most interesting, morbid & surreal is the journey to find my grandparents gravestone. My grandparents are buried together, and I hadn’t been back to Canada since my grandma died when I was a child so I knew I had to make time to pay my respects. Because I love the snow, I am a confident driver and also potentially very stubborn I insisted the road trip had to happen in the winter. While in St John, NB, where my family is from, we stayed with a beautiful couple in their hotel. It turns out they knew a distant relative and they were deeply engaged in my plans for the trip while we were local. Each morning we’d have breakfast together and they’d ask me what was on the agenda. The morning I was planning to head to the cemetery, John the owner asked me “which cemetery is it?” and when I told him the name he gave me a fairly quizzical look and wished me luck which in hindsight should have been a red flag. Oblivious, I journeyed out to the edge of town with my travelling companion and we pulled into the cemetery.
We were met with an almost unending field of pure white. Although it had been a milder Winter in NB, there was still around two feet of snow everywhere we went. I remember thinking “I wonder where are all the graves are” as more and more stretches of white appeared as we drove down the main path to the centre of the graveyard. I knocked into the office, finding a sole employee about to leave for lunch. She very kindly checked the names on her computer and handed me what looked like a hand drawn map of the place and circled the exact plot. “Your best bet is to find the trees, see these are them here, and then work backwards from there. I’ll grab you a shovel.” she said, rushing out back.
Perhaps it is worth noting at this point, this cemetery is a flat headstone cemetery. This fact is something I either had forgotten, or simply never knew. In hindsight, I perhaps would also have chosen a Summer Road Trip had I known this.
She came back with a bright red plastic shovel that looked like it had seen better days. She wished us luck and jumped in her car. Off we trudged to the smudged mark on the map and started moving snow about with our new tool. We got about 2 inches down until we hit something hard. Ice. And a lot of it. At this point, I began to panic. I felt like I’d let my grandparents down by not being more prepared, by not knowing this could happen. I looked at my partner and he smiled at me, “don’t worry, I’m sure there’s a hardware store nearby” he said as the plastic shovel we’d been given snapped in two. So off we went to the local hardware store and picked up a spring loaded ice pick, multiple cans of de-icer and a new shovel for the cemetery staff, choosing a slightly stronger one as their previous plastic tool was clearly not up for the job. We even thought about renting a heater and a generator but felt perhaps that was in fact too far.
We returned to the cemetery, rolled up our sleeves and got to work. There were two main problems: the snow obviously, but also the map we’d been given was almost useless in a sea of white. We were essentially guessing where the headstones could be, which felt both disrespectful and dangerous. We gently nudged our way through the snow until we heard the sound of stone, knowing the headstones must be underneath. After 45 minutes we finally got down to a name. Unfortunately it was not the one we were looking for, so we apologised profusely and laid flowers for the kind lady neighbouring my grandparents. After a few more near misses, and more flowers shared around the recipients of this part of the cemetery we finally found the start of my surname. At this point we had been digging up snow for nearly 2 hours, and I was exhausted and freezing. In desperation I started shovelling the ice with my gloved hands and the cans of de-icer until I could see enough of the name to be sure it was finally the right stone. We excavated the whole top of the stone, and I laid the remaining flowers (now a much smaller bunch than intended) for my grandparents. We sat and told them the story, apologised for waking all the neighbours and hoped they’d find the whole thing very amusing. After a while, with the feeling in my toes long gone, we got back into the car and drove back to the hotel. John was delighted to see us and asked how we’d got on, with a knowing glint in his eye. We told him about the headstones and he burst into laughter, apologising for not warning us and gladdened by our problem solving.
Sometimes, life happens in the most unexpected ways but I am so glad of this trip and all the memories it gave me. It was an honour to get to say hello and goodbye to my grandparents again, and in many ways my father. I am also incredibly relieved that no one else came to the cemetery that day as explaining that yes, in fact, we probably did have permission to shovel snow but maybe not dig up an entire graveyard would have been deeply difficult. The cemetery photos are saved just for family, but here are a series of less dramatic moments from that trip.
