Chapter Two: Cutting the Distance

By Paul Fast

Scale determines how we see the world. For architects, it is the way we relate what we draw to what gets built, and how the human body experiences it. One of the things I love most about about architecture is watching a space emerge from nothing. The first time you walk into a space that has existed only on paper, the moment you see the light fall in a room in a way you never could have anticipated. There’s a special kind of magic in that. Sometimes the spaces have a strangely familiar feeling when they emerge from the form work and framing, as if we have been in them before, in some other dimension. Other times they surprise us. I remember pacing out the surveyor’s lines at the New West pool…we had always talked about how long the building was, but there it was, scribed in neon orange paint on freshly laid gravel, and it was big. Travel has a scale to it. It is one that relates lines on a map, not only to distance traveled, but to the experience of those spaces. Maps allow us to understand how we might move through a land or series of geographical spaces, but then there is always the question of what they can’t tell us…How difficult will the travel be? How far can we actually go? What will the place feel like? It is common, particularly with back country travel, to overestimate the distance maps suggest you can do in a day. It is always a theoretical exercise until boots (or tires) hit the road.

I feel this as we wind our way down the Californian coast, stitching one bit of geography into the next. We have left I5 at Grant’s Pass, and are now cutting our way through the heavily treed mountain range separating us from the coast. Imposing redwoods slowly yield their ground to grassy slopes bounded by windrows of junipers, their shoulders hunched into the heavy ocean wind. Everything here has been shaped by the wind. We make a three day pit stop in Anaheim to visit Disneyland, where we marinate our minds in the sensory overload of a million colours, sounds, smells and tastes. Then it is back on the road.

The Mexican border comes at us quickly along with our first crossing challenge. We have researched and rehearsed the bureaucracy of the cross-border dance many times, and we have every possible piece of paperwork at hand. Despite our uber-preparedness, the customs officials can’t quite figure out the temporary import permit for the truck (or is it a motorhome?), and I find myself behind closed doors with a young official nervously shuffling papers and suggesting that he is willing to do us a “favour”. I wait him out, plead ignorance and eventually the paper is begrudgingly stamped and we are on our way.

The Pan-American Highway is daunting even on a map. Any road that traverses that much of the globe would be. But like many things, the more you look at it, the more you convince yourself it’s doable. The most direct line down to Ushuaia from Vancouver is 18,350 km. That’s before you factor in all of the back and forthing to actually see places. Air travel would certainly allow you to see many of the places we are travelling through in a much more efficient manner. But that’s the beauty of traveling overland. We are measuring the land, one kilometer at a time, watching lines we had only seen on maps become three dimensional realities full of things we never could have imagined. Being wrapped in the embrace of warm, humid salt mist after hours of dry, conditioned vehicle air. The midnight owl that bombs down the highway ahead of me, using our headlights to flush mice from the roadside shoulders. The way the Golden Gate bridge seems to grow out of the fog of the Bay itself, as if it had always been there. And so, as our hard working Duramax ticks off the kilometers one by one, we construct a new reality and discover spaces previously only dreamed of. But I am indulging too much in sentimentality. We have a journey to complete and miles to cover. When I go into the mountains I am almost always overwhelmed by the size and scale of the landscape relative to the where we need to get too. I have felt this same feeling as we complete the first week of our trip. Suddenly the immensity of crossing the earth one kilometer at a time takes on a new reality. The gas bills are terrifying. The prospect of completing this long of a journey without something major breaking down seems unlikely. Who knows how the political situation in Peru will unfold?

A good friend texted me this quote the day we left: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. I find myself strangely pessimistic. That’s a fine proverb to contemplate from the comfort of an armchair, but the author clearly doesn’t know that my rear tires are already down to the wear bars. Daniella sees things differently, and has the boys run some numbers to lift their Dad’s spirits. They calculate actual and projected distances, and quarter and half points. And there it is. In the first week of travel we have (purposefully) laid back some monster distances. We are almost to Guadalajara, which puts us at 4,600km, which is a quarter of the direct distance to Ushuaia. The boys hold up the Google map with our fat blue line plotted on it. Look how far it is they say. As a geography major, I feel compelled to remind them that Google uses the Mercator map projection which favours a North American/European perspective and clearly will distort their perception of continental land sizes. But they are right - we have come far.

This has always been part of the plan. 12 months is a long time…unless you are traversing the globe. Once you break the 12 months down, that time frame becomes a lot tighter. Given this, our plan was to cover as much ground through the US and Mexico as possible to buy us time for the rest of the trip. We are also taking advantage of night driving through the US. The Golden Rule of overlanding is to never, ever drive at night. Security issues aside, the roads are too rough, and the animal and people life that thrives along the narrow margin of the shoulderless highways presents to great a risk. So we make time by driving long into the night through Washington, Oregon and California. Every proper road trip has it’s late night drives, when a certain distance must be won, and the dark hours hold the promise of easy driving with sleeping children. I’m reluctantly indulging a foray into country music, and Whiskey Myers is crooning…”the night is my companion, and the highway is my home.” And yet it seems that the darkness has closed in and fallen heavily. In the tightness of a space carved out by two headlights, my doubts close in like a wolf pack, lined out and noses to the wind. Is the camper too heavy? Will the frame hold? Is that a new vibration? Can we sustain this pace for a year? Did we bite off more than we can handle? But after each dark, there is the promise of light and a new day, for what is darkness, but only the absence of light. So I hold on to the steering wheel and pray through the doubts until the light comes. And when it comes, the world we are traveling through receives its colour, and the promise of a new day is born. A new landscape emerges, hope rises and the air is filled with anticipation for what today will bring. Best of all, the Duramax is purring along just fine.