Ends and Beginnings – The Start of a Pan-American Journey

By: Paul Fast

It is strange that the beginning of one thing is often found in the ending of another. This journey finds it’s beginning in the tearful conclusion of a trip that Daniella and I took early in our life together. Thirteen years ago we stood in the arrivals lounge at the Vancouver International Airport amidst the bags that had accompanied us around a one year journey through Africa, Russia and a large part of Europe. When we married, we had both agreed that our life would not be static, that we would allow adventure and exploring to shape our future. Just to make sure we were both on the same page, I proposed marriage while skydiving out of an airplane. She said yes and we laid our plans. In our first summer we guided German tourists on camping tours throughout BC’s back country. Our second summer, we drove a 1996 Ford Explorer with a failing transmission to the far edges of the Arctic Ocean in the Northwest Territories. Our trip to Africa and beyond was a much-needed reprieve at the conclusion of my grad studies in architecture. The trip changed us.

The tears came as we prepared to leave the arrivals lounge. Ahead of us were a set of automatic doors, and through those doors were family and friends we were desperate to see, but also the start of a different life – the building of careers, our own family (Daniella was pregnant with Nathaniel), and eventually a house and other expectations. It was difficult to reconcile a future of adventure with mortgage payments and diapers. So there, surrounded by the detritus of a year’s travel on the cheap carpet of the arrivals lounge we told ourselves that one day we would travel with our children. We would show them the world outside of their own, and plant deeply into their little souls (three total, all boys) the desire to explore, to reach for bigger things and drink deeply of life. This was the promise we made each other, and it got us through the doors.

I don’t have a good answer for you as to why we chose the Pan-American Highway. It may have started in my grade four classroom, which is the first time I saw a world map pinned to the wall. I remember being disappointed that this rather fantastic world that had been described to me could fit on a single sheet of paper. I decided then, that if the world really was so terribly small, I should at least see a good part of it.

My early disappointment with the representation of the world on flat pieces of paper developed into an obsession with maps and geography, which I would later study in my undergrad. I also developed a remarkable stubbornness in not turning around on a gravel road before I had seen the end of it. I suppose all of that led somehow to the idea of driving immense distances, stitching one landscape into the next. Air travel has always felt like cheating, and every time I stepped off an airplane I felt strangely disoriented. Travel by road allows us the familiarity of a home base, control over our pace, the satisfaction of understanding geography by seeing it at eye level. It is also something our family does well.

The Pan-American happens to be the longest, drivable road in the world. It stretches from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia Argentina, and if you plug that into Google Maps it will tell “Sorry, we could not calculate driving distances….”. The culprit is the Darien Gap, a 60 mile gap in the road between Panama and Colombia that has been deliberately left unbuilt due to the immensity of the jungle, cartels, rebels and other miscellaneous problems. Minus the gap, the road is 30,000 km long, crosses 16 countries and the equator, 16,000 ft mountain passes, and the driest desert in the world. The only other living thing that makes a journey that long is the Arctic Tern, which migrates north to south every year, chasing the sun along the curve of the earth.

There are easier ways to spend a hard-earned sabbatical year, and I am under no illusions about the difficulty of a trip like this, and that there is a real possibility of pulling the ripcord halfway through. I wake up occasionally wondering whether I am doing the right thing, dragging a family of 5 on a journey like this. But in my heart, I know that I am also teaching my boys not to be afraid of things we do not know. I hope that when they have children of their own some day, they will hold a globe with both hands, trace a route from one side to the other and have a few stories to tell. And so on the first of February, I will shift our truck into gear, nose it onto the highway heading south and drive until the road ends.