THE EXPEDITION Chapter 8: Ow (Section 2)

In which there is an inventory of the disgusting but occasionally useful things you find along the Trans Canada 

Date: May 5, 2019

From Maple Creek to the old Piapot campground: 33.3 km

I nursed my knee for four days. The motel people were so helpful, with ice and with people paying for my room from afar and by various means, and with meals and information, not to mention a lot of heartfelt friendly support and encouragement.

As part of keeping quietly occupied, I’d turned the emptied trailer (the young man who helped get our contraptions and gear into the room very kindly insisted on taking the load apart for me) upside down. I’d been collecting good bungee cords along the highway, and wanted to weave several of the heavy duty black across the frame as extra support, considering the rather more than recommended amount of weight it was carrying. It kept me still and busy for a while. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone buys bungee cords – just go for a walk along a highway for half an hour and you’ll be all stocked up even if you’re as picky as I was!

There’s also a truly phenomenal amount of garbage.

It kept coming out from under the re-melting snow, and blowing out from between slowly wakening grasses and shrubbery and trees. It just kept coming. All those hyper critical and outright rude Canadians I met while I was trying to live like a gypsy in Jamaica need to shut up and look around their homeland. Don’t throw stones when you live in glass houses, even if the glass is filthy, but especially if you insist you can’t even see the glass.

I’d been talking about it with a man in the UK who was planning a cross-country highway cleanup walk. It was supposed to take place during the summer of 2020, but I suppose the pandemic put things on hold. I do hope he’s still going to go ahead though, as soon as he can.

He said he’d also be walking, and laughed when I asked if he was going to arrange to have a few trucks somehow donated to follow him.

“I’m getting a really big cart, I can toss everything in and empty it at every stop along the way.” I had trouble believing he was serious, and it took him a little while to realize I wasn’t kidding about thinking such an undertaking would require large vehicular assistance. We had quite an in-depth talk about the amounts and types of garbage on our respective roadsides. He was dismayed and disgusted.

“But you’re Canada!” he typed. “You’re supposed to be so clean and nice and responsible! What happened!?”

Here’s what’s along the Trans-Canada highway, in approximate order of amount, at least according to what I saw… I think the first three are tied for first place, depending where you are:

Water and drink packaging

Fast food and convenience store food and other food packaging (often with food)

Pieces of vehicles (glass, rubber, metal, electronics, identifiable and otherwise, large and small)

pieces of vehicle accouterments (bungee cords, tools, work gloves and rags, etc)

booze bottles and packaging

syringes

bottles of urine (drivers fill the bottle without stopping and toss it out the window)

plastic bags of excrement (without investigating too closely, it appears to be soiled diapers, some undiapered children’s poop, mostly adult waste, often tossed in plain sight from moving trucks and sometimes cars)

children’s things (toys, etc)

electronics (and parts thereof)

clothing

condoms

random stuff… broken earrings, a golf ball in the middle of nowhere-near-a-golf-course, a fishing fly as far from fish as could be, a brand new soup thermos I still use (still sealed with plastic wrap, with the care and use blurb inside), a can of bear spray I lost later, an awesome refillable air horn I lost after that, all sorts of things

The saddest things I saw were a broken child’s safety seat coming out from under the snow early on, and once, a broken denture in a pile of metal scraps and safety glass.

Syringes, though?! Why is the highway littered with used syringes?! Maybe there’s boatloads of diabetic people driving around, because of the stupendous amount of energy drinks their tossed bottles say they’re all drinking? It’s a little hard to imagine there’s that many diabetic litterbugs on the road, though.

I thought about it as I listened to the traffic that night near Piapot. It didn’t stop. All night, trucks rushed back and forth. When we roadtripped this highway when I was little, there’d be great long gaps with no traffic, especially at night. Not any more. It slows down a little, but not much. Later, drivers said that way they don’t have to worry about non-truck traffic getting underfoot. They’ve mostly only got each other on the road in the dead of night. Some say they sleep in the day, and can focus better tat night without the small car distractions. Others just drive way too many hours. There’s regulations and controls, but there’s also a lot of evidence in the ditches. Thank goodness Mr Myrtle had boots with good soles, but I always scanned ahead of our steps.

We’d gone to Piapot because even though it was a bit far on a bad knee, local folks agreed there wouldn’t really be anywhere else to stop before then. We’d had cooperative geography and weather, though; it was generally downhillish, and paved, with a bit of wind mostly from behind. My knee wasn’t too bad, and we’d started early.

Piapot itself was a few kilometers off the main. The only place to stay there was a place that ostensibly called itself a hotel but was really just a guesthouse for friends and family. He wasn’t interested in the climate or ladies on missions (even if they had a bad knee). We were at a campground right at the turnoff to the town. Many years ago, it had been fully equipped with staff and all the relevant utilities and everything. Now, it was a large safe space where people still camped on a regular basis despite the lack of everything that had previously been there. Even the locals do, and they keep an eye out to make sure folks are alright there. I ran into some later on, and some who had passed us there without noticing our lovely little well-camouflaged dark green bump of a tent.

I didn’t sleep. I kept listening to the steady stream of trucks rushing back and forth. Nonstop carbon emissions, delivering products and packaging probably largely made with petroleum products, manufactured with mostly unsustainable resources and energy, to millions of people who don’t need most of it and keep buying more. Western culture especially has distorted perception of needs and wants so much that most people have lives full of luxuries which they truly believe are necessities. Most of it is either disposable or so poorly made that it might as well be, or is designed on the principles of planned obsolescence, so that it needs constant updating and replacing, or it’s consumables we don’t need, grown in ways we cannot continue, from places we shouldn’t be shipping it from. We use it all up so much that this main shipping artery is apparently full of drivers shooting I don’t even want to know what into themselves, so they can keep up with getting all our terribly important meaningless crap to us.

My head hurt thinking about it. My knee hurt. My other knee hurt too. My heart hurt.

#WalktoWakentheNationexpeditionbook