Road Fever by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online Page B

men of forty who recall the shame of going to school every day with a bag lunch that was the mark of their poverty. The rich kids had peanut butter and jelly. Sons and daughters of Acadian fishermen had to make do with lobster sandwiches.
    New Brunswick was once famous for the quality of its ships and the men who sailed them. Today, it is the eighth most populous of Canada’s ten provinces, and per-capita income lags behind Canada as a whole. The best and the brightest of New Brunswick’s young people often see little opportunity, and there has been an exodus to the more dynamic provinces to the west. On the other hand, forest covers over 80 percent of the province, and the moose population is increasing.
    Maritimers who stay in the provinces are often great travelers, adventurers of a sort, the kind of people who venture out to see the big world, absorb all they can, and return to commune with the moose in what they consider to be the finest place on earth in which to live.
    Maritimers, and Canadians in general, generally suffer a beneficent affliction that the Canadian writer Marian Botsford Fraser has forth-rightly and fearlessly labeled “niceness.” An American who spends too much time engaged in a corrosive harangue about a bad airline flight falls into line soon enough. Persist in your ill temper and people begin looking at you as if you’re wearing a leather mask and carrying a chain saw.
    Garry Sowerby picked the two of us up at the airport in his family car, and older-model Oldsmobile 98 with ninety thousand miles on it. On the way into Moncton from the airport I believe I said that the land was inspiring and the people seemed, well, nice.
    “It’s a national trait,” Garry said sorrowfully. “We can’t help it. It’s like, well, you know why Canadians say ‘eh?’ at the end of the sentence?”
    “I thought it was a lingering French habit, like saying, ‘
n’est-ce pas?
’ ”
    “No. It’s this niceness. This Canadian niceness. You say, ‘piss off!’and then add ‘eh?’ What does that mean? It means piss off but, uh, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I mean, look at your national symbol. You’ve got a bald eagle. Fierce eyes, a snake in its talons. What do we have?” Garry bit down on his lower lip, thrust his face into mine, and widened his eyes so that he looked moronically eager. “Beaver, eh?”
    Sowerby, who had the slightest of Canadian accents—“aboot” for about—was a connoisseur of great “ehs?” but he himself never eh-ed except in jest. “Remember when we came back from Panama?” he asked. “We flew out just before the riots. And then you got back to the States, what were the big headlines there?”
    “Iran-contra,” I said.
    “The big scandal here, front page across the country, somebody found out the prime minister owned forty pairs of shoes.”
    “Yeah?”
    “That was it. That was the scandal.” Apparently, Canadians felt that the prime minister was about thirty-five pairs of shoes to the dark side of nicety. Garry, like any man who deeply loves his country, purely enjoyed complaining about it.
    “You know who our prime minister is?” he asked.
    “Uh, used to be Trudeau. Now it’s, who, Mulroney?”
    Niceness doesn’t make headlines. Americans don’t know anything about Canada. We read about Noriega, or Qaddafi, or Khomeini. We respect Canadians, we like them, but the great mass of ordinary Americans somehow missed the big northern footwear exposé. Virtually any Canadian could tell you the name of the American secretary of state. I didn’t even know what you called his Canadian counterpart.
    The two-lane road ran through the forest and into Moncton where Garry Sowerby was born and raised. It is a town of sixty thousand, an old railroad center where the streets run parallel to the tracks and the homes are generally well maintained and newly painted. The nearby Bay of Fundy, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia,