Canadians by Roy Macgregor Page A

before a fantasy that existed entirely in the mind of an American poet.
    It was the kind of story—the irony, the wonder, the sheer madness of it all—that put the squeak in Walter Stewart’s voice and the magnificent tweak in his writings.
    JOAN DROVE HER HUSBAND twenty-five thousand kilometres, much of them on the Trans-Canada, much off, over those long months Walt spent doing one final check of his country. He made up a list of “Deep Thoughts”—“Unisex washrooms at gas stations are not an improvement” and “‘Country Cookin’ means over-cooked in grease”—and entertained himself by jotting down the best and worst of everything they saw. “Best road for scenery—The Dempster Highway.” “Worst road for driving— The Dempster Highway.”
    He poured his love of history and his love of truth into the book. But there is also a love of the landscape, a respect for the natural world that might be expected from a man whose parents, Miller and Margaret Stewart, had once co-authored a long-forgotten book on the natural world they called Bright World Around Us .
    Walter and Joan Stewart covered every province and then drove north up through the Northwest Territories toward the Beaufort Sea. They visited L’Anse aux Meadows, the ancient Viking site on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland. They toured historic Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and drove across the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island. They sat by the statue of Lord Beaverbrook that stands in Fredericton, a statue of a man of astounding wealth built by the nickels and dimes of New Brunswick schoolchildren. They travelled to Quebec City where, three decades earlier, they had driven straight into a language-rights demonstration and Joan, honking the horn and screaming, in English, “KINDLY … GET … OUT … OF … MY … WAY!” had pushed through the crowd to get to their hotel while Walt cowered as close to the floorboards as he could get. This time, a much quieter time, they kept running into the same couple from Boston who, at every encounter, extolled the beauties of this glorious city, the middle-aged American woman admonishing Walt to be careful with the way English Canadians treat French Canada because, well, “You wouldn’t want to lose this.” In Ontario they saw the sights, travelling from the Martyrs’ Shrine at Midland to the huge roadside goose at Wawa. They meandered across the prairies talking about everything from rebellion to elevators and asking such pertinent questions as “Why do they paint the barns red?” (Red was the easiest paint to make. Just put iron scraps into a bucketful of buttermilk and wait for the rust to turn the whole mixture the colour of a handsome barn.) They toured over the mountains and down through the Okanagan and talked about everything from ginseng farms to the Nisga’a land claim.
    The trip had a profound effect on Stewart. The man who, many years earlier, had written a three-part series he called “My Farewell to Quebec” found now that he’d softened—or perhaps Quebec had softened. He found Canadians warm and open. He found them interesting. And he found the place much changed.
    In the final chapter of My Cross-Country Checkup, Stewart said his country could still be intolerant, even racist, but that most Canadians now considered these “matters for shame, not pride.” Yes, there was still avast gap between the wealthy and the poor, but there remained the possibility of that gap narrowing over time. The most promising change of all, he said, was that Aboriginal issues were now being addressed not by force but by law.
    A modern traveller across this country, he felt, would recognize its vastness and variety but would also gain “a sense that there are no problems we cannot meet, no challenges we need to fear, no wrongs we cannot right, given the political