OPEN ROAD

TERRACE TO PRINCE RUPERT, BC

I PEDAL OUT OF TERRACE FOR GOOD ON THE FIRST Monday of September. Even though my head is weary from goodbye revelry the night before, I hit the road early, past city limits by the time the sun catapults from behind the mountains. As the pavement unrolls beneath my wheels, I still can’t believe that I’m actually leaving.

The ride to Prince Rupert clocks in at 150 kilometres, my longest trek yet. But I’m not worried. I don’t need to board the ferry to Haida Gwaii until ten p.m. tonight. To my right, granite cliffs angle through a canopy of pine and spruce. I track pace on my bike computer, find encouragement in the steady roll of digits. I glance over my shoulder as I pass the Tempo gas bar, near the entrance to the Kitsumkalum First Nation community just west of town, and wonder if I should buy an energy drink for the road. I’m only carrying two water bottles, but there is a rest area around the sixty kilometre mark where I should be able to top up my bottles, so I pedal on.

A few kilometres in, I realize that I’ve packed too much. I’m several clicks shy of my usual cruising speed of twenty-four kilometres an hour, and building momentum from standstill is like hoisting a train cart over the Rocky Mountains. Recalling my father’s advice, I’d counselled myself to pack only what was necessary. Unfortunately, reducing possessions to instruments of survival had proven more challenging than I’d imagined. On top of the basics—tent, sleeping bag, air mat, map, tools and spare tubes, stove, cooking supplies, cycling apparel, and rain gear—I have convinced myself that I absolutely need half a dozen novels, two pairs of jeans, and a set of crocheting needles that I have yet to teach myself how to use. Atop my two rear panniers—crammed to bursting—my tent and a ten-litre dry bag are strapped to the rack. What won’t fit I’ve simply bungeed on top of everything else, including a scarf that carries the wind like a mauve flag and will inevitably become tangled in my spokes. I’ve clipped a canister of bear spray to my handlebar stem for quick access. The bear spray was a departure gift from the women of Bike Club—“To fend off wild animals. Or wild people.”

Weighted down with all these essentials, my bicycle is back-heavy and the front wheel pops off the ground when I shift my mass to the rear. This has never happened before. To counter this imbalance, I settle painfully low over the handlebars, sinking into my wrists and shoulders to keep the bike grounded. My mind wanders as I follow the scenery, the dense screen of shadowed birch trees along the river. I wonder what my sister is up to, 1,500 kilometres south at the Ecovillage. Thirty more days until I see her.

Physically, Alisha is nearly a carbon copy of myself—both blonde, muscular in the shoulders and thighs. Both of us with blushing, punch-pink cheeks. I’m older by eighteen months, but Alisha stands about an inch taller, a difference that can probably be attributed to her spine-straight posture, my bent-over-the-keyboard slouch.

Alisha and I haven’t always gotten along. I blame it on our closeness in age, the potential for sibling rivalry unavoidable. While I was all teen angst and rebellious energy—sneaking out the bedroom window and threatening Alisha with pinches and punches if she told our parents—Alisha was sensitive, spiritual, and infinitely more grounded than me. I thrived on team sports and the adrenaline rush of competition, whereas Alisha spent her free time in the garden, baking, or advocating fair treatment of animals—she turned vegetarian at fourteen and never looked back. Aside from happening to play on the same rugby team (there was only one women’s team for grades eight through twelve) we wanted little to do with each other. It wasn’t until university, when she moved north to study in Prince George while I stayed at home to attend Simon Fraser University, that our relationship ripened into friendship.

Throughout this past summer, Alisha and I have only managed a handful of conversations, and never decisive get-down-to-trip-planning talks, both of us still too caught up in the wonder of embarking on such an adventure to grapple with specifics. Once, she phoned to say that she’d found the perfect touring bike and purchased a copy of Bicycling the Pacific Coast, Tom Kirkendall and Vicky Spring’s veritable bible for cyclists tackling Highway 101. Sometimes, I’d catch an edge in her voice that made me worry about childhood tensions reigniting. Was it wishful thinking to imagine we’d get along effortlessly for two and a half months after a childhood of friction?

I remind myself that we are adults now. Different people. Besides, I don’t know anyone else crazy enough to join me.

SUN SPIKES OVER THE MOUNTAIN RANGE and backlights the leaves of deciduous trees. It’s nine a.m., the hour I typically show up for work. Vehicle traffic remains light, the occasional motorhome or big rig. No other cyclists. I imagine the highway as a great grey snake dividing the unspooling wilderness on my right from the gushing Skeena, water no longer murky with spring runoff, but the electric turquoise of a blue raspberry Slurpee.

Summitting the hill we stopped at on my first ride with Ladies Bike Club, I slow for a moment as I recognize the gravel pullout where I couldn’t guzzle my water fast enough. I’m actually doing this, I realize, as I cross the boundary between familiar terrain and the unknown. This is not a Monday night ride, but the first of many milestones in a cross-continental journey. The future, which always seemed like those distant dinosaur egg mountains on the horizon, has arrived. Building speed on the downhill, I scream, a wild she-woman shriek of tonsils and spittle and untethered liberty. There’s not a soul around to hear.

A few kilometres on, I pull off to rest on a jumble of rocks piled near railway tracks that cut a line between Highway 16 and the river. Already, my body aches, hamstrings and quadriceps tight from the task of schlepping my over-stuffed touring panniers down the road. If I rest now, I reason with myself, I can maintain my strength for later. No point in running myself out early; I have all day to reach Prince Rupert. I picture myself as my childhood hero, Link—the 8-bit puzzle-solving adventurer from Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda—pausing to reflect on the monumental nature of this journey. Down by the tracks, the atmosphere is serene, the Skeena’s even current as ordinary to me by now as the hum of a refrigerator.

I have been to Prince Rupert—a drizzly, worn-down port town—before. That time, I’d travelled by rail to see my friend, Graham, a university student from Victoria who worked at Prince Rupert’s customs docks during summer break. Graham’s mother was born on Haida Gwaii, near Queen Charlotte City. He and I had spoken about my cycle trip when I was in the planning stages, still debating whether or not to take this side trip to the island of his mother’s birth. Because of my background in anthropology, it felt like someplace I needed to visit, a chance to experience the connection between land, people, and history that my textbooks fell short in describing. But I’d be travelling in September, the onset of the stormy season, and had to meet Alisha by the end of the month. If I knew anything about the West Coast, it was that rainfall warnings were not to be taken lightly.

Graham had listened to my concerns, nodding staidly. Then: “You have to go to Haida Gwaii. If the sand is hard and the tide is out, you can ride to the point at Naikoon and see where Raven discovered the first men.”

On a visit to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology the previous year, I’d seen Haida artist Bill Reid’s world-renowned sculpture The Raven and The First Men. Carved from yellow cedar, Reid’s work depicts Raven on top of a giant clamshell, with the limbs, torsos, and faces of men poking from the cracked-open lip. The carving also features on a version of the Canadian twenty-dollar bill.

“I just don’t think I’ll have time.”

“You’re cycling to Prince Rupert anyways,” he reasoned. “When will you be back?”

Graham was right. It was now or never. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to witness the intersection of landscape and mythology, and it would be a mistake to let it pass me by.

AN UGLY HEADWIND PICKS UP AROUND NOON. I strain to maintain pace, sun burning hot against my spine through the thin nylon of my cycling jersey. No water left in my bottles, but the rest area is coming up soon. They must have a fountain. My sunscreen, I realize, is in the bottom of one of my panniers, which one I’m not sure. I yank out T-shirts and spare parts, jeans and a two-pound bag of potatoes, until finally discovering the slim tube with my first aid supplies, bundled into a Ziploc next to iodine tablets and Advil. Then I shove everything back in, shirts, sandals, and crocheting yarn all in an impenetrable tangle. The clock is ticking. With the headwind, I’m nowhere near the pace I’d been banking on, and even with these high-latitude late-summer sunsets, daylight can’t last forever.

Not long after I start pedalling, a grey pickup truck pulls over and blocks my path along the shoulder, less than a hundred metres ahead. My chest tightens as I arc wide around the vehicle, then crane around to reassure myself that I’m not being followed. Just paranoid, I tell myself. I recall the billboard on the way out of Terrace, “Girls, Don’t Hitchhike: Killer on the Loose!”

This 720-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, the Highway of Tears, is infamous for missing and murdered women and girls: mostly hitchhikers, mostly Indigenous. Most last seen on the shoulder of the highway. Over the last four decades, disappearances have totalled somewhere between eighteen, the official RCMP count, and over forty, according to Indigenous advocacy groups. On the east side of Terrace, another billboard features a teenage girl hitching on a highway of white crosses as a pair of spirit-women urge her to return home. “Ain’t worth the risk,” it reads. Shivers had nipped my backbone every time I passed it on my rides out of town; however, I also questioned whether victim blaming and scare tactics aimed at keeping females off the highway were the most effective way to pursue a killer. At the end of the day, the culprits would still be out there, billboards or no billboards.

Everyone from the curator of the museum I worked at to the pump boys at gas stations where I’d stop for Gatorade had warned me to stay away from the Highway of Tears. A number of women in my bike club refused to cycle the highway except on Monday night rides—they’d take their chances with bears and wolves on the northbound Nisga’a Highway instead.

I hadn’t known about this Bermuda Triangle of missing women and girls until moving to Terrace, even though the tragedy was taking place in my own province and had been going on for at least fifty years. Over the summer, the wilderness around me had lost some of its enchantment, turned sinister. I still went out for solo rides, but I couldn’t help looking into the shadowed woods and thinking how easy it would be for a person to vanish, out there.

My mother had urged me not to bike, to take the Greyhound instead.

“I’ll send money for a ticket,” she said, her voice peaking, frustrated. “You can’t be serious about riding.”

“It’s the start of my trip,” I explained. “A bicycle trip. Not a bus trip.”

“Why begin on a deserted stretch of highway with a reputation for missing women?”

“I just have to do it.”

I was scared, of course, though my anger about these serial murders was an even stronger emotion. I felt it was my duty, as a member of the community, to resist the pervading fear by cycling the Highway of Tears. Looking back, I can see that I didn’t yet realize the shield of my own skin colour, and how being a white woman in Northern BC is not at all the same as being a woman of colour, especially an Indigenous woman. It wasn’t until later, when I’d meet a Chicana cyclist down the road in Los Angeles, that I’d come to understand the privilege inherent in being a member of the white majority.

I glance again at the pickup—the driver is a male, no other passengers. Blood thrums in my wrists, kinked sore from the strain of being held too long at a sharp right angle. The vehicle doesn’t move. Doesn’t follow. Still, I can’t help but wonder if my mother was right: Perhaps I should have taken the bus.

THE SUN IS HIGH WHEN I PULL OVER at Exchamsiks River Provincial Park for lunch. No water. The roof of my mouth dry like the street grit I’m constantly accumulating on the underside of my fenders, but the sight of people relieves some of my thirst. Or at least gives me something else to focus on. While families picnic on a grassy pitch overlooking the river, passengers from a tour van disembark and form a line to the outhouse. I struggle to manoeuvre Blue Steel over the curb to access the grass. She’s even more unwieldy when I’m not in the saddle. I rock the frame back and forth, heaving my whole body to lift her over the six-inch ledge. Finally, she yields, but with the sudden give I stumble. A tug of pressure on my right knee—the one that I’d had reconstructed nine months ago—as the pedal skins my shin. Shit.

I ease Blue Steel down on the grass so I can assess the damage. There’s a dull throb in the back of my knee, but it’s manageable. I dab at the scrape on my shin with a grease rag. What I really need to do is lighten my load, but right now I’m too parched and hungry to sort through my belongings. So I toss the bag of potatoes in the trash and sit down to a meal of tepid party leftovers: pasta salad and devilled eggs.

Nearby, a father tosses a Frisbee with his son, the disc spinning precariously close every few minutes. In addition to the concentrated pain in my knee, the rest of my body is experiencing a dull, low-grade ache, not much different from how I used to feel after a rugby match, actually. I decide to ask one of the picnickers for water, right away, as soon as I’ve had a little rest. I close my eyes and stretch out.

The groan of a motorhome pulling away from the empty lot wakes me. Wind licks up whitecaps on the river and my chest shivers with prickly dread as I realize how exposed I’d left myself. It’s three p.m.—I’ve been here for nearly two hours, and I still have almost a hundred kilometres to go. Suddenly, I’m not at all confident that I’ll make it to Prince Rupert before dark. I should never have fallen asleep, and I shouldn’t have taken all those rest breaks, either. My pulse rocks inside my head, drowning my thoughts in a soup of white noise. I’m dehydrated. Everyone has gone.

I stumble down to the river to refill my bottles, forgetting the ache in my knee until I slide over a log. I tell myself that I just need a drink and I’ll be fine. But on the river’s edge I waver, lightheaded from a combination of thirst and rising too quickly after my afternoon nap. I brace myself against a boulder until finally I can lean in to let the river’s torrent fill my bottles. Without waiting, I down the first one, fill it up again. I know all about beaver fever and waterborne parasites, but can’t stop myself. I’m so thirsty. So tired. After I haul my bottles back to Blue Steel I add iodine drops the colour of liquid rust—they’ll be safe to drink in thirty minutes—and coax Blue Steel upright. Then I climb back in the saddle, prepared to do battle with the brutal headwind.

Every downstroke is a dare, a test of my endurance. I don’t bother to locate the pain anymore—it’s everywhere. I set small goals: a signpost in the distance, a curve in the roadway. No way I’m spending the night out here. I knew cycling wasn’t going to be easy, but nothing had prepared me for this. What have Alisha and I gotten ourselves into?

The trip was conceived during a visit to O.U.R. Ecovillage, midway through my second-to-last semester at Simon Fraser University. Alisha had moved back to the coast to round off her undergrad at UBC, and the two of us were headed to the Ecovillage for something called a Youth Convergence. I had no idea what to expect.

“Just keep an open mind,” Alisha had said. She’d spent a few weekends at the Ecovillage and had attended a previous Youth Convergence. “There’ll be some interesting people around.”

The registration email had invited us to “Explore and share our personal visions, and gain skills for building community capacity collectively.” There would be workshops, group activities, and hands-on learning projects to foster a deeper sense of how to live and work together.

Instead of enjoying the view of Active Pass—the whirling channel of water cutting between BC’s Southern Gulf Islands—from the upper deck of the ferry, I’d spent the voyage inside, marking notes in the margins of a textbook about the evolution of anthropological thought. I seemed to have lost the ability to turn my classroom-brain off. On top of the immediate concern with passing my fourth-year courses, I was weighed down by the guilt of not knowing what I was going to do after all those years of university, years that my parents had supported me. I owed it to them to find a job, become a contributing member of society.

But I put my course materials away when I arrived at the Ecovillage. I was instantly intrigued by this community of creative-minded people—Villagers, as they called themselves—living at the end of a dirt drive, their twenty-five-acre corner of the world a serene refuge from the hustle-and-go pace of the Lower Mainland. The Villagers were an eclectic mix, from early-twenties environmental-science hippies to a wizened old man who reminded me of Saint Nick in a cowboy hat. As new arrivals for the weekend convergence gained their bearings—about eighty of us in total—the Villagers prepared a locally-harvested meal in the open-air kitchen. Later, a handful of people played guitars and didgeridoos around the bonfire flames. I’d begun to realize that this weekend was going to be wholly different from anything I’d experienced before, and it wasn’t long before I joined the group of visitors and Villagers tramping hypnotic circles around the blaze. After the embers died down, I slept on the floor of a yurt with twenty others, our communal breath drifting out the chimney like smoke.

The next day I woke up to the quick-footed rush of morning, people brushing their teeth on the yurt steps and lining up to use one of the composting toilets or rainwater showers. I chatted with a pair of touring cyclists from Spokane, Washington—in all likelihood the first people outside my family or my classmates that I’d spoken with since the semester had begun a month earlier. The climate of openness made it easy to jump into passing conversations.

Alisha and I spent the weekend attending workshops in everything from winter gardening to goal setting, lending a hand in Village projects and pitching in to prepare communal meals. I stayed busy building mud-brick abodes and listening to activists discuss the rationale for protesting farmed salmon, while Alisha spent most of the weekend in the garden beds, learning permaculture techniques and harvesting fresh produce for meals. The world expanded, suddenly, and my anguish about grades and graduation appeared shallow and superficial in the greater scheme of things.

I also came to see that academic achievements weren’t making me happy. I needed to make a change. Until I arrived at the Ecovillage, I’d felt tired, thinned out like a splash of milk on a tabletop. Exhausted from doing the same thing day in, day out, and wondering what it was all for. If I was going to spend my life working, I decided, it would need to be on my own terms.

At the Youth Convergence, I spoke to people employed as landscapers and kayak guides, urban gardeners and theatre artists. I doubted any of those professions were right for me, but the possibility of having a personally satisfying career suddenly seemed both feasible and necessary.

Alisha and I did manage to take one class together: It was about using conscious language to realize goals. The facilitator sat us in a semicircle around pens, papers, and poster board. She waited for everyone to settle, her face a 100-watt bulb illuminating the cedar beams overhead.

“Thoughts are powerful things,” she said. There were only six of us in the room. “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”

Two days earlier, Meaghan-as-academic would have laughed at this kooky hippie talk and combed the area for an escape route. But after a weekend of sleeping in a yurt and using my own hands to shape mud bricks, I was open to whatever insight was headed my direction. I’d been struck by how confident the facilitator was. Every sentence was straightforward, simple and direct. She had us write down a number of “I choose” statements, imagining them through to intended results. Again, Meaghan-as-academic would have found any kind of self-reflection or visualization to be painful, tedious—just get to the point!—but this time I bought in. I wanted a plan; I needed to know what to do after I left the Youth Convergence that weekend. At the end of the session, all the participants departed with a mantra rooted in conscious language.

“I choose to bike to Baja California.” I can’t remember which of us said it first.

It was crazy. I’d only returned to cycling six months earlier; most of Alisha’s experience on two wheels dated back to elementary school. But we had the stories from our father and the coins from our grandmother, as well as my childhood fantasies of packing off like Bilbo and Gandalf, bound for distant, mystic lands.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “We choose to embark upon an awesome southbound adventure, propelled by strong legs and new connections. To Cabo!”

We would travel the following autumn, we decided. Tires pointed toward sunnier climes while nimbus clouds greyed out the Coast Mountains. That would leave nearly a year to save for touring bikes, panniers, and a lightweight two-person tent.

The tightness winching my chest on the way over had disappeared by the end of the weekend. I left elated, buzzing electric with our mantra and future possibilities. The bike trip fulfilled the dual purpose of giving me a plan for my immediate future, and buying more time to map out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I knew I would take a different path than my parents: my father who worked double-overtime shifts, and oftentimes fell asleep in the driveway with the key still in the ignition; and my mother, who was wholly unsatisfied with her job as a cake decorator at Safeway.

Alisha and I told ourselves that it didn’t matter that we came up short on both gear and experience. The important thing was that we’d made a choice, a small gesture toward rebellion. The rest of the details could be sketched in along the way.

THIRTY-FIVE KILOMETRES FROM PRINCE RUPERT the highway begins to reel inland, honeyed sun dipping behind conifers that curtain both sides of the road. It’s past seven now. Evening shadows weigh across cooling asphalt like the silhouettes of many-limbed beasts. Headwinds lessen away from the river, and I watch the numbers of my speedometer tick into the twenties as my pace picks up. My right knee bulges slightly, fluid-filled and squishy after the mishap with Blue Steel and the curb, but the final twilight kilometres into Prince Rupert are sheer downhill joy. I’d almost given up hope that I would make it—but here I am, cruising into town. Evening air cleanses my pores, reignites the fire in my blood. I coast past a mural of prop planes and sea life on McBride Street, catching glimpses of the harbour shimmering like a pot of gold coins between downtown apartments. Like a time traveller I tumble into the ferry terminal, disoriented but ecstatic to have survived the journey.

Now that I’m back in cell range, I can see that my mother has been calling me all day long. I phone her back, and she picks up on the first ring.

“Why would you do this to me, Meaghan?” Her voice is clipped.

“Mom, I’m fine,” I say. “You’re getting worked up about nothing.”

“I don’t think I’m overreacting.” She pauses. “I was about to call the police.”

“Seriously? Mom, you can’t be like this. You need to chill out.”

What I don’t say is that I was scared too. I only relay that I’m here—I made it. I don’t say that I’m starving and sunburnt or that my jittery legs remind me of the bruise-purple Jell-O my mother made when we were kids. I don’t tell her about the questions that are running through my mind: Where do you draw the line between a daring adventure and a dangerous situation? How can I determine the difference between an actual threat, and what I perceive to be one? Will there ever be a time when passing a male-single-occupancy-vehicle on the side of the highway won’t trigger alarm bells, or should I be a little bit scared, a sort of self-preservation tactic? Moreover—and here’s my main concern, the one that’s been on my mind for years now—how can I create a meaningful life while balancing risk (both perceived and real) with my desire for adventure?

A voice over the loudspeaker calls for boarding.

“I love you,” my mother says.

“Love you too.”

I click my phone off and prepare to embark on the next stage of my journey.