In the city of Saskatoon, which as you may know lies in the midst of Canada's prairies, the left turns we make are typically about 90 degrees - if even that much. Our intersections are usually designed to simply facilitate an alteration to the way our car is facing, no more no less. They're about as interesting as a Catholic mass (note: this specifically does not include Catholic masses which reference the parts of the old testament with all the smiting). Once, during a winter road trip from Saskatoon to Calgary, AB, I had the pleasure of driving through the hills surrounding Drumheller. The twists, the turns, the gas-brake action, rapid shifting upwards and downwards. More hairpins than a beauty salon. It was like a grand commercial for a performance automobile, and I was strikingly out of my element.
I came back to Saskatoon, and it's yawn inspiring turns, feeling like a man whose tongue had experienced what good wine is supposed to taste like, and been subsequently banished to a land of grape juice with vodka. 90 degrees, and that's all I could get. 90 puny degrees.
It could be that I've somehow never seen the hard, winding bends of Saskatoon. Or it could be that without a developed palate for hair-raising turns, I'd simply never noticed them before. Nevertheless my whistle had been whet, and I spent my time poring over maps - both street and elevation - trying desperately to spend some time at the wheel with my mind ablaze, my calloused hands at their quickest, and my feet dancing among the pedals. As a process it was exhausting, but I was able to find a few left turns in Saskatoon that offer more than a simple change of direction - they offer an experience that reminds the driver of the importance of topping up his power steering fluid, and never going anywhere without his motoring gloves. If you think driving through Saskatoon is as ho-hum as it gets, try adding these special turns into your route plans. You'll think twice before you tell your friends that Saskatoon has no turns over 90 degrees again!
1. College Drive westbound, turning left onto Clarence Avenue southbound. Having just passed by the remarkably beautiful University of Saskatchewan campus, you'll find yourself heading toward a bridge. Just as you think you might need to fade right and soar high above the swift waters of the South Saskatchewan River, you'll dodge it for quick uphill left onto Clarence that is simply divine. Then again, if you have a heart condition or are pregnant, it might be best to avoid this thriller.
2. Spadina Crescent heading north, turning left onto Queen Street heading west. In the absence of oncoming traffic, try shifting down and accelerating through the apex - I bet you'll shit a brick!
A few years later I was in Las Vegas around Christmas visiting with my girlfriend's family, her parents having taken up residence there for parts of the year. Similarly, my father and his special lady spend part of the year at their home in Palm Springs; specifically, they spend the part of the year that is frighteningly wintry in Saskatchewan. I had been informed by my father that Palm Springs was a stone's throw from Las Vegas, and it would be a tragedy to be so close and not spin down to see each other over the holidays. We talked about it on the phone, and discussed how nice it would be for the four of us to get together; a civilized stroll through downtown Palm Springs, a leisurely dinner following a polite cocktail hour on the patio, and conversation centered on only the highest of high brow topics. We went through the paces together on a long distance call, the image becoming solidified when he told me there was a sort of street fair taking place while we planned to be in town. We talked about it like we meant it, but we both know what I was really saying, "I'll drive down there and we can get really drunk in the hot tub and talk about bull shit all night."
The one part of the whole, grandiose idea that wasn't a cover was the drive itself. For all I know about southern California, the region is designed carefully and skillfully with the sole intention of finding more ways to drive somewhere. In the boardroom of the urban planning department of every city in every county, there's a banner that says Sure, But How Does It Let Us Drive More?. Thus there are several different routes that one can choose from to get between Las Vegas and Palm Spring and my father, as has always been his talent, seemed to have an unreasonable understanding of all of them. For a certain period of my childhood he would occasionally wait for a time when I literally couldn't leave - whilst in a moving car was a common choice - and he would run me through each of the possible routes between Saskatoon and the Glacier National Park in Montana. He'd list each of the highways, the turns required, the distance differences, and we'd speculate on the potential for getting good mileage depending on which way the wind was blowing. It happened so often that I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to decode this aspect of his personality; did he actually think it was fun? Was it a torture technique he'd read about in an issue of National Geographic during the 1970s? Maybe he was working on his memoirs and was bouncing some material off me? I've come to many conclusions over the years, but most commonly I decide that it's simply a cathartic exercise. Some people do a crossword, others go bird watching, my father's method for relaxing was doing math in his head and converting between imperial and metric units. "You can shave 90 miles or so if you head through Havre instead of going though Medicine Hat, but there's a lot of single lane in there, and if you end up with a wind out of the west it can be an absolute bear!"
My father assured me though that the way to go was to roll through the Mojave National Preserve or, through the desert, as everyone in the area seems to say. I kept referring to it as the Mojave, and I would sometimes get as a sideways look. I liked to imagine that using the actual name of the desert fell out of fashion when certain people kept pronouncing it wrong and it created that eternally awkward situation where one must decide if they should correct the pronunciation and risk feeling like a jerk. My girlfriend's parents had purchased a car from friends to keep as as second vehicle in Vegas, and were very gracious about lending it to us for the drive. It was a 1990 Mitsubishi Eclipse, with a 5-speed manual transmission, and a 2.0 liter turbo engine. No question about it, this was a hot car... at least, at some point in history, it was designed and marketed as a hot car. I am someone that has exclusively owned cars that were in the final, golden years of their lives, so worn from many years of abuse, but still not quite dead. As such, I've spent a lot of time imagining - rather, trying to get inside the head - of someone who bought my car when it was new, off the lot. I would own the car at a point when spilling an entire cup of coffee in it wasn't really that big of a deal, but at some point in the 1980s, someone was touring a car lot with their chequebook in hand, and the heavens split when their eyes met with the savvy lines of this fine automobile. They looked at the features, they test drove it, their eyes met with those of their passenger and they mouthed the words, "I want this car. This car is me." My expectations for a car's performance are, as a result, relatively low. "All five gears work?" I would say, "I can actually adjust the seat?" I felt as though I was in the midst of a wonderfully unrealistic dream. So while my girlfriend's parents wanted to downplay the Eclipse's hotness, I carried on about it for days before and after the trip. They may have thought that I was making fun of them, but I was sincerely impressed that I didn't get an electrical shock when I adjusted the air conditioning.
We set out on a beautifully clear day, and found a radio station that really seemed to have our number. Despite being sort of chilly out, I insisted on driving with the windows down on the freeway leaving Las Vegas. The dusty desert air poured into the car blowing our hair around, and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor as the car sputtered up the on-ramp to the interstate. My father's recommendation to drive through the desert was something I still thank him for now and again; it was an incredible drive full of twists and turns and hills and bumps. It had been a few years since my drive through Drumheller, but I felt an old fire inside me begin to flare up, stoked up with coal every time I had to hold onto the wheel with two hands because I whipped around curves at twice the recommended speed. Several times, my girlfriend's coffee spilled out and onto her clothes, but I think she knew that I was having a moment with the car and the desert and decided not to shout at me about it. It was the kind of thrill-a-minute, heel-toe driving that my heart had longed for in Saskatoon. My sweating hands toggled constantly between the steering wheel and the gearshift, and I jammed on the pedals to make the whole thing more dramatic. In 1990 the folks at Mitsubishi unleashed this model of the Eclipse on the world, and I don't doubt that when people wandered into the showroom the salesmen would paint a picture in their heads that was, turn-for-turn, exactly my drive through the Mojave National Preserve. It was that blissful combination of exciting and frightening that underlies most good things that happen to us in our lives. It was a memory that I still think of often, and that I take the chance to tell people about whether I think they're listening to me or not. I think sometimes about regaling my nephew with the tale when he's old enough for me to tell the version where I curse a lot. Perhaps I'll wait for a time when he literally can't go anywhere, like when we're in a moving car or something.
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