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CBC LITERARY AWARDS

For over 20 years, CBC Radio has celebrated the best of Canadian writing talent. For a third year enRoute is proud to sponsor the CBC Literary Awards / Prix littéraires Radio-Canada by publishing the winning texts in English and French. Watch for award-winning short fiction and poetry in upcoming issues.

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Second Prize
Travel Literature

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Text: ALAYNA MUNCE

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It’s the middle of the night, middle of December. My father is two weeks dead. My brother and I are bowling in Winnipeg.

We don’t live in Winnipeg. We don’t live anywhere near Winnipeg.

We’ve chosen the far lane against the wall: life-sized mural of a tropical beach. Bottles of Blue and bowling shoes. My brother’s filming it all. I can only get a strike when the camera’s off.

When it’s not my turn I stare at the mural. Something in me recognizes the wonky palm trees as kin and aches with a disproportionate love for this all-night bowling alley so far from home.

My brother gets a strike and whoops. Dad’s dead. I’m drunk.

What are we doing here?

My father died very suddenly. A beloved teacher in a small Ontario town called Huntsville for almost thirty years, driving home from school on a Friday afternoon in late November, fifty-six years old and at the height of his powers, he had a brain aneurism. Right downtown, at the corner of Centre and Main, a vessel in his brain burst, and he drove his car into a beauty salon.

At the time, my brother Jeremy was driving across the country. He’d spent the fall touring around the west coast in what he called his "mobile editing suite" (translation: a laptop in a bright yellow 1974 VW bus). Two days before Dad died, seized by a sudden impulse to come home, Jeremy had started out, though the heater in his van was broken and he knew the November nights would be cold on the prairies. When we got in touch with him on his cell phone, he was forty-five minutes west of Winnipeg. He parked his van at the Winnipeg airport and made it to the hospital in time to see Dad while his heart was, albeit by machine, still beating.

My mother and father had been apart for over twenty years, so Jeremy and I suddenly found ourselves the main mourners in an extraordinary and very public outpouring of grief. Two weeks later, after the funeral and memorial, we flew to Winnipeg together and drove the heater-less van back through Ontario to the house we’d so recently inherited from our father.

The idea was this: a road trip. Just the two of us. No condolences. No brave faces. No heat. Just the two of us, the road and the absence. We imagined the van as a bubble of suspended time inching across our vast province toward home. A sense both of immersing ourselves in the reality of our father’s death and of staving off reality. A wild and healthy NO to the inevitable moving on, a NO to the daily dilution of grief that is healing. We didn’t want to heal. We wanted to hurtle down the highway and howl. We wanted to blare Dad’s favourite music – Bob Dylan, the Band – and sing to it until we were hoarse. We wanted a reprieve from the seemliness of public grieving. We wanted to eat in roadside diners among strangers and laugh maniacally about how funny Dad used to look doing his daily workout, laugh until our stomachs hurt and we snorted the famous family snort. We wanted to be free to literally laugh until we cried. To be free, just when we thought the laughter had finally died down, for Jeremy to do a gimpy jumping jack in his red vinyl booth seat. Free to start laughing all over again, this time with chocolate milk coming out our noses.

We wanted to launch ourselves headlong into the strangeness of it.

So that’s how we end up bowling in Winnipeg. We arrive at the airport after dark and call around for a motel, stop calling after we get through to the Red Lion Inn. It’s cheaper than the ones we’ve called so far, and it’s an independent establishment (this is one of the rules of the roadtrip: no chains). Plus the lady has a sweet motherly voice and gives good directions. Plus we like the name. Red Lion. The choice is clinched when we drive up and find it’s attached to an all-night bowling alley.

Next morning we wake later than we’d planned, hungover. Breakfast at the motel diner: good over-easy eggs, bad coffee. The service is terrible, but we leave a big tip anyway. (It’s another rule of the road trip: big tips all the way.)

Outside, our breath plumes like exhaust. After applying to the windshield a little tube of goo that’s supposed to keep glass from frosting over in the absence of a heater, we find our way easily out of Winnipeg and onto the TransCanada.

Feels good to be on the road, though no matter how we hit it, the heater remains inert. The local CBC informs us it’s -20 and dropping. An hour and a half later we pull into a truckstop called the Timberline on the edge of the prairies to get a bowl of soup and thaw out. The toes are the worst. We’re both wearing Dad’s socks, but even they aren’t a match for this cold. Dad had an obsession with this particular kind of very thick pure wool grey sock, ordered them in bulk from some store in town. I found an unopened package of them in his room a few days after he died and realized with an almost heart-stopping pain that I didn’t know which store. Jeremy and I are quiet most of the day. The van can’t go much past 90 and we have to stop every hour and a half to warm up, so it’s slow going. Neither of us suggest putting on Dad’s music the way we’d imagined. The cold and silence feel appropriate somehow.

Romantic notions about the cold, however, only go so far, so in Kenora we stop at the Canadian Tire to see if they have a space-heater that plugs into the cigarette lighter. They’re sold out. Try the Canadian Tire in Thunder Bay, they say. We look at the map; Thunder Bay’s a long way away. Instead, we buy some plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal in the front of the van, figuring our breath might have a chance at heating up a smaller space, if only by a degree. Then to Tim Horton’s for hot chocolate. The no-chain rule is proving to be a lot harder to abide by than the big tip rule.

When the sun goes down the cold becomes unbearable; an old van with no heat at nightfall on deserted Northern Ontario roads in -25 degree weather is a slightly frightening place to be. We make it to the outskirts of Dryden, numb on every level, and give up for the day.

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