Maia Grecco/The Globe and Mail
The first year I had a driver’s licence, at 18 years old, my mom made me do the Christmas drive to my grandparents’ house in Montreal. It should have been a six-hour journey from Toronto; it took 16. A Christmas Eve storm dumped so much snow that long stretches of Highway 401 were closed, and we slogged along Highway 2 instead.
My mom sat in the back with my sister, and my dad occupied the passenger seat, telling me what to do. He was annoyed I was driving, but my mom’s theory was that I had just completed a full driver’s education course – all the lessons for good driving would be fresh in my mind and far better than my dad’s bad habits. We went along with it. You would too, if you’d met my mom.
The weather wasn’t bad at the start, with the trunk of the big Ford LTD sedan stuffed full of gifts, and the chunky, aging winter tires biting through the snow. We took it slow and steady, but traffic was terrible – everybody else was doing the same thing and, like Santa, we all had a deadline.
Once we reached Kingston, everything seemed to close in. The main highway was closed and the radio implored drivers to find a room for the night. But it was Christmas Eve and we decided to press on. My poor dad gripped the edge of the dash even more tightly than I gripped the wheel and provided a running commentary.
”Watch out for that truck! There’s a car in the ditch – that will be us in a minute! If we don’t get past this plow, we’ll never get there!” And my favourite, just before I slid out but somehow regained control: “Oooh – slippyslippyslippy!”
My dad kept this up for hours. My mom sat tight-lipped behind, resolute that it was the right decision for me to drive. My sister just peered out the window at the snow. The radio played accounts of Santa’s progress around the world; it also played Jose Feliciano. Give me the Santa report any day.
Once across the border in Quebec, there were no plows to clear the way and we drove through a swirling maelstrom, squinting ahead into the snow-spattered dark. We all saw the stalled car at the same moment and my parents shrieked when I hit the brakes at 40 kilometres an hour, but I lost control and slid wildly to the right. None of us had thought that snow tires that were older than the car were a problem, and we all learned a lesson that day. We were sideways when we passed the stopped car. Miraculously, the brittle tires found traction just when they happened to be pointed in the best direction and we slipped back into the lane.
“That’s how you do it,” said my mom. “That’s how they teach them these days.”
We drove in silence the final two hours to the city. When we reached my grandparents, we all drank to our deliverance while the handbrake slowly froze solid on the car outside. It took hours to thaw it free on Christmas Day before the car could be moved.
My parents separated not long after that – no surprise there – and the next time I travelled to Quebec for the holiday was when I left my Dad’s place in Toronto on Christmas morning to visit my mom and her parents at the house in Montreal later in the afternoon. This time, the weather was abnormally warm, a few degrees above freezing, and the forecast was for sunny skies all week.
I was young. I was dumb. I decided to ride my motorcycle.
I didn’t own any heated clothing that could tap into the bike’s battery so I dressed as warmly as possible and hunched over the gas tank of my Kawasaki GPZ 750 sport bike and headed east. This time, the six-hour drive took 12. Six hours to drive, and six hours to warm up.
When you’re immobile on a motorcycle, unable to move even your head because your thick scarf is trying to keep out the wind, there’s no way to restore any of the heat that slowly but surely leaves your body. The first couple of hours were okay, but I started to shiver at Belleville and stopped for a coffee. Then some soup in Kingston. Then more soup in Brockville. Then every half-hour, to relieve myself and drink coffee and huddle under the hot-air dryers in the bathrooms of whatever service centre I could find open.
It was a freezing, frigid, frozen ride, made worse by car drivers pulling alongside and peering idly over from their heated cocoons. The temperature dropped once I passed Lake Ontario, but I’d ridden too far to turn back. It really dropped when the sun set and the road became just a dark ribbon to be overcome, beaten to submission.
Eventually, I rode up to my grandparents’ house, warmed by a shot of adrenalin when the bike slipped on some dark, side-street ice, and tottered inside to toast my deliverance.
“Was it worth it?” asked my mother.
Yes, I told her, it was totally worth it. I got to spend Christmas with both of my parents. For the return trip, I took the train.
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