There’s a wonderful British movie from the ’80s called Withnail and I about two extremely urban young fellows who go off cottaging for a week to escape the misery of their decrepit London flat. Borrowing the key to an uncle’s country house, the two struggle with a broken-down car, driving rain, and uncooperative road maps to arrive, cold, wet, and exhausted, in the middle of the night, without a scrap of food between them. Naturally, the cottage experience looks guaranteed to increase their woe, and hilarity ensues. At one point, desperate for food, they flag down a passing farmer on his tractor. “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake,” they exclaim and, hoping to ingratiate themselves with the skeptical local, they say, over and over, fooling no one, “We’re not from London, you know.”
I was reminded of this hilarious scene last summer when stuck in what I consider to be the great leveller of cottage experience—the full-stop, no-way-out traffic jam. Your cottage may have three floors, a Jacuzzi in the gazebo, a full fleet of personal watercraft, and satellite TV, while mine is a shack with mice and a radio that works on sunny days; you may be driving home in a bulky SUV with in-console global positioning and a DVD to keep the kids happy, while I’m pushed up against the steering wheel by all the gear stuffed in the back of my no-frills Corolla, but we’re all in the same boat when the traffic comes to a halt without a visible sideroad in sight. Good thing you’ve got that GPS, my friend. Now you know exactly where you’re going to be for the next few hours. And this was a whopper of a traffic jam. A few old buddies and I had just spent the weekend camping near a friend’s cottage, where we’d parked most of our cars. We had canoed down a lovely little creek just a dead-end sideroad away from one of the major headin’ home routes out of the Kawarthas. The weekend had been fine, until Sunday dawned with a threatening blanket of cloud in the sky. As we broke camp, the rain hit, and we spent an hour or so sitting beneath a tarp, finishing up the food and debating the storm’s potential duration. Do we continue to wait out the downpour and risk getting caught in the inevitable afternoon traffic or get a little wet on the way upriver but make that priceless early getaway? Being campers by committee, we did a bit of both, and neither one worked.
We eventually threw off the tarp and paddled to the launching site (a good hour’s canoeing), and arrived soaking wet, cold, and tired, with-out a scrap of food among us. We could have consoled ourselves with ice cream at the local general store, but the general store was suddenly hours away. What had once been a beautifully fast and efficient artery out of the countryside was now a parking lot. A multi-car accident, caused, no doubt, by newly slippery roads and anxious cottagers hoping for an early start home, had completely blocked the highway just before the next through sideroad. Heading north was not an option either as we had to retrieve the rest of our cars at our friend’s cottage, a 10-minute drive to the south. The northern route would have got us there eventually, but others before us had the same idea, and now there was another fender-bender blocking the road that way.
It’s not just in soda pop commercials that traffic jams can actually be fun. No one was playing a piano in the back of a pickup, but a few folks strapped on their Rollerblades and slalomed around the parked cars (yes, the storm passed—good thing we didn’t wait for that; we might have got caught in traffic). Kids cajoled their dads to break out the fishing rods and try their luck in the creek. Here and there people picnicked (those people who hadn’t already, foolishly, eaten all their food), bird-watched, sunned themselves, and generally accepted their fate and enjoyed the afternoon. We unpacked our camp chairs, sat down, and dried out. Eventually, a card game broke out on one of the coolers, and I finally talked my buddy Dave into a game of chess on my travel board. Dave’s an excellent chess player but ever since I beat him once rather quickly (a complete fluke, I admit) he’s been hesitant to sit across from me again. I was manoeuvring him toward the board all weekend and finally he had nowhere else to go.
As traffic jam society goes, everything was progressing beautifully until one anxious fellow in a very nice car made a fateful error. Having obviously never seen Withnail and I, and perhaps feeling that he had indeed gone on holiday by mistake, he jumped out of his seat and approached a local police officer who was touring the lane explaining the situation and helping people adjust their ETAs. The helpful constable’s apologetic response of “two more hours at the earliest, sir” was not the answer our fellow traveller had been looking for and his composure was suddenly a distant memory.
“Two hours,” he shrieked, “but I have to get back to Toronto!”
Now, I live in Toronto, as do most of my camping buddies. We like living in Toronto. Toronto has wonderful theatres and live music, and you can get the best Chinese food at two in the morning on Spadina Avenue. We are proud to live in Toronto’s multinational hustle and bustle. Hey, we won the World Series twice in a row, and the Leafs just might pull it off this year. Toronto is great, but you wouldn’t catch any of us yelling at anyone, let alone a police officer, about our need to “get back to Toronto” on a Sunday during a traffic jam in cottage country. What was the guy thinking?
As the word “Toronto” echoed off the rock cuts and into the surrounding bush, a new and far more ominous cloud passed over the once-friendly police officer’s face. He advised the man to get back in his car and wait patiently, and then went about perusing the vehicle in question. There was no explicit threat in his interest, but the implications were unmistakable. Had there been a malfunctioning tail light or a loose muffler, this would not end well at all. If the man’ s licence sticker had been out of date, look out. The unhappy Torontonian sat in the driver’s seat looking unconvincingly contrite. He was on his own.
Our gang of Torontonians, on the other hand, sat loudly and contentedly discussing the merits of this or that local attraction, looking for all the world like being stuck on the side of that highway for two more hours was exactly what we wanted from life. Take your time, we seemed to be saying. These two hours will be the most fun we’ve had all weekend. Can you stretch it to three hours because we have a little Hearts tournament going on here, and it could take a while. We love it here, and we’re most definitely not from Toronto.
Eventually, the officer moved on to let everyone else know of the delay, but when it was time to move out, he was back, stopping traffic right in front of the anxious Torontonian in order to let us pull out of our sideroad onto the highway. Message delivered. Dave beat me at chess, it took us eight hours to get from the campsite to our respective homes, and we never did stop for ice cream, but at least we weren’t that other guy.
Journalist, poet, and novelist John Degen is the CEO of The Writer’s Union of Canada.
This story originally appeared in our June ’02 issue.
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