Riding On Vehicular Waves On In Timbit Nation

-To understand Canada, our beloved Timbit nation, as examined for the Globe and mail, and to get a sense of the allure of hitchhiking, you have to understand the power of car culture. John Stackhouse says it this way:

"My Canada lived on the highway, and by the highway....I could not have realized it at the time, but this one road was quietly uniting the country in ways the railway never did. In the emerging era of the middle class -- the motoring class -- the Trans-Canada enabled ordinary Canadians to see Canada....When I was old enough to travel alone but too young to afford a car, I began hitchhiking on the same road. My student poverty aside, hitchhiking in the 1980s seemed innately Canadian./There was no better way to see a country and meet its people than to beg for rides along the way, to have long conversations (sometimes very long) with strangers, to test public generosity, to overcome fears, within oneself and in others, and to see the road, and feel it. Standing on a remote rural road, you could see the vastness of what it was attempting to connect. On a suburban on-ramp, you could feel the pulse of a society as it rushed from office to mall to home. And climbing into the cars of that society -- at the invitation of a stranger who had everything to lose, as did you -- you could sense the openness of a nation, along with its fears and prejudices. In short, you could stand on the roadside and put an entire nation on the couch. Over the years, I came to see hitchhiking as the most genuine form of travel. Through it, I was forced to meet new people and new ideas. It was wildly unpredictable, maddeningly erratic, hilariously entertaining and slightly dangerous -- all in all, what a great journey should be."