The road started to flatline around 10 this morning.

We left our campsite in Banff, rolled down into Canmore and then it started…miles and miles of road that stretched off into the forever distance. It’s afternoon now and our Garmin is warning us that the next turn is in 472 kilometers.

Yikes! Keep your eyes peeled! Get ready for that turn! 

I remember when my Uncle Abe and Aunt Gert would come to visit us in BC from their far-away home in Saskatchewan. Uncle Abe would continually pine to get back to the prairies, “I can’t stretch my eyes here,” he’d say, hitching up his suspenders, “everywhere I try to look a mountain or some forest gets in the way.”

And so, we’re busy stretching our eyes through the flat lands of Alberta as we head due east, and I mean, absolutely dead-ahead due east toward the even-larger prairie world of Saskatchewan. And when we reach Saskatoon, after almost 17 hours of driving, we’ll have come less than a quarter of the way across this country.

There is a relentless beauty in a land that stretches as wide as an ocean, where telephone poles stagger farther than I can see. Further, in fact, than my imagination can take them.

Such a large vast land, connected by thin wires and a long-ago dream.

There are so many reasons why Canada doesn’t make sense:

It is too large. There is too much infrastructure required. Too many roads, trains, telephone poles and not enough tax-payers to support those projects. There are too many tongues. Too many ideals. Too many new beginnings.

Too many factions, fractions, stressors and far too much distance to create cohesion. All in all, it is a too-grand experiment.

But something is working. Yes, there is lots that needs fixing, but mostly it works…in spite of itself.

Canada is an experiment that I’m immensely privileged and honoured to be a part of.

Because truly, what’s the point of dreaming, if you don’t dare to dream big?