Did you know that Canadian highway signs make a creaking noise?
Every time a semi-truck barrels past one of those markers suspended by a chain, it emits a slow whinge to nowhere. They are signs you have passed a thousand times, the ones indicating the flow of traffic, the angle of the road, the narrowing of the shoulder, you have seen them so often they hardly register, and every time you have passed them they have let out a small groan in response. A groan you have never heard.
There are large distances in this country in which that metal whine, and the engines guzzling past, are the dominant sound. Some days when the winds gusts reach a certain fervour, it is only the metal creak and no engine noise at all. I have listened to these mournful sentries as I pedaled slowly past. I have listened and been devastated by the distance that they represent. That all across this country, in the hinterlands, in the prairies, in the east, and the west, there are metal signs creaking out solemn whistles and no one can hear them because our country is too vast.
To be the second largest country in the world (and Canada is that) requires only one thing: mass. It does not require population, power, prestige, it doesn’t even require cohesion. Canada is a collection of provinces and territories that were banded together in a reactionary way to some local happenings it deemed less than savoury. It was not made out of unity, but rather from each province’s individual sense of what they could get out of the bargain to align intentions coast to coast to coast. Still, since Canada’s official formation, it is clear that its citizens have begun to believe that, by nature of being connected by law, our provinces now also have a shared identity.
