Five a.m. Breath misting in the cabin as the heater works hard to wake up in the cold.
One slim sliver of moon hanging overhead, a paring cast aside from some celestial lathe. The hum of the engine. The whir of the tires on damp asphalt. Behind, the city's electronic soup recedes into the rearview; in a pocket, a jostled iPhone lights up and shows the two finest words in the English language: No Service.
We are told that the connected car is the wave of the future. Right now, automakers and governments alike are throwing cash at the problem of the autonomous car. Soon, they say, we'll all be able to summon a safe little pod to the curb, curl up inside without the encumbrance of a steering wheel, and hurtle toward our destination on a cloud of efficient electrons, all without lifting our eyes from a tiny screen.
Nuts to that. True, commuting is a joyless time-suck, and not having to spend your life at the wheel, grinding your teeth at the traffic report, would be a boon for most people. The autonomous car will open up transportation for the elderly, cut down on drinking and driving, reduce pedestrian fatalities, maybe make our roads a safer place.
But it'll also be another day spent indoors in a cage of our own making. We've built these miraculous little boxes of stimulation and convinced ourselves that we're still connected to each other, still huddled around the campfire in the dark, telling the important stories, listening to each other.
The fact is, we all carry a prison in our pocket, one that makes us miserable. Ten million tiny Ozymandiases, all digitally proclaiming, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." We see friends, coworkers, acquaintances, celebrities, every one of them presenting their best side, carefully crafting a digital life that only shows the positives. We measure ourselves against these artifices, ask others to vote on how happy we should be. At mealtimes, instead of talking, fingers itch to check our statuses. How do we rate?
Nuts, as I've said, to that.
Because you can break free. You can get up early, crank over the engine and run. Run from the electronic swamp and its poisonous miasma, run to the hills, to the flow of the road and the reassuring realness of the landscape. This really is the best place on Earth, and all you have to do is look up for a minute.
So, I run. In everything from a borrowed Jaguar convertible to my own Cheerios-strewn Subaru. Shoot past the traffic, out into the wild: life begins beyond Pemberton. It's not the road as your own private racetrack, it's the tarmac'd interior of this province as the best therapy you can buy.
There are trails to be found out here, campsites to chart. British Columbia is a place that rewards the explorer, and you don't need the months-long expedition nor the mule-train those early pioneers did. Now, this whole place is open to pretty much anyone: when you turn the keys in the ignition, you open the door to a kingdom three times the size of Texas.
The car is freedom, it pretty much always has been. Before, it was the chance to explore, to get out of the little valley where you might have otherwise been stuck and see the big city. It was the chance to open up the corners of the world, expand your mind, democratise travel.
Now, it's perhaps the last escape from a future spent dabbing at a touchscreen like some dopamine-demented lab rat. No Service. No Facebook. No Twitter feed crammed with 140-character oversimplifications or nuclear-strength narcissism. The marketers want to turn the car into the same sanitized, joyless experience you get from modern air travel. It'll be easier, cheaper, less challenging. You won't have to let go of your electronic crutch.
But nuts to that. Get up early, grab your keys, pick up a friend to keep you company - shared experience, the landscape unfolding out in front of the windshield. Don't worry about capturing what you're seeing so someone else can hold up a yardstick to it.
Going for a drive for no reason comes with the best reason there is. It's a chance to get clear of the buzzing and leave the electronic fog behind. The sun comes up, gilding the coastal mountains in golden glory. Behind me, people are waking up, reaching for their phones, checking their email to see how they should feel today.
The road stretches out ahead, promising the lone and level sands of the desert. Empty your head of the modern cacophony; fill your heart with something real.
