The Trans-Canada Highway

 

I grew up in the town of Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick.  The nearby Trans-Canada Highway came near there around the time I was born.  It was just a few lanes wide and didn’t get expanded into a freeway till the mid-1990s, by which time I no longer lived there.

Driving west, you’d ascend Beech Hill and go a length through the woods to Memramcook, where the road descended to a river valley with a gravel quarry.  Then you’d go back uphill and soon get to the Moncton area, where you’d enter the city or go even further, on routes that took you to west to Fredericton and northwest to Quebec, or southwest to St. John and west to Maine.

Driving east, you’d go past the Tantramar River with its tidal dam, and a group of radio towers that were used by the Canadian Northern Service back then for shortwave broadcasts. The land is flat and marshy there, and the railway runs parallel to the road.  Then you’d climb a ridge to Aulac.  The National Historic Park at Fort Beausejour was there, along with a tourist information centre and a place that sold apples every fall. (I think they have an EV charging station there now!)

There one branch of the Trans-Canada Highway goes east to Northumberland Strait.  Our summer cottage was in that direction, and further on was the ferry to Prince Edward Island. (There’s a bridge there now, but it was only built after I left.)

The other branch goes south to Nova Scotia.  You’d descend to more of the marshy flatland, and the Missaguash River that forms the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  Then you’d climb another ridge to where Fort Lawrence was, and another tourist information centre.  This was in the Amherst area where you could enter the town. (In the late 1980s, we often went to Amherst to rent videos.  There was also a Dairy Queen there.) But you could go further south to Truro, and from there south to Halifax or east to Cape Breton Island, which we regularly visited in the summer.

That was then, this is now.  I never learned to drive, but now I live in a big city near a streetcar line.  My household went carless ten years ago.  The Trans-Canada Highway doesn’t even reach Toronto!