Take a drive

Route 66 across the U.S. is the highway of song (Get Your Kicks On), literature (Steinbeck called it the Mother Road) and cinema (the animated gem Cars.) It even appears on the to-do list of a website called Bucket List Travel.

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No comparable roadway exists in Canada, not the Trans-Canada, which has more length but lacks the cultural touchstones, not to mention Santa Monica beach near its terminus.

But on a smaller scale in southern Ontario is a highway that also ends near the water's edge, passes through cities, towns, hamlets and corners, crosses fields and rivers, plunges, winds and is ramrod straight, is built atop old Indian trails, settler roads and farm concessions.

The Great 8.

Before the QEW and the 401, King's Highway 8 was the road to take. In some respects, the important ones, it still is.

Since ancient times (Isaiah 35:8 "a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness") the highway has served as a metaphor for life, a symbol of journeys taken and not taken, corridors to the future and the past, of hope and fear, places and people found along the way.

This ethos is really only true of highways where travellers can stop, reflect and encounter. It is not true of high-speed multi-lane incarnations, such as the 400-series highways that take you places but offer little on the journey.

Hwy. 8 has changed over the years but it still stretches from Goderich on the shores of Lake Huron in the west, east through Stratford, Kitchener, Cambridge, Hamilton, officially ending in Winona where it becomes a regional road. Forty years ago, Hwy. 8 continued to the U.S. border. With no QEW, it was the road to New York.

The Great 8 is the second oldest highway in Ontario by one year after Hwy. 2. It was established as a provincial highway in 1918 although its roots go much deeper.

Highway aficionado Cameron Bevers, who works for the Ministry of Transportation, decided to drive every kilometre of provincial highway in Ontario in his free time. He completed the journey after several years.

He says Hwy. 8 remains one of his favourites because of its history.

"It's such a diverse road. You don't realize the things you're missing when you drive on (the big highways). It's a different perspective when you take the old road instead of going 100 km/hr."

Like any road of character and place, you need to drive Hwy. 8 not to get from point A to point B. That's 401/QE talk. This drive is all about the points in between.

Before setting out from Hamilton, check the calendar. Winter is not the ideal time to go, especially the western swing to Goderich, where wind and snow blows hard across the flat terrain.

If it's hot, there is opportunity for two-lane highway summertime etiquette. That means going for stretches with 2/90 air conditioning (two windows down doing 90 kilometres and hour). It's the right thing to do.

The question is which leg to take, east or west? The jog through wine country to the east is a beautiful stretch (see sidebar). You may have done it already. The western swing on Hwy. 8 to Lake Huron? Not as likely.

If you Google directions from Hamilton to Goderich, it will send you north on Hwy. 6 to the 401, ultimately joining Hwy. 8 at Kitchener. Non-stop, the route takes two and a half hours. But our cross-country journey is not about making time, it is about savouring it.

So instead drive the entirety of the Great 8 and add a half hour to the trip. (Tack on more to allow for stops along the way.) The actual distance does not change, about 180 km on either route.

Depart Hamilton on King Street East through the heart of Dundas, where blue number 8 signs appear (it's not officially the King's Highway here because it's managed by the city), to the base of Greensville hill, where closed Dundas District High School sits, with its 82-year old gothic stylings, entrances marked Girls and Boys and, across the street, a 200-year old Chinquapin oak, one of the largest in the province.

Up the steep incline, through a corridor of trees, hard right then left at Bullocks Corners and up through West Flamborough winding through the country, Peter's Corners to the curve of the Rockton bypass.

Bypass? That's right, 60 years ago Hwy. 8 was such a busy and vital route that the province felt the village of Rockton needed bypassing. You can still see a short tongue of beaten pavement that was the highway, fading into dirt and a field.

Old 8 still goes straight through the village, past Rockton General Store.

"Highway 8 used to be a big deal," says Bill Janssen, in jeans and suspenders, grey beard, his speech unhurried, having a smoke in front of his store with a farmer named Harry. The morning is marked only by the sound of crickets.

The store was a hotel in 1793, eight rooms. Today it specializes in Dutch goods, jams, licorice. A T-shirt hangs inside, not for sale. It says Zelhem, Bill's hometown in Holland. He was back visiting there awhile ago, saw a guy wearing it.

"Where can I buy that shirt?" Bill asked.

"They don't sell them," the man replied. Then he took it off his back and gave it to him.

Returning to 8, pass Sheffield, along another bypass built in the '50s, and a large pond with a wooden sign that says Williamson Lake with a couple of old picnic tables by the water and a pair of sandals in decent shape.

The roots of this section go back to an Indian trail on high and dry ground where settlers in the 1830s placed stone to solidify the surface. It was called Old Stone Road and wasn't paved until it became a provincial highway.

Not far from this spot just outside Cambridge one night long ago, two people were shot inside a parked car but only one of them was murdered.

More later on that night and historic aftermath.

On into Cambridge or what at this end of the city is still called Galt. The highway is called Dundas Street, running past Galt Arena Gardens that opened in 1922, a striking structure the city bills as the Oldest Operating Arena in the World.

Gordie Howe played a season for the Galt Red Wings here in 1944.

Through a five-way intersection locals call The Delta, Hwy. 8 is called Coronation Boulevard - in the 1930s it was classified a divided highway - running parallel to the first hole of Galt Country Club, a jewel of a Stanley Thompson golf course.

It becomes King Street through Preston, the second of Cambridge's three amalgamated towns (Hespeler is the other), and past the hippest bakery around. City Caf� Bakery is in a renovated gas station where customers pay for thin-crust pizza and other delights by the honour system, dropping cash in an old transit fare box.

Looming against a hillside at a T-intersection is what in 1890 was the opulent Preston Springs Hotel.

Turn right up Shantz Hill and rather than taking the 8 expressway through Kitchener, take old 8 for a while over Freeport Bridge, which was built in 1926, seven spans and 502 feet long, the longest concrete bridge in Ontario at the time.

After crossing Fairway road, take the exit marked Hwy. 8 West Stratford. It's back to the country, corn fields, open spaces, and for the next 100 kilometres pretty straight sailing to the Lake Huron coast at Goderich.

It can't be helped, a voice inside is saying: you gotta make better time. Economic mobility, access to the automobile, urban sprawl, all changed our notion of time, creating the drive-thru freeway culture. Everything is about shrinking time, whether it's on a paved highway or the information superhighway.

There's a price to pay for speed, progress. The late journalist Charles Kuralt once observed that the American interstate superhighway system made it possible to "travel across the country without seeing anything."

If you're driving the Great 8 alone, or even with someone, long stretches of silence work well. You're going slow enough to notice sights even while focusing on the road.

The wind howling through your window from the 2/90 AC is pleasant, not deafening. If you desire more audio, talk radio, ringing with fleeting concerns of the day, should be avoided.

As for music, genres are a matter of taste. For what it's worth, Springsteen works for two-lane driving when he sings of the Long Walk Home (the Magic album) and that Tomorrow Never Knows (Working On A Dream); Rise by Eddie Vedder on the Into The Wild soundtrack works ("Gonna rise up/Find my direction magnetically...")

West of Kitchener, Hwy. 8 runs past (and once went through) the town of New Hamburg, its name reflecting the German heritage of the area. (Kitchener was called Berlin until 1916 when a referendum, boycotted by 90 per cent of the city's 15,000 people, led to the name change.)

Just past New Hamburg, if you turn left off 8 at Road 5, you hit Punkeydoodles Corners. Not much to see but the name makes it hard to bypass. It even has a Facebook page ("I wish I was from Punkeydoodle's Corners Group").

Joe Clark visited in 1982 for Canada Day festivities, no doubt a cheeky staffer thought it a novelty. But the blue sign announcing you are in Punkeydoodles Corners is gone.

"Someone probably stole it," says Judy Lebold, who lives in one of three households. "Don't know who does it, but several times a year it vanishes."

Back on the highway, seven paces off the road sits Lingelbach United Church, built in 1883. It still has no parking lot. Across the road is Lingelbach Cemetery. On an old highway worth driving, the dead are never far away and Hwy. 8 has several cemeteries hard by the route.

Many of the stone inscriptions at this one are blurred by the years but not all: "Karen Marie, five months, infant daughter of Carl and Phyllis Niebergall, born May 13, 1943. Asleep in Jesus."

Moving on past the historic settlers watering hole called Fryfogles Tavern, which goes back to 1828, the highway straightens through the hamlet of Shakespeare. Stratford, 12 km away, is the more famous Canadian home for all things Bard, but the namesake hamlet offers subtle charms, such as the Best Little Pork Chop gift store, where a giant decorative pig named Percy stands on the lawn.

"Everyone wants to have their picture taken with the pig," says Cathy at the Artisan Welcome Centre. Coloured pins on a wall map mark the visitors from places as far away as Santiago, San Francisco, Melbourne and Buenos Aires.

In the heart of the village are shops such as the British Touch, Funky Junk and Scary Guys Exotic Pets. A sign reads: Save the Hamlet of Shakespeare. The province plans to widen two-lane Hwy. 8 through town or bypass it, thanks to the increasing volume coming to and from the London area. A lot of folks are not pleased with either idea.

Next is Stratford with its beautiful European streetscape. While quiet and quaint by some standards, it is bustling and big.

Back into the country is Sebringville ("the hamlet with a heart") and after crossing Whirl Creek, the town of Mitchell. Founded in 1836, by 1874 2,000 people lived there and 1,000 have been added in the 136 years since.

Down by the Thames River is Howie Morenz Gardens with a nice little pagoda to eat a picnic lunch. The Montreal Canadiens' legend was born in town and skated on the river. On his death at 34 in 1937, he lay in a casket at centre ice in the Forum.

Morenz lived and played hockey for a time in Stratford, too, but Mitchell does not let the big city horde his legacy, even though the nickname Stratford Streak stuck with him more than Mitchell Meteor. A tribute sign on Mitchell's border - nothing like it marks any other town on the highway and it may be unique in all of southern Ontario - welcomes visitors to The Home of Howie Morenz.

"It just shows you that big people come from small towns," says Connie Hessel, volunteering at the visitor's centre.

Mitchell is considerably less well known as the town where I got my first writing job with the weekly Mitchell Advocate.

I last saw Mitchell in the rear view mirror in the late summer of 1992. At 24 I had been grateful for the opportunity Andy Bader, the Advocate's genial editor-in-chief, had given me as a reporter/photographer/layout person.

I will never forget Andy chuckling when I locked my car door on my first day. This is Mitchell, he said, you don't need to do that.

I was desperately hungry to write for a daily, eager to blow the country town for the big-time. But I warmed to the place, the people and the elderly lady whose home I boarded at. I covered town hall, the Mitchell Fair, Cornfest and community gatherings in surrounding hamlets such as Brodhagen. ("The Brodhagen charity chicken barbecue was a great place to be last Sunday," I wrote at the top of my story, "unless you were a chicken.")

I departed Mitchell one day in a white Fiero my buddy Pete had loaned me for the summer while he trained with the military out east. Eighteen years later, the Fiero is long gone, Pete is in the thick of it in Afghanistan and I write for a daily. The road continues.

Andy remains editor of the Advocate, still has the same smile in his eyes, still carries the flag for small community journalism, a family man who lives a block from the local ballpark.

On the Great 8 journey I arrived in town just after noon and dropped by the old Advocate office, which is still in the heart of town on Montreal Street, a stone's throw from the highway, excited to see Andy for the first time since I had left. I felt a grin when I locked my car.

I walked to the front door where someone had posted a handwritten note: "Closed for lunch. Back at 1."

Out of Mitchell, further west, vast farmland flattens, through the village of Dublin and past the shutdown Crossroads Gas Bar, then St. Columban, marked by little more than a church, and into the town of Seaforth, which is a bit younger and smaller than Mitchell.

At the main intersection stands the old Queen's Inn, having gone through numerous facelifts over the years. Now it's the Yorkshire Inn. At the bar is a man in a Roman collar nursing a soda water and lime, travelling with a buddy from Toronto who is having a beer.

"We took four days off, headed to the countryside on our way to Goderich," says Harold Jenkins, honourary minister at St. Peter's in T.O. "No one is in a hurry out here. It's a lovely respite."

A young woman serves drinks. She is Sarah Pitcher, and she has been told her name is perfect for hoisting lager. She loved living in Vancouver but recently returned to help her mom look after her grandparents. She speaks of this turn in her life with a smile and not a hint of bitterness.

Her eyes nearly glow green. It is the contact lenses. "The colour's called green envy," she says. "I wish God had given me this colour."

She tells the two men that she dreams of winning the lottery but not a mega payoff. Just a million dollars. "I'd be happy with that, would buy me a lot in town," she says, then laughs. "I'd have nothing left!"

On the way out of town is a tiny blip on the map called Harpurhey, a reminder that no place is too small to be called a place. Big Freeze, home of Uncle Jack's Fish and Chips, has been around since the '60s. (Drive-thru windows are not permitted when you experience Hwy. 8.)

A sign on the window says Charlene Thompson is getting married and one and all are invited to a Buck and Doe for her and fiance, Ben Finlayson.

Charlene used to come here as a little girl, pretty much runs the place now and knows what local folks will order before they say a word. The wedding is in the Dominican Republic and it will be the first time she has been outside Canada.

She likes her job, the people, her town. When asked if she enjoys Seaforth, she says yes, but points out she actually lives in Egmondville, a tiny former village enveloped by the town.

How much longer does she plan to work at Big Freeze? She pauses and smiles. "As long as I keep getting paid."

The next town, the last before the lake, is Clinton. It is the home of writer Alice Munro although residents surely tire of journalists noting it was also home to one of Canada's most notorious homicides, the murder of 12-year-old Lynne Harper. Fourteen-year old Stephen Truscott was convicted of the crime and sentenced to be executed.

He testified he had last seen her getting into a vehicle on Hwy. 8. He was ultimately released on parole and cleared of the charge.

A large radar installation monument just off the main drag marks Clinton's place as Canada's "home of radar" where the Royal Air Force established a radar station in 1941.

Eighteen km to go, the highway stretching like a ribbon to the distant horizon and into Goderich, "Canada's Prettiest Town" - it just may be - and the end of the line. In town, a white and black King's Highway sign at Elgin and Toronto streets declares Hwy. 8 ends.

Stay straight and it turns into a residential street, ending at the edge of a cliff with a lovely view of Lake Huron. Better still, hang a right where 8 concludes, go north on Hwy. 21 for a few seconds, then left on Hamilton Street to the octagonal shaped town centre with the Huron County Court House in the middle.

We were taught in Mr. Sullivan's Grade 11 geography class that Goderich's downtown is an example of a radial street pattern, a mini-Paris, where streets feed like spokes on a wheel to a central focal point. Our geography project was to design our own city and I picked the radial street pattern with a sports stadium downtown as my focal point. Note to Bob Young: I got an A.

From the town centre, take West Street down a slope to the beach and the old pier. It is lined with rocks on one section and sand on another at Rotary Cove.

Dan Paprocki is taking in the view with his wife, Sandie. They live in Kitchener and love their summers at the cottage. Dan says friends from Toronto simply look forward to exiting the 401, getting on Hwy. 8, and lounging in the slower pace and signs marking the quiet hamlets and villages.

"Once they get on 8, they know the holiday has begun."

Wade into calm Lake Huron and dive under water into darkness, soothing cool and up again, the warm air barely noticeable on wet skin, focus on the blue-grey horizon, the weakening late day sun a golden circle low in the sky.

Route 66 purists will tell you the Mother Road should only be taken west because it is about escape, heading west to California to strip away life's conventions, start fresh, commit to an adventure from which is there is no return.

In Ontario, Goderich is not a bad place to start fresh but not today. Head east, returning through Clinton, Mitchell, Shakespeare, Kitchener, Cambridge.

Just east of Galt, a sign says Welcome to Hamilton and announces that downtown is 33 km away. It's an incongruous notion, really, that this country frontier is Hamilton. There are still small monuments to the fight over amalgamation. A faded sign on a post says: "Free Flamboro." But the post is in Sheffield so who is treading on whose territory?

Just inside this rural Hamilton boundary on the right side of Hwy. 8 is a black and yellow sign that says "Gas" and below that "Pete's Garage." An old gas station without pumps sits surrounded by grass, like an island, the driveway disappearing. A rusted bus-shaped auto has sunk up to its lug nuts in the dirt.

The gas station closed in 1975. A knock at the door of a tiny house next to it; a face appears in the window, ghostly white, he can't see well, can't look you in the eye. Who is he?

"I'm Pete," he says. No last name, Pete is a private man.

He is 95, his wife died 40 years ago. He grew up in Holland, came to Canada in 1951 and opened his garage 10 years later. He lived in back of the gas station and rented the house out.

He pauses in his chair silent awhile.

"There was a murder out here in the yard."

True story: On June 2, 1952, the place was a motorcycle repair shop. Owner Harry Davidson heard something outside, checked it out and found a parked '39 Chevy sedan in the lot, a man and woman in the front seat.

The woman was drenched in blood, the man also bloody, but still breathing, two gunshot wounds in his chest. The window was open a crack and the man, whose name was Harry Lee, gasped that he was shot and his wife was dead.

Harry Lee, police believed, murdered Mary Rosenblatt - who was not his wife - and shot himself perhaps to attempt suicide. Lee and his mother protested his innocence to the end. He was hanged.

"The last man ever hanged in Hamilton," Pete says, which is also true.

Pete keeps a bible on his coffee table, eats three square meals a day. As far as his place being part of Hamilton, he didn't pay much attention when that happened.

"We didn't hear anything about it until the tax bills started coming."

Roll back onto Hwy. 8 through west Flamborough, a winding and dipping road, passing fields, a tree nursery, descending back to Bullocks Corners, an old cemetery to the left and a stone house at the turn, a few homes nestled in the woods. Hollywood shoots films here on occasion.

Approach the northern rim of the escarpment atop Greensville hill, willow trees on either side, and at the cliff's edge is surely the most breathtaking gateway to any city in Ontario - even more arresting during the colours of fall.

A slow sharp turn left, a low stone wall for a guard rail, a trickle of water down a rock face, a tiny waterfall that comes and goes.

Here it is, out over the edge, a panorama that only the miracle of the human eye can take in all at once: treed ridge of the escarpment towering in the distance, the Dundas Valley below it, and Hamilton's skyline to the east, with the glassy finish of the lake and dark outline of the Skyway beyond.

It's gone in a few blinks of the eye. The car straightens down the hill, facing a sheer rock face above. Now under a railway bridge, through a tunnel of green, around the bend, the facade of the old high school in view, hands on the clock forever stuck at just before 10 o'clock.

At the start of the journey, the drive up the hill had been pretty. But it is only returning east to Hamilton and only on the Great 8, the road less travelled, that you experience the full view. What you see depends on where you let the road take you.

jwells@thespec.com

905-526-3515