Halifax author Chris Benjamin’s Chasing Paradise takes the classic road memoir genre to a new place of humour and good will, with servings of self-discovery and love added for extra enjoyment.
Benjamin, an award-winning writer with a background in environmental issues, social activism, freelance journalism, and short fiction, and a sometime contributor to Saltscapes, is well-acquainted with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, perhaps the best-known of all road memoirs.
“At 21, I loved the book, but it was also a bit boring,” Benjamin says, of Kerouac’s tendency toward meandering and repetition. When it came time to pen his own memoir, stemming from a collection of detailed journals he’d written while hitchhiking across Canada and working as a “WWOOFer” (Worldwide Opportunities Working on Organic Farms), the now 48-year-old Benjamin aimed for a livelier read.
In Benjamin’s account, you can practically hear the car doors opening and closing and the miles whisking by as he and his travel mates move across Canada and, reaching British Columbia, head north, and then come home to the Maritimes via the United States after a stay in Toronto.
He covers much geographical and emotional territory, all engagingly, with great use of remembered dialogue and conversations, some of which he found racist and offensive. His coping mechanisms of Canadian politeness and acceptance didn’t always help him. Nor did gentle, or even forceful, pleas for more open-mindedness.
“Sometimes I just had to invent an excuse to have the ride drop me off at a gas station,” Benjamin says. “It was too much.”
On a happier note, he says, “I found one of the common themes of our travels was generosity, strangers helping strangers,” says Benjamin. “Canadians are proud of where they live. They take pride in their homes and regions.”
No matter the circumstances (some of the WWOOFing experiences sound dreadful, with heavy work and crummy food and lodgings), Benjamin never loses his droll sense of humour or appreciation of satire. “Sometimes I felt like Hawkeye Pierce in the TV show MASH,” he says. “You know, ‘If I don’t make jokes I’ll scream.’ The world is a mess — then and now. Amidst all that, dudes are just trying to get by.”
As was Benjamin, who at the time of his travels in May 2001 was age 23 and fresh out of graduate school. “I needed to be blown out of that bubble.”
Travel gave Benjamin an opportunity to ponder meaningful work and how to give back, to find his purpose. He was also looking for enduring love.
A romantic at heart, Benjamin writes about his personal relationships with grace, fairness, and self-deprecating humour. And he does indeed find lasting love by the end of the book — with a woman, Miia Suokonautio, who became his co-adventurer and wife, and with his home province, Nova Scotia.
“After four years of living in Toronto, where I met Miia,” he recalls, “I really grew to miss home, my family, and the ocean. I was seeing Toronto through Miia’s eyes. So I brought Miia out to Nova Scotia, to see the Maritimes through my eyes.” He smiles. “I took her to Crystal Crescent Beach.” (As locals know, that’s one of the loveliest beaches in the region.)
Miia didn’t stand a chance. Nor did she want to, taking to East Coast life with enthusiasm. Halifax is now a longstanding home to the couple, and their two children.
“The way I look at it,” says Benjamin, currently working as energy efficiency coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre, “Halifax has everything Toronto has, but only one of, not 50. You can also visit people unannounced, and every time you go out, you run into people you know and like. The city is small enough that people can connect. Trust gets eroded in bigger cities. It was the human scale that pulled me back. A place to call home — I had forgotten I already had one.”