Travel to Canada’s Moon Road with Sarah Leipciger

Submitted: 26th June 2024

Canada’s Moon Road

A road trip across Canada is always going to be interesting but the one in this book is both poignant and meaningful.

Sarah Leipciger has started the engine and we’re off!

Map of locations in Moon Road

Moon Road is set in Canada over two time periods, late-90s and 2019. The nineties story takes place for the most part in the remote fishing town of Tofino, which sits on the windy tip of a Pacific peninsula on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The 2019 story unfolds as a road trip that begins in Ontario, in the east, moving west across the prairies, into the Rocky Mountains, and finally ending up back in heady British Columbia, very near to Tofino.

Main Street Tofino, BC:

Map of locations in Moon Road

I have lived in England for over twenty years, but the bulk of my work is set in Canada, where I’m from. I recognise this as an affliction: this compulsion to repeatedly feed my nostalgia, to be drawn in by stories that demand I bring to life the smells and sounds, the textures and voices of the country I reluctantly left behind. As I grow older, searching for more complex stories to tell, my curiosity about my country’s past – to times well before the reach of my insatiable nostalgia – is piquing, a creative development which I suspect will not allow me to relinquish Canada, just yet, as the setting for my work.

The bridge to Medicine Hat, BC

Map of locations in Moon Road

Moon Road is very loosely based on the actual disappearance of a young woman in 1990’s British Columbia. What initially interested me about the story, having watched a short documentary produced about seven years after the disappearance, was the disparate responses of the parents to their daughter’s missingness. Dad had settled into a kind of weary peace, resigned to the notion that the only person who could bring his daughter home at this point would be his daughter.

Mom, on the other hand, was still frantically stapling fliers to telephone poles. This gap between two people responding with such a marked difference to unimaginable, shared loss was the first seed for Moon Road, and was what drove every sentence to the end.

Nanaimo

Map of locations in Moon Road

I am from a small city in Ontario, and have also lived on Vancouver Island and worked in central British Columbia, but had no experience of the prairies. In autumn 2021, I took a research trip and flew to Winnipeg, Manitoba – near the eastern boundary of the prairies – and drove a rental car all the way to the Pacific coast. I did this so I could feel the long road beneath my wheels and get lost in the endless skies.

Map of locations in Moon Road

I also wanted to return to the Rockies, a region I hadn’t visited in over ten years, for the alpine fragrances and the way the rock cuts cleanly into the blue, for the air that could fool you into thinking the whole world is still clean. What I hadn’t anticipated were the liminal spaces, the transitions from flat to mountainous, to the temperate rainforests of the west coast where, after the frank dryness of the Rockies, the hills and canyons envelope and enchant you. Tempt you into something undefinable, which you can’t even begin to acknowledge until it’s too late. Driving my rental with the music high, I (re)discovered a landscape that leant itself perfectly to the drama developing inside my fictional pick-up truck: unrelenting roads leading seemingly to the edge of nowhere, baffling skies, amusing signage written in the vernacular.

Map of locations in Moon Road

Coquihalla Canyon.

Map of locations in Moon Road

The west coast, and the Rockies, get all the best press when people talk about visiting Canada, and for good reason: you’ve got rainforest; you’ve got ancient Redwoods; you’ve got godlike mountains. Bears by the side of the road, salmon-spawning rivers, orca whales. Everything is massive, wild, breathtaking.

Map of locations in Moon Road

If you wanted to experience the world of Moon Road, I would urge you to travel to Tofino and get the 6am boat up to the hot springs. Or find the Calico Cat in Nanaimo and have your tea leaves read. Rent a bike and go cycling in the Coquihalla Canyon (above). Be warned: like all things that were once rough and easy, these too have become riddled with tourism, but are still worth it.

Haliburton:

Map of locations in Moon Road

If you want to be a little different, however, resist the temptation of the west and go to Ontario, in the east (Alice-Munro land, if that entices you). Find yourself a cottage or a campsite somewhere around Minden or Bancroft or Haliburton. See the lakes and small towns where my protagonists grew up, where their daughter, when they still had her, used to roam.