In late August 1967 I gazed from the back seat of a Chrysler Saratoga as we exited a farmyard full of cultivation equipment and assorted outbuildings. Against a far granary was parked the 1942 Chevrolet pick-up truck that had been my personal vehicle the summer of work I did on that spread. I had been taught to drive it at age thirteen. On my fourteenth birthday I spent the afternoon piloting an eight-thousand-pound diesel tractor towing a rod weeder on forty acres of gently sloping Saskatchewan wheat field. Kids, I learned, learned heavy machinery at a young age in that part of the country.
But now as I left the dry land, headed for a train back to Port Alberni in time for school, I wondered what it might be like to drive that antique all the way to the coast. Decades of school and work at various places later, I got to examine this eternal transit feeling in Amaranthine Chevrolet, a novelized distillation of that odd prairie-to-Pacific urge. It is primarily an indulgence in the linear joy of the road story.
Over a literary career spanning half a century my books have garnered flattering notices. There were laudatory accreditations for deftness of prose, accuracy of dialogue, depth of theme, etcetera. None have landed with such impact in my heart as the one or two recent readers who described Amaranthine Chevrolet as 'Canadian'. I could not have wished for a more affirmative benediction than to have been said to have written a pure expression of what it is to be of our great spread-out, coastal-mountain-plains-forest-lake-metropolitan nation.
My time setting is the summer of the centenary of Canada, while EXPO '67 was bubbling in Montreal, and the highways were replete with long-haired, flower-dressed hitchhikers traveling anywhere. Travel, such a Canadian thing. Love of travel machines...another thing particular to our spirit. The necessity of traverse over the second largest country in the world makes the maintenance, marshalling and, yes, affection to rolling machinery nearly a DNA element of the Canadian essence. My boy-protagonist Robin truly loves his machine. The drama I try to create depends on this quintessential long-distance passion.
The fact that the object of all this Canada-love is an American-built symbol of the mechanized hegemony of our southern neighbors is a wonderful irony I celebrate in my contemporary soul with particular gravitas. It took me fourteen years to write this book—seven years alone to settle on the last two pages! - so the recent confluence of national rising pride and the appearance of my Canada-celebratory novel is a happy coincidence. Though a staunch patriot—I've got the summertime cadet experience to prove it—I did not set out to proclaim any particular desire to engender national collective fealty.
My true desire was to tell a straight story of an earnest youth in search of familial love, and perhaps an incidental further understanding of himself. Canada will always be in this tale.
A teenage boy’s curious road trip across a radically changing country.
In the year 1967, fifteen-year-old Robin drives an antique pickup truck west from Saskatchewan, travelling on farmland and on unmapped roads to avoid police. Like Odysseus striving toward home, he encounters trying situations: men on the run, hippies creating utopia, marijuana farmers, mechanical breakdowns, a raging forest fire. Robin passes through a massively changing society — a rural culture that, though eroding, hangs on to values of kindness and endurance, and one in which Robin must be both heroic and vulnerable.
A RARE MACHINES BOOK
Historical | Fiction Literary [Rare Machines, On Sale: June 10, 2025, Trade Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9781459754775 / eISBN: 9781459754799]
Dennis E. Bolen is the author of several novels, short story collections, and one volume of poetry. His fiction explores the experience of varied careers: social worker, university instructor, arts journalist, accounts clerk, mill worker, farm hand. He grew up on Vancouver Island and now lives in Victoria, BC.
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