Road trips to regret

Source: The Globe and Mail

Roadside memorials a powerful reminder on the start of National Safe Driving Week

ONTARIO - After driving 5,000 kilometres along the roads of Atlantic Canada, they seem as common as Tim Hortons.

The roadside memorial - a relative rarity a decade ago outside Quebec - is now everywhere, the expensive road toll of this nation of asphalt both shocking and saddening.

Outside Bathurst there is a riveting testament to the seven young basketball players - Javier Acevedo, 17; Codey Branch, 17; Nathan Cleland, 17; Justin Cormier, 17; Daniel Hains, 17; Nicholas Kelly, 15; and Nick Quinn, 16 - who died nearly two years ago, along with teacher Elizabeth Lord, when the van they were travelling in skidded on ice, crossed into the oncoming lane and crashed head-on into a tractor trailer. They had just finished singing Happy Birthday to Nick Quinn, now 16 forever.

They call the memorial "The Boys in Red" and it includes a basketball net, their pictures, the numbers they wore as members of the Bathurst High School Phantoms and a ring of plush red hearts.

Sometimes the memorials are simple - four white crosses just outside Halifax, two more a short distance on - and some complicated: one dedicated to two young men not far from the Woods Island Ferry in Prince Edward Island is wired for solar energy and sits on a base of white landscaping stone.

But all are powerful reminders of how often something goes dreadfully wrong on our roads - and how little ever seems to be done about it. Something to consider on this, the opening day of National Safe Driving Week.

The Olympic torch relay has already passed by dozens of crosses and makeshift memorials and will pass far too many more as it snakes its way through Central and Western Canada on its way to Vancouver.

When it reaches the Ontario city of Cornwall on Dec. 14, something unique will happen in that the torchbearer so carefully and deliberately selected by the local committee is not alive to run.

They chose Heather Saaltink to run the final 300 metres of the local leg of the relay. On Dec. 17, it will be a year since the high-spirited 22-year-old philosophy student was struck by a driver who is currently before the courts on a number of charges, including impaired driving causing death.

Heather, who died of her injuries just before Christmas last year, was by all accounts a most promising young woman. The day she passed on, she received an e-mail from a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay advising her that the paper she had handed in before heading home for the holidays was going to be up for a special award.

She was a superior athlete from an athletic family. She was on the university's track team, running the gruelling 3,000-metre event. She ran cross-country. She had recently been recognized by the Association of Canadian Inter-University Sport as an Academic All-Canadian.

She ran marathons. Her whole family ran. Her father, Rik, had been training for an iron man competition in Germany; her mother, Brenda, had arranged to run a triathlon relay at the same time; and Heather and her two sisters, Emma and Robyn, came up with a plan to go along and do their own relay triathlon, Emma (a student at Dalhousie University) doing the biking, Robyn (at Brock University doing postgraduate work) the swimming and Heather, of course, the running.

She came home for the holidays and some family training, was picked up at the Ottawa airport by Rik and Emma and, after a day of shopping, they set out for their Cornwall home. Heather was driving. Rik, having had a glass of wine, was setting an example, passing on the keys and moving to the back seat.

The half-ton truck that hit them head-on destroyed their little Toyota. It injured Emma and put Rik in intensive care for six days. It killed Heather.

"I am the people and places of my life," she once wrote in a letter to a friend. And those people and places didn't forget.

The Saaltink family did go to Germany. Rik did his competition and the girls completed their relay plays - Heather's boyfriend, Jonathan Boo, handling Heather's run for her.

"It was pretty emotional," recalls Rik.

In May, the relay committee put Heather's name down as the runner they would like to see finish the torch run in Cornwall. In July, the nomination was accepted and confirmed.

They asked Rik if he would consider running for her. He was both honoured and stunned at the same time.

"Heather was very special," he says. "She was on her way to having some impact on the world. And if she can now have some reflected impact - perhaps inspire someone - then that will be good.

He also hopes that it might cause another sort of reflection - a little thought that might save a life like Heather's.

"I just wish people would think before they do something that will cause so much hurt, that will be so widespread.

"It's been a horrible, horrible ride for us."

This, he believes, will help. He plans to carry nothing special with him, just the Olympic torch.

"In my mind," he says, "I don't need something of Heather's with me.

"She's right around my shoulders talking to me."