Spying on America
On a June morning in 2022, Bill Gaston drives off the Victoria–Port Angeles ferry in a rented Dodge Charger with his two sons. Born in the USA but “Canadian through and through,” Gaston is on a road trip to Tabor, Iowa, the town founded by his great, great, great-grandparents as the westernmost hub of the Underground Railroad.
The Gastons’ eleven-day trip to Tabor and back takes them up and down and across a swathe of rural red states. Motivated equally by a curiosity to find out what really makes Americans tick and the motto ya gotta stop, the Gastons explore the American west, navigate unmapped dirt roads, eat too many French fries, overnight in clapped-out motels, visit a Buddhist mountain monastery, marvel at spectacular landforms, and enjoy unlikely conversations with real Americans.
Both a sideways glance at contemporary American culture and a mordant yet tender account of the true meaning of ancestry, Spying on America is an unpredictably insightful exploration of family, Canada’s neighbour, and the “American bald ego.”
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“Spying on America is a fascinating road trip in a muscle car, a family quest to visit a tiny Iowa town founded by Bill Gaston’s ancestors as a western hub of the Underground Railway. The father and son story zigzags through Buddhism and Trumpism, bad karoake and very good Mexican food, finding kindred souls and Red State epiphanies fuelled by Dog Slobber ale.” — Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Burn Man
“Part family road trip, part reconnaissance mission into the heart of America. A wonderful read!” — Stewart “Brittlestar” Reynolds, author of Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism
“A fascinating journey through the looking glass into that torqued version of Canada we call the United States. A meditation on family and aging disguised as a road trip, this is Bill Gaston at his freewheeling best.” — Will Ferguson, author of Meanwhile, Back in Nokomis
Bill Gaston was born in Tacoma, Washington, and grew up in Canada, becoming a Canadian citizen as a teenager to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. He has lived and worked, mostly as an itinerant scholar, all across Canada, in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Toronto, Vancouver and, finally, Victoria. Gaston is the author of numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including The World, winner of the Ethel Wilson Prize for Fiction; Gargoyles, winner of the Victoria Book Prize and finalist for a Governor General’s Award; Mount Appetite, finalist for the Giller Prize; and the memoir Just Let Me Look at You, finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize. He lives, grows food, and writes, with the writer Dede Crane, on Gabriola Island, in the Salish Sea.
