Oh, Canada

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After a summer on the road, Naomi Harris pulled into her parents’ driveway in Toronto in September 2011 and photographed her odometer. She had driven just over 22,000 miles â€" more than four times the distance across Canada. Ms. Harris, a self-described “professional hobo,” had traveled the country in a car she bought on eBay, taking portraits of people she met along the way. Having lived in the United States for many years, she was seeking to capture her beloved homeland, asking herself an all-too-common question:

What does it means to be Canadian

“Here I am always talking about how proud I am to be Canadian and I’ve never seen my own country,” said Ms. Harris, 39, who grew up in Toronto but moved to New York in 1997 to study. “That’s ridiculous.”

What she produced is a delightful and somewhat surprising series â€" one that doesn’t really provide a succinct answer to a Canadian identity crisis, so much as it emphasizes the differences that define the country’s makeup. While she did not come even close to seeing everything, Ms. Harris’s project â€" which she documented on her blog, The Maple Highway â€" spans 10 provinces (though no territories) and a ! range of lifestyles. She photographed Sikh motorcycle clubs (Slide 2) and an Icelandic ice queen. She photographed aboriginal groups. She photographed recent immigrant families.

Canada is, for lack of a better word, big. It takes a long time to drive from one side to the other. But Ms. Harris wanted to do it to counteract common misconceptions â€" the idea that all Canadians say, “Oot and aboot,” for instance, or that Canadians are all “pale-cheeked, blue eyed, blond,” or speak one language.

“Why is it that the majority of people from around the world have little or no knowledge of what a Canadian is and what our country looks like” she wrote in her application for a grant she received from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ms. Harris began by driving west through the United States. (“I didn’t want to see Canada yet,” she explained.) She officially started her trip in Victoria, British Columbia, in May. The obvious route across Caada is one of the world’s longest highways, the Trans-Canada Highway, which stretches nearly 5,000 miles. But Ms. Harris was open to exploration.

“I’d hear about something that was really interesting that was 250 kilometers north and I thought, I’m not going to stick to rules; what’s the point I’ll just zigzag across,” she said.

She did have some destinations in mind â€" like Vulcan, Alberta, where she met Roy and Marilynn Elmer (Slide 17), members of the board for Vulcan Spock Days, a community event devoted to “Star Trek” fandom.

Naomi Harris The 2010 Fjallkonan (Icelandic for Ice Queen, or Lady of the Mountain) â€" Gudrun Viola Bjarnason Hilton, in Winnipeg.

She knew she needed to visi! t Rowley (Slide 1), a tiny community a couple of hours north of Vulcan whose residents throw a pizza party at the local saloon on the last Saturday of each month, often attended by hundreds from nearby towns. Ms. Harris described Rowley’s most recent population boom, a growth from six people to eight.

“Basically, this one woman, she got a boyfriend and she had a baby,” she said.

In Saskatchewan, she went to Little Manitou Lake, Canada’s only salt-water lake. And because she has no plans to visit Afghanistan anytime soon, she paid a visit to Kandahar. The community’s Web site notes that it “is a quiet, peaceful place, quite different from the other Kandahar in Afghanistan.”

Not that Ms. Harris avoided unhappy reminders. She photographed the children of Chinese immigrants, who had to pay a head tx to enter the country before 1923. She photographed survivors of Canada’s World War II-era Japanese internment camps.

“While there’s a lot of good things about our country, we have a bit of a dark past,” she said recently, “and we don’t like to address that.”

Most people were happy to be photographed. Some were not. In Mundare, Alberta â€" home to a 42-foot-tall sausage â€" she met a Ukrainian barber in his 80s who had opened his shop about 60 years earlier. “It was so beautiful; it was like something out of a movie,” she said. He declined to be photographed.

“I’ve been photographed before,” he told her.

She finished in late September in Newfoundland, where she tasted roasted seal and photographed Henry Vokey, a locally famous wooden boat builder.

Ms. Harris is plotting another road trip across Can! ada, havi! ng received a second two-year grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This time, she will focus on landscapes, as well as portraits.

First, though, she plans to travel across the United States, spending two or three months in her 2003 Honda (where she will often sleep). She will travel with Maggie, a shih tzu adopted from a reservation in Saskatchewan during her trip, and film interviews with people she meets, asking them questions about America.

While she dreams of one day owning a quiet piece of land where she can make maple syrup, Ms. Harris, a proud Canadian, has a more pressing task to complete first.

She’s getting her United States citizenship.

Naomi Harris Capt. John Russell, centenarian seaman, in Bonavista, Newfoundland.

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