Motorcycles

(This is the first soapbox bonus post. Memories are posted each Sunday)

Picture this. A boulevard six lanes wide plus turning lanes, guarded on both sides by majestic royal palms. Behind those palms, you’d find furniture stores, strip malls, restaurants, nautical shops, golf stores, a shopper’s paradise, busy busy busy.

Brittney is driving daddy’s Tahoe with best friend Miranda sunk into the plush leather on the passenger side. Miranda has her own and Brittney’s cell, at the same time texting LeMario and Barwin, of course, plus various other friends. It’s prom time. Brittney pulls into the left lane to pass an old batmobile, the caped crusader now silver haired and long retired.

Suddenly, Miranda is like, “oh my gawd, Sophia’s dress is like the same green as yours.” And Brittney is like, “oh gawd.” And then she notices that they are almost going to miss the entrance to the salon for their mani-pedis. Brittany swerves the Tahoe right and thwack, she sideswipes the motorcycle that had zipped around the batmobile was about to weave past the Tahoe on the inside lane. The biker, in sleeveless T breaks his neck against the trunk of a palm tree and leaves a smear of blood across the decorative paving stones, his body coming to rest awkwardly contorted against a line of tourist brochure boxes.

Something just like this happens every day in Florida. It would appear to me that a person has to fail some kind of I.Q. test before they are issued a licence to operate a motorcycle in this State.

The Tampa Bay newspaper reported in September 2013 that hundreds of people had already been killed that year while riding motorcycles in Florida. In fact, bikers are 60 percent of Florida highway fatalities even though motorcycles are only 16 percent of the vehicles.

The chances of dying in a motorcycle accident are cut in half by wearing a helmet. However, Florida statistics are unaffected by that because nobody wears one.

You’d think that a cotton head scarf emblazed with the American flag, or the Confederate flag, a vision of the Blessed Virgin, or a fire-breathing skull over an iron cross, or some combination of those, would indeed provide supernatural protection, but alas…

Some people seem to believe that the more annoying the sound of the vehicle, the less likely that vehicle will be in a collision. These people think that the road is made safer by replacing mufflers with straight pipes, which make your $15,000 vehicle sound like dueling lawnmowers with dirty gas, but alas again…

What astonishes me is how motorcycle drivers seem to think other drivers can see them. They pass on the right, often weaving back and forth from lane to lane. Sometimes with partners on the back, sometimes with their kid.

I stay alert to the traffic around me, but sometimes motorcycles whiz by before I know they are there, and then they disappear by weaving around the traffic ahead.

Bikers often say drivers of cars and trucks need to watch for motorcycles. Hello – drivers in cars and trucks are in a concealed and padded steal box on four wheels; you are on two wheels with nothing around you. Who needs to be watching out for whom?

Especially in Florida -- where every block has a tiny old guy who can hardly peer over the dashboard of his luxury cruiser. The truth be told, a FedEx van could hide in the blind spot of these batmobiles. Also heading to or from the beach are the local kids and spring breakers under the influence of no end of distractions.

In the summer of 1965, when we moved to the suburbs, I told my parents that I wanted to buy a little Honda motorcycle so I could get downtown to see my old friends. My Dad said motorcycles are too dangerous, how about an MGB? Dad was no dummy.

When I think of stupid things I did in my late teens and wonder if I would have done stupid things on a motorcycle, I don’t have to wonder long. Sure I would’ve. But -- and this is my point -- then I grew up.

How Tricky Dicky Saved my Marriage

I was a real work-a-holic reporter when I was first married. I covered meetings day and night Monday to Friday, and chased feature stories and breaking news on weekends. It was grueling and I was getting burned out big time. After a couple of years, Joan had just about had enough, then along came Richard Nixon to save my marriage.

Prior to Nixon’s cover-up of the break in to Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel during the 1972 US Presidential Election, the news media tended to trust people in government. Relationships between public relations people and reporters were friendly, with reporters sometimes accepting invitations to go on junkets and other favours.

For instance, before the Watergate cover-up became uncovered, the Ministry of Natural Resources employed a former game warden in their PR office. This guy had the gift of the gab and would arrange for government bush planes to fly outdoors reporters to a remote lake. First, though, he arranged for the local hatchery to dump a load of tame trout into the lake. In turn, the reporters would write about the great fishing in that region. It was a tit-for-tat kind of deal and nobody got their shorts in a knot over it.

After the cover-up, newspapers and TV networks set new standards for dealing with news sources. No gifts, no free rides, none of that kind of thing. To use that same example, outdoor writers had to say “no thanks” to fishing junkets and pay their own way to remote places. Suddenly, all kinds of agencies, companies and others, who wanted to get their story told in the press, had to hire people who knew how newsrooms worked and how to write a compelling news release.

Among those organizations needing improved media relations was Lambton College, which hired me.

That 8:30-to-5 job at the college was the beginning of my varied and illustrious career in public affairs. It meant no more covering town councils arguing about building permits ‘til midnight. No more boring evenings with the board of education. No more digging for an interesting lead in the remarks of a dinner speaker at the local orchard growers’ meeting. No more getting back to the office at 10:30 at night and to write those stories for the next day’s paper.

How did that work out for me? I had breakfast with Joan again this morning.  

Thank you Richard Nixon.

Uncle Bill and Uncle Wes

Thousands of days go by as a person grows up. Most are forgotten. A few occupy a prominent place in a person’s mind forever. What is it that makes one day so much more important than the others?

One of those memorable days happened in 1959 when my Uncle Bill and his brother, Uncle Wes took me with them to catch minnows at a beaver pond.

The radio in their pick-up was playing The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. My uncles sang along, “… we fought the bloody British….” They asked me if I liked the song. I somehow knew that the bad guys in the song, those Bloody British, were our side in that war. My uncles didn’t care and kept singing. They were really enjoying themselves. “We like it anyway,” they said.

We drove from Waubaushene, through the village of Cold Water, down some lanes that weren’t really roads, through forest and past small bodies of water. We parked on a high outcrop of rocks overlooking a beaver dam and the large pond that the dam had created. We saw water snakes, found a deer antler that had been bleached by the sun, and talked about nature.

Uncle Bill talked about conservation, the beauty of nature and the value of the wilderness -- all new ideas for this kid from the city. My uncles caught minnows in a long net, each of them wading into the pond holding an end of the net. The minnows were dumped them in a tank on the truck. Anything else living went back into the pond.

The minnows would be taken back to be sold as fishing bait at the Bridge Grill: a gas station, bait and tackle shop, and restaurant on the old highway that passed through Waubaushene on the way to Honey Harbour, Parry Sound and all places north.

I could see that the Supertest gas station part of the Grill had been a BP and a White Rose because the old signs were leaning on a shed out back. My Grama made pies for the restaurant and waited on customers. Grampa cooked. Bill and Wes looked after the worms and minnows, and service station part. The Bridge Grill was on the corner of what is now Duck Bay Road and Coldwater Road. I see on Google maps that Marsh’s Marina is still across the street. I remember Marsh as a big happy French Canadian with a fluffy moustache. When Hwy 11 was built to by-pass Waubaushene, the Bridge Grill lost all its business and my grandparents and uncles had to move and find jobs elsewhere.

In those day, I lived in the city of Windsor. Our countryside was all farms – no hills, no forests, no beaver dams, no rocks. So, when our family took the trip to Waubaushene to see my grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, I was visiting a place unlike anything I was used to. On our annual vacation to Waubaushene, Uncle Bill might take us out to fish on Georgian Bay in his boat. I caught sunfish off a dock with my Grampa. We walked the streets with my cousins and my grandparents’ giant bullmastiff, Tuffy. I remember some dogs came out of a house barking at us; Tuffy appeared and those dogs turned around and ran. All great memories, but the day my uncles took me in their truck to the beaver pond remains a special day in my life.

When I wonder why – was it the ride through the woods in a pick-up truck, the remoteness of the beaver pond, the introduction to nature? – I realize these were part of it but, most important, it was a day when my uncles made me feel special. I may only see them once a year but I was one of the family. These tough and carefree young men shared their own happy time with an 11 year old kid. That’s what will always be special to me. 

The Barrel Works

During the years when I was five to nine years old, I lived next to the barrel works in central London. We moved from there to Windsor in January 1958.

Until the second half of the 20^th century, there was a market for large barrels made of wood.

The house where I lived backed onto the yard where the barrel works piled the boards they used to make the barrels. There was barbed wire at the top of the fence, but you could get over it by climbing the junk piled behind a neighbour’s garage and jumping over the wire onto the top of the stacks of boards.

Barrel boards were curved and tapered so the barrels would be wider in the middle and narrower at the ends. These boards were stacked so that each layer of boards was set at right angles to the ones above and below. What looked like one stockpile of boards was actually a huge set of crisscrossed towers stacked against each other.

The kids in our neighbourhood made forts in the piles the way people play Jenga (www.jenga.com ), that game with little squared logs where you try to remove logs without the pile collapsing.

Today I imagine how dangerous that was and I wonder how none of us got crushed in a cave-in. We did have cave-ins, but we always wormed our way out.

The key to not getting caught by the barrel yard workers was to build the fort in the middle of the stockpile that could be a dozen or more stacks long and four or five stacks deep. We would make a shaft from the top by taking the boards out one at a time and adding them to the surrounding stacks so they wouldn’t be noticed.

We learned to leave the outer boards in place so we could put the top two layers back so the fort would not be found. That meant the outer boards had less weight securing them, so climbing was precarious. One time we got a nice shaft built and we figured out how to remove some boards in adjacent stacks to make a couple of rooms. It’s a wonder we weren’t maimed or killed when it collapsed.

When the barrel workers were retrieving boards to make barrels, they would find a fort. That led to somebody coming up the street knocking on doors to tell parents that kids were playing in the barrel lumber piles. Our mothers would say, “Stay out of the barrel works” and we’d say “Okay Mom.”

Even today, if you read this and you know my mother, don’t mention forts in the barrel works.

If you would like to see where the barrel works was, on Google Maps go to Hamilton Road and Little Grey Street, London, Ontario. The barrel works was in the area between the houses on Rathgar and Pearl Street and between Little Simcoe and Little Grey Streets. After we had moved to Windsor and the market for wooden barrels ended, the barrel works became a geared-to-income housing project.

A Greaser Among Frats

In the summer of 1965, I was between Grades 11 and 12 when my family moved from our pre-depression-era house on a busy one-way street downtown to a brand new modern home on a quiet crescent in the suburbs. Both homes were in the city of Windsor, but it was like moving to a different country. Everything in South Windsor was different: the shape of the streets, the lack of alleys, the big attached garages, the rec rooms in basements, the open parks with no shade trees, the stores all bunched in plazas. Nothing seemed the same as it was downtown.

I did not realize how very different the suburbs would be until I got to my new school. I had started high school at Patterson Collegiate Institute (PCI), the oldest high school in Windsor, just a couple of blocks from the Detroit – Windsor Tunnel.

After school on Thursdays and Fridays and from 10 to 6 on Saturdays, I had worked at Clark’s Market, a little neighbourhood grocer on Grove Street. Mr. Clark paid me $5 a week. Because I had this job, I got no allowance at home. If I wanted something for myself, it had to come from that $5.

So, when I went to Patterson, pretty much all my clothes were hand-me-downs, or Christmas or birthday presents from grandparents, or bought by my Mom at some sale. Nothing I wore was cool. I almost had something cool to wear in the Fall of Grade 11 when I had heard that Hudson’s, the 14-storey department store in downtown Detroit, had wide-striped shirts like the Beach Boys wore on American Bandstand. I went by tunnel bus after school over to Hudson’s, but they were sold out. That was the first time I really tried to buy something trendy to wear until that summer of 1965. 

That summer, I worked four weeks as a counsellor at the Kiwanis summer camp on Lake Erie. At the end of that summer of 1965, for the first time in my life I had enough money to buy clothes to make me cool at school. I had $100. 

My friend Randy’s mother took us to Miracle Mart in Detroit to buy our clothes. I bought clothes that would be super cool at Patterson: six pairs of white socks; a pair of high-top shoes with long pointed toes and faux-alligator patterned into the leather; and two pairs of black pants. These pants stopped high on my ankle to show the white socks, and they were so tight I could hardly squeeze my foot through the legs. I also bought two bleeding madras shirts with tab collars. You did up the top button then buttoned the little tabs that stuck out from each side of the collar so it was snug on your neck. Coolest of all, I bought one grey shark-skin shirt. Shark-skin was a shimmery flecked material that Motown singers like Smokey Robinson wore. My shark-skin shirt had snaps for buttons and a snap-down collar. I thought I had bought the coolest stuff!

Because of that move to the suburbs, I had to transfer from Patterson to Vincent Massey Secondary School. First day at my new school, I got ready in my black pants and shiny shark-skin shirt, white socks and pointed fake-alligator shoes. In those days, I combed my hair with two dabs of Brylcreem, one all over, and the other to sculpt the wave on the front. My wave went up from the part, then swooped down in the middle of my forehead, then high again and back on the other side. It was a real work of art.

So, in my coolest outfit and sculpted hair, I walked into my class of Grade 12 at Massey, not knowing a soul, and saw the guys were in grey flannel dress pants with cuffs. Their shoes were brogues and penny loafers. They wore coloured sweat socks and pin-striped shirts. Their shirts had button-down collars worn loose and open at the neck. The colour of the stripes in their shirts matched their socks and their hair was dry and fluffy, not slicked.

I was a greaser in a school of frats.

It was pretty depressing. No one made friends with me. Everyone at school seemed to believe I was some tough greaser from Patterson. That idea was confirmed for my classmates when our English teacher had us bring a record to school that contained poetry in the lyrics. I brought the Bob Dylan album, Bringing It All Back Home and played She Belongs to Me. I was surprised when the cool kids in the classed laughed at it. Then, after class, a kid bigger than me, Ian Craigmile, grabbed my album from me and was going to toss it down the hall like a Frisbee. His friends were enjoying watching. I grabbed Craigmile by his burgundy sweater [thinking to myself, wow, what a nice sweater] and I slammed him against the lockers.

I knew he was going to punch me out. At Patterson, if you did not stick up for yourself you became the guy that always got pushed around. But, if you did stand up for yourself, you just get whupped once and then made friends. But this guy in the expensive sweater handed me my Dylan album like he was afraid of me. That was the worst possible thing that could happen. It made me look like a tough guy and left me still without any new friends.

I finally broke the ice when our class had to do speeches. I wrote a speech that today would be called a stand-up. I made fun of myself, buying greaser clothes because I came from downtown. I confessed that my pointed shoes were uncomfortable and I had no money to buy new ones. I explained that I got a job so I could buy a car so I could go downtown to be with my old friends, but I can’t go see my friends because I have to work all weekend to pay off the loan for my car. Then I made fun of how dull Massey was compared to my old school. For instance, Massey had no lunchtime entertainment, but the guys at Patterson could watch girls fight in the basement halls. The whole class laughed and laughed and the greaser – frat barrier was broken.

Not that it mattered for long. A short time later, all the greasers and frats had move on to flower-patterns in their shirts, bell bottom pants, and longer hair.

The real upshot came when our English teacher, Mrs. Grossutti, took me aside. She said to me that if I liked to write, maybe I should consider being a writer, like for newspapers or magazines. I had never given any thought to a career. But when she said this, I thought to myself, “Write stories for a living? That sounds better than working!”

The Volkswagen 1600 and the White-out of 1977

During the winter of 1977, Joan and I lived in Chatham, but I had left newspaper reporting for a day job at Lambton College in Sarnia. The commute in my red Volkswagen 1600 was an hour each way.

The 1600 was a bit bigger than a VW Beetle. It had a trunk in the front over the gas tank and another trunk in the back over the engine. Like all Volkswagens, the air-cooled engines produced very little heat in the winter. VWs tried to compensate with a secondary defrost heater that burned gasoline. This would help keep windows from frosting up when it worked. Gas heaters were unreliable, so Volkswagen drivers kept a small scraper handy to maintain visibility for the road ahead: one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand scraping the inside of the windshield and side windows.

Wallaceburg was half-way between home and work, and the trip this cold morning as far as Wallaceburg was uneventful. I turned right onto the main street after crossing the Sydenham Bridge, then north again onto the county road that took me straight up to the college. At the north edge of Wallaceburg, a line of cars had stopped on the road in front of me. I realized why when I saw the wall of white. Thick snow, high into the sky, was blowing from west to east across the road head. A car coming south emerged in a poof from the white wall like a special effect on Star Trek.

Immediately, I turned around and raced back through Wallaceburg and south down Hwy 40 toward home. It wasn’t long before the white-out was catching up with me. Through my windshield, I was seeing blue sky and open fields. In my rear-view mirror was the oncoming tempest of white. Once I was in it, I could not see the sides of the road or anything around me. I soon did not know if I was still on my side of the road. I dropped into second gear and crept along, then first gear. The tail lights of a car ahead appeared just beyond my front bumper, then were obscured. That car was moving. I followed, glimpsing the tail lights then losing them in the white. Same with headlights near my rear bumper. It was stop and go, moving blindly as part of a chain.

When the car in front stopped moving, I could only wait – nothing to do but scrap the inside of my windshield. Visibility was a few feet at best.

This was corn and soybean country. No hills, no forests, no windbreaks. The fierce wind had free reign from Lake St. Clair across kilometers of open field. I had no idea how far I had travelled, whether I was near the ditch or the middle of the road, whether there were any homes nearby, nothing. I kept the engine running trying to keep out the cold. I was dressed for work in a jacket and tie, overcoat and scarf, thin rubber galoshes over my shoes, leather gloves and no hat. All I could do was hope the storm would end -- no cell phones in those days!

A long time had passed when a man in a snowmobile suit appeared in the whiteness and rapped on my hood. He motioned for me to get out. “Keep your hands on your car. Don’t leave the car,” he said. “Is there anybody behind you?” I shouted yes and he disappeared into the whiteness. He reappeared with the guy from the car behind me. I tied my scarf over my head and ears. Nearly blind and being whipped by the fierce blowing snow, we plunged forward through drifts along a line of vehicles, picking up other people waiting at their cars, careful not to step out of reach of a car or each other.

Our group came upon a few more people who had been rounded up from the other direction. We held hands, shoulder to shoulder, our backs to the wind. Conversation was impossible. I could not see how many of us were there. A snowmobile came out of the whiteness, then another, to take us away, one at a time.

When it was my turn, I was freezing from the cold. I was worried my fingers, face and feet were freezing. Eventually, a house appeared. We could not see it until we were right next to it.

Inside, we were cold to the bone, and could only warm up slowly. I was numb until well into the afternoon. When I thought Joan would be home from the school where she was a teacher, I used the phone in the house to tell her that I was safe. I learned that schools had been let out early in the morning because of the storm emergency. Joan had been worried about my safety all day.

By the time she had gotten home that morning, the white-out was enveloping our street in the north part of Chatham. The power went out soon after. She could not see anything out the windows. The storm did not let up all day. Snow piled against the screen door in the back of the house, so Joan had to use the back door from the garage to let our bichon frise, Gonzeau, outside to do his business. She had to pick him up and toss him onto the hard packed snow, then lift him back inside.

I slept that night on the crowded floor of that house with other stranded drivers, still not knowing exactly where we were. The next day when the storm was over, I recognized the crossroads with the little ranch-style house. I had only made it halfway from Wallaceburg to Chatham. 

A convoy of snowmobilers was organized to shuttle us one by one, down the snow-covered highway, passing stranded vehicles left and right. At the edge of Chatham, a police car was stranded where a barricade had been set up the day before. Down the road, over lawns, through parking lots and into our neighbourhood of deep snow-covered streets, we saw people starting to dig out cars, doorways and driveways, but the only thing moving that day were snowmobiles. My ride ended right at my door.  

Inside, I returned the borrowed snowsuit, and hugged my wife.

On the TV news, an aerial view showed the highway north of Chatham was deep with snow drifts. Stranded cars and trucks were scattered facing all directions. Most cars were buried in snow and only recognizable as bumps in the drifts.

It took two more days to clear the highway of snow and stranded vehicles.

When I went to the impound lot, my old Volkswagen 1600 started right up, ready for another adventure.