from "A Squandered Life" / Motorcycle 2 '67
BSA 250
Graham and I kept a bit of distance from each other for a while, but in the mean time I found my morbid self-destructive attraction to motorcycles re-surfacing. This may have been brought on by the occasional false spring peculiar to Alberta - the magnificent Chinook which brought unseasonably warm weather down from the foothills. In its gentle embrace one would suddenly find shirtsleeves were enough to walk across the snow to work. The ice and snow itself would relent and give up locked in scents of earth and fresh water in a way a fully fledged spring might, only to lock it all up again as the Chinook winds changed directions and became something else. But I was also still stung with shame at having trashed that beautiful Triumph 500 and had a nagging compulsion not to accept defeat and to have another crack at getting it right. What kind of a man could I be if I couldn't ride a motorcycle?
There was a bike shop in Red Deer full of mouthwateringly menacing and shiny British motorcycles, heavy with gravitas and presence, and I kept being drawn to its show room like a dying moth. A true man would, of course, be drawn to the 650's, but, surprisingly sensibly, I felt constrained by my budget and my previous. No point in getting another big bike if I was only going to fall off and trash it again. At this time BSA had brought out a line of blue and white 250s called Starfires. Previously, their smaller capacity bikes had looked just like that - smaller capacity bikes, mopeds even. These 250s however looked light and elegant yet substantial and convincing. They looked like proper motorcycles; like bigger bikes. And they had a healthy long stroke chortle which sounded very authoritative for a bike that size. It pushed all the right buttons (looks and sound) and I resolved to put my money down and engage in the first hire purchase scheme of my career.
I rode that bike very tentatively, especially as whenever the Chinook departed I was dealing with ice and snow again, but my confidence grew and I began to feel as though I might be a bonafide motorcyclist after all. I spent many days off on my own, sometimes in warm, bright sunshine; sometimes in sub-zero weather, exploring the side roads and trails around Red Deer. As I analysed my ineptitudes, it seemed that the biggest problem emerged from my use of the back brake. The pedal for the back brake, on British bikes in those days, was on the left. For people used to driving cars, in which the universal braking foot is the right, this is counter-intuitive. Add to this a sub-conscious reluctance to put too much emphasis on the hand operated front brake - because, whereas a back brake can be forgiving and simply fishtail if you lock it, a front brake with even a hint of lock will often have you on your arse in the blink of an eye. I flashed back to my glorious day as a 500 Triumph rider and realised that, in my moments of crisis, my right foot was grimly and foolishly stomping down on the gear lever. No wonder I could never stop the damn thing in time!
These tendencies are, as you'd expect, acutely exaggerated in ice and snow. This meant my ability to stop in a hurry was severely compromised, and I learned two valuable lessons. The first is that, whatever the crisis, first response should always be to shut the throttle down. Sounds obvious, but not to an instinctive nervous system tuned to compel its limbs to do something else altogether. The second is that, by and large, a motorcyclist cannot afford to get into a crisis at all. Instead, he or she must get into anticipating trouble in the way car drivers don't. This means you don't simply watch the tail lights of the car in front. You keep that sort of detail in your lower peripheral vision, but your primary mission is to keep watching as far down the road as humanly possible. This is to allow you to see the trouble developing, before it is actually trouble, for the simple reason that if you don't see it developing it will probably be too late to react at all.
With these few lessons burned in I managed not to trash my 250 and even gained some kudos among my fellow male nurses who began to wonder if they themselves should blow their life savings on a motorcycle. But none of them did because the real king of cool was a guy called Lester who drove a vibrantly green Corvette Sting Ray and poo poo'd my motorcycle at every opportunity. Just to emphasise the point, he would occasionally depart the parking lot in front of the residence in a tortuous squeal of rubber, leaving smoke and skid marks in the way a dog might re-assert his territorial rights if he had the same technology.
Across the Rockies Again
After a cooling period, Graham asked if I fancied a holiday road trip across the Rockies to Vancouver in the big yellow Galaxy convertible. I had days off owing and hadn't a clue how to make use of them, and, besides, I was glad to re-kindle our friendship. He was, after all, easily the most entertaining guy in the hospital and I missed our conversations. In addition, my doomed infatuation with Youngberg was leading me into a morass from which I needed extricating. So I agreed and we occasionally met to set dates and discuss schedules.
I remember setting off in his bright yellow car, roof down, filled with the anticipation of open roads and mountain vistas and unstructured time to savour whatever came our way. We talked like we used to when we first met - books, films, philosophy, even psychology (which I'd flunked miserably at university). We stopped at diners and cafes and picnic spots, chatting and nattering the whole time. This was my third crossing of the Rockies so some of it was becoming familiar, but it continued to surprise and enthral me with vistas of unspeakably stunning and breathless beauty.
Graham wasn't into camping so we stayed at cheap motels, stopping late and carrying on early. We swept through the Okanagan and down to Vancouver. We didn't linger long there but caught the ferry to Vancouver Island and carried on to Victoria.
It was a great time, thoroughly enjoyable, but for some reason now obscure to me, we had another falling out and decided to head home.
Coming back down the eastern side of the mountains towards Calgary, in the darkening hours of late evening, I asked Graham to drop me off so I could hitch back to Red Deer. He was completely and utterly incensed. We were supposed to go back to his parents' place and spend the night there; heading back up to Red Deer in the morning, but I couldn't face carrying on a charade of palship in the company of his parents and wanted to bail out. In a rage, he swerved over to the side of the road then and there and told me to get out. It was a completely dark and inhospitable stretch of road, nowhere near any intersections or facilities, but I was happy to get out. As his car screeched off into the night I only felt relief. True, it was a long dark night of trudging and thumbing and it took a prolonged while to get back to Red Deer, but I felt significantly less encumbered and lighter of foot.
Wendy
After the return from Vancouver Graham and I hardly spoke. We went about our respective tasks with the minimum of one to one contact, occasionally exchanging terse phrases when the work required. But one day he appeared on the ward with a winsome and engaging dark haired flowing beauty and proceeded to give her the tour. It turned out that she was to be a second psychologist on Linden - Graham's equal and co-conspirator. If he felt threatened by this assault on his princedom he didn't appear to let on. He swanned around with her over the next week or so in a way which must have put Catherine's nose out of joint. The new girl - Wendy - looked as if she was to be the new princess in a re-structured Camelot. This appeared to wane after a while, but the only thing Graham ever said to me about her was that, having spotted me, she'd asked, sarcastically, “Who's nature boy?” This was enough to put me off trying to engage with her in any way and I now found myself in the peculiar situation, for a psychiatric orderly, of avoiding contact with both the psychologists.
In any event, summer was clearly on the way and I decided to hand in my notice so that I could continue on my deluded Odyssey to the mystically alluring California west coast.
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- from A Squandered Life / Spruce Ward '67
Sometime after I'd given my notice, I was out and about with one of the kids and turned around to find myself confronted by Jimmy, the allegedly prescient boy from Cedar Ward. How he'd suddenly got there I still don't know, but this time he wasn't...
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