[EFC#2] Moving Out

This is the second installment of segments of ESCAPE FROM CERTAINTY: MY SAFE PASSAGE THROUGH THE ULTRA LEFT, A MEMOIR OF THE RADICAL 1970S AND 80S. I will be “dropping” these into my substack periodically.

In the spring of 1974, I completed high school and rather than enter university at the beginning of September, with $400 in my pocket and a VIA youth-rate rail ticket, I set off by train to Vancouver with my Peugeot ten-speed sent ahead by a few days in a baggage car. The plan was to bike back to Ottawa, riding an ambitious 100 miles a day to complete the 2,760 miles in 27.6 days before the snow fell. My budget was unrealistically tight: spend no more than ten dollars a day on everything ($276), which technically was possible, given no torrential rain storms, no motel stays, no rockslides, no moose collisions, no surprises. In my mind, I had a buffer of $124.

Where did this idea come from? Travel adventure books had an impact. But the two-wheel sojourn idea percolated prior to reading about the Beat Generation in Kerouac’s On the Road, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (After reading psychologist B.F. Skinner’s eminently reasonable utopian novel, Walden Two, I’d later ask around to see who wanted to set up a commune in the Gatineau Hills. Share the workload, share your possessions, why have personal kitchens when you can have common dining rooms; can’t we all just get along? There were no takers thank god.) The Drifters, James Michener’s story about youth traveling together across Europe and into North Africa, brought on an urgent desire to visit Morocco and the rest of the Maghreb. But I read that book later, too.

I was keen on an adventure, a self-reliant sojourn I could look back on in later years and boast about. For whatever reason, that year I narrowed my travel itinerary to a classic month-long trip to the west coast and back. It seemed cheap and feasible, and I loved my Peugeot. Arriving at Vancouver rail station in late afternoon, I located my bike and imediately hit the ground peddling. I found a road out of the city in pursuit of the TransCanada #1. No interest in exploring the city of my father’s birth nor checking out English Bay and Stanley Park, which we’d seen already as children. The goal this time was moving along before it snowed, not sightseeing.

There was far more uphill than anticipated as I headed east into the Coast Range. Car horns started complaining about me almost right away, although I saw no signs prohibiting highway bicycle travel. This was years before bike lanes.

Three days out of Vancouver, pedaling along the Fraser River Valley, through Mission, past Hope and closing in on Kamloops, three flat tires, a complaining knee, and already spending beyond my means (a motel on a rainy night, too many restaurant meals), it would then look like getting back on the train might be the best prospect despite the humiliation it’d bring. I had to decide while I still had enough cash to buy a train ticket east, or keep on going.

The second morning I had stopped at a roadside restaurant for breakfast and ordered pancakes, which arrived partly raw. The day was to be complicated further by a flat tire that I had to repair at a gas station in Cache Creek. My plan was to sleep under the stars in the local park overnight with my thin plastic tarp as cover. The young gas station attendant advised against this. It’s Friday night, he warned, and the locals will be coming back drunk. “Don’t sleep in the park, you might get stabbed.” Instead, I could place my sleeping bag down on the pavement, in behind a building across the street. There was a small, enclosed storage area on the back wall surrounded on three sides by a wooden fence. I thanked him for the offer and that evening parked my bike and put my foam down and my sleeping bag on top, shut the gate and retired. I was briefly interrupted by an uneasy stomach and got up to retch on the asphalt a few feet away. Something I’d eaten, maybe those pancakes? I shut the gate and went back to sleep.

At about two in the morning the locals did return to town, tires squealing, lots of yelling. Someone loudly pushed open the door of a trailer the next lot over, screaming at his girl inside, and then came wandering in my direction. Why here? There was a foot-high gap below the fence where I lay and that I could look through. Too much like fate, I watched as my trailer neighbour stumbled in a stupor right up beside the storage area where I was. It was dark, and he was no more than three feet away although I was hidden. He commenced to piss out his beer and it splattered through the gap towards my head. I held my breath and lay dead still, not sure if this was a local drunk or a local slasher drunk. Of all the walls in all the streets in Cache Creek, why did he have to piss up against mine? He zipped up and then leaned over to inspect my puddle of vomit, not sure what it was. Then he got a whiff: “OHHH FUCKKK!” he screamed. But he wasn’t looking for someone to punch out, and turned away, stumbling back to his trailer. I guess his trailer didn’t have a toilet.

That was enough for me. I put my belongings together in a few seconds, tied them to my bike’s rattrap, and pedaled down the road out of town. I pulled into the ditch between the curb and the hillside, where I completed a very restless moonlit sleep lying on gravel.

The next day at breakfast, while I chewed up more of my precious financial resources, a trucker cautioned me that bears were sighted all over, therefore sleeping in ditches was not a good long-life strategy. Camping along the roadside, however, was the way I had planned to live on $400 for the month, and so a new drastically shortened bike tour was born.

A pickup truck picked me up. About an hour west of Kamloops it took me in for the last lap, an ignominious final few miles with my Rosinante swaying with me in the bed of a Ford, sharing the open air with three kids, one of whom had fallen down a well when he was an infant, I was told, and was now a deaf mute. I’d biked about 200 miles in three days, not quite the planned 2,760 in 30 days, and somewhat off pace. But to be fair, so far it was mostly through hills, seemingly going only upwards. I had planned to make gains on the prairies.

Instead I bought a one-way rail ticket back to Ottawa from Kamloops for $80. Three days on the train sitting up each way, plus three days sitting up on my bike in-between. Nine days from day zero, I was back home.