THE TWO-WHEELED UNDERGROUND CANADIAN RAILROAD
Sometimes the longest trip begins with a really long trip...
Peter Egan
The summer jobs were over and Donnelly and I were rich. Three months on a railroad section crew, shoveling gravel halfway from Milwaukee to the Twin Cities, had earned us each a tidy $1400. In 1967 that was a lot of money. It would pay for our room, board and tuition at college, with change left over for a few student luxuries like cigarettes, pizza and gas for our motorcycles. I had a slightly beat Honda CB16O and Donnelly had a Honda 305 Dream, a little less beat. We both wanted Triumphs but had settled for these used Hondas because they were amazingly cheap, having been bought late in the second semester from other desperate students.
It appeared we were all set for a junior year at the University of Wisconsin. I was an English major and Pat Donnelly was in Political Science. What we hoped to do with these majors I have no idea. We weren’t thinking very far ahead. The war in Vietnam was going on, so between that and various other social perils it wasn’t fashionable or especially worthwhile to make plans much beyond the age of 21. There was plenty of precedent for disappearing just a bit earlier than that.
The idea at the time was to join the army if you flunked out of college or happened to think the war was a good idea, or to stay in college if you weren’t entirely convinced it was a wonderful thing. Donnelly and I were not entirely convinced. A few years earlier we’d gotten out of high school with a fairly solid collection of patriotic notions. My freshman year in college I’d gone so far as to sign up for the ROTC because I wanted to become a Navy fighter pilot. But two years spent reading newspapers and watching the war on TV at the student union had eroded my enthusiasm for the conflict. By 1967 my conventional military fervor had turned to a sort of heartsick malaise. Donnelly, my roommate and best friend from youth, felt the same way.
So when I say it appeared we were all set to go back to school in the fall, I mean we were tossing around some other ideas. One of those was moving to Canada. That was a big step, of course, a trip of no return that slammed the door on families, friends, girlfriends, home towns and calling ourselves Americans. Neither of us had ever been to Canada, nor anywhere else outside the U.S. for that matter. We wanted to see this Canada before we attempted to move there; to see what life looked like from across the border, to smell the Canadian air, drink Canadian coffee and meet some Canadians. Did Mounties still wear red outfits? We were told they looked like FBI agents now. We needed a scouting trip to check it out.
That trip was planned for early September, between the end of railroad labor and the start of the fall semester. In retrospect, our preparations for the trip seem almost quaint. We changed our oil, adjusted valves, lubed our chains and each took $60 out
out of the bank. To the rear seat of my CB160 I strapped an army surplus duffel bag containing a flashlight, a sleeping bag and Big Pink, a faded red pup tent from my childhood, a tent originally designed to make a pair of dwarfish 9-year-olds mildly claustrophobic. Its lack of water repellency was legend among all who’d been doused within its tiny pink walls.
Rain gear?
Forget it. Motorcyclists didn’t wear rain gear in those days (unless they had an ounce of common sense or were older than 18). We saw motorcycle rain suits as an extravagance for people who worried about all the wrang things. No, Donnelly and I had our blue jeans, work boots, Bell helmets, leather jackets and gloves, and that was enough.
The first part of the trip went pretty well. We left early on a gray morning and had breakfast in a truckstop on Highway 51, heading southeast from Rockford. Our first stop for the night was to be Arlington Heights, a suburb of Chicago. Another roommate of ours, Hugh Wessler, lived there. It took us half the day to blunder into greater Chicago and the other half to find Arlington Heights amid the suburban sprawl. We finally found Hugh’s house and, with typical courteous forethought, called from a gas station about two blocks away to let the Wesslers know we were in town. Yes, I admitted, we sure could use a place to stay for the night, now that you ask. Hugh’s mother wanted to know if we were hungry. I told her not to go to any trouble in a tone of voice that implied if she had a side of beef or maybe half a dozen pizzas around we’d probably eat them.
When we got to Hugh’s house he was in the basem*nt, listening to his Heathkit stereo and making an electric guitar in his woodworking shop. Hugh was an engineering major who could make anything, including, it turned out, a living when he got out of college. We had a marvelous dinner concocted by Hugh’s mom on short (no) notice, and let ourselves out the back door the next morning, leaving a thank-you note propped between the salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table. We wanted to be in Canada by nightfall.
If you’ve never been there, Calumet City and Hammond are lovely at six in the morning viewed from the elevated Chicago Skyway, especially with a light rain falling. The air is scented with aroma of Bessemer furnaces, industrial arc welding and co*ke production, and rain glistens on the axles and driveshafts of overturned cars with their wheels gone. Open gas flames billow from tall chimneys and everything, including your motorcycle, face shield and very teeth, acquires a fine patina of cinders and ash. We skirted the south end of the lake through Gary and headed northeast into Michigan on Highway 60.
Traffic was heavy on 60, but at last the factories and scrap yards gave way to green pastures and wooded farmland. Our bikes were running well. Oddly enough, my CB 160 was quicker through the gears than Donnelly’s single-carb 305 Dream. True to its touring image and ethereal name, however, the Dream cruised at a more relaxed pace on the highway and had a few more mph right at the top end. Both bikes topped out in the neighborhood of 90 mph and cruised at 70 or more without apparent strain.
The only real problem with my 160 was a dead battery, meaning I had to bump start the bike every morning in a sort of Hailwood-at-the-TT imitation. Once the engine was warm, the kick starter worked all right. With no battery to regulate things, however, the brightness of my ^ headlight varied with revs, so I tended to flicker and dim at stop signs.
Michigan was my initiation to a basic maxim of cross-country travel. Stated simply: Maps are small, while the earth, on the other hand, is quite large. It looked like a short jaunt to Detroit in Rand McNally, but it took us all day to get there. Our original plan on this trip was to ride across eastern Canada all the way to the fishing villages of the Gaspé Peninsula on the Atlantic coast. Halfway through Michigan we began to see Montreal as a more realistic goal.
After a late hot dog dinner at some godforsaken shopping center in Jackson, we rolled into Detroit at exactly midnight. I don’t remember much of Detroit from this trip. We were pretty tired. The enduring image is miles of broad avenues with streetlights throwing a cadence of glare and shadow across my scratched yellow face shield; parked cars, honking and weaving cars, sirens and the slickness of rain on manhole covers. We looked neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead, and passed through Detroit at midnight.
I remember the Canadian border very well, however. I wasn’t too tired to remember that.
We pulled up to the U.S. Customs station on the Detroit River and a uniformed official signaled us to stop. He looked us over for a minute and then leaned into the office and said something. Two more uniformed men came out. They asked us to get off our motorcycles and push them over to the side of the office, under the lights. We were instructed to remove all our luggage from the bikes and bring it in the office. There everything was gone through. I should say we were instructed to go through everything by the officers, who did not deign to touch our motorcyclish belongings. It was, “Take off those leather jackets. Okay, now open the duffel bag. Unroll that pink thing. What is that, a tent? A pink tent? Unroll it. What are those?”
“Tent stakes.”
“What’s that other thing in there?”
“A flashlight.”
“Let’s see it. Take the batteries out. That’s it. Put them on the table.”
And so on.
Then we were searched and told to empty our pockets on the desk. Drivers licenses were checked, social security cards, draft cards of course, and we were told to count our money. We were questioned as to travel plans, home towns and possible criminal records. One officer took our ID material into his office and began dialing phone numbers. He talked, nodded, dialed, lit and snubbed out numerous cigarettes, all the while watching us through the glass partition with unblinking reptilian eyes that said he’d seen guys like us before. It was 1967, a war was on, we were of college age, this was the Canadian border, it was midnight and of course we were on motorcycles. All wrong.
When we had been found unarrestable, they quickly lost interest and told us to pack our scattered belongings and go. After only an hour’s delay we were on the road again. For about 20 seconds.
The Canadian customs officials were more efficient. They took about 20 minutes to go through our luggage, grill us as to our plans and have us count our money. Only one phone call was made, and then we were free to pack and go.
Wfe crossed into Canada at 1:30 in the morning. The drizzle had stopped and a warm autumn wind was clearing the sky, revealing a nearly full moon. We were so tired Donnelly claimed to be hallucinating various restaurant foods as we stopped for a light in downtown Windsor. I suggested we take Highway 401 out of the city, hit the first likely exit ramp and find a place to eat and camp.
About 20 miles from Windsor we peeled off into a little town called Tilbury. For two in the morning, the main street of Tilbury was jumping. Crowded cars cruised the strip, groups of people mingled and walked on the sidewalks and there was actually an open cafe. We parked in front of the cafe, found ourselves a booth inside and ordered breakfast. “Lot of people out tonight,” I said to the waitress.
“Hops picking season,” she said. “Teenagers and migrant workers from all over, and they all come into town on Friday night.”
Our bacon and eggs had just arrived when I looked out the cafe window and realized that three guys in leather jackets of the multiple-zipper persuasion were messing around with our bikes. They looked drunk. One was trying to unhook the bungee cords from my pack and another was kicking the spokes on Donnelly’s 305. The third was watching. We put down our forks and laid our napkins on the table with weary resignation. “Well, let’s get this over with,” I said.
As we left the restaurant, the waitress and a cigar-smoking cook and several patrons came to the front window to watch. “Be careful,” the cook said. “When those boys get drunk they’re really crazy.”
The three guys wore motorcycle jackets and heavy-duty engineer boots, but they didn’t seem to have any motorcycles nearby. I walked up to the one who was meddling with my luggage and shoved him away from the bike. “What are you doing,” I said. He threw something back at me in garbled French and shoved me back and then I shoved him and so on . . . the usual boring pre-fight choreography.
Meanwhile, Donnelly was dealing with the other two. The one who’d been kicking his spokes was a short, stocky guy with a blue stocking cap and curly red hair that stuck straight out from the sides of his head. The other one, who stood back a bit, was slightly larger with a sort of weasel-like demeanor. Donnelly had pushed them away from his bike and was trying to talk to them in our excellent University of Wisconsin Conversational French, sophom*ore level. He wasn’t getting very far. Another shoving match was developing. So much for the U.N. approach, I thought.
Then I saw the knife.
Right. A knife. The short guy with the shocking red hair had produced a very long, very open switchblade and was playing it unsteadily around Donnelly’s throat, moving him back against the restaurant window. The waitress, cook 1 and five customers stood watching on the other * $
side of the window glass. The cook was sipping coffee and , munching on a donut. Just behind him was a phone on the wall, but no one was using it.
The knife changed everything. My absurd shoving match slowed to a halt, and even the guy I was shoving stopped to watch and his breathing tightened up. This wasn’t fun anymore.
Donnelly looked down at the knife and then back into the face of the red haired man. Donnelly was a naturally obliging, easy-going person but he had a rather explosive flash point and I had personally seem him lay waste to much larger individuals who gave him unsolicited trouble. And at that moment I could see the anger rising in his face.
I think the man with the knife sensed this, even through his glazed, drunken eyes. The way things were shaping up, he’d either have to do something terrible with that knife or get himself all ripped apart by Donnelly. He backed up a few steps and blinked. Glancing uneasily at his pals, he suddenly made a motion with his head and said, “Allons.” They all backed away from us, then turned and staggered off down the street.
When they were half a block away we heard the switchblade snap shut. They crossed the street, piled into a yellow and white ’59 Chevy and drove away.
We both let out a long, low whistle and went back into the cafe. Back to our ice cold bacon and eggs with the grease congealed on them. The customers returned to their seats and the cook said, “You don’t want to mess around with those boys. They get crazy when they’re drunk.”
I said, “Yeah, well, thanks for all your help.”
He apparently sensed my insincerity because we didn’t get any more coffee.
Returning to our bikes, we saw a cop car cruise by, so we flagged him down. We explained the entire incident, complete with knife, descriptions and the colop of the ’59 Chevy. Everything but 8 x 10 glossies, as Arlo would say. He listened to our story without emotion and without writing anything down, all the while looking at our boots, jackets and motorcycles. Then he asked to see our drivers licenses. He wanted to know what, exactly, we were doing in Canada and where we were going. He took out a pad and wrote down our license plate numbers, then went to the patrol car and made a radio transmission. A few minutes later came a radio squawk reply we couldn’t understand. The cop gave us back our licenses, said we were free to go and drove away.
I looked at Donnelly and shrugged. “Looks like we’re innocent. . .”
“Yeah. Third time tonight.”
As we rode out of town, a ’59 Chevy peeled out of a side street and dropped in behind us. It took us about three blocks to lose them forever. We turned down an alley, across a parking lot and through a schoolyard as fast as we could ride. Our friends in the Chevy were last heard running into some garbage cans with their car. They were in no condition to drive.
We took the first backroad we found out of town and rode about five miles before pulling off on a tractor path into an open pasture. We parked the bikes under a lone oak tree and by the light of the moon and the Dream began to unroll our tent. I was getting the tent stakes out when Donnelly grabbed my arm and said, “Do you hear voices?”
I did.
And laughter and the breaking of glass.
We turned out the bike headlight and climbed a nearby rise in the field. As our eyes adjusted to the moonlight, about 25 or 30 cars materialized, parked in the open field. Someone was pumping a beer keg and we could see cigarettes glowing or being lit. “Great,” Donnelly said. “A goddam beer party. Let’s get out of here.”
We rolled up our tent, rode another five miles, found another pasture and pulled off. This time there were no voices. We put up the tent and climbed into our sleeping bags. As we drifted off to sleep it became apparent that some sort of drag race was being run on the nearby road. Eventually we heard what sounded like a serious car crash off in the distance. Lots of traffic sped by and later there were sirens. We didn’t care about any of this. We were too tired.
“Welcome to Canada,” Donnelly said, and we more or less laughed ourselves to sleep.
Bathed in pink tentlight, we awoke at about 11:30 the next morning, gasping for air. We ripped our way out of the hothouse tent to discover a beautiful autumn morning. We rode under clear, sunny skies toward Highway 3 and the shores of Lake Erie. The warm fall air smelled like the fields of stubble and cornstalks along the road, taking on a cool freshness when we got to the lake. The north shorelines of Erie and Ontario were lovely, and whenever possible we stayed on the two-lane shore road.
Riding again until long after dark, we had dinner in a place called Gananoque at the north end of Lake Ontario, then found a campground in a piney wood south of town. We stumbled out of our tent in the morning to discover ourselves camped about 50 feet from a tall shoreline cliff that overlooked the famous Thousand Islands, where Ontario narrows into the St. Lawrence River. Donnelly had thought to bring a small pan and a jar of instant coffee, so we made a campfire on the rocky cliffs and sat under the pine trees for a long time, drinking coffee and watching the sun rise over the U.S. side of the channel, burning the mist off the green islands. I smoked my last Marlboro, crushed the pack, and made a mental note to buy a pack of Players at the next gas station.
Following the St. Lawrence River, we crossed into Quebec Province and made it to Montreal late in the afternoon. After being turned down at three hotels with VACANCY signs burning, we learned to leave our helmets and jackets on the bikes while inquiring. In the end, the effort was wasted. We found a room in a downtown hotel so cheap that mere possession of helmets and jackets made us something of a success story within its dark hallways. Most of the patrons were elderly men who talked to themselves and seemed to own nothing but a jealously-guarded brown paper bag. The rest were slightly younger women who kept
funny hours.
For the next two days we walked all over the hills of Montreal, sitting in parks, poking around in book stores and looking over the campus of McGill University. We climbed Mount Royal and looked out over the grounds of Expo ’67. The second evening we stopped in a topless bar, which at that time was a brand new concept of great novelty. As we sipped on our beers, a rather bored looking woman climbed up on the bar and did some perfunctory topless dancing to Spencer Davis’ Gimme Some Lovin’. Then she sat down at the bar and said, “Give me a beer, Ernie.” Donnelly and I looked down the bar and smiled politely. She studied us for a moment and didn’t smile back. I don’t think she liked my work boots. It was suddenly too quiet in the bar. What do you say to a topless dancer? “That was nice dancing”? We paid our tab and left, I felt Spencer Davis had somehow been compromised.
It was a long walk back to the hotel. The weather was changing and a cold, raw wind was blowing down the streets of Montreal. It was a Monday night and the streets were almost empty, people all gone to their homes or offices, doing routine things. The city around me suddenly felt remarkably cold and indifferent to our presence, and it was my first inkling that foreign cities are not by nature hospitable to people without connections or money. I felt like Bob Dylan on the cover of Freewheelin’, except I didn’t have my girlfriend clinging to my arm. She was back in Wisconsin.
As we entered the hotel the manager stopped us and wanted to be paid now because he knew we were leaving in the morning. We paid him and tried to get some sleep in our taco-shaped beds.
In the morning we loaded up our bikes in the alley behind the hotel and I pushed mine across the street to a gas station, not wanting to do my mandatory bumpstart until necessary. The gas station had signs in English and French, but the English words had been painted over with red paint. The attendant ignored us when we asked about filling up our bikes and buying a quart of oil. Our poor French didn’t win him over. Another customer who’d been refused service, said “Don’t bother. Go to an English station.” The Quebec Separatist movement was at something of a fever pitch right then, and we’d also been refused service in a French Canadian bar the previous night. To Donnelly and me, who thought of ourselves as civil rights advocates, this behavior seemed unbearably provincial and small-time. It was another version of something we despised in the States.
We finally found some gas, got my reluctant bike started, and left Montreal on Highway 17, which follows the Ottawa River across the northeastern border of Ontario. Financially, Montreal had taken us beyond our point of no return. We each had about $25 and had to make tracks on the way home.
Somewhere near Ottawa a hard rain began to fall; a chill autumn Canadian rain that angled down in drops like cold steel pellets. The rugged, wooded countryside along the river was beautiful, but much of its charm was lost on us, what with our relentless shivering and borderline hypothermia. We set up our wet tent in a dripping pine forest on the wet banks of the Ottawa River early in the afternoon because we were too cold to ride any further. We climbed into our wet sleeping bags with our wet clothes on and I think I spent the night wondering if it was physically possible to chatter your teeth into pure calcium dust. I slept briefly, dreaming of jackhammers and sidewalks.
Through some miracle of meteorology it managed to rain harder the next day while getting still colder, yet not quite snowing. We rode, with an uncharacteristic lack of cheer, for many long hours down the long, straight pine forest roads of Ontario. I got a flat tire around mid-afternoon, so we hid my bike and our luggage in the woods and rode Donnelly’s bike 20 miles into the next town for the patch kit and tire pump I wasn’t carrying. I replaced the tire, managing to put several permanent sprocket stains on my blue jeans, and we were off again. At 4:30 in the afternoon we were too cold to ride anymore, so we pulled off at a sign that said WRIGHT’S CABINS, near Pembroke. Sitting just back in the trees, this place had one large log cabin/office surrounded by a horseshoe of similar but smaller log cabins. We didn’t have much money, but after two days of rain we had to get indoors for one night and warm up. We were both beginning to shiver and sweat at all the wrong times, when not busy coughing.
Always wary of being refused service because of our motorcycles, I was overjoyed to walk into the office and find that the place doubled as a Yamaha dealership, of all things. An elderly woman sat knitting by a kerosene stove. She explained that her son ran the Yamaha end of the business and she managed the cabins. Would we like a cabin for the night or motorcycle parts? A cabin? She’d get the stove and hot water turned on for us, then, and a clothesline to hang up our wet clothes. She explained almost apologetically that the cabin would cost six dollars for both of us. Was that okay?
It was okay.
We stayed in a tidy little log cabin with two feather beds and a bathtub on feet. In the morning the rain was hammering down on the green shingled roof and neither of us wanted to get out of bed. We discussed staying in the cabin until the rain stopped or until we died, whichever came first. Lack of money and a driving need for breakfast finally got the better of us, however, and we pushed onward into the morning rain.
At a coffee shop near Sturgeon falls we ran into another traveling motorcyclist. His name was Ron. He was a free man, having just gotten out of the U.S. Air Force, and he was circumnavigating all of North America on his brand new Harley XLH. His Harley had the biggest pile of luggage and random equipment I’d ever seen lashed onto the back of any motorcycle. It looked like an overloaded pack burro. Prominent in this mobile heap of goods was a full-sized Coleman two-burner stove, an ice chest and the biggest tent I’d ever seen outside a circus.
Ron sipped his coffee and looked in amazement at our damp jackets. “Don’t you guys have any rain gear?” he asked.
“No.”
He shook his head. “Strange . . .”
He invited us to travel with him and said he had a tent big enough for all of us. The weather at last began to clear, and the three of us cruised along the north shore of Lake Nipissing, across the barren yellow moonscape of Sudbury’s sulfur mining district and down to the North Channel of Lake Huron. It took us a while to get used to traveling with Ron. He cruised down the road with his feet up on highway pegs, looking around at the scenery, never exceeding 60 mph. It had never occurred to Donnelly and me that anyone would ever voluntarily go slower than 85 mph, as long as there were no cops around. We rode everywhere flat out. And here was this guy, motoring along 5 mph under the speed limit, appearing to enjoy himself. It took some getting used to.
It was strange too, listening to the katuff ka-tuff of the low-revving Harley next to our wound-out smallbore Hondas. With his tall windshield, huge padded seat, highway pegs and thumping engine, this guy was traveling in a different world from us. There was no sense of urgency in his riding. We were always in a hurry, even when I couldn’t think why. He was just traveling, of course, and we were on our way home.
We found a perfect campground (Ron had a campground guide) on the shore of Lake Huron, and we put up Ron’s tent. I had seen tents like this only in Sears catalogs—the photo where the whole family is playing cards around a table inside the tent. We laid our our sleeping bags, Ron erected his folding army cot (I’m not kidding about this) and then he insisted that we all park our bikes in the tent “in case it rained again.” He had cardboard to catch oil drips. He got out the Coleman stove and the ice chest and cooked us up a great dinner of Spam and fried potatoes, with bottles of Moosehead Ale. Later we had coffee and made a big campfire. For the first time in days Donnelly and I felt roughly like human beings instead of muddaubed barbarians of the northern rain forest. “This guy,” Donnelly mumbled to me, “really knows how to travel,”
“Next time,” I said.
We sat across the campfire from Ron and I watched him, wondering what it would be like to be out of the military > and free to travel; free to cross borders, work, not work, marry, stay single, go to school, quit school, bum around or save money for a brand new motorcycle. Ron’s face flickered in and out of the shadows and I watched his expression for some sign of the calm and serenity that must certainly come with that kind of freedom. In that light it was hard to tell. I grinned to myself and thought, “Ron is on the other side of the fire and we can’t see him clearly.”
We parted company with Ron at Saulte Ste. Marie the next day. He was heading around the north shore of Lake Superior and we were crossing into upper peninsula Michigan.
WJ Je had no trouble getting back into the U.S. and were virtually waived through customs. “Right,” I thought to myself. “Volunteers.”
The rain had gone away, but a cold, piercing wind was blowing off Lake Superior and the later afternoon clouds had the pink-and-gunmetal look of winter. I was suddenly very tired of being cold. Once we crossed the border, our homing instincts set in and we rode absolutely flat-out across northern Michigan without regard for police and traffic tickets. Nightfall found us still a long way from home, so we took Highway 41 down to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Another college friend, Jim Wargula, lived there and his parents were particularly understanding and good-hearted people. We rang their doorbell at 8:00 in the evening.
They had just finished dinner, so Mr. Wargula ran out and got us a huge bucket of Kentucky Fried chicken. While he was doing that, Mrs. Wargula made fresh hot coffee, ran bathwater, got out towels and put sheets on the guest room beds, all the while chatting cheerfully and asking us about our trip. Jim put the bikes away in the garage for us.
Mr. Wargula returned with the chicken and we all sat around the kitchen table. While we ate, he noticed that our leather jackets were all cracked and stiff from repeated rainstorms, so he went down to the basem*nt and returned with a can of neat’s-foot oil. While we drank coffee he insisted on cleaning up our jackets and making them supple again. Jim helped him and Mrs. Wargula brought out a homemade cheese cake. She told us to take off our old damp boots and brought us some clean, dry wool socks. Mr. Wargula put our boots next to the radiator—but not too close— to dry. He said he’d put some neat’s-foot oil on those when they dried a little better. Mr. Wargula knew all about proper care of boots because he’d been a soldier in Europe during WWII, and he was presently a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. Mrs. Wargula poured more coffee all around and offered to run our road clothes through the washer and dryer later.
We sat at the table gradually warming up, and Donnelly and I exchanged a glance. Through bloodshot eyes from 14
hours of riding that day andW
four days in the rain, it was the flat, neutral glance of two people who were thinking exactly the same thing, no expression required. Looking at these friends, I wondered how I had ever thought it possible to cut myself off from them. They were good friends, but would they be able to come to Canada to see us? Wave, perhaps, from across Niagara Falls? It was hard to imagine.
When we got home the next day the welcome mat rolled out all over again. Our parents were tremendously relieved to see us back, and I was quite content to be there. I called my girlfriend and we talked for a long time. She said she was glad I was home. .
After the trip Donnelly and I never mentioned moving to Canada again. The subject never came up. It took a special courage and conviction to leave everything behind, and I don’t think either of us ever really had it. My parents eventually sold the Honda 160 for me when I was J
in Vietnam.
I look at the Canadian trip now and no conventional description of the journey fits exactly; I can’t see it as merely an adventure or a fall vacation or a first motorcycle trip. In retrospect, I think it was just practice for subsequent journeys and other homecomings. A dry run.~
