A Very Long Day

I apologise for writing an adverse number of travel stories, but to be honest these stories most easily come to mind.  This story took place 49 years ago on March 27th, 1975, so it seems appropos to write about it now.

On the Tuesday before Easter that year, once my father came home from work, we three kids were loaded into the car about four in the afternoon, bound for California.  My sister, Lani, named after a Hawaiian girl my mother had looked after when she worked in a hospital in Weyburn Saskatchewan, was 18 months older than me; my brother, nicknamed Terry, was 5 and a half years older.  As the youngest, I was 11.  The plan was to see Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, Seaworld in San Diego and then drive up to San Francisco.  My father had to be back at work on April 7th.  I'm not going to talk about the whole trip with this post; just the beginning and our first full day on the highway south.

That first leg to Great Falls, about five hours and some, was no pleasant trip.  After flurries all the way to the U.S. border, Interstate 15 through Montana was covered with sheer black ice.  My father had driven on such stuff most of his life, but it took all his concentration to keep our station wagon on the road — while we in the back were made to keep absolutely silent.  I remember only the blowing snow and that all was pitch black except for our headlights, with the road a band of jet below the front hood.  I don't think I fully understood how dangerous a situation we were in, but my father's tense grip on the wheel remains in my mind.

Great Falls itself was utterly without snow at all; we rolled into a Best Western — those were everywhere in those days — and spent an easy night before getting up the next day, Wednesday the 27th.  We were supposed to sleep the next night in Salt Lake City, and since in those days I saw much of the trip with a big red Colliers atlas on my lap, I marked every town as we passed through it.

Our target was Monida Pass, 6,870 ft. above sea level, in the Bitterroot Range; that would take us through the Rockies and down into Idaho.  We passed through Red Rock and it began to snow a little, and when we reached Dell, about 24 miles from the pass, my father inquired at the Sheriff's station there and confirmed that the pass was open.  But as we went south, starting the climb at the little burg of Lima, the snowfall got thicker and the snow deeper.  Sure enough, we encountered a roadblock, only to learn that yes, the pass was open, but only to cars with chains.  We didn't have chains, so we turned around and went down again.

My father couldn't find a place in Lima at the time that sold chains, so it was back to Dell.  He loaded the chains into the back of the car and we started up again towards the pass.  It was still snowing.  When the road was snow-covered, we stopped at the side and with some help from my brother, my dad got the chains on.  It wasn't his first time; growing up in Alberta, working on oil rigs and for a time as a firefighter, he'd encountered most things like this.  He just hadn't thought we'd need chains, as it was late March.  As I write this in 2024, here in Calgary, there's a foot of snow on the ground — but this, too, is unusual.

So, up to the pass, where we found out that the pass had been closed completely, chains or no.  So we turned back again, took the chains off, and got back onto dry roads by the time we reached Dell.

Things weren't going very well; we only had so much time to get to California and hours were slipping away.  There was talk of going around through Wyoming, or maybe getting across into Idaho somewhere by Missoula, but either pretty much meant our losing a whole day.  We went past Red Rock and north all the way to Dillon ... and there my father learned that Bannock Pass to the west was still open.  Bannock is 7,684 ft., in the Beaverhead Mountains, and this sounded uncertain.  And we headed south, then west on 324 for about an hour, and lo and behold, the road over Bannock Pass was dry.

We descended into this beautiful, wide green valley in Idaho, where we picked up Highway 28 at Leadore.  This is the Lemhi river valley, and after all the snow and difficulty we'd had with it, the March emerald grass was a most welcome sight.  My mother remarked on it more or less continuously, while we listened to the local station on our way to Idaho Falls.

Then a news report interrupted our reverie, warning travellers to stay away from Highway 28.  A state-wide notice told us that some dam was in danger of breaking and that it was, in effect, the last place anyone wanted to be.  I never could figure out which dam it was supposed to be; the Lemhi is only 60 miles long and a look along it on google maps shows no such dam.  Who knows what was really meant by that report?  It was repeated periodically, though, and when we looked up the valley, darned if the fluffy clouds on the horizon behind us didn't look like white water.  My mother, more apt to worry about such things, stayed unhinged until we got out onto the flat where we linked up again with Interstate 15, all hunky dory.  We had lost time, though, and reaching Salt Lake City that day was out of the question.  We found a place in Pocatello and sorted ourselves out.  My mother expressed a desire for a sit-down dinner rather than fast food, so we changed our clothes and walked a couple of blocks up the street to a really nice place — velvet table clothes, wineglasses for water, chandeliers, the whole works.

During that walk, as the tale would be told hundreds of times in years ahead, my mother remarked about the day, "All we need now is an earthquake."

The answer is Yes.

On the evening of March 27th, 1975, about 63 miles south of Pocatello on the Idaho-Utah border, a 6.3 earthquake occurred at 8:31 PM mountain daylight time.  We were in the restaurant, waiting for our food.  That would suggest that the earthquake hit us roughly 12 to 18 minutes after my mother made her remark.  Our first hint of it was the jingling of the glass in the restaurant chandeliers.  After that was a most uneasy feeling of the table and glasses moving; I clearly remember reaching out and snatching my glass before it fell over.  And then, queerly, as my mother put it, the building seemed to "get up and dance a bit, before settling down again."  Then it was over.

My mother was roundly accused of causing it, but we were all too tired to press the point — that would come later, when for the next thirty years my mother was firmly told not to say any bad thing that might happen out loud.  As I remember, the restaurant was practically empty; it was nearly nine o'clock on a Wednesday, so that more or less fits with my own restaurant experiences as a long-time cook.  We were served; there was no evidence of damage.  Placidly we returned to our hotel and settled down to sleep, all exhausted.

Drunkeness

I'm not a person who gets drunk.  I enjoy the taste of alcohol, which I've learned over the years is not the reason why most people drink.  When I was young, vodka was my preference, but as I've aged I'm more apt to buy a bottle of rye; specifically, Gibson's silver label.  There is a mild pleasure in being lightly affected by alcohol, but I imbibe infrequently, drinking perhaps just two or three bottles, or about 3 litres a year.

Yes, you read that right.

Once upon a time I had a friend at university, who was not a university student.  His name was Ken and he was the graphic artist for the university newspaper, the Gauntlet, in which I wrote weekly.  Ken had a degree in commercial art from the Alberta School of Art & Design ... and in some strange way, our personalities just meshed.

I would head up to the Gauntlet every once few weeks, even long after I'd finished university, and sit in Ken's office while he worked on business ads and the occasional bit of art for a story.  The atmosphere was so lax that no one cared that we would sit and chat all day, as I studied Ken's movements or asked him for advice for my own page design efforts.  And then, if I had nothing doing that night, we'd go down to "The Den," the campus bar, and buy a pitcher of beer.

Ken usually bought the first one, and then I'd buy the second ... and for reasons I've never been able to explain, one of us would then buy a third.  And sometimes a fourth.  I discussed the phenomenon often.  I did not like to get drunk, it was not my habit to get drunk; but somehow, with Ken, as we'd talk for hours in the bar about Frank Zappa and social engineering, the idiosyncracies of women and art, I'd drink and drink until yes, I would get absolutely smashed.

I'm a very relaxed, high functioning drunk, as it happens.  Ken's bus and mine both came to the same stop, so we'd walk over and go on talking until one of our busses showed up.  Mine at that time was the 73, which was just a 12 minute ride to the little condo village I was living in at the time.  From the Den to my front door, there wasn't a single street that needed crossing and I don't ever remember losing consciousness.  Michelle was always sweet to me when I got home, because I was always a sweet drunk ... and in all, this didn't happen more than about half a dozen times.

One time, however, I was sitting peaceably on the bus home.  I'd guess I was about 29 or 30.  I sat contemplating our long and fruitful discussions when the bus made a sharp jog to the left ... and whoop, it tossed me right off the seat and into the aisle.  I barely remember the short trip, but next thing I knew I was on my ass, on the gravelled bus floor, with others jumping up to ask concernedly if I was all right.  And I began to laugh.

I didn't stop laughing even as arms helped me back onto the seat, and for the rest of the short trip I giggled most of the way home.  I'd never been that drunk before, and I was never remotely that drunk again ... but somehow, I found it funny.

Ken moved on from the Gauntlet in the mid-90s, and after that I'd go over to his house and sit in his living room, surrounded by three giant tanks that housed his turtles.  Sometimes we go for a drink at a nearby bar, but the magic that would make me drink hard with him evaporated.  Things just change.  I lost track of Ken entirely somewhere between 1998 and the year 2000.

The Piano

After Michelle and I were married on November 15th, 1986, at which time we were living in a rowhouse in northwest Calgary, she was able to convince her parents that it was time for them to make good on a promise.  See, like her father, Michelle had pursued two degrees; the second was education, because she'd always wanted to be a teacher like her father.  The first degree was in music composition and theory.  Michelle's major had been French horn, and her minor the flute ... but of course, as she had lived with her music teacher father and had invested herself in music and band since before puberty, she could also play piano.

Her parents had for a long time been in possession of a family heirloom, an upright grand piano made of rosewood, which dates to the mid-19th century.  It still exists, though I don't have it now.

This piano comes to my shoulder, or about Michelle's height of 5 ft. even, and weighs about 700 lbs.  We never did get an exact weight for the instrument, though looking around on the net they can weigh anywhere between 500 to 900 lbs.  So I'm splitting the difference.  It was made in Ontario somewhere around 1850 to 1860 and was afterwards transported by train to Manitoba after 1880, as an object of the Williamson family.  Eventually it came into the possession of Floyd Williamson, Michelle's father, who lived in Calgary before Michelle was born here.  I was also born here, and I can tell you, finding two people in Calgary who were both born here is no small feat.

And so, on a warm day in February 1987, this piano came into our possession.  My initial feelings about it were somewhat indifferent.  I am no musician and have never had any particular gravity for the profession.  I can sing, and I've performed as a singer before an audience more than a dozen times ... back when I had a voice.  But playing a piano was not my forte.

We lived in that rowhouse for not much longer that year, before moving into the apartment in Sunnyside.  The piano came with us, naturally, which was no mean feet because the Sunnyside apartment was a walk-up with no elevator, and we had to get this beast up three half flights of stairs.  Thankfully, it was on wheels and I was just 23 at the time, with 23-year-old friends.  And so, using six-by-twos as ramps, and a six-by-two as a brace, and a certain amount of stupidity (as I'll explain in a minute), we did at last get the piano into our apartment.

We lived in the Sunnyside apartment for, let me see ... 14 months.  In May of 1988, after many months of trying to determine if Michelle was fertile, and then if I was fertile (and this is a story of its own), we learned that Michelle was pregnant and was due the end of September.  The apartment did not allow kids, and though we asked for an exemption we were turned down.  So with the deadline approaching, we found a house on Centre Street (3808, it's still there and it looks like hell).  And moved the piano again.

Unbeknownst to us the first time, and frustratingly unbeknownst even to my father-in-law, who had only ever once had to move the piano, when he was in the army and had stronger friends than I had, pianos can be taken apart like any machine.  Somehow, this had never occurred to any of us.  I noticed the screws just before our leaving Sunnyside, and asked around, getting the answer, "Oh sure they come apart and go back together just fine."

I don't feel entirely bad about this.  In the last 30-something years, anytime I've mentioned that fact to someone, they've been surprised by it.  Anyway, getting the piano out of the apartment went a lot easier the second time — though taking a piano apart still leaves one rather unwieldy piece that weighs about 350 lbs.  Realistically, on any kind of stair, even a landing, it takes four people to handle it.

So we moved onto Centre Street and my daughter was born.  The rent was outlandish, but it had been the only place we could find in a tight market; in fact, all through August that year, we weren't sure we'd find a place.  We made a go of it for just a year, before finally we had to give it up.  The rent was a mere $750 for 1989, back when I was in university and Michelle was working in daycare, being unable to get a teaching job; still, we couldn't swing it.  And so I moved the piano a third time.

We moved into a townhouse next to Queen's Park graveyard; the rent was less, we had three bedrooms and no basement, and we were there for seven years.  All of my daughter's memories of the piano are mostly of that time.  Michelle tried to teach me some, and for a brief time I could play a recognisable version of Silent Night.

Steadily, I began to love that thing.  The marvelous wood, the ivory and ebony keys, the resonant sound, the very fact of the thing enchanted me year by year, until I really began to think of it as "mine" as much as it was Michelle's.

In September 1994, and I'm sorry I'm not going into this at this time, Michelle's multiple sclerosis stopped being in remission and over a period of about three weeks she lost all control over all four limbs.  Over the next three years, caring for her, caring for my daughter, trying to hold onto work, praying that something would change and things would improve, our lives became a raging sea.  It all came to a bitter end, the worst period of my life, between the summer of 1996 and February of 1997.  And on February 24th of '97, I and my father moved the piano for the last time into a storage shed, with all of Michelle's things, before giving the keys to her parents.  I have not seen the piano since.

Storms in the Mid-west

The four days of April 29th through May 2nd of 2002 were some of the hardest that Tamara and I have ever spent together ... and we had been together in person for only four weeks.  The consequences would plague and mess up our lives until just days before Canada shut down as a country on account of covid.  I can't begin to tell the whole story, not now; so much of it is embarrassing, so much would seem to an outside viewer as perhaps the stupidest string of decisions that two people might conceivably make, one destined for disaster.  Yet we are still together, nearly 22 years; in fact, we are just 15 days out from that number.

On the second day, we woke up in a motel in Davenport, Iowa, anxious to drive across the country to seek a friend of Tamara's on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.  We started out early, it was a fine day, and unquestionably Iowa is a beautiful state to drive through.  We reached and passed through Des Moines on I-80, and thereafter the scenery grew rich and green and flabbergastingly beautiful.  I'd never seen green hills like that in my life, though Tamara could remember such.  It all seemed fairylike until we came to a sign that let us know the Missouri border was 35 miles away.

Somehow, in Des Moines, we'd missed some twist and turn that would keep us on I-80, and had wound up driving south on I-35 instead.  Naturally, we took stock and turned around ... whereupon I made the stupid suggestion that we should drive cross diagonally across Iowa rather than head back to Des Moines and find the right interstate.  I had a map; I'd never been lost before; Iowa's a generally flat country and heck, while I was there, I wanted to see Iowa.  So cross-country we went.

And I got lost.  I'd spent too much time on Alberta roads, which follow rules of north and south, east and west, in grids that make sense.  Backcountry Iowa is nothing like that, as anyone who knows Iowa can say, as they vigorously nod their heads just now.  In some dumpy gas station in fuck knows where, a place not apparently marked on the map in any way that I could find (and I am a fellow who knows maps), Tamara and I had a fight.  A bad fight, an accusation fight, the sort of fight that couples who have been married for three years never want to have again.  Then we picked a random direction and drove until a place that was on the map went by.

The fight evaporated, many apologies were made, we found out way to Council Bluffs, where we took I-29 north to Sioux City, then Sioux Falls.  We bought some food for the car and struck out west on I-90, which we could safely follow all the way to Seattle.

The fight was long forgotten by then.  Tamara was feeling fairly good about still driving, so we weren't sure about stopping in Mitchell or going on.  Then the weather made up our minds for us.

I'm not a hundred percent sure on this; I've looked at maps many times and I've never quite been able to absolutely state where we wound up.  It was six-thirty, there was still sun in the west, but a storm so black that Tamara was talking about tornadoes she'd seen and lived through in Kentucky, where she lived as a girl until she was 11.  I have to admit, I can't say for sure I've ever seen a storm black out the sun like that.  We were following an eighteen-wheeler, about 50 yards ahead of us, when the hail hit.

This was literally like driving through a curtain.  The road was dry, bare, and then it was pure white and an inch-deep in hail.  Tamara's Buick LS immediately began to plane as the tires lost their grip on the road ... but we weren't thinking of that, because the truck in front of us began planing as well.  Swear to gawd, it began to swing 90-degrees to the road, right in front of us, and we thought we were going to have to aim for the space between the axles to save ourselves.  Tamara gave our car some gas, just as the trucker got the truck starting to straighten out, and we came up to his back corner, missing the trailer by about five feet.

As we slowed down, an overpass approached and we agreed, the hail still falling, that "fuck this," we were done for the day.  We turned off and rolled along a very low quality yet somewhat paved road, towards I think a place called "Spencer."  I'm pretty sure it started with an "s"; I was using a road map and identifying where we were by the road number.  If I'm right, it was "431st Ave."   The map of Spencer on google maps looks right for the layout of where we stayed the night, in this very low-brow country motel with six rooms, built of not-thick cinderblock.

We weren't keen on the accommodations.  But we were hungry and tired and the only place to eat was this little roadside cafe across the road.  We showered, changed, and tramped out for what we expected to be half-rate diner food.

I cannot remember what the place was called ... but without question, in 2002, it served the best damned food anywhere in South Dakota.  And not just because we were hungry; I was still working as a cook then.  The food was outrageously well made and served.  The server was warm, friendly, chatty, funny and had a great sense of humour.  We stayed and ate two meals each, and bought a fifth to take on the road with us the next day.  I had a hamburger and then two pieces of fish in a tartar sauce I've never tasted since.  I can't remember what Tamara ate.

We liked the restaurant so much, we went over before leaving to have breakfast there.  Damn.  It was so good.

Well, that was the 30th of April.  Probably do the first two days of May before I build up the courage to talk about the 29th.

Clouds and Rhinos

Thinking back to 1987, when my first wife Michelle and I lived in a neighbourhood called Sunnyside, along the Bow River just across from downtown Calgary.  We used to go on walks along the river, often in the evening.  I remember there was a bench we'd sometimes sit on the faced west, where we could rest and watch the sunset above the river as it flowed by.

One such evening in the summer, Michelle commented on the prettiness of the pink sky, and how sweet it looked above the trees.  Being 23 and terribly wry and cynical, I made some joke about the purplishness of her language being worse that the pink sky, and as was her want — she was a small girl, ten inches shorter than me and just half my weight — she lowered her head and butted me as hard as she could in my shoulder.

I'd felt that many times, so I just laughed and replied, "So it goes.  I married a rhino, and the clouds were pink."

She laughed, and I laughed, and I suggested that would be a good title for an autobiography someday.  The moment stayed in my head, though ... and some two years later, after our daughter was born, I was in some toy store looking for stuffed animals when I found a pink rhinocerous.  I bought it immediately and gave it to Michelle as a present.  She loved it, and it sat on her bedside table for years.  I'm sorry to say I don't know where it is today.

Michelle passed away quite some time ago ... but our daughter today has a 3-year-old grandson, who takes great delight in slamming his head at every victim within reach.  It just a coincidence, obviously, but of course I can't forget a small, ordinary set of events that took place a very, very long time ago.

The Moment that Tells the World Makes No Sense

During Easter of 1979, my parents took my sister and me on a 10-day vacation to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, the only actual time I've been to the latter.  They wanted to get as early a head start on the trip as possible, so we left Thursday afternoon before Good Friday.  A quick search on google informs me that was the 12th of April.

I was in junior high, with my last class letting out at 2:20 in the afternoon.  I remember it was Mr. Hodgekins science class.  My parents had the car packed and waiting outside the school, and knowing they were there I had to hurry.  My sister was in grade 10 of high school, so we had to stop over there to pick her up ten minutes later, and then we were off and out of town.

We drove for about six and a half hours and stayed the night in Revelstoke.  This all seems kind of rushed and irrelevant, but this is all a set-up for the point of this story.  The next day, we drove over to Kamloops and then down the old Lytton highway (the Coquihalla turnpike wouldn't be built for another seven years), stopping at Hell's Canyon on the Fraser River for a couple of hours.  We had time to reach Vancouver in the late afternoon, just at the tail-end of rush hour.

My father got lost as we came into Port Coquitlam, so that we wound up wandering back and forth across the Fraser river I think four times.  He was trying to get to North Vancouver, but he hadn't been in Vancouver for some 20 years and nothing was where he remembered it.  I remember we finally got across the bridge into North Vancouver from Burnaby Heights; I can still visualise the way the Stanley Park peninsula and the bay looked.

We were all pretty tired.  The car needed gas and we found a gas station ... but strange as it may sound, this particular gas station didn't have any drinks or candy bars, so I told my mom that I was going to run across the street where I could see a hole-in-the-wall grocery.  I took off like a bolt, caught the lights and cut through the door.  Seems I was always full of energy like that.

It was a very, very old shop, with wooden boards on the floor, a very old dusty smell and very narrow aisles.  And as I came in, paying at the counter, was my science teacher Mr. Hodgekins.  I swear.

He was as gobsmacked as I was.  I said hello to him, he answered hello back ... and that was our whole conversation.  He grabbed his purchase off the counter and seemed to rush out.  Like he was frightened or something.

Coincidences are freaky.