Biking in Westport
February 20, 2008
All through my childhood in Westport I would hear visitors exclaim: “Why are there so many churches in such a small village?” I didn’t have an answer at that time, but later on I came up with an explanation: instant prayer and The Mountain.
More specifically, it was the corner on the Lower Mountain which used to snake its way around Stan Crawford’s house. I would suggest that over the years many a deal was struck with The Almighty on the lower reaches of that hill by a series of young men on bicycles with failed brakes, some with a pant leg wrapped hopelessly around the sprocket, others with the chain flapping randomly beside the bike. Without hand brakes, about all you had was prayer and adrenaline as the white corner of Stan’s house loomed up and you leaned the bike over until the pedals scraped.
There are no atheists on bikes without chains.
I don’t recall any cyclist-shaped silhouettes bashed through that wide white sign at the bottom of the hill, so the prayers must have had some effect.
My pal Don Goodfellow had his disaster on the Upper Mountain. What he told us was that a car turned in to the beach and cut him off just as he hit top speed on the run down from the dump, forcing him to run headlong into the Anglican Cemetery’s wire fence. He reportedly flipped over the page-wire panel and came to rest with a tombstone as a backrest.
I remember joining Bob Conroy, Don, Johnny Wing, Jim Forrester and David Roberts on a ride “back the mountain” to a cheese factory, loading up on a pound of fresh curd each, then coasting back to town. By the time we got home in the hot sun, what was left of the curd was positively leaping around in the bags, a fitting accompaniment for a lunch of green apples.
This was before the days of mountain bikes, though we could have used them. One summer our favourite pastime was to schuss down the hill next to the beach, rolling over old hay and juniper bushes, seeing who could make the slope last the longest while not putting a foot down until the wheel hit water.
Later on it was my great pleasure to introduce my son to cycling in Westport. Charlie and I made a trip around my old haunts a part of every summer’s cruise. One time my mother reported coming upon: “This big lug on a bicycle in the middle of 42, and he had a little kid with him, and a dog on a leash, and they were riding right down the highway!” My sister broke it to her that the obstructions on the road were in all probability Rod, Charlie and Grover returning to the boat after a visit to the Bresee homestead.
Perhaps the greatest triumph of technology over the aging process was the first time Charlie and I rode up the lower mountain. He was about thirteen at the time, and had put a lot of effort into his bike. I had a standard Raleigh12 speed mountain bike, but lots of determination. We had talked about this for months.
Off we went. We passed where we used to have to stop and push our old one-speeds. Then we passed where the best bikes of the sixties gave out. Then we shifted down to the lowest gears and kept grinding at about walking speed. The hill grew steeper, and then nearly vertical. I started to zig-zag across the hill, counting upon my hearing to save me from vehicles in the grip of gravity in the oncoming lane.
I’m not saying it was pretty. There was drool all over the front forks of the Raleigh. I couldn’t talk for wheezing by the time we reached the entrance to Foley Mountain, but I had climbed The Lower Mountain on a bike without putting a foot down, and I didn’t die! My partner seemed much less fatigued. Better gears, I guess.
I had warned Charlie that he would have to look out for himself on the trip down, because in my 14th year I had burned out the speedometer on my bike coasting down this stretch and that speedometer registered up to fifty.
He didn’t seem too impressed, and was even less worried that his digital instruments would be stressed by a little run down the hill. He refused to call it The Mountain.
Off we went, coasting. He drifted a bit ahead. Huh? I have seventy-five pounds on him and he’s getting ahead? On the steepest part of the hill a porcupine waddled out into his lane. In horror I watched him brake neatly, steer around the rodent, and then accelerate away from me again. He made the widened corner at the bottom without incident, then coasted over to The Spring for a drink.
I puffed in behind him. “Thirty-two miles an hour, Dad. That’s a nice hill.”
So much for my fifty miles per hour. “I couldn’t believe it when you coasted away from me like that. What have you done to that bike?”
“Remember what I told you about the bearings in stock bikes? The after-market ones roll with much less resistance. That’s why I spent so much to change them. You should upgrade your bearings and save some effort.”
I don’t remember what I mumbled, but the bike is still hanging in the garage, unchanged.
On the other hand, that porcupine showed me that instant prayer is still very much a part of my repertoire.
Renewing Acquaintances
January 18, 2008
Attending my uncle’s wake in Westport this week proved a jolt of sorts. I talked to Salem farmer Bob Ambler for the first time in 54 years. When I told Howard Maynard’s daughter tales of hunting in their woods during my childhood, he reminded me that his mother had also kept me supplied with .22 ammunition, a practical way to cut down on the woodchuck population on the property.
Jack and Mary Dier don’t look a day older than they did in 1973. How do they do it?
A couple of people at the wake were able to identify me by the blurry photo above my articles in The Review-Mirror.
The jolt came though, when Linda Bryce told me that she had read the column about the Volkswagen Beetle to her dad just before he passed away this week. It wasn’t until a bit later that I made the connection: Linda is the cousin who bought the car from us, and her dad, Don Hannah, had replaced the floorboards for her. They would have known the Beetle even better than we did.
It’s far too easy over the years to forget the intricate connections which have made us who we are.
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Offroad Adventures with a 1973 VW Beetle
By Rod Croskery
Later on in life a man may forget the name of his first love, but he will never forget the intimate details of his first new car. Mine was a yellow 1973 VW Beetle Custom. I chose the Custom model rather than the Superbeetle, because I was skeptical of those newfangled MacPherson struts — thought they were a fad, and CV joints looked to be a maintenance nightmare.
The Beetle was a great car on the road, especially after I replaced the stock bias-ply tires with oversized radials. The thing was amazing on ice: just how amazing I was to discover one Sunday afternoon in February.
The Big Rideau had watered up in mid-winter, leaving a triangular, five-mile expanse of perfectly glare ice. This was too much to resist. Gingerly I drove on at Portland and worked my way up through the gears, getting the feel of the unfamiliar car on the unfamiliar surface. Everything seemed quite well balanced, so I got up into 4th gear and settled into a cruising speed at what I considered the limit of adhesion, 68 miles per hour.
A Ford Courier with a cement mixer in the back came up behind me and then pulled ahead. This would not do. Determined to catch this upstart, I gradually sped up. The Beetle complained, squirmed a bit, then, resigned, settled in all the way up to 80. All of the sudden everything let go at once. There was no gradually-increasing oscillation which normally leads to a spin-out with a Beetle. Nope. All of the sudden I was spinning like a top.
This was quite an interesting sensation: on a zero-traction plane, you go from a vector of 80 mph north to a similar vector counting in about sixty revolutions per minute. I’d never spun that fast or for that long. I started to worry about oil pressure, so I shut the engine off and shifted into neutral. Still spinning, not even slowing, I turned on the tape deck. It worked fine. I was still a mile from any shore and still spinning, so I just settled back and enjoyed the ride.
Eventually the back wheels caught up and the Beetle coasted to a stop. The Ford Courier was long gone over the horizon. I started up again and continued my tour. A new Corvette blew by me, and I chose not to take up the chase. After about an hour of glare-ice driving and a tour to Rideau Ferry and back I had a pretty good feel for the car. 68 miles per hour remained the optimal cruising speed on ice.
The Beetle served us faithfully for ten years and 130 thousand miles. Then it received new floorboards and lived with my cousin for another three. Its only ill-effect from its many off-road adventures was that when we sold the car it was 1 ½ inches longer than when it was new. My dad’s horses had had to tow it quite a lot, sometimes out of ditches, and sometimes like a toboggan over the snowdrifts to the ploughed road. A couple of times I buried the thing while driving on the crust. Once, disgusted, my dad made me wait until spring to recover it. I had to use my wife’s Datsun for a month until the snow melted. What a grouch!
We got rid of the Beetle when our new son arrived. The Rabbit was much safer, but useless off-road. My dad could hardly contain his relief, but two months later he bought his new grandson an army surplus Jeep to drive around the farm.
the Walnut Diary 