Thunder Road

Back when I was in college I took off every Summer and went hitch-hiking to Canada.  This is no small feat for a boy from Florida as Canada is at least a couple of thousand miles from where I lived.

However, Canada was then a lot more hospitable to Americans than America was, and I suspect still is.  I would not recommend that any American try hitch-hiking in America, at least not as a “vacation”.  Americans who hitch-hike in America are considered vagrants, even back in the late ’70s and early ’80s when I traveled this way.

The summer of my first junior year (I spent five years in college.  You can only be a freshman, sophomore or senior once, but you can be a junior forever.) I toured the Maritime’s (The Eastern Provinces of Canada) and as Fall approached and I had accomplished my tour I thought I would head West to visit some friends in Western Canada from previous trips before returning home.

I found myself on the outskirts of Thunder Bay, Ontario, just after dark on a lonely Saturday night.  (In mid-to-late August this must have been around 10 PM.)  In Canada, this is “Highway 1″, which is the main national highway that crosses the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

I was looking around for a safe, out-of-the-way place where I could unroll my sleeping bag and get some sleep without being noticed when a late-model Pontiac Trans-am pulls over and a young man, not more than a few years older than me pulls over and hops out of the car.

“Can you drive?” he asks me.  “Uh, yes.” I told him.  (It’s pretty rare when you are hitch-hiking for someone you just met asks you to drive his car.  In fact, I can only recall it ever happening once before.  It was in Idaho, Interstate 15, heading South.  an 18-wheeler Peterbilt, privately-owned-and-,driven rig picked me up. After an hour or so the driver asked me if I would like a cup of coffee.  I told him, “No, thanks.”  The driver stood up (yes, he stood up) keeping one foot on the gas pedal and a couple of fingers gently on the wheel and told me it was my turn to drive.  He had an automatic coffee-maker and was going to fix himself some coffee.  I sat down in the seat and took the wheel.  “Keep it at 2300 rpm”, he told me.  Pretty much freaked me out as I had never driven anything so big….back to the Trans Am.)

He popped the small trunk, grabbed my backpack, scrunched it into the truck among his carefully packed luggage (my backpack on these summer trips normally weighed more than 100 pounds), and tossed me the keys to his car. He said, “drive”, and then he got into the back seat. (The back seat in an F-body is pretty damn small and to think this guy would be able to sleep there told me how desperate he was.)

I was a bit hesitant, but I got into the drivers seat.  I was thinking that he had stolen the car and I was reluctant to drive.

He told me, “I have to report to a new job in Edmonton, Alberta, I’m a hydraulics engineer, at 8 AM on Monday morning.  I am from Halifax, I have been driving for 20 hours and I need to sleep. Can you drive?”

“Yes”, I told him.  “I can drive, no problem”.

“This is a 455 Trans-AM (455 cubic inch displacement V-8 engine)” he told me.  Can you drive fast?”

“Yes, actually, I have a Datsun ’71 240-Z, and I have a dorm buddy who has two 455 Trans-Ams.” (Actually, the 240-Z, 2.4 liter or 145 cubic inch engine, had about the same stop speed of as the Trans Am, a bit over 200 kph, but the Trans Am was much faster from 0-100 kph)

He scoffed at my 240-Z (which is actually a very quick, nimble and fast car and could do over 200 kph, with a front spoiler.  Before I put the front spoiler on it I needed a lot of new, fresh road to even do 175 kph, because the car was airfoil shaped and at high speed it would obtain lift and drift. Once the front spoiler was installed, the car would hug the road and I could even take my hands off the wheel doing 200 kph on freshly paved Highway 20 in the Western panhandle of North Florida, the “Pensacola Road”.), but seemed to gain some confidence by my stating that I did own another notable fast car.

“Don’t spare the gas”, he told me.  “I do not care how fast you go, just drive safely.  However, you have to drive fast because it’s over 1500 miles to Edmonton, and I have to be there by this time tomorrow night.”

I had been thinking it would take me days to reach Edmonton so this was like a God-send to me.  I could tell he did not really want to talk a lot, so I fired up the car, and carefully put the auto-transmission into drive and smoothly accelerated up to highway speed.  “Faster”, he said.

I took the car up to around 120 mph (190 kph) and he seemed to be happy with that.  The car was rock-solid stable, the highway was great, smooth, and with wide shoulders.  After about 30 minutes we began to skirt a town and he asked me to go into the town to top off the tank and get some ice cream. We topped off the tank first.  The car only took a few gallons, but he told me it was late and we would not know when and where we would be able to get fuel again.

There were only a few people around at the ice cream shop we stopped at after fueling up, but as we left I inadvertently barked the tires when backing out of the parking place.  This is not hard to do in a 455 Trans-Am.  A light tap on the gas pedal and the tires talk.

I kept the car slow going back to Highway 1 so that we could eat our ice creams.  Once I got out to the highway, I quickly went to 100 mph (160 khp) and then slowly accelerated from there, until I hit 120 mph (190 kph), where I was comfortable.  The car still had plenty of go.  I was just at a comfortable cruising speed, flying low over Western Ontario.

About 20 or 25 minutes after we left the ice cream shop the dark prairie sky lit up with blue flashing lights.  I could see the grill of a police car just a few feet off my rear bumper.  It was a shock.  I slapped blindly into the backseat, “wake up, wake up”.  I turned on the right side turn signal and gradually let off the gas.  The cop car dropped back and I pulled off to the paved shoulder of the road.

This was in the early 80′s when a driver was expected to remain in the vehicle until the police driver approached the driver.  Today, I believe it is more appropriate for the police to stay in their car and order the driver out of the car over the police car’s loud speaker, especially if a car is pulled over for such excessive speed.

“How fast were you going?” my benevolent friend asked me.  “Maybe 120 (mph)” I said.  “Shit!” he  said.

The police car was OPP, Ontario Provincial Police, not to be trifled with.  The OPP asked for my drivers license and I gave it to him.  He ordered us out of the car.  To my surprise he then crawled inside the car, looking around with his flashlight before emerging and asking me to open the trunk.  I opened the truck with the keys and again I was surprised to see how he nearly crawled inside it, inspecting everything there.

“Don’t worry”, the car owner told me, “we don’t have any alcohol”.  (The law in Canada is/was an open container law.  If you have a “broken” 6-pack, then you are considered to be drinking while driving.  That’s why packs of beer in Canada were/are sold in a sealed cardboard case.  If you have a bottle of whiskey and the cap seal is broken, even if the bottle is full, you are subject to citation or arrest, even if it is in the trunk of the car where you cannot access it.  I suppose the theory is that you could throw a bottle of beer out of the car, or you could put water in the whiskey bottle to make it appear full, or that you could occasionally pull over and fix a new drink from the bottle in the otherwise inaccessible truck.)

After the OPP inspected the trunk of the car, the owner crawled back into the back seat and acted like he was going back to sleep.

“Who’s car is this?” the OPP asked me.  “His”, I said.

“Where are you going?” he asked me.  “Edmonton”, I told him.

“Why were you driving so fast?” he asked me.  I told him the owner of the car, the one sleeping in the back seat had a new job appointment on Monday morning and we needed to get to Edmonton as fast as possible.

The OPP asked me to pop the hood.  I did.  He asked me to rev the engine.  I did.  He closed the hood himself and then began inspecting my drivers license again.

“When will you be back in Ontario?” he asked me.  “Maybe next summer, sir.  I am a college student, just traveling for the summer, “I’m not sure if I will ever be back.”

“You squealed your tires when you left that town back there, why did you do that?” he asked me.  “I’m sorry, sir, this is a Trans-Am. I didn’t mean  to spin the tires.”

“It took me 20 minutes to catch up with you”, he told me, seeming to beleaguer his own vehicle as if it were inferior to the job.

“I’m sorry, sir.  There are no cars on the road.  Since we left that last town we have not even encountered a single car going the other direction and we have not passed any cars going in our direction.  The road is wide open. You have a great highway.”

“Florida?” he said again as he looked at my license.  “Yes, sir” I said.  (I knew that in Florida that the law was that any driver caught exceeding 100 mph under any conditions was to be arrested on criminal charges and only released by bond granted by a judge.  I suspected Canadian laws to be similar, so I really thought I was in some deep doo-doo.)

The OPP handed me back my drivers license and said “keep the speed down.  Good luck.”

I quietly picked my jaw off the pavement, got back in the 455 Trans-Am and eased it back onto the highway.  In my rear-view mirror I could see the OPP car turn around.

I quickly brought the car up to 120 mph and glided through the night while the dull and dark countryside of Western Ontario slowly changed into Manitoba and then into Saskatchewan and Alberta.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 13:30 and is filed under Musings, Personal, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.