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Jass Richards
Category:
Humor
Publisher: Magenta
ISBN-10: 1926891651
Type: Fiction
Pages: 121
Copyright: 2016
ISBN-13: 9781926891651
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
TurboJetslams tells the tale of one person’s pathetic and hilarious attempts to single-handedly stop the destruction of a little piece of beautiful Canadian wilderness by the increasing numbers of idiots who couldn’t care less.
You ever have a neighbour whose behaviour is so mind-bogglingly inconsiderate and so suicide-inducingly annoying that you just want to ask him, in a polite Canadian way, to please stop?
TurboJetslams isn't like that.
Jass Richards' new novel, TurboJetslams, tells the tale of one person's pathetic and hilarious attempts to single-handedly stop the destruction of a little piece of beautiful Canadian wilderness by the increasing numbers of idiots who couldn't care less.
A perfect cottage-warming gift. Boomer lit. Sure to resonate with paddlers everywhere.
Excerpt
Understandably, she was beginning to love winters in her cabin on a lake in the forest. No backhoes. No dirt bikes. No ATVs. No jetslams. No screaming kids.
It would have been perfect. It would have been paradise.
Except that in the third week of December, Bullert and his buddies showed up in their pick-ups pulling trailers full of—snowmobiles.
The Sinclairs came up with their snowmobiles the week after.
Oh well, Vic thought, not to worry, there was a network of snowmobile trails available for their exclusive use. That’s right. Ontario had kindly set aside 279,000 miles of crown land just for snowmobilers.
Snowmobilers are a minority, she thought. Angrily. When she had found out about this. Local business owners, who, she was told, benefit from snowmobilers, are also a minority. So why do they get to determine policy and practice? Policy and practice that affects other people? When they use their trails, no one else can. It’s too damn unsafe. Ask my neighbour’s cross-country ski friend, she muttered to herself. No, wait, you can’t. She’s dead.
And she wasn’t even on the snowmobile trail. She was on the logging road they use to get to the trail.
Or, rather, the racetrack. That’s what they used the trails for. Which meant our government had handed over thousands of miles of crown land to a bunch of men (yes, of course, they’re almost all men) (boys) to use as their personal racetrack.
It would have been bad enough if they’d stayed on the trails. Even the non-designated trails.
But they also used the roads.
It’s nice that we can hear a snowmobile coming from miles away, she’d thought to herself one day. While out walking on said roads. It means we have time to get out of their way.
But it wasn’t enough, she’d discovered, to get off to the side (assuming that’s not where you already were), because that was where the snowmobiles drove.
It wasn’t even enough to get completely off the road and up onto the snowbank, because they liked to ride the banks.
You had to climb up and over the snowbanks to be safe.
No wonder the elderly couple had stopped walking in the winter.
In some countries, pedestrians had the right of way. In Canada, gas-guzzling, fume-spewing, noise-farting, male-driven snowmobiles did.
And of course they used the lake.
They zoomed up and down and up and down, and around, and around, and around, and up and down. They had to leave their tracks on every inch of the lake.
Which was breath-takingly beautiful before they’d arrived.
So she left a note on the Sinclairs’ door after the first weekend, explaining how she so loved the pure white snow in front of her place, would they mind, when they were out snowmobiling, just turning around a few seconds earlier, before they got to her place? They had to turn around anyway, since she was at the end of the cove. It was a dead end. And she’d have to wait until the next snowfall for their criss-crossing tracks to get covered up. She thought maybe if the Sinclairs started turning around a couple lots before the end of the cove, Bullert and his buddies would follow suit.
What they started doing instead was making a point of coming into the cove, right to the end, right in front of her place, then tearing around for a good five minutes before heading back out onto the lake.
And, when she was out walking the following weekend, two snowmobiles roared to a stop a few feet from her. The guy on the first one got off, flipped up his helmet visor, and stomped over to her, his face black with rage. He started yelling at her and jabbing his finger at the air in front of her face.
“If you ever trespass on my property again, I’ll sue!”
Trespass? Oh. She guessed she was trespassing when she left the note on his door. Jeez. Get a grip.
And again she asked herself, how foolish is it to piss off those of us who are here 24/7, when you’re not?
The weekend after that, the Sinclairs arrived to discover that a bunch of grouse had flown into their windows, breaking every one of them. Strange thing that. Middle of winter and all.
Then one Thursday in mid-February, after two months of this winter wonderland, and after a really good snowfall, Vic went out onto the lake with her shovel and built a ramp. Basically, she just moved the snow from here to there. ‘There’ being pretty much in front of the deranged beaver’s dam. You know how spiders on LSD weave fucked-up webs? Half the anchor lines are hanging in mid-air and most of the radiating lines don’t? There was a beaver on Paradise Lake that must’ve been similarly brain-damaged. She thought maybe it was because of all that gas in the lake. Anyway, it had built this bat-shit dam. Some of the trees it felled ended up being too big to drag. So they were just there in a jumble of pick-up-sticks-for-giants. Others were the right size, but once they were felled, they were used for abstract art, not a safe, secure home. So behind the jumble was a zig-zag palisade of pointy stumps. Thin, pointy stumps.
Friday afternoon, four o’clock, the Sinclairs and Bullert’s crew arrived en masse. As soon as they turned off their pick-ups, they turned on their snowmobiles. As usual.
An hour later, they got on them.
And an hour after that, they saw the ramp. And couldn’t resist.
The first one went over. His machine made a weird noise, then stopped.
The second guy didn’t hear that because he was busy revving his machine. He went over. Probably landed on the first guy.
The third and fourth guys fought about who went over next. They went over together. Sweet.
The fifth guy was so pissed off to be last, his machine positively skyrocketed over the ramp.
None of them got up and walked away.
It was the quietest weekend they’d had in a very long time.
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