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Athor Alfred Cool
Category:
Humor
Publisher: Amazon.com
ISBN-10: 1463767668
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 96
Copyright: August 17 2012
ISBN-13: 9781463767662
Price: $1.99 (eBook)
At the crossroads of reality and insanity (again!) during the worst deluge the rain forest of northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia has produced since we began recording West Coast weather history, the author has to make a decision: beer run or not?
The year is 1977. Over 7 days in October, this true-story, first person narrative takes place on the central coast of BC. During a record month of storms, the action picks up when the 2 spirited BC boys blitz across hundreds of kms of dangerous back roads to get to the closest cold beer store.
Cool withdraws from SFU, broke and cynical, to replenish his funds by returning to logging, finding work on Northern Vancouver Island. After travelling all day Cool arrives at Beaver Cove, a ‘No Booze Allowed’ camp, as gales begin howling during torrential rainfall. Within hours, the rain and the melt-off of higher-elevation snowfall combine to cause floods and slides. Within 2 days they are isolated. Roads close, ferries over-book, planes are grounded and Health Department regulations close all bars, stores and restaurants. Cool has no money for travel or food anyway. Work stops and management leave the camp with little food and no heat, lights or clean drinking water.
Cool devises a plan which involves Drake, the other guy left in camp, and his car. Drake has his girlfriends’ broken-down 1964 Vauxhall Viva. That’s enough to get Cool scheming and them moving, giving them an outside chance for self-rescue if they put it all on the line. With only the vague notion of a ‘4x4 back road’ to Campbell River as their map they quit the camp, ‘heading for the barn’. For hours, they negotiate deserted mountain roads and near-deadly detours across raging creeks, down mud-slides and through bogs, running on only fumes and luck. Arriving, finally, at a town amazed at their survival, they discover they’ve popped up at a totally wrong destination. Most of their money goes to gas, oil and beer leaving them no choice but to continue into the night, nursing the car through a further four hours and 250 kms of storming weather. Eventually they arrive, exhausted, back in Vancouver where Drake is turned out by his girlfriend and Cool has to confront unpaid bills and night shift taxi driving. Inspired again, he makes plans to keep the adventure alive and go to the ‘Charlottes.
Through the eyes of some of the characters who lived and worked here - before the province we live in today evolved - this fast-paced comedy-quest champions the lure of adventure and the devil-may-care attitude it takes, sometimes, to win against the odds.
Excerpt
The camp was eerily silent when we got back. The amber lights in the yard were off. Power was out. Drake and I tried the door to the cook shack. It was locked and those lights were off too. Someone was paying massive homage to this deluge, and us bunk-house boys were going to feel the real pinch.
"Oh oh," I said, "no power, no food. Let's get outta here and get some beer before the roads are closed too." Posted beside the "DRY CAMP" notice on the cook shack door was a paper note, flapping in the wind, which read, "Power out. Sandwiches at 6 PM tonight."
Drake said, "Nothin' but the best for the boys on the riggin' around here. I guess we can try to start the car."
"Wha'd'ya mean, try?"
"Points can get sticky. She ain’t good in the rain."
#
"Well, you are truly correct, it is a classic." I stood in the downpour, next to the driver's door, my attitude a little deflated. The Viva, which once was probably powder-puff blue, looked to be held together mostly by rust now. I had doubts the almost flat and rotting tires could ever be fully inflated again. The windshield had taken a rock or baseball bat on the passenger side, so it was starred and criss-crossed from side to side with cracks. A couple of days ago, when I first saw it, I thought it had been abandoned. Now I was sure.
"Pop the hood," Drake said doubtfully, "I'll turn her over. Let's see what we have to work with before you take off the rain gear." Drake, sitting in the driver's seat now, cranked the starter as I leaned into the engine under the 'bonnet'. I heard only the predictable and sad clicking of the solenoid.
"Needs a jump." I hollered back, exhausting my automotive knowledge. Two and a half frustrating hours later, we recruited a mechanic. Louis was a balding, over-weight, forty-ish Portuguese guy with a big generous smile and a dark complexion. He hadn't shaved in a week. He was wearing blue, grease-stained coveralls, a filthy welder’s skull cap, and had hands like hams with hairs on his knuckles. He had volunteered to help us on his break after I bribed him with hash. We borrowed first his knowledge, then his tools, and finally Louis himself, who, after about forty-five minutes, a battery test, a jump, several compression reads, a radiator flush, a cleaned in-line gas filter and a lot of swearing and very creative name-calling, most of which was directed at the 'car', told us to, “Wait a minute.”
He left for the garage. Returning with a spray can and a very determined look on his face, he emptied half the can of Ether straight into the carburetor, jumped her again, and managed to get the Viva spluttering to life. This treatment was usually reserved for cleaning out D9 Cat manifold intakes after wintering outside, but seemed to work as well for this British engineering wonder and dominator of Anglias. The Viva sat before us in the rain coughing up a sort of sick idle. Louis took her for a few donuts around the paved parking lot, leaving behind him enough smoke to cover a platoon attacking a pillbox.
"You boys plan on taking this thing anywhere today?" asked Louis, coughing horribly, climbing out of the car a little blanched from the volumes of carbon monoxide leaking into the interior during the short test drive. He was obviously the kind of wrench jockey who found it in his heart, and necessary, to warn the innocent of pending disaster. I believe he found this generosity after I bribed him with those same two grams of black hash.
"Town." I said hopefully.
"Well, she's only firing on three cylinders, and her oil is low and draining out of two or three seals and is probably blowing oil from the rest of her cylinders like the exhaust is into the interior. The brake fluid is leaking, no gushing, out of the cracked reservoir. That's one of the smells coming from under the hood. That real bad smell is the heater hoses that are shot, probably won't heat the car and definitely won't keep the windshield clear. You shouldn’t plan on driving too far until those are replaced."
"That's okay," said Drake, sounding strongly confidant, "I have a cloth for that."
Thick, black Portuguese eyebrows raised, incredulous, and Louis continued, "I think she's only braking on the right front, but that's okay ‘cause she pulls like a train to the left so it kind of evens out. Go slow from here and you might make it back to her parking spot. Oh yeah, first gear is slipping 'cause the clutch is almost shot. Or it could be the synchromesh. Not sure. Maybe both. I don't think there's any brake lights and no backup lights neither, but that don't matter 'cause I couldn't get her into reverse. Right turn signal works, somehow, but the left don't, so don't turn left."
"No left turns. Okay. Thanks, Louie, we'll watch that." I said. Louis left to return to his job, conflicted no doubt, in awe of our bravery and contemptuous of our mechanical ignorance. Hey, hate the car Louie, not the driver.
"You don't happen to have any good news for us, do you Lou?"
He turned around, walking backwards, great big wide smile on his face and said, "Front grill is in pretty good shape."
"I was going to take care of that reverse thing when I got back to town." Drake said, after Louis left. I appreciated his trying to ameliorate the situation.
"Well, always safety first," I said, adding "he missed the fact there is only one headlight, and it seems to illuminate left and high." I was aware of this because when Louis brought the car back to where we were standing, the single headlight shone up and reflected off one of the bunkhouse windows.
"Only works on high beam, and the passenger side window leaks. Good thing we're just going for beer. We'll be back before dark, for sure."
"And who can trust a mechanic doesn't know if it's synchro’ or clutch, anyway?" I added. So we hopped in, or rather, I waited for Drake to open the passenger side door for me as the outside lock had been popped into the door when someone had either tried to break in or out. I eventually discovered it was pretty tricky from the inside too without locking vice grips on the handle spindle. When I got in, I noticed the radio worked. "Hey, have we got tunes?"
"Top of the line." said Drake.
I sourced the painful screech coming from the single wiper that worked, driver’s side, smudging only a slim pie-slice, clearing less than half the driver's view. Wiper metal scraped on the windshield glass, zinging every one of my fillings. The wiper slapped the hood of the car violently each turn it took, scraped half way back up the windshield, then slapped violently down onto the hood again. I noted this inefficiency in the operation of cleaning the windshield and asked Drake about it.
"Uh, Drake, is that the wiper that works?"
"Yeah, but don't worry, I know how to fix the noise." Drake turned the radio volume up until it drowned out the wiper's scraping. CBC talk radio was blaring into the car. "See, you can't hear it now." he yelled, meticulously plucked eyebrows arching toward me. I was pretty sure mine were arching too from the increasing earache pain caused both by that radio volume and his station choice.
As we rolled away from the bunkhouse, I fiddled with the tuner and found static everywhere but on the CBC frequency. Our limited selection was due to the sad fact the aerial was broken off about three inches above the hood. We were doomed to being subjected to opinionated Ontario talk radio, bad puns, denigrating comments targeting Canada's western provinces and self-aggrandizing on a scale only available where obscene amounts of public money supplement content decisions with no recourse to the demands of a legitimate market.
"That can be fixed, y'know." I yelled back.
"Really, how?"
"Buy a real fuckin' car."
Drake ignored my comment, assuming what I was to learn was ‘the driving position’. However, I wasn’t quite sure at that moment whether he was anticipating a very fast and curvy corner, or he was brazenly displaying a latency issue. I squirmed toward the passenger door awkwardly, ready to employ the aptly named vice grips if this got out of hand. Drake, leaning in close to my crotch, working the clutch, grinding the transmission, finally forced his way into the suspect rear gear. In order to see to drive, he had to peer out of the cleaned lower portion of his side of the window. I noticed bits of rubber peeling back from the wiper blade too, as I writhed tortuously away from the steady stream of water pouring in on me from the passenger window and was equally repulsed from the proximity of Drake's head to my lap. The smell in the car was a foul collage of stale beer, mold, exhaust fumes and a particularly disturbing stench from the heater.
I focused on trying to look through the broken windshield and saw nothing but broken windshield. I leaned into the water drip finding that if I sat rigid and jammed against the door, I could just see past the 'bonnet' and catch a glimpse of what I hoped would soon be some of the road ahead. I marveled at my foresight to leave my rain gear on and hoped my body language would have deterred any thoughts Drake might be displaying with his body language about anything other than driving. Since it seemed I had the choice, I felt it more probable I could endure the Chinese water torture more than I could Drake making homosexual passes at me. We lurched violently to the left at the gate, finally coming to a full stop with a grinding metallic screech, just before T-boning into a convoy of towering and unforgiving logging trucks racing along the highway. Trying to be helpful, I yelled over the radio, "Well, the brake works."
"Yeah," Drake yelled back, "y'know, I love this little car. I might get it insured after all."
In a cloud of blue smoke we backfired out of the yard and onto the busy 'highway to beer' finding our place at the tail end of the convoy of other deserters heading for 'Hardy.
#
We mushed our way along on soft, worn out tires, the single 'working' wiper snapping angrily at the hood all the way. We had decided, yelling and hand signaling over the radio, that we should try Port McNeill for beer. I wanted to add, "If we make it that far." but found that part difficult to hand signal. After finally getting up to speed, a feat accomplished mostly due to the lengthy downhill run past the dryland sort and the carloads of hopefuls trying to escape on the last we’d see of the NIP, the car seemed to float along okay. Drake feverishly wiped the inside of the cloudy windshield while the stream from the leaking door continued to pour in on me.
My misgivings about Drake’s imagined and unwelcome advances toward me subsided when it became clear he was only trying to see through the wiper pie slice so he could keep us on the road. Now, Drake was sitting up more behind the wheel as the wind of the open road was blowing the rain off the windshield as fast as it splattered down. Our smoke screen was less obvious at these speeds, and there was no need to abuse the brake on the highway. The exhaust coming into the car seemed to leave just as fast from various rust holes and, though I was beginning to feel both a slight elation and a little ill, I was glad to be on the road. The radio was an irritant, but we were on a beer run, so the little things didn't actually count anyway.
Yelling over the voice of the very pedantic Don Herron, subbing again for Barbara Frum and waxing poetically about some drivel, I hollered, "McNeill?" Drake looked at me, questioning. He hadn't heard me while he was watching the road. "Maybe we should check Port McNeill before we go all the way to 'Hardy?" He gave me the thumbs up acknowledgment, which is bilingual Canadian pidgin, reducing our communication to hand signals rather than strain our vocal chords even further trying to converse across the front seat of the Vauxhall.
By the time we reached Port McNeill, I was hallucinating from the carbon-monoxide poisoning building up in my blood stream. Certainly I felt both a suspicious sense of well-being and a sickeningly strong need to vomit as we pulled off the highway, heading into the town. We began braking almost immediately because we had to negotiate at least a half mile of a varying downhill trend to get to the bar. We scraped the hell out of the single front brake pad, finally making our way into a sort of crash landing at the side of the beer store parking lot. This followed a precarious run through a controlled intersection where the traffic light was not working, then our ricocheting off a cement barrier in front of the Cold Beer and Wine store at the hotel, after which we finally rolled to a stop.
I was considering taking up religion while walking tentatively to the store while Drake got out and worried over the newest dent in the right front fender of the car. Gulping huge mouthfuls of fresh air, my head began to clear and my stomach was settling as I entered the beer store. I was still a little dizzy.
The babe behind the counter was young, slim, native, and had long black hair. She looked me over with pretty, smart, brown eyes. She was wearing ea
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