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Surly Trucker "When I am dead, my dearest, Rambling along Beach Road, on the shore of Lake Simcoe, we marvelled at waterfront 'cottages' the size of mansions. Our halcyon ride ended at an intersection to a feeder route for the infamous bicycle-eating Trans Canada Highway. Heavy long-haul truck traffic plied Highway 48. We had been doing well until we met three oncoming flatbeds - each carrying a house. Complete with verandas (I'm not making this up). I didn't hear celestial music, but I did experience another near-death episode. The wide loads hung halfway into our lane. Suddenly a car sped past us, hurtling head-on toward the wide loads. At the last possible moment the car driver swerved back into his lane, scarcely missing getting wiped out by the lead house. "Try to explain that to your insurance agent," I chortled. The titter died in my windpipe. From a thousand paces behind, a teamster airhead laid loud and long on his horn - not slowing one scintilla. Another piranha from the carnivorous might-is-right fish school of hard knocks. Two oncoming houses slipped past us. Sharon, behind me, waggled in her lane, attempting to slow the rearward trucker till the last oncoming house was safely past (we had learned that if we appeared a wee bit unsteady, car drivers gave us extra room). No way, José. Not this beef jerky. His 130 decibel Grovea air horn strafed us again. The hell-bent for leather poo-brain steamrollered closer. One hand flashing his lights. The other yanking his horn chain. Both feet tromped on the accelerator. The third and final oncoming house driver maneuvered his new address as far to the right as possible - the big rig's tires chewing embankment gravel - bungalow dangling precariously over the ditch like some clownish off-balance high wire act. Sharon, cat-like, saving one of her nine lives for later, ditched her bike onto the loose gravel. Foolishly, I stayed my course, anchored to a skinny ribbon of asphalt (barrelling a fully loaded bike onto gravel is a mite trickier than it may first appear). The freighter roared within ramming distance. Nearly on top of me. Six-hundred rampaging horsepower. Raging like an iron Minotaur. Seventy tons of death. I held my breath. Think thin! Think thin! I repeated to myself, tucking my elbows in while adhering to my skinny strip of fogline paint like Lycra on Pamela Sue Anderson. A thundering whoosh as Fat Daddy's tractor and twin trailer units scorched past my quivering thighs. A blur of steel and grey. A hairbreadth away. Hot fumes from the engine bounced off my nostrils. My heart thudding, I could have reached out and filed my fingernails on the trailers' box. I felt gadfly small (with brain to match). Eighteen torrid tires smoked past, hammering sickeningly at head height like a dozen and a half hard rubber mallets. Whew! In my peripheral vision, I noted my left arm was still attached. I gave thanks. But the fun wasn't over yet. Past me by mere inches, the crank hack swerved his bucket of bolts onto the gravel shoulder directly in front of me. Grit, dust, sand and rock fragments spat in all directions. Like legions of angry hornets, they stung my bare arms, legs, and face. Belches of black sooty diesel exhaust farted up the oil burner's dual chromed smokestacks. The surly trucker kept his rig of death on the gravel shoulder for the next kilometre. A plume of wavery dust hung in the air, like an achromatic spectre of the Grim Reaper. I almost laughed in relief. Guess he taught me! As my brother, Rob, used to say in his long haul trucking days, "If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch." "My God!" a disembodied voice behind me shrieked. "What the hell are you doing?" Sharon screamed. "Just because you're allowed on the freaking road, doesn't mean you have to prove it! There's no glory in being dead, ya know! Dead right or dead wrong, it doesn't matter. Either way, you're still dead!" Severely lashed, I would forevermore walk with a limp, seeing how Sharon chewed my ass off. A few kilometres farther, we exited onto a side road and made it through Pefferlaw, experiencing no more Big Mack attacks. My heart rate had just about returned to normal when I had yet another close encounter of the near-death kind. A van, pulling a utility trailer, almost clipped us. But unlike the trucker, he gave no warning whatsoever. No traffic was oncoming and, with the wind in our ears, we hadn't heard his approach. He didn't move over one bit. The utility trailer, wider than his van, virtually skinned our legs. When the truck driver had missed me by one inch, I was quite certain he had meant to miss me by one inch. When the van missed us by a hair, he was just plain lucky. "My God!" Sharon gasped, for the second time in as many hours. "Didn't he see us? For crying out loud ... one little wobble and it all would've been over." Ontario was home to the worst collection of
road hogs we'd ever had the misfortune to meet. I wondered how
many were slaughtered daily? |
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