The CliffR Project

`THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES'

CHAPTER 22

   While I lived at Rochdale College in Toronto in the fall of
1969 after being fired as manager of the MTYD rock band, I had
been discussing the expansion of consciousness with someone. My
favorite claim at the moment was that my consciousness had gone
from here (hand at the waist) to here (hand at my neck), because
of my restrained use of psychedelics during my years with the rock
band.

   The other party looked at me and said, "the consciousness of
the whole planet has been going up sky high since the early
sixties. Without the drugs, your consciousness would probably have
expanded from here (hand at the waist) to here (hand way over the
head)". I knew in my little heart of hearts that he was right.

   Drugs had just gone along for the ride and tried to take all
the credit. Unfortunately drugs also took a lot of good people
right out of the picture. Because of this realization and other
factors, on February 10th, 1970, I stopped smoking the good old
stuff cold turkey, forever.

   After returning to Vancouver in the spring, I knocked around
for a year. Eventually I took up with a small group of people,
some like me who had dropped out of drugs. Along with other
groups, we became local advocates within the hippie scene for
dropping out of drugs in general and becoming responsible again.

   Some of the fellows were experienced leather craftsmen. I
learned a bit and we shared our knowledge as a way of self
reliance. That's how I got into leather crafts. Some of the girls
set up a flower girl basket route. And the group eventually
evolved into our original flower selling enterprise.

   For a while, some of us did voluntary door to door canvassing
for charities. Four of us were going down a street one day.
Someone had evidently called the police to check us out, because
suddenly a police cruiser appeared around the corner and came
toward us down the street. He checked out our permits and IDs.
Then happy, he left.

   About five minutes later I saw the car slowly coming around the
corner again. Instinctively I said to myself, "oh shit, it's that
jay walking ticket". I hadn't even thought about it for over five
years. Sure enough. The car pulled up and the cop asked out of his
window. "Which one of you is Livingstone". I just turned to the
others and said, "see you later". Then without further ceremony I
climbed into the back seat of the cruiser without even being
asked.

   Vancouver has a very good pedestrian bylaw. If you step even
one foot off the curb on any main thoroughfare, and someone
doesn't stop, they get a ticket. But if you step even one foot off
the curb, and it wasn't at a designated crosswalk, you get a
jaywalking ticket. New York it isn't.

   In the summer of 1966, in my footloose and fancy free hippie
days before the rock band, I had been walking west along Nelson
Street in Vancouver's West End which is hard adjacent to the
downtown core. Nelson was a quiet side street lined with nice
thick shade trees. I crossed over in the middle of the block,
walked to the next cross street, took it down for a block, then
continued west again along the next street over.

   Suddenly a motorcycle cop pulled up beside me and said, "you
jaywalked in the middle of Nelson Street". I said, "Nelson's not a
main road". He said, "Nelson is an officially designated taxi
route, therefore it is subject to the jaywalking bylaw".
Apparently every citizen in the City of Vancouver was supposed to
know that, because he wrote me out a ticket.

   I put the ticket in my back pocket and never thought about it
again. In those days, worrying about a jay walking ticket was
about as relevant to an average hippie's daily curriculum as was
the temperature on Mars. Now that I was no longer a hippie, I was
busted for it five years later. Go figure.

 I spent the night in the poky. I appeared before the judge the
next morning. While awaiting my turn, the judge called a fellow of
Inuit persuasion to the stand charged with 35 counts of
jaywalking.

   In a stern authoritative voice, the judge peered down at the
fellow and asked, "so what do you have to say for yourself". The
Inuit quietly looked up at him for a minute. Then in a very slow
not too sure of himself way, which I'm pretty sure was pretty
deliberate he said, "red lights, green lights, they're all same to
me. You see where I come from we all travel by dog sled".

  The judge knew he had been had. But he couldn't come down on the
guy for fear of looking like an idiot. So he just fined the fellow
time served and admonished him to learn the law.

   Fortunately, the incident had served to pave the way for me.
When my turn came up the judge just fined me minimum fine despite
my five year on the lam. I thought about it while writing this
book. I decided that it definitely had to be an 'outie' in my
Karmic Car Cycles.

   When lining up the material for this book, I had suddenly
realized the inordinate number of times I seemed to have
inadvertently run afoul of the law for traffic related offenses.
But hadn't done anything. At least not in the sense of
deliberately trying to break the law or trying to get away with
something. Or similarly, how many times I had been in a vehicle
when my hair was raised from freak out, or my feathers ruffled
from something out of the absurd. And the circumstances had been
beyond my control.

   Some people never get a ticket in their entire life. No matter
how much they flagrantly flaunt the law. Like speeding. I never
deliberately speed. Similarly, if a traffic light is out, some
people always see that as an opportunity to pull a quick one.
Others instantly go into cautious and courteous mode.

  I always go into an extra courteous and cautious mode to be on
the outlook for the opportunists just specified above. Yet I
always seem to be getting into hot water with the law no matter
what. Like the Jay walking ticket.

  I also looked at all the unseemly untoward things which always
seem to be happening to me involving motor vehicles. Like buying a
brand new tire and running over a big nail twenty minutes later. I
finally figured out that it was probably because I had
inadvertently set up a Karmic Car Cycle when I was a kid.

  You know how Karma works. You do something bad or nasty in one
lifetime. And you come back in the next to make amends. It's like
a ledger. The not-so-good stuff you do all goes into the book as
'bad' Karma. In the next lifetime, the good stuff you do is 'good'
Karma. If all goes well, and you watch your Ps and Qs carefully
enough, eventually the slate is clean and you're off the hook.

   My supposition is that Karmic Car Cycles work in somewhat the
same way. The rules are simple. It all happens in the same
lifetime. Similarly, instead of your higher spiritual action, the
gods of cars are the keepers of the ledger. Similarly, the bad
stuff you do goes in as 'innies. The good stuff comes out as
'outies'.

   So say if I were to break the law, or was instrument in a
vehicular situation which was not exactly good form under the
circumstance, then it would go into my Karmic Car Cycle ledger as
an 'innie'. Similarly, if I got an unfair traffic ticket or was
involved in a vehicular situation that was decidedly in my face
under the circumstances, it would come out as an 'outie'.

   Some people flaunt the system their whole lives and never seem
get caught or have to pay retribution. Others, who are a little
bit subject to Karmic Car Cycles, get away with the littler
things. But pay for the bigger things.

   Others like me, are so finely tuned to the Karmic Car Cycles
they pay for every little nicky nork thing you could possibly
imagine happening.

  The car gods are excellent bookkeepers. I therefore concurred
that my non-stop montage of unfair tickets and unfriendly like car
coincidences over the years, was therefore probably on the
playback or 'outie' side of the ledger.

  This is all tongue in cheek to be sure. But it's fun. Besides,
just about everybody has been there at least once in their life in
at least one way or another, at least at some time or other, to at
least some degree or another.

  One last thing. Since nobody in the universe is keeping the
Karmic score as it occurres within this book except you and me,
errors are not out and out not impossible. So if you see something
I record as an 'outie' and you think it should definitely be an
'innie', what can I say.

  Similarly, if you are one of these types with a photographic
memory and you have to know that of all the things I am, the one
thing I'm not is like that, and see that the slate has gone a
little off track, then keep your own slate and keep it to you.

  What I'm trying to say is that like the lady said, through all
of this I'm dancing as fast as I can. I can boogie with the best
of them, but I never could and never will be able to do Author
Murray with any of them.

  I've concluded that one of my earliest deeds ever involving the
Karmic system had to do with the actual setting up of my Karmic
Car Cycle. I figure it happened when I was a kid back in high
school in Vancouver. I used to ride around with Ted in his Daddy's
car. I had inadvertently inputted an `innie' and it was a big one.

   During the winter of my last year in high school, circa 1957, my
father being an IBM executive in Vancouver had put us squarely in the
middle class. With six kids to dress and feed, it was solidly lower
middle class. But some of the people in our Kerrisdale neighborhood,
including some of the kids at school, were squarely upper class.

  In fact Kerrisdale along Marine Drive not far from where we
lived, was home to some of the wealthiest families in Canada at
the time.

  In particular, one of my high school buddies Ted was going
steady with the daughter of the owner of one of the world's
largest forest product companies. In the daughter's case you could
say with certainty that money grew on trees.

    Not only was her Daddy worth many many dineros, he was then
some. He was also one of the first to see the potential of Hawaii
for cold cold winter relief. He virtually single handedly started
the proliferation of high rise resorts along Wakiki Beach during
the mid fifties, which surfed the tourists not the tide.

   Her Daddy owned a large stretch Cadillac, top of the line. In
fact only one of it's kind existed in all of Canada.

   By the late winter of 1957, Greydie, Ted, another chum, and
myself, all traveled together as a rat pack. Our habit for the
weekend was to hit the house parties that weekend. Then we would
cruise the strip on downtown Granville Street a bit. We would have
some burgers at one or another of Vancouver's many drive-ins at
the time. Then call it a night. Nice simple Ronnie Howard American
Graffiti type stuff.

   One evening at supper, Ted called to say he was getting the
keys to Daddy's car that evening. He arranged to meet us about
11:30 that night at one of the scheduled house parties.

  Sure enough, just after 11:00, Ted showed up cruising in the
Caddy. So Greydie, I, Ted, and our other buddy took off in grand
style to cruise around. We did some house parties, went down town
to Granville Street for awhile, had some burgers and went home.
Nice simple Ronnie Howard American Graffiti type stuff.

   Daddy's car became a fairly regular occurrence. About every two
weeks Ted would call at suppertime and line the three of us up to
meet at one of the house parties. He would pick us up. We would
drive around, etc. Nice simple Ronnie Howard American Graffiti
type stuff.

  You have to picture it. We were strictly standard textbook
middle of the road teen age kids. But here we were driving around
in the big black Cadillac stretcho of all time, longer than some
driveways. Our long blue winter Bennie overcoats were rolled up at
the collar. We looked like the mob on a hit.

  One weekend, we got news that Daddy had just got a brand new
Caddie. The latest off the assembly line. There were only two of
it's kind in Canada. As usual Ted had it for the evening. He
picked us up at the usual 11:30, picking up last Greydie finishing
the night pinsetting at a local bowling alley for 90 cents an hour.
We did the usual thing and headed downtown and drove around Vancouver's
main drag Granville Street for a while.

   While we were coming back out of down town, just after coming
off the south end of the Granville bridge and heading south on
Granville Street, a police car pulled up beside us and waved Ted
over. Apparently the stolen car report had gone out at 11:15.

   Ted pulled over. The police car pulled up beside us, just
nudging in to the front of our car. The officer on our side
started to step out. He approached the car signaling Ted to roll
down his window. To this day I'll never figure out why the police
hadn't brought their car right around in front of ours to cut us
off. But they hadn't.

  Greydie was in the front passenger seat. The other chum and I
were in the back. I was on the driver's side. As the officer
neared the car, Ted quietly pulled a pair of gloves out of his
pocket and pulled them on. Then without warning he grabbed the
steering wheel with both hands, jammed his foot to the floor and
said, "gentlemen, I can't stay here", and as the mighty
engine roared to life, remarked to the cops, "see you later boys".

   The car leapt forward like a rocket sled cut loose from its
moorings. The rest of us all started screaming at the top of our
lungs. If I remember correctly we said something truly profound
like, "what are you doing, what are you doing".

   Ted took the full length stretcho in a complete 180 degree turn
under full power. Then headed back north up Granville Street and
across the bridge back into down town. The three of us were
hollering like stuck pigs.

   The car went back over the Granville Bridge in nothing flat. At
this point the three of us of had no idea on the planet what was
going on. I simply thought that Ted had lost it.

    By now, between the panic of the speed, the confusion of
events, and the general layout of Vancouver's bridges and streets
which had never been designed with speed in mind, things were
starting to seem like a high speed action flick running at double
speed.

   The car screamed over the Granville Street Bridge, made a quick
flick onto the very narrow Seymour street turn off, ran full
throttle down Seymour Street, Ted had flatlined the speedometer
at 140 miles an hour, the speedometer itself had no higher numbers,
and hard cut a right hand turn through a red light onto Cambie street.

   The front end of the other car going through the intersection
took my back door of the Caddie clean off. Veering in a two wheeled
lean right onto the Cambie Street Bridge we sideswiped a taxi putting
it out of misery for about a month. Then we headed across the Cambie
Street Bridge. The three of us were by now screaming bloody murder.

   I have to explain that the Cambie street bridge was one of
Vancouver's first bridges. This was back in the old days before
anybody had ever seen or even dreampt of an automobile. The bridge
was steel girder encased, and had a single set of train tracks
running down the middle. A single lane for cars ran down both
sides of the tracks. It used to be that the center span lifted
to let boats through into the inner sanctum of False Creek but
nobody remembers when last the Cambie Street Bridge center span
lifted.

  There with barely enough room between the girders in each lane
for even just an average sized car driving exactly down the center
of the lane at exactly the posted speed. Cars normally steered
left and right, passing across the bridge, because the center span
was just too narrow to garuantee safe passage, beside's Vancouver's
refuse burning incinerator for the whole region was a hole into a
yellow hot blowhole in the middle of the center span, and directly
underneath, the open door directly into the burner itself.

  We went flying over the Cambie Bridge in the giant Cadillac like
the last lap of the Indy 500. I swear the girders flicked by in a
blur no more than two inches from my open door. We came off the
Cambie Bridge, all pistons screaming and took a hard left at the
next corner.

   The front end of the other car coming through the intersection
took off Ted's front door. Then we headed screaming up the cross
street with a whole fleet of police cars in hot pursuit like a
Swartzenegger movie. Weeee weeee weeee weeee weeee ....

   About six blocks in, the engine suddenly stopped dead and the
car started slowing down. As we were rolling to a stop in front of
a large fenced in empty lot, Ted suddenly leapt out yelling, "OK
everyone, time to bail". Greydie hit the pavement at thirty, me at
twenty five with both legs running, the other two at fifteen.

   I took off into the empty lot, up a foot wide plank, and over a
six foot fence. I kept going until I finally ended up in a lumber
stockpile yard about six blocks away. I burrowed under a pile of
lumber and stayed there until dawn, heart racing like a broken
clock spring unwinding.

   When I finally felt brave enough to walk the 36 blocks home,
the light of dawn was already coming up. I took only side streets,
watching over my shoulder at every step. I still didn't have even
the slightest clue as to what had actually happened.

   I got home about seven in the morning. Greydie was already home.
Apparently he had been unable to make it up the foot wide plank. So
he hid underneath. He had watched a cop's flashlight come slowly up
the plank on his left side to about half an inch from his face, then
stop. And a lungfull of cigar smoke blew straight in his take. Talk
about no cough and a full load of spurious dischage putting weight
in the rear end of the pants, only time, says Greydie, in his life,
a actually lost a load.

   Then it went slowly down the right side of the plank to about a
half an inch from his feet then stopped. Then the cop went away.
One of the policemen even kicked the grass around about a foot
from where Greydie's feet were tucked, curled in as hard as humanly
possible, silently. Then they left. Greydie must have been sucking
himself in like a local black hole not to have been seen. Ted phoned
about 9:00 AM. But, back to the primordally urgent saga....

   Greydie finally eased himself out from behind the plank extremely
slowly, one inch at a time, and started to make his way home also, he
later reported. At 4:30 am after walking through every driveway and
backyard he could find stealthing through the Shaunessy Heights mansion
district toward 41st and Granville, he arrived, reaching the Granville
Street and 41st Avenue intersection, his first target of two in getting
home safely.

   There sitting on the bus stop intersection, as the first grey lights
of dawn began to crack the universe, was Ted, sitting slumped on the bus
stop bench. He and Greydie (as Greydie later reported) conversed briefly
then it was time to head on home but no way Ted was going to stay parked
on the bus stop bench where he felt safe.

   Our other chum was also safe at home. What had been happening
was that Ted's girl friend's old man would come home about 10:00.
He would leave the keys on the fireplace. Then hit the sack at
about 10:3O. Then around about 11:00 the girl friend would grab
the keys. The three of us had always presumed the keys were being
handled out the front door with everyone's blessings. Actually she
had been sliding them out her bedroom window to Ted waiting below
with only Ted's blessing.

   On this particular evening, her older brother had come home at
11:15 and saw that the keys weren't on the fireplace. When he
found his father upstairs sleeping, he had called the police to
report the car as missing.

   A day later, Ted got the follow up story from his girlfriend.
The police had clocked us at 135 miles an hour going over the
Granville Street Bridge. We did 105 going down Seymour Street, 95
through the turn onto Cambie, 115 across the Cambie street bridge,
and 95 going around the second corner. If nothing else, you had to
admire the way these Caddies's could move.

   Why the engine eventually stopped so abruptly was that the car
was brand new, so the block had cracked. Also, since the two
drivers side doors were long gone, her father simply decided to
claim it on insurance and got a new one.

   Her father also no doubt had put two and two together. But he
must have decided not to press charges because we never heard
anything about it again. Needless to say we never went out in
Daddy's car again.

   But later that spring, some other somewhat less than middle
class kids starting showing up at beach parties in their Daddy's
cars. It was eventually determined that they were hot wiring cars
from a local auto dealer lot. Between the two, that's how I
learned early in life that 'Daddy's car' usually meant that Daddy
probably didn't know anything about it.

   At any rate, regards the Caddie, since my good sense should
have prevailed and I should have realized full well that in no way
would Daddy ever likely be giving Ted the keys to his prize new
Caddie for joyriding, I have to consider the whole affair a full
blown 'innie' in a Karmic Car Cycle.

   Actually, I had probably set the cycle in motion the year
before, when we had first moved from Winnipeg to Vancouver in the
second week in October in 1955, when we booked into our local high
school on the first day in town, when on the second day, four of
the locals took Greydie and I over to see the one of the other
local high schools during lunch.

   In case you forgot, the car was a flat black primer painted hot
rod, half finished, late 40s Chev or something similar. The front
end was jacked as high into the air as shock risers could raise
it. The back bumper just barely cleared the ground. In the style
of the times it was quite an elegant bomb. Oh yes, the engine,
bomberino all the way, the roarrrrrr!

   On the way back, a cop pulled us over for speeding. "Lets see
your brakes", he said to the cocky owner. The owner's foot went
down right to the floor. "Let's see your lights". The owner
reached under the dash and shorted a couple of wires. "Let's see
the horn". The owner reached under the dash again and shorted some
more wires.

   So it went. And, oh yeah, he didn't have a valid driver's
license or a registration for the car. So the cop confiscated the
car and we had to take the bus back to school. We arrived an hour
and a half late. We all got a week of detentions.

   "Didn't take you long", said the principle to Greydie and I.
Great. I wasn't even in school two days and already I was in the
Principle's, 'better keep my eye on this guy's', little black
book. I figure that whole deal is what had probably originally
set up the Karmic Car cycle, as an 'innie'.

   I knew the car was a clunker and never should have been in it.
But you know how peer pressure works. I was only one and a half
days old at the school and didn't want to come off as a suck.

   And this same time period was source of yet another probable
'innie'. It was of a rather trivial kind, but an `innie' non-the-
less, cited here to broaden the scope. We had two chums with a car
in our last year of high school. Bud was the main car guy, driving
a nice 1954 Dodge.

   We were all over at his place one afternoon after school when
his younger sister walked casually through the room exclaiming,
"your car's on fire".


   Bud and his younger sister at the time were in the standard
brother sister mode of brrzzpppttt to each other so well
characterized by most comic strips characters except Bumstead. So
Bud just gave the poor girl the standard "beat it, go away, yah
yah yah, don't bother me, get lost, brrrzzpppttt", type stuff.

   A couple of minutes later she walked through again repeating
the message. You have to understand that she wasn't any more
concerned about whether Bud actually believed her or not than he
was in taking her seriously. After all it wasn't her car and she
was just Bud's stupid sister. A third time she came by with the
same message. So someone woke up enough to take a quick look out
the window.

  The drive shaft of Bud's car was red hot and flames were pouring
up both sides of the car from underneath. Bud had driven home with
the emergency brake on. Since it was the type that gripped the
drive shaft it had caught fire.

   I raced to the kitchen for water. Somebody else ran for rags.
Bud ran steaming out to the car to try and put the fire out with
his bare hands. We had the fire out in no time and Bud only
received second degree burns to his hands.

   However, I have to admit that it was to my dying shame that I
had participated in Bud's `more than demeaning' attitude to his
younger sister of not taking her seriously. So this was a 'innie',
clear and simple.

   You have to understand that the Car, and or `Abide by the Law',
Gods, take this callous kind of stuff very seriously. After all it
was one of their own which was under flame.

   And yet another "innie" occurred in this relative time frame.
Stereo hi fi first hit the scene in the very late fifties. I
didn't have the money to buy a good stereo amp. But I did have
enough to buy a good stereo amp kit in the States with the higher
Canadian value of the dollar at the time. But I didn't have enough
to pay the Customs and Excise.

   So I drove down to Seattle Washington, picked up a kit, opened
the box, and carefully placed all the parts around under the back
seat. Then I drove back across the border sweating no less than
someone smuggling a million dollars worth of drugs in the tires.
No doubt about it. I didn't abide by the law. So this had to go in
as an 'innie'.

   Similarly, around the same time, four of us were in Blaine
Washington one afternoon just tooling around. Blaine is a very
small border town sitting exactly on the US side of the US
Canadian border. The two main reasons for its existence were much
cheaper cigarettes and much cheaper beer than in Canada, in very
close proximity to Vancouver. If there's a well in the desert,
there's a tent on the sand.

   One of the guy's parents had a summer cabin up Bedford Bay in
the north arm of Burrard Inlet at the extreme East End of Vancouver.
The inlet was about thirty miles from downtown Vancouver. So we picked
up on a couple of cases of American beer to go up to the cabin for the
rest of the day to party.

   We pulled out the back seat of the tiny little English Austin
my friend was driving and carefully filled the springs with the
bottles of beer. When we crossed the border, the two of us in back
were sitting so high on the back seat our heads were bowed under
the roof of the car.

   The border guy looked us over for a minute or two tying to
figure just how tall we must have been. Then passed us through.
Broke the law again. Cost me another small 'innie'.

  In 1958, like I mentioned seven of us went to a drive in movie.
Four crammed into the trunk. The gate guy noticed that both back
tires looked half flat from our weight. He actually kicked one
just to see if it was OK.

   But he never twigged onto the trunk. Our reason for this the
little caper was not to intentionally defraud the drive in. It was
more of a stunt just to see if we could get away with it. That's
a classic Grey zone crime denial if there ever was one. At any
rate I was one of the guys in the trunk breaking the law. No
matter how I try to slice it, make it another small 'innie'.

   A sizable mansion not far from our house had a very large
deluxe heated swimming pool. Word was out that the owners were
always away Friday nights. So a few of us thought why not. About
nine in the evening we snuck in over the fence, dropped our duds
in the bushes alongside the pool, and splashed around for about
twenty minutes.

   I hoped out of the pool, headed back into the shrubs buck
naked, bent over to pick up my cloths and saw a big black boot
standing on my stuff. I looked up into the instant snap on of a
heavy duty flashlight. It was the cops.

   The owners had apparently become tired of the word being out.
So they had cued up a regular Friday night checkup by the cops.
The gendarmes escorted me home into the hands of my parents. My
parents did what any self respecting parents would do at a time
like this, and laughed and cried and laughed and cried, then cut
off my social life for the next two weeks.

   No 'innie' on this one. I paid for it cash and carry.  So
that's about how the rules for 'innies' and `outies' work just in
case you ever decide to check out your own karmic car
accumulations a little.

   If I had been a lot more alive and alert during the time of my
big Daddy's Car 'innie', I might have already anticipated
something like a Karmic Car Cycle going on. If only because the
next year I was passenger in a friend's car when he got the
dumbest speeding ticket I ever heard of. At the time it was quite
a mystery why.

   We were driving up Granville street well out of the down town
core. He was doing exactly 31 miles an hour. The speed limit was
thirty. A cop pulled him over and said he was speeding. The car
was a hot rod sure enough.

   But unlike the original hot rod Greydie and I had been riding
in during our second day in town, this car was properly painted,
properly working, and properly licensed. My fiend was also duly
cordial and un-snotty to the cop. In fact everything was proper
about the whole thing except that he got the ticket.

   I remember thinking about the cop to myself at the time, "what
a dink". "No way should my buddy have got a ticket, that's the
crummiest ticket I ever heard of". But the Cop's dinky wasn't it
at all. I of course now realize that it happened to my friend
solely because I was in the car at the time and I was carrying a
wholloping load of 'innies' in my Karmic Car Cycles.

   So my poor buddy never had a chance. The cop was just doing
what he had to. It was in the books. It was merely an 'outie'
coming back out of the cycles.

   One of the most memorable hair raising experiences in my life
occurred in the spring of 1957 in Vancouver. I had just obtained
my driver's license. It was only about a month after Daddy's car.

   My first time behind the wheel of a car was in 1955 in
Winnipeg. I was 15. A friend from high school owned a car and let
me drive one day. I couldn't keep the thing pointed straight and
kept running into the curb.

   My dad officially started to teach Greydie and I to drive the
next fall after we moved to Vancouver. Our family car was a 1956
station wagon, stick shift. It was not that hard to drive relative
to any other car of that era, just a little bigger.

   Before long I could drive OK, except for the curious desire to
drive in the left hand lane. I had to fight the urge to cross over
the yellow centerline with every fiber of my being for a long
time. I figured I had to be an incarnated Englishman. By the
spring of 1957 I was over the tendency and driving fine.

   The Vancouver area is blessed with nice seaside beaches. All of
the beaches are excellent for weekend beach parties, for which
Vancouver is world famous if you live there. Crescent Beach was
one of the better beaches.

   Crescent Beach was a long clean stretch of sand on the shore of
Boundary Bay, about 25 miles south of Vancouver and not too far
from the American border.

   In the spring of 1957 it was a popular fad at our high school
to have a beach party at Crescent Beach every Friday night.

   The big wheels at school with their own cars formed the main
body of party goers. Those who were lucky enough to talk their
parents out of the family car for the evening, like Greydie and
myself from time to time, comprised the second body.

   The third body came down in, sic, 'Daddy's car'. Which we
eventually of course learned was an euphemism for, sic, 'stole it
from a local car lot for the evening'.

   The neat thing about these beach parties was that they were
completely impromptu. The first ones to the beach would find a
likely spot, set out their blankets, and start of fire. The next
ones in would simply check around until they found the first ones.

   Since anybody from anywhere in the lower mainland Vancouver
area could set up a party, the trick was to just keep checking
around the campfires until you found one with somebody you
recognized.

   Greydie and I took turns getting the car and it was now my turn
for the night. My twin brother Greydie, plus our one year younger
brother Ron, plus one of his a chum's were at one of our school's
Crescent Beach parties.

   We had been at the party for a couple of hours and had heard
word that an even bigger party from our school had formed about a
mile up the beach. So we decided to check it out.

   Crescent Beach stretched for a couple of miles along the shore
of Boundary Bay. So did the Great Northern Railway which ran a
busy schedule between Vancouver and Seattle Washington about 120
miles south of the border. The railway hugged the ocean shoreline
like a ribbon nearly the whole distance between the Seattle and
Vancouver.

   Along Boundary Bay through the Crescent beach area, the rail
bed was a sharp rise along the top of the beaches. The Great
Northern barreled assed like behemoths along the Crescent Beach
stretch of shoreline.

   Because of the distance to the other beach party we decided to
take the car. We piled into the car and headed out. We were still
on the beach side of the train tracks. The feeder road I needed
for going any distance up or down the beach was on the land side
of the tracks. So I drove slowly along for a bit until I found a
small crossroad cutting back up over the rail line.

   It was absolutely pitch black out. About 500 yards down the
tracks from where the road crossed, the tracks made a sharp bend
around the shoreline. The track completely disappeared from view
behind the high deep bush sitting above the sand line.

   On the crossroad, the track was raised so high the rail bed
almost seemed like a long long 2 by 4 board on end. I slowly
started inching the family station wagon up over the tracks. My
headlights hit nothing ahead but the tops of the trees on the land
side of the tracks. Because I couldn't see anything ahead on the
ground in front of the car, I went at a snails pace.

   I managed to get the car up straddling the tracks on top,
stomach balancing somewhat like a gymnast on a cross bar. The
headlights looked straight at nothing but trees half way up into
the branches ahead.

   I didn't want to drop suddenly down the other side of the
railway because I had no idea at that moment what was down in
front of me. Indeed, at this point, we were raised so high that I
didn't even have a guarantee that there was a road on the other
side. Some things you just have to take on faith.

   So I was only going over the tracks an inch at the time.
Suddenly a Great Northern train came barrel assing around the bend
at eighty miles an hour. The engineer saw me sitting on the top of
the track as soon as he rounded the bend and started leaning on
the air horn like a blaring claxon.

   So there we were, sitting flat out frozen broadside to the
oncoming holocaust like crash test dummies. The claxon horn was
blaring a non stop trumpet of doom. Everyone else was screaming
bloody murder. So I did what any self respecting driving novice
would do at a time like that, and stalled the engine.

   The train bore down on us like an unleashed jaggernaught. I had
the ignition key turned hard over and was pumping on the gas
giving it everything I was worth. As any self respecting
experienced driver knows, that is exactly the wrong way to start a
flooded engine.

   The train was all but upon us when at the last second I
suddenly had the presence of mind to take my foot off the clutch
and let the starting motor pull us off the tracks.

   The motor pulled us over the tracks a grunt at a time. At the
last bare second the car suddenly dropped over the track and down
the other side. The wind from the train going by blew the back of
the car over about three feet.

   I consider this incident decidedly `in my face'. My first
official 'outie'. If I had arrived at the track a few minutes
before, or after, then it wouldn't have been a matter of
consequence in the slightest. If I hadn't had the presence of mind
to use the starting motor, it wouldn't matter at all. Nothing like
getting your first 'outie' at two hundred and fifty miles an hour.

   In fact Greydie reported doing the same deed, using the starter
engine of the Ford station wagon to pull the car load over the tracks
out of the path of an oncoming blazing orange Great Northern diesle.
Others we knew reported the same experience. The steep grade up the
road over the tracks was wicked on cars, indeed.

   They say that shit happens. Maybe that's all it was. I know for
sure though that if I live to be a hundred and one, I would have
lived to be a hundred and two if this event had never happened. So
for the sake of that alone, 'outie' it is fair and square. Nothing
like getting your first 'outie' at a flat out three hundred and fifty
miles an hour.

   When we returned home that night, I told my parents about the
incident. My Mom said she was in a similar incident when she was a
kid in 1936. You will recall she was from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

   Granddad was one of the town's top lawyers. So the family was
relatively well off at the time despite the depression. The family
had a grand Packard touring car. Granddad used to take the family
out for a drive every Sunday.

   The family comprised six kids nicely split, three girls, three
boys. Everyone would pack into the car and Granddad would head out
somewhere for the day.

   But Granddad had one very bad habit. He was an impatient
driver. Whenever they had to stop at a railway crossing, as soon
as the caboose went by Granddad would goose the car in
exasperation, totally unconcerned about the possibility of a train
coming the other way.

   Apparently, because he was also somewhat of an imperialistic
sort of an individual, trying to say anything to him about stuff
like that was a little bit like trying to tell the Queen she has
bad breath. In this family you didn't speak unless spoken to.

   So every Sunday saw the family touring the countryside.
Everyone would sit white knuckled every time they came to a train
crossing with a train passing by. Except for Granddad.

   One day, they had been sitting for a particularly long time at
a crossing because the train was a very long freight and going
very slow. As soon as the caboose cleared the front of the car,
Granddad goosed it for all it was worth. The fast freight coming
the other way took off the back bumper.

   As Mom explained it, Granddad just pulled quietly over to the
side of the road and regally sat regaining his composure. No one
said a peep. After about twenty minutes of quietly reconstituting
his dignity, he slowly put the car in gear and continued on
driving as though nothing whatever had happened. But the lesson
was well taken. Granddad never goosed it at crossings again.

   Sure it pays to keep your mouth shut, but sometimes the payoff
is not what you would like. I kept my mouth shut twice and it cost
me 'innie' points both times. In the winter of 1958, a jazz club
opened near the waterfront in Downtown Victoria.

   Like a similar club in Vancouver, these clubs were semi beatnik
places. You went in about eleven in the evening with bottle in
back pocket. If the music was great you came back out bleary eyed
at about five or six in the morning and no bottle in your back
pocket. If the music was bad, you came back out bleary eyed at
about two in the morning and no bottle in your back pocket.

   Greydie was a practicing jazz drummer in Vancouver at the time.
You remember, this was during the time I had been working with the
Telephone company in Victoria. One weekend a top world class jazz
musician was playing at the club. So Greydie and a buddy from
Vancouver decided to come over for the weekend and go to the club
with me and a buddy Jim from work.

   Jim had just bought a 1946 Cadillac convertible. The car was in
pristine condition. only 7 thousand miles on the speedometer. It
looked magnificent. It was also fairly rare, from an old lady's
estate in Victoria, and worth a pile of money even then. I can't
even imagine what it would be worth today. There weren't too many
Cadillac convertibles around, even when they were making them.

   We all piled into Jim's car and headed to the club at the
waterfront. Jim found a convenient place to park between two
telephone poles sitting about three feet out in the middle of the
street and we all hopped out into the club.

   Downtown Victoria in the fifties was known for three
distinctive features. The sidewalks rolled up at nine. The city
had hanging English flowerpots on all its downtown streetlights.
And the telephone poles were three feet out from the curb in a
large portion of the downtown. The pots gave the city a
distinctive English flavor well touted by the Victoria tourist
commission.

   When the general mode of transportation upsized from horses to
automobiles at the beginning of the century, the city widened all
the streets to accommodate the cars. But the budgets weren't
sufficient to move the telephone poles. The city never seemed to
be able to budget enough to move them over the years. So there
they sat. Still sitting in open air on the open pavement of the
streets.

   After a long night of most enjoyable jazz music, we tumbled out
of the jazz club at about six in the morning. The sun was just
coming up over the horizon. Jim cranked on the car engine, threw
it into gear, stepped on the gas, and headed straight up the
street from the curb. The car was headed directly toward the pole
sitting right between his headlights about ten full car lengths
ahead up the street.

   As Jim zeroed in on the target I thought I should say
something. But then I thought, "that would be stupid, of course
Jim sees the pole". Then I thought, "maybe he doesn't. But
obviously he should, it's sitting right there in front of him".
"Maybe I should speak up". I was forgetting completely about the
time of the morning and the absence of the bottle in the back
pocket.

   Before I could finally make up my mind which way Jim was
probably going to go, wham. We hit the pole square between the
headlights. The damage to the front of the car was about $400.00,
1959 prices.

   Afterwards Jim said, "why the hell didn't one of you guys say
something". Apparently we had all being going through the exact
same thing because all any of could muster up to say afterwards
was, "um, ah, but, but". Anyway I couldn't very well put the blame
on any one else. So it cost me an 'innie'.

   I almost hate to bring up the matter of Jim's boat. In the late
spring of that year, Jim bought a twenty four foot sailboat with
inboard engine. We were both about to be transferred back to
Vancouver so Jim booked his holidays such that he could sail the
boat back to Vancouver. He asked me if I wanted to come along.

   I had never been in a boat before except for a canoe at camp,
and my Dad's thirteen footer with outboard motor. So I booked
holidays for the same time and said sure.

   We planed a route up the inside of Vancouver Island to
Parksville. Then we sailed across Georgia Straight to Powell River
north of Vancouver where Jim had some friends he wanted to visit.
The plan was to stay in Powell River for a couple of days. This
would still leave lots of time to get back down to Vancouver at
the end of the two week holiday.

   We got to Powell River just fine. Some of it actually under
sail. In Powell River Jim went off with his friends and I went off
with a couple of people I knew to give them a ride in the boat. If
truth be told, show off in the boat was a little closer to it
since one of them was, well, a rather pretty young lady.

   Late that afternoon I anchored the boat off shore from Jim's
friends house a few miles down shore from the Powell River harbor.
I planned to move the boat back inside the harbor later that
evening.

   Just after dinner the wind suddenly started to come up. We
tried to secure the boat but the waves were starting to build. In
a panic I called Jim who was visiting with some friends of his
friends elswhere. Jim said not to worry, just wait until the wind
dropped off later in the evening like his friend's were advising
him it always did.

   By about ten o'clock that evening not only had the wind not
subsided, but the boat was in serious serious trouble. I called
Jim again for the umpteenth time. But he said not to panic, just
leave the boat alone and it'll be fine.

   The next morning at six AM, Benton Fraser of the RCMP knocked
at the door. A dreaded Nor'wester had come up in the middle of the
night and the boat was strewn along three miles of beach.

   I was so stricken by self incriminating remorse, I could barely
function. But then I found out that Jim had not been cashing his
paychecks and had been stashing them all on the boat. And no locks
on the boat. My recriminating bouts of crippling remorse
mysteriously vanished.

   I ran into Jim a couple of years later. Like me he had
eventually quite the Telephone Company. Then he had moved to New
Zealand for awhile. Then he married an absolutely sparkling New
Zealand lass, moved back to Vancouver, and was as happy as a clam.
All's well that end's well. So no changes in the Karmic Car Cycles
over this one.

   My other time for not speaking up and I should have, was two
years later. In the late in the fall of 1960 I had just started
first year at UBC. We still lived in Kerrisdale. Kerrisdale was a
bit of a distance from the campus so I hitched out every morning
along Marine Drive. If I timed it right I would be picked up every
morning by a third year Theosophy student.

   In a very rare occurrence for Vancouver one morning, the
streets were coated with about a half inch of ice, and the trees
heavily laden. It was breathtakingly beautiful. But of course
dangerous as hell for driving.

   We were driving along cautiously enough, and came to a mile
plus stretch of straight road on Marine Drive. Marine Drive
otherwise twists and turns endlessly through the extensive
University endowment land forest. This was 'the' straight stretch.

   As soon as we hit the straightaway, a Volkswagen stepped on the
gas and swung out to pass. The Volkswagen had been hard on our
tail for some distance and most antsy to pass. He came up parallel
to us in the other lane. But then we sped up. As he sped up, we
sped up. You've all been there but probably not on ice.

   Our Theosophical friend seemed to be oblivious to the car
beside him roaring to get past. I just sat there looking stupid
waiting for him to finally wake up.

   The two cars raced ever faster and faster down the
straightaway. The other driver was desperately trying to get
around us because the straightaway was quickly coming to an end
and the road was covered in ice. I just sat there thinking I
should say something. But instead I simply waited for our
theosophical friend to snap out of it.

   Suddenly a car came shooting around the curve at the other end
of the straightaway coming fast forwar toward for the Volkswagen.
The Volkswagen jammed on his brakes and tried desperately to fall
back in behind us.

   But he was going waay too fast. He shot straight off into the
trees at about a sixty degree angle like a hockey puck ricocheting
off the boards.

   The Volkswagen rolled over and over about three or four times.
Then ended sitting straight upright about 150 yards into the
trees. It had gone clean into the middle of the thick forest of
the Endowment lands without even hitting a bush. Talk about
hairbreadth lucky.

   We stopped and backed up. The Theosophy student had no idea on
the planet about what had just happened. All he was aware of was
that a very serious accident had suddenly just happened suddenly
right beside him for no apparent reason. Some people are hard
pressed to even know what day it is.

   The driver came running out of the trees waving frantically in
the air. Miraculously he wasn't hurt. "Please, please, please", he
pleaded when he got to our car, "I'm a graduate student in
particle physics and I have a life and death math exam this
morning. You gotta give me a lift". Nothing like having your
priorities straight.

   Also try and imagine staying in focus for a big exam after a
kick in the basket like that. On the other hand what a project for
a physics thesis in random action theory.

   I saw the physics guy a couple of days later on campus. It was
all good news thank goodness. He had aced the exam. Better. When
he had gone back after the exam to check the car, the car was
fine. It had come through the ordeal completely unscathed.
Unfortunately I hadn't. Now I had a seriously big new 'innie' to
contend with given the very real life and death consequence the
situation had represented.

   By the fall of 1961, Greydie had a small 1954 Hillman Minx.
Hillmans were a popular British import of the times. So we would
drive together to UBC every morning.

   Because we were driving instead of hitchhiking, we were able to
use a little known back route through the endowment lands, and so
avoid the traffic pile up along the standard routes. Because we
were students, the car's brakes were in real bad shape. Otherwise
the car was in excellent condition. Not a mark on her. Even had
real leather solid white upholstery and door panels, and white
plush floor carpets.

   We were clipping along one of the back access roads, I was
driving. Suddenly a 1957 Ford jammed with students came shooting
from a crossroad on my right. The car was going hell bent for
leather. Like us, the driver had been using one of the alternate
back woods routes.

   I stood right up on the brakes. Like right off the seat
straight up like a cartoon, what they mean by 'standing on the
brake'. We weren't going all that fast. But since the brakes were
going even less fast, the car just sort of glided smoothly to a
stop instead of stopping on a dime.

   In fact the car eventually glided all the way to a stop exactly
at the side of the other car. I mean exactly, a coat of paint
exactly. You could not have passed a sheet of paper between us as
the left front fender of the other car whooshed on by the right
front of the Hillman. Then came the ominous sound of seriously
crunching metal.

   In 1957, American car manufactures for reasons known only to
themselves and their bankers had starting manufacturing cars out
of metal sprayed tissue paper. The British cars on the other hand
were still being manufactured out of what could only be as
described as metal plates left over from tanks during the Second
World War.

   When the Ford finally came to a stop, the entire left side of
the Ford, from the beginning of the driver's door to the end of
the back fender, was crumpled like an accordion. The only damage
to the Hillman was a tiny dime sized indent at the rim of the
right headlight.

   Turns out the right headlight rim latch had picked up the
Ford's left side chrome strip right by the beginning of the
driver's door. On the Hillman, the chrome strip had snapped the
rim latch off, leaving the dint.

   But on the Ford, the chrome strip had buckled the full length
of the driver's door. Then it had passed the ball to the chrome
strip along the back door which continued the crumple. Finally the
strip on the back fender had picked up the ball and finished the
job.

   The end result was that the entire side of the Ford from the
driver's door the back of the rear fender looked like ten
accordions lined up side by side.

   Because the other car had been really flying, and because
Greydie's car had basically no repairs to it to worry about, we
never bothered swapping papers.

   But because good brakes would have prevented the whole thing in
the first place, and because I knew how bad the brakes were going
in but of course never told the other guy, this was definitely
another 'innie' added to the kitty. You can fool other drivers but
not the car gods.

   Near the beginning of my third year of university, broke as
ever, I was riding a motor scooter out to campus. The scooter
belonged to my younger brother Ron and I was riding it on loan for
the fall.

   The car in front of me was a Volkswagen. There were a lot of
Volkswagens around in those days. It seemed like every third car
on the road was a Volkswagen. The driver put on his right turn
signal and served hard to the right. So naturally I swerved to the
left to go out and around.

   Then, without even slowing, the Volkswagen cut a 180 degree
turn to the left right in front of me. What he had planed to do
all along in that secret little planning alcove in people's brain
that sometimes works hard in total secrecy, was to do an full
fledged left U turn.

   He figured he needed all the room he could get. So he had
decided to start the maneuver from the far right hand side of the
road. He had therefore given the politically correct signal at the
start. Normally there would be nothing wrong with that particular
maneuver. People do it all the time.

   But he had evidently forgotten that sometimes there are other
drivers on the road and had forgotten to check first before going
into the hard left come around comprising the all important second
part.

   I hit him broadside to the center post. I went up right and
over the car like a gymnast off a spring board. I hit the ground
on the other side of the Volkswagen in a full somersault and came
to my feet like a circus pro.

   The scooter had a bang on the fender. His car had a dint and a
small scratch where the scooter had hit. I had a bruise on my knee
and a million dollar lawsuit in my hands, which never even
occurred to me.

   I could have finished my last two years of university in real
style. But for reasons still unclear to me, all I could think of
was to get back up the scooter and out of there as fast as
possible from embarrassment.

   Probably it was just my Karmic Car Cycles kicking in a bit in
the background, subconsciously reminding me that I had accumulated
enough 'innies' to have a nice little 'outie' coming my way. So
why push it.

   As you will recall after university I had set up a small mining
company in the fall of 1965. As soon as the company had been set
up, the board figured, as president, I should have respectable
wheels. So they authorized the company to buy a Rover 2000 as my
company car to drive. My pick.

   Rovers are an extremely beautiful British car. The Land Rover
is still a world famous 4 wheel drive vehicle, even today. The
sedans were luxurious. They were often called the poor man's Rolls
Royce. The Rover 2000 was their first venture into the sports
sedan field. It was a little beauty.

   The only problem was you that you had to drive it slowly and
carefully for about 4000 miles to break in the engine. Nowadays of
course, that's all history. Today you drive new cars straight off
the lot like a Le Man's trial for pole position and the cars
couldn't care less.

   I had just broken in the engine nicely when my younger brother
Gerry borrowed it for a weekend trip to Seattle. On the way down
he put in oil but the mechanic had forgotten to replace the oil
cap. The engine blew half way back up from Seattle. Because the
dealer determined that the oil light had failed to come on, they
replaced the engine under warranty.

   I had just nicely broken in the second engine when an mining
associate asked if he could borrow the car to check out a
prospective mining property in the upper Kootney Mountains at the
East Side of the province. I should have said no. But I gave him
the keys. He was back a couple of days later with an engine that
sounded like a Lawnboy lawnmower hitting rocks. Two nice little
unearned 'outies' for the inconvenience.

   Likewise enough was enough. So I traded the Rover in for a 1963
TRS sports car. Now as a sports car this was the real McCoy. An
engine with a seat. It was fast, efficient, and super fun to
drive. This was the same sports car I once drove to the Okanogan
Valley with a soft back tire and a mining engineer who kept trying
to jump out and run alongside because of the way it pitched
and leaned going through the most dangerous curves riding the
soft tire that I didn't know about until after we got there.

   I was coming across Burrard Street Bridge in Vancouver one
night, about 1:30 in the morning. There was absolutely no one in
sight in any direction ahead. From behind I could only see a
single pair of headlights in the rear view mirror.

   I was going 35, the speed limit was 30 miles per hour. When I
had finished crossing the bridge I turned right onto Cornwall. A
cop, i.e., the headlights in the rear view mirror, pulled me over
and gave me a ticket for speeding.

   A month later I was driving quietly down Broadway West one
Saturday afternoon. A motorcycle cop swung in behind. I continued
driving in the flow watching my every driving P and Q with sweat
leaping from my forehead as is the normal reaction everyone
experiences whenever a cop suddenly homes in and latches on to
about three feet behind your bumper.

   The speed limit was thirty. The traffic moved along at a rock
steady thirty five miles an hour. Carefully holding my exact place
in traffic, I drove along dragging the cop in tow block after
block after block.

   Eventually I reached the turn into my residential area. I did
some rights and lefts. Finally I pulled up in front of my house.
As I was climbing out of the car, the cop was climbing off his
motorcycle. He gave me a ticket for speeding.

   I ignored both tickets completely for a couple of months. Then
I got a summons to court. The judge opened the ticket for speeding
over the Burrard Bridge first and read, sic, "traveling at speeds
in excess of thirty miles an hour, there was no accident". I guess
so there wasn't any accident.

   At any rate, the judges took one look at that, and combined
with the other outstanding ticket plus the fact that I had to be
hauled into court buy warrant because he decided I needed to be
taught a lesson and he fined me the maximum fines and suspended my
driver's license for six months.

   Somebody told me afterwards that it was because cops didn't
like sports cars at the time. They thought they were too
dangerous. But I know better than that. These were actually
'outies' in my Karmic Car Cycle. Nice calm, cool, collected
'outies'.

   I ignored the driving suspension and carried on as though
nothing had happened. Not a particularly wise thin to do when
there's Karmic activity going on. About three months later I was
coming home about 11.00 in the evening.

   The brakes were again almost non existent and again I didn't
have even close to the money needed to fix them. So I compensated
by taking it easy. I was coming up a side street near my house
minding my own business at just under the residential speed limit.

   There was a completely blind unmarked intersection coming up at
the right. I slowed down to about 10 MPH. Just as I reached the
intersection, a carload of teenagers rocketed by from my right.
They were doing at least eighty miles an hour.

   I just had enough time to get my foot off the gas and onto the
brake. But not even time enough to push it down. I hit the other
car broadside, square between the doors. The only sound was a
quiet thumpff.

   Like a billiard ball transferee, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Because I was already going to floor with full weight on my foot,
all I did was stand up about a foot off the seat. The front of my
TR3 looked like an English bulldog, accordianed completely right
up to the firewall.

   Being the momentum transference recipient, the other car had
rotated a full 90 degrees sideways and continued on down the
street in the same direction it had been going. It continued
bouncing and skipping sideways for half a block before finally
coming to a stop. That's how fast they had been going.

   The whole side of the other car was bashed in. Fortunately no
one in the other car was even shaken up.

   The kid who had been driving leaped out and immediately started
ranting and raving how his father was going to use me for a floor
mop because he owned an insurance agency. After all, the kid did
have the right of way for being on my right.

   I gave him my phone number and all my other particulars. But I
never heard back. A neighbor had heard the crash and phoned the
cops. So a cop had come and had taken down all the accident
details. I figured that as soon as the kid's old man had seen the
accident report, and calculated therefore how fast the kid must
have been going, the kid had ended up mopping the floor with
himself instead of me.

   This event should therefore have been a huge big 'outie' for
me. But it wasn't. Likewise, neither could I counter claim for
damages. You see there was still this little problem of my
suspended driver's license.

   In a panic, I called a lawyer friend of mine who told me not to
worry. He told me to just come down and give him all the accident
details for an accident report. I gave him my driver's license
number which he read back, one number wrong.

   I repeated myself and he read it back again, the same number
wrong. I repeated myself again. This time a little impatiently.
Again he read it back with the same number wrong. "Right", I said,
and never heard from anybody again about my suspended license.

   But you don't get to mess around with the law like that and get
away with it. Not at least if you have a Karmic Car Cycle in
progress. So this all goes in as a one big fat nasty, 'innie'.

   I couldn't afford to fix the TR3. It was getting near the end
of my mining days and I was getting broke again. So I sold it to a
kid down the street for $200.00 as a fixer upper. I used the money
to buy a 1957 Volkswagen. How the mighty do fall. Six months
earlier I had been driving a hotshot Rover 2000.

   The Volkswagen was pale blue. You know how it works. You never
notice a particular car before. Then you buy one. Then all of a
sudden it seems like every second car on the road is the same as
yours.

   Well Volkswagens beetles were very popular around that time,
and pale blue like mine was the favorite color. Baby blue beetles
were everywhere. Both literally and in my imagination. So I felt
in good company. Albeit my Beetle was a 1957. But since the styles
never changed one jot from one year to the next who could tell the
difference.

   It ran well. It was good on gas. Luxury it wasn't. But then
luxury was never the reason anybody ever bought a Volkswagen
Beetle. Anyway, given my down sized station in life I was pretty
happy in my Volkswagen. But one day it took me straight into the
twilight zone one of the few times in my life.

   The psychedelic scene had hit San Francisco with a vengeance.
Because of the proximity, also Vancouver. Like San Francisco,
Vancouver was starting to see frequent rock shows. Someone had
even started putting on regular weekend psychedelic dances, then
as you will recall, eventually me.

   The guy I had bought the Volkswagen from was the leading
psychedelic poster artist of Vancouver. In San Francisco, the
state of poster art had quickly become art Nuevue in it's own
right. So outstanding were the posters from a psychedelic art form
point of view, that extra posters were being printed to sell in
poster shops as wall art.

   The local Vancouver artist had a link with somebody in San
Francisco to ship small quantities of these posters. I would
wholesale them around Vancouver to make a little pocket change. I
used to pack them around in the Volkswagen and sell them out of
stock like a rutabaga route rather than take orders like a regular
catalogue business.

   I pulled into the parking lot of the Oakridge Shopping center
one day. The Oakridge mall in Vancouver was one of the first big
indoor mega malls of its type in North America, if not the actual
first.

   I got out of the car, put the key in my pocket, loaded up, went
to lock up, and couldn't find the stupid key. I'd just put it in
my pocket. To make a long story short I ended up looking
everywhere.

   I looked inside and outside of the car. And of course through
all my pockets again and again and again just to make sure. But no
key. The theme music from the Twilight Zone started to play in the
back of my head. But even that didn't help.

   I finally decided to get serious. Presuming I must have dropped
the key somewhere inside the car, I pulled everything from inside
the car that was pullable, seats, carpets, mats, everything.
Nothing. No key. Not a thing. Noa thingie.  Nada.

   By now it was nearly two hours along and the stupid key had
gone completely blue sky on me. It was either a bonafide case of
my elastic band and paper clips being able to teleport themselves
out of the picture theory. Or I had definitely and decidedly
entered the Twilight Zone.

   After turning over all the seats and looking through all the
springs yet one more time, I stood up. I put my hand in my pocket
yet one more time, and there was the key.

   When I had put my hand into my pocket this time, one finger of
my hand was sticking out a little and so had caught and gone down
behind my belt instead of down the front as usual. It had gone
straight into a secret little pocket for pocket watches behind the
belt that I had never even knew I had. I had been wearing the
jeans for over two years and never even suspected the pocket had
existed.


   When I had dropped the key into my pocket more than two hours
earlier, it had gone behind the belt and dropped into the watch
pocket. So it wasn't an unexpected step into the twilight zone
after all. Just an unexpected zone in the twilight of my pants.

   This little incident of course has nothing to do with my Karmic
Car Cycles but I sure enjoyed telling you about it.

   My next actual connection to my Karmic Car Cycle happened just
a few months later. I had to go to Seattle on both poster and rock
concert business. So I took the Volkswagen.

   I went down the whole way flat out at seventy. Volkswagens were
like that. A big part of their popularity. You were supposed to be
able to run a Beetle flat out all day and it wouldn't even notice
the warm up. It was probably true for the newer ones at least.

   I was heading back to Vancouver in the same go for broke way.
Namely flat out at seventy. I was just approaching the little town
of Marysville about half way back up to Vancouver on the US side,
when I heard a loud clank in the engine at the back. The car
slowly started to drift to a stop at the side of the highway. I
had blown a rod. The engine was toast.

   I hitched a ride into Marysville. I found a local service
station with lots of old cars around the lot. I gave them the key
to the car and arranged for them to tow my car into town for me. I
told them I would be back the next week to figure out what to do
with it.

   Well given my now fairly typical hippie type lifestyle of the
time, I never got back. To this day I have no idea what ever
happened to the darn thing.

   Similarly in 1966, a friend handed me the keys to a beat up
1962 Mercury and told me to look after it for him until he got
back to Vancouver. It stopped running one night in the parking lot
of an apartment building in the then West End of Vancouver.

   So I left it and never got back. I never saw the car again and
never saw my friend again either. Always wondered what ever
happened to the both of them. But even though cops weren't
involved, these abandoned cars things are well within the bivouac
of police concerns. Besides, acting so ignorantly about cars like
that just had to tick off the car gods. So both of these
definitely count as small 'innies'.

   Likewise since I was by now down to pocket change from day to
day, the Volkswagen was the last car I owned personally for quit
some time.

   Speaking of Volkswagens, the fastest I have even gone in a car,
including today, is about 129 mile an hour. That does not include
the unofficial 140 miles an hour with Ted on the lam in daddy's
brand new stretch body Cadillac. It was in a Volkswagen. Well not
exactly a Volkswagen, actually a Karman Ghia Volkswagen. Just after
the demise of my blue Volkswagen, a friend named Egon bought a 1963
Volkswagen Karman Ghia.

   Needless to say it was his pride and joy. The body of the Ghia
was an Italian designed sportscar beauty. The car itself was
actually the Italian designed sportscar body dropped over a simple
Volkswagen beetle chassis. The idea was to capture a bit of the
European sportscar market which was steaming up the showrooms at
the time.

   Volkswagen beetles had a tiny little air cooled engine in the
back, designed to do 70 miles an hour all day. The cars were
designed for utility not speed.

   So to make the Karman Ghias more viable, the engines had been
rodded up a bit. The car was therefore not all that bad for what
it was intended, as long as somebody didn't go forget the rules
and start thinking of it as an actual sports car.

   A band new paved highway had just been opened between Vancouver
and the small town of Squamish about 30 miles up the end of Howe
Sound from Vancouver. Squamish is probably not so small any more.
It's the gateway town to the mountain string where sits Mount
Whistler one of the most famous ski resorts in the world. Take it
to the bank therefore that Squamish is now probably a middle sized
town sitting about 30 miles up the end of Howe Sound from
Vancouver.

   The B.C. Highway authorities were waxing proud about their new
highway. How, for example, the pavement had come out as smooth as
glass. So Egon decided to take his new pride and joy up the
highway to see what it would do. He asked if I wanted to come
along for the ride. Having absolutely no suspicion of what kind of
ride Egan had in mind, I said, 'why not', and off we went.

   About a third of the way up to Squamish we came upon a long
long strip of die straight brilliant black new highway, gently
sloping down in front. Not even a yellow center stripe yet. The
road then slowly rolled upward ahead at the other end. 'Haahh',
said Egon gleefully, 'now lets see how fast this baby will go'.

   The speedometer on the car topped at 140 MPH, so I suspect Egon
might have had expectations over and above that actuality. I'm
sure like a lot of people he thought that if the speedometer
topped at 140 then the car should go 160.

   That may have been a bit optimistic. Most cars of the day had
speedometers topping 140. Even the ones that could barely do 70.
At any rate, down went his accelerator, and up went my heartbeat.
Remember, this was basically just a Volkswagen. Not even a new
one.

   Quickly the speedometer started to pass a hundred. The car
started to shimmy and shake a little nervously and I started to
shake and shimmy a little nervously on my own as well. Egon just
continued to glare down the road ahead, hunched over the wheel
like a Kamikaze pilot zeroing in on a target.

   The speed climbed to 120. The car started to shake and shimmy
and a lot. I started to shake and shimmy a whole lot. Finally as
Egon's Karman Ghia was reaching 129 mile an hour I politely
wheezed out that maybe he should slow down a little.

   Egan eased off the gas. Then leaned back in his seat ranting
with pride. "Man, did you see that, did you see that". "Well no
actually I hadn't", I thought. All I had seen was my whole life
flashing before my eyes.

   I couldn't speak. I could only sit there gripping my seat, my
heart beating so hard the blood was pumping up into the split ends
of my hair. After all I had just been in a second hand Volkswagen
Beetle going nearly 130 miles an hour.

   All I could think was that if there had been even a leaf on the
road, we would have sailed so high in the air over the next
mountain down the road we would probably shown up on radar at the
Vancouver International Airport.

   Since my hide had been very much on the line, I count this very
definitely as a very very nice, very very well earned, 'outie'.

   I almost hate to mention Egon's 1965 Dodge station wagon.
You'll recognize the car once I'm finished telling about it.
Egon, Hungarian, was planning to drive down to visit his Mom
in San Francisco, who had been living in Frisco ever since the
Russians had invited themselves to take over Hungary.

   I was already thinking about a trip down there to do some
business on behalf of the rock band I was managing by then. So I
agreed to split the gas and off we went.

   We reached the middle of Oregon State at about 11:30 in the
evening. We were approaching the major truck stop City of Eugene,
Oregon. I was driving. The plan was to stop at Eugene, gas up,
feed up, and be on our way again all gassed up but not fed up.

   About a mile and a half before town the red oil light suddenly
paffed on right in front of my face. We were passing right beside
a roadside gas station. Egon said better go in and get some oil.

   I didn't know until precisely this event that when the red oil
light of a car comes on, either the engine is already toast or you
have about two and a half seconds to turn it off or it will be
toast.

   So I said why not just carry on for the remaining mile and a
half and we can take care of everything including the oil all at
the same time. Bad call. An eighth of a mile later, the windshield
suddenly disappeared behind a thick black layer of oil.

   The engine had thrown a rod. The rod had punched right up
through the top of the piston chamber, up through the engine
plus hood of the car blowing out half the oil with it. Needless
to say, the engine was toast.

   We had a wrecker come and look at it, who offered Egon five
bucks for the rest of the car. There was little Egon could do but
take the money since we were about 350 miles from home. These guys
definitely know to turn an opportunity for good deal when they see
it.

   We finished the trip by bus. In anyone's books, since it was my
call, that has to count as a rather large size 'innie'. So I guess
it kind of nullifies the large sized 'outie' I earned at Egon's
expense in the Karman Ghia. So call Egon even Steven.

   A car's oil is its lifeblood. A friend told me just a couple of
weeks ago about a new oil filter he installed in his car when he
was a kid in Winnipeg. The car was sitting on the family's brand
newly paved driveway. The car was facing the house.

   He attached the new filter, filled the oil back up, and jumped
in and turned on the engine. The car hood was still open. The
instant the engine fired up, a huge spray of oil fanned over the
whole front of the house. It covered all two floors including the
big bay windows on the main floor.

   The filter was faulty. The oil ran down the front of the house
like big gobs of liquid honey. The big bay windows, being mostly
glass, were the hardest to clean. But all's well that end's well.
The oil filter company gave him a $200.00 rebate for his troubles.

   I didn't have any more direct interactions with my Karmic Car
Cycles that I can remember until well into 1975 in Halifax driving
cab. Except for a small incident in Saskatchewan when two of us
were clocked by the cops doing over ninety five miles an hour in
a fully loaded Econovan.

   In the spring of 1968 when our rock band was on the caravan to
Toronto for some bookings and to find a buyer of our tape, one of the
vehicles was a 1965 Ford Econovan loaded to the gunnels carrying the
driver and myself. A Dodge van carried the rest of the gear and the
rest of the fellows.

   The bass player was driving. We were going through Western
Saskatchewan late in the afternoon. This is the part of the
country which is so bereft of distinctive landscape features that
the locals use eight foot high trees as major landmarks.

   We had been cruising unchanged for over an hour when suddenly a
cop car pulled up right beside us. The cop signaled frantically
for us to pull over. The cop was more than a little flustered when
the bass player came to a stop and rolled down his window.

   But he seemed a lot more relieved that we were still alive than
arrogant that we had just broken the law. It seems we had been
doing ninety five miles an hour, and he had had a hell of a time
just catching up. The highway was straight as a die for miles. The
landscape was stultifying the same in all directions. So it was
easy for road hypnosis to set in.

   The cop therefore didn't want to give us a ticket. He evidently
just wanted to make sure we stayed alert to the danger and started
making more frequent coffee stops.

   I suspect we were by no means the first to be caught in this
particular area's patented psycho sync. But because of the
officer's kindness, and my stupidity for not paying more attention
to what the bass player was doing, I have to grade this one as a
little bit of an 'innie'.






THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 3

`THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES'

CHAPTER 23


     Nothing happened coming or going in my Car Cycles for the
next five years. Except the jay walking ticket in Vancouver in
1971. Then I moved to Halifax Dartmouth and my cycles went crazy.

   I arrived in Halifax early in early fall of 1974. My twin
brother Greydie was already there driving cab. Not a bad idea I
thought. So on the next day I went down and tried the test. But of
course I failed miserably. I drove around with Greydie the rest of
the day and evening to get the lay of the land. He also cued me up
over a map of the town.

   By the next day I had honed up enough to pass the test. It had
taken Greydie seven tries to pass the landmarks and street names
test. But then he hadn't had his help like I had. So by my third
day in town I was already driving cab.

   I got around simply by asking my fares what the shortest route
to their destination was. What a Carney. They thought I was been
considerate and saving them taxi fare. What they didn't know was
that otherwise I wouldn't have had the slightest idea on the
planet how to get them there.

   After about an hour and a half on my first day out, I spotted a
fare waving at me from behind back up the street. So I did what
any self respecting cabby would have done in a situation like that
and pulled a big fat Uuee. Right under the nose of a cop. The cop
stepped off the curb and gave me a ticket for an illegal U-turn.

   Turns out that in Halifax Dartmouth, the legal way to make a U
turn was to make a cut into a driveway or lane, stop, put the car
in reverse, back up a bit if even for just a foot, then put the
car back in forward and finish the maneuver.

   The operative step in this whole charming maneuver was the part
about going in reverse. No reverse, no legal. Since no one had
apprised me of this little law of perverse reversity going in, my
maneuver of hauling a full throttle U-turn was therefore sore
illegal.

   Halifax was like that all over. It was full of local little
laws and bylaws guaranteed to make the probability of somebody
getting a ticket at any given time very high.

   This was to take full advantage of the fact, or was the cause
of the fact take your choice, that foot policemen were stationed
at every street corner in the downtown core and surrounding area.
Patrol cars were everywhere. The traffic ticket business was
Halifax's main source of income. "If you can't mine the mines,
mine the public", somebody out there had evidently said to get
elected.

   So you really had to watch your driving Ps and Qs. Particularly
if you were a taxi driver who were the cops number one prey.
Definitely an 'outie'.

   Near the end of the period we drove cab, just before Greydie
and I decided to set up a flower route business instead, I had
just picked up a fare on Gottengin Street and was heading east
toward a small suburb at the end of Gottengin. The street passed
through a park. For nearly two miles there were no access roads.

   The taxi drivers in Halifax used to swap notes. Which gas was
giving the best economy and performance that particular week. One
of the Gulf service stations had just got in a load of supposedly
pretty good stuff.

   So I had decided to try the stuff out. I had gassed up just
before I had picked up my fare. So I figured the two mile stretch
through the park was as good a place as any to give the gas a good
try out.

   I started to feather the gas, pushing up the speed a little. I
feathered the gas again pushing up the speed a little again. I
feathered the gas again. I figured the gas wasn't all that bad. So
I eased back off. But I had inadvertently climbed up just over the
speed limit for about a hundred yards.

   As luck would have it, it was in the same hundred yards where
the cops had set up a secret radar gun hidden in the bushes. 'What
are the odds'. Or, `what terrible timing'. Or, `how does Murphy
always seem to know'. At any rate, less than a quarter of a mile
later a cop stepped off the curb and gave me a speeding ticket
even thought the fare though it was completely unfair and told the
cop so. Another 'outie' I would say.

   Greydie and I both rented our taxies. I rented my taxi from an
old ex postman from Antiguinish. The car was a nearly new, all
luxury 1974 Mercury Marquis. The Mercury Marquis was the top of
the line. So except for the guy in town driving the Caddie I was
probably driving the nicest cab in Halifax. But there was a
problem.

   The car was so big and smooth it was terrible in the snow. Even
the top of the line radial tires didn't help. The car was a bomb
in the snow. One snowy late fall evening, I happened to be coming
out of a very hilly up and down part of Halifax. I had just
dropped off the fare and was proceeding slowly up a sharp steep
little hill.

   Suddenly I felt two or three extremely sharp jabs under my
right collarbone, right near the shoulder. It felt as though
someone had poked a finger in there and shoved hard three times.

   Ignoring the signal, I reached the top of the hill, veered to
the right, and looked straight down a hill which looked like the
first big drop on a roller coaster. The bottom of the hill was
crammed with cars like an ant trap in the sand. 'Oh oh', I
thought, already knowing it was too late to stop because of my
momentum despite only going about four or five miles an hour.

   Sure enough, I went over the crown of the hill at about a mile
an hour and started down the other side at about half a mile an
hour. For all the good all my efforts for stopping the slide did,
I could have sat back and read the newspaper with the same result.
Talk about helpless.

   I hurtled all the way down to the bottom of the hill at the
same constant mile half a mile an hour speed solely because of the
weight of the car. When I hit bottom I went face first into the
melee of cars at the same one half a mile an hour.

   So the damage wasn't much. Nonetheless I forewent luxury for
practicality the next day and traded the Marquis in for a much
smaller car. I also figured I had earned another small 'outie'.

   I had a similar experience in Vancouver once, in 1959. A girl
friend's younger brother was playing a basketball game out in
Surrey. Surrey was about 25 miles east of Vancouver up the Fraser
River. We decided to go out by way of Marine drive. It had started
to snow a little, an extremely rare occurrence for Vancouver.

   I came over a hill, looked down, saw about half a mile of dead
flat road ahead and a similar sized hill going up at the other
end. The flat spot was filled with cars and getting fuller by the
moment. It was another ant trap filling up, Just like in Halifax,
piece of cake going in, nothing doing going out.

   Some of the cars had already been there over an hour futilely
attempting to climb back up one of the slopes. Even if they had
known what they were doing it wouldn't have helped. Don't forget
this was Vancouver and it never snowed in Vancouver. So hardly
anybody had winter driving experience whatsoever in the first
place.

   A city emergency tow truck arrived about an hour later and
started pulling the cars up one at a time in order of turn. Our
turn finally came at 1:30 in the morning. I never did find out who
won the game.

   For the first couple of months driving cab in Halifax, we had
rented our cabs from various people in the business. We paid a
very stiff fee every week for each of the two cars. We decided
that paying out for two cars every week was stupid.

   If we owned our own car we could drive it in shifts and put a
lot more money into our pocket. After watching the ads for a
while, I settled on a nice Mercury 1964 V8 four door sedan.

   The car was a beauty. The color was deep maroon with rich red
vinyl upholstery. The back seat looked like it had never been sat
in. The only problem was that the back end was completely rusted
out.

   Ford products at the time had a notorious problem with back end
rust. Combined with the salt factor off the Atlantic, and it being
a Ford product, the job on the Merc had been done mercilessly and
with considerable dispatch.

   I had someone go over the back end with a fine toothed
acetylene torch sufficient to pass the taxi safety certification.
I hired a body man to paint the back area. He suggested yellow
stripes over the Maroon. "Good idea", I said.

   I envisioned nice little pinstripes. When I picked the car up,
the lower back fender was canary yellow. A yellow strip the width
of a wide paint brush came out of the yellow area at the back and
finally petered out near the front of the front fender. With all
due respect, I don't think an uglier looking paint job could have
existed in the entire English speaking world.

   But the car passed inspection if not comment. Within a couple
of days I was officially in business with my own car. Greydie and
I called it the yellow streak. However the paint job turned out to
be a boon in disguise. People who liked my service simply asked the
dispatcher for the yellow and red taxi. I shoud have mentioned, when
first buying the car for $500 as it, it was known that rust had
penetrated a rear main frame to the point where the frame existed in
two separate main parts. After the tow to the bucket shop the guy with
the grimy face holding the acetaline tortch and goggles pushed up off
the face, took one look under and said he could have her fixed for $200
bucks. Another $50 bucks for the missing floor in the trunk. Deed done,
after that the car drove with a soft lazy floating motion compressing
off the next welded tension of the broken repaired main frame.
Passengers loved the feel of the ride and constantly commented.

   I drove it for nearly two months without a problem. One day I
was driving slowly up Quinpool and heard someone urgently honking
their horn behind. I pulled over. It was the old ex postman from
Antiguinish we had rented one of our two original taxis from.

   In his rich true blue 'born and raised in the Maritimes'
accent, he said in a slow drawl, "I'm not sure bey, I might be
wrong, but it sure looks to me like your back end is draggin".
Sure enough. Both sides of the frame over the back wheels had let
go. The back part of the frame on both sides had sunk to the
ground taking the gas tank and whole inside of the trunk with it.

   It looked just like a Roman racing chariot underneath. If I had
been going sixty miles an hour and hit a bump or caused a spark, I
would have been going a thousand and sixty miles an hour straight
up and my hinder binder up with it. Talk about an 'outie' with
credentials.

   The closest call I ever had to calling it mustard involving the
back end of a car happened while driving back to Vancouver from
Toronto in the spring of 1970. After being fired as the manager of
our rock band in the fall of 1969, you may recall I had holed up
in Rochdale College in Toronto for about five months.

   I found out that somebody from Rochdale was planning to drive
to Vancouver in March. So I booked passage by offering to split
the gas. We had a great drive, the weather was excellent. The car
was a Chevrolet Monza. The Monzas were sporty economy cars with an
air cooled engine in back. Fun to drive.

   We were on our way through Montana. About fifteen miles before
Kalispell we got a flat on the highway. We fixed the tire, put
everything away, hoped back in car, and headed on our way. We
hadn't gone five feet when we heard a very loud clunk in the back.

   We jumped out and discovered the engine hanging down at the
back like a bay door on a transport plane, butting against the
pavement.

   The engine was so heavy it had dropped hard. Despite the few
miles an hour we had been going, it had still managed to cut a
half inch gouge in the hard highway pavement about eight inches
long.

   Think long and hard on that for a minute. This was the car's
engine we're talking here. We had the car towed into Kalispell.
The mechanic took one look and said the U-bolts had let go.

   The only thing holding the engine to the frame in these Monzas
was evidently two small U-bolts attached to the back axial. If the
bolts had let go when we were doing sixty, the engine would have
bounced back so fast it would have shot the both of us to China
via air express.

   Talk about an 'outie' with clout. Monzas as you may also know
never caught on in popularity, and Ralph Nader hadn't even needed
to get involved.

   It was also another juicy class action law suite opportunity
which just never occurred to me. Given the obvious fault of the
design, as the passenger I was sitting pretty, so to speak. But
like I've said before, my brain just doesn't work in the 'look for
any possible juggler and go for it big time mode'.

   After Greydie and I had put our own cabbie car on the road in
Halifax, the split shift formula we ran was simple. Eight hours on
and eight hours off around the clock. If you do the math, it meant
one of us would drive the night shift one night and the other the
next.

   The night shift business was usually marginal. But it made
enough to be worth while overall. So we did it as much to keep the
money coming in as to keep the momentum running. One night I
picked up a fare who wanted to go to the airport. It was nearly
1:00 AM, long after the airport had officially closed for the
night.

   The fare to the airport was a standard twenty bucks. Not bad
for the hour it took round trip. So under normal circumstances
when there was a good chance of picking up a fare coming back, it
would be considered a lucky fare.

   But it was late at night, therefore not so hot. But the fare
was desperate. Something about missing his ride for a night shift.
Any way I could never say no. So I did the right thing and off we
went. When we arrived, a crowd of eight people were standing
outside the terminal, desperately looking for a ride back into
town.

   Apparently a tour plane had arrived late on a return from
Florida. These were the remnants of the flight who either hadn't
had a car stashed on the parking lot, or hadn't cued up a ride
with family or friends, or hadn't thought of bumming a ride
because they hadn't anticipated the airport being closed for the
night by the time they landed.

   So these people really were desperate. Taxis were not supposed
to double fare. But what the heck, at this time of night I was
sure non of them were about to complain to the taxi commission,
and I sure knew I wouldn't. So I crammed them all in and charged
them all half fare.

   Then off I headed back to town loaded to the hilt with people
and luggage. I cued up everyone's destination in advance and ran
the whole thing like dropping off a car pool. An hour and a half
later I was done and had a nice little wad in my pocket for my
efforts. All in all it was a very nice little self paid  'outie'.
No change to the Karmic cycle. It just pays to do the right thing.

   My best fare ever was a guy who ordered a cab one night about
two in the morning and wanted to go to Parrsboro. Parrsboro was a
tiny fishing village about 220 miles away on the west shore of the
Bay of Fundy. I asked if he was sure. But he was a sailor in from
a long time at sea.

   He hadn't been home in a long time and his pockets were loaded.
So we negotiated a fair price, I called my brother to tell him I
would be gone for a while, and off we went.

   It was a marvelous trip for both of us. He got to visit his
family for half a day and I got to see a part of the country I
probably wouldn't have otherwise seen. More than that, this area
in particular was well worth visiting because it was the center of
the world famous giant Fundy tides. A unique combination of
squeezing and sloshing along that piece of shore produced the
highest tides in the world, twice a day.

   I was doubly lucky because I got to see the tide full out and
full in. When we first got there the next morning, the tide was
just turning far out in the distance. All the wharves were sitting
on the top of forty to fifty foot pilings. They looked absolutely
ridiculous sitting way up there out of the water, like someone had
made a mistake.

   By the time the fellow wanted to head back, the tide was full
in. Water lapped near the top of the wharves like a day at the
cottage. The difference between the two water levels was almost
too unbelievable to accept. That particular trip was definitely
having my cake and eating it. But the best I ever heard of was a
cabby who had taken four tourists from Hong Kong to Montreal and
back.

   As he explained, he was sitting at the airport looking for a
fare when four Chinese businessmen hopped into the cab and in very
broken English said what sounded like, "Montreal". Well Montreal
was over nine hundred miles away.

   Thinking he had heard wrong he asked them again where they
wanted to go. Again the answer was awfully close to "Montreal". It
soon became apparent that Montreal was the only word they sort of
new in English.

   So he drove them to a Chinese restaurant he knew to see if the
Chinese owner could help out. Well it was true. Turns out the four
gentlemen were wealthy businessmen from Hong Kong who had just
spontaneously decided to fly to Canada to see Montreal. Now they
needed to get there and money wasn't the object.

   So off they all went. They were gone for two weeks. The four
businessmen covered all the expenses no questions asked. The
driver had the time of his life, going first class and staying in
all the best places.

   When they got back to Halifax, the businessmen handed him two
thousand dollars for his time, a nice chunk of cash for a couple
of weeks work in those days. But he had shown them every turn and
courtesy and they had had the time of their lives.

   So to them it was also money well spent. It was a classic win
win. I have to believe even to this day that it was one of the
best cases of having your cake and eating it that I have ever
heard of.

   Our yellow streak taxi was also house of an ironic but very
annoying small adventure one evening. All the taxi drivers in
Halifax knew to keep away from the area of the Armdale Rotary and
Chebucto Drive at about 9:20 every night. Chebucto Drive came out
of the Rotary, and in a small flat spot alongside the Rotary was a
small strip mall with Motion Picture Theater.

   The theater used to disgorge it's first showing every night at
that time. People would all hit their cars in the parking lot at
the same time. If you were in the area precisely at the time of
the dump, you could be stuck for fifteen minutes or more waiting
for the traffic to clear. Expensive down time for a taxi.

   One evening, I had taken the car into a car wash near the
Rotary. When the wash was finished I emptied the ash tray and left
it on the roof while I cleaned the dash. When done, I came through
the Rotary onto Chebucto. I passed under the railway overpass
right at the beginning of Chebucto and up the long slope towards a
flat stretch, which is how Chebucto worked.

   I was pleased with myself that I was safely in front of the
theater dump by about a minute and a half. I was half way up the
rise after passing through the underpass when I heard a small
clunk and clatter on the road behind. Feeling fairly certain that
it had something to do with me, I did a legal U-turn and went back
to take a look.

   It was the stupid ashtray. I had forgotten to take it off the
stupid roof. Now it was sitting in the middle of the stupid road
looking even stupider. I pulled over to the curb and got out to
fetch it back.

   I hadn't even taken two steps when the first of the movie dump
came swooping through the underpass and up past me standing by the
side of the road. I'd been too late by about fifteen seconds. I
stood at the side of the road waiting, watching at least about 150
cars go by, bumper to bumper.

   When the very last car came up out of the underpass and started
up the hill past me, I readied at last to retrieve the ashtray
still sitting unmolested in the middle of the road. But this last
car got it, flattening it like a pancake. `What are the odds'. I
mean sometimes you really do have to wonder. This was an 'outie'
with a painful edge for sure because it was almost like a
deliberate 'in your face'.

   Another time I was passing through the rotary. Actually I was
just coming into the rotary from the end of Quinpool. Just before
the plaza with the movie was a small power sub station stuffed
with huge power transformers on the right hand side when going
into the rotary.

   It was about nine fifteen in the evening in the middle of
winter, and black as coal out except for the street lights.
Exactly as I was passing the sub station scarcely fifty feet away
from the big transformers, and I mean exactly, one of the
transformers blew with a colossal bang and the whole region went
instantaneously jet black. All the lights had gone out in the same
exact millionth of a second that the transformer blew.

   I don't know if it was the shock of the bang and simultaneous
drop to stygian darkness, or the effect of a trillion megawatt
electromagnetic field suddenly collapsing, or all three, but I
rose straight up in my seat in sitting position and almost hit my
head on the ceiling of the car.

   It was the strangest feeling. I'm almost sure I had levitated
because I had gone up fairly slowly and had come back down fairly
slowly. Anyway, for sure, for wear and tear on nerves and fiber, I
warrant this a small 'outie'.

   As far as my outstanding speeding ticket on Gottengin Street
was concerned, I had forgotten all about it. I was on my back from
the airport one evening when I came over a hill on the highway
back to town. Not paying much attention I let the speed creep up
over the speed limit a little through the assistance of gravity.

   You know how it works. Go down a hill and you speed up. Go up a
hill and you slow down unless you have a three hundred horsepower
engine. Just as I was reaching the bottom of the slope, a cop car
came bounding over the crest of the next hill ahead and beaded
down at me with his radar gun. So I got another ticket for
speeding. Both these tickets should have been little 'outies', but
it didn't turn out that way.

   I went to court, planning on pleading guilty with explanation.
What I didn't know was the fact that in Halifax, the bench took as
incontestable fact that if you received a ticket for anything, you
were guilty of the offense or wouldn't have received the ticket.

   So therefore, if you tried to plead not guilty or with
explanation, you were ergo simply a snively little weasel trying
to get out of paying the fine. So they would throw the book at
you. Because of its seventeenth century heritage, the Maritimes
have a much simpler view of justice. And then of course there was
always the matter of the revenue at stake. Between the two you
didn't have a chance.

   Not knowing about any of this, I said my piece in court.
Without even responding to my explanation, the judge charged me
maximum fine. I said, "that's a little steep isn't it under the
circumstances", believing in the righteousness of my situation.

   Completely missing the point, the judge pulled out a big thick
book of traffic bylaws, and said, "under amendment blah blah blah
of section blah blah blah, I can charge you a maximum of blah
blah". So likewise completely missing the point, I said, "OK then,
you judge yourself by your actions".

   Big mistake, big mistake, very big 'innie', very very big
`innie'. Never ever talk to judges that way. They can't handle it,
can't handle it big time. The judge slammed shut the book and gave
me the fine or thirty days in the pen in lieu of payment. He then
sentenced me to ten days in jail for contempt of court.

   In an instant the bailiff had me clamped by the arms and out
the door. In less than an hour I was sitting on a cot in a
cellblock of the Provincial jail in Stittsville contemplating my
fate.

   My brother's turn came up next. His was only a simple ticket.
But because of the good mood I'd put the judge in, he also went
straight from the courtroom to the pokey, and he had pleaded
guilty. He just didn't happen to have the money on him in his
pocket for the fine. But unlike me, he was only taken to the
Regional Detention Center - joke joke that place was a big upgrade
in prisoner status - and locked in solitary confinement over night.

   It seems the judge had been really ticked at seeing identical twins
in front of him, both lawbreakers by dint of traffic tickets, and
had odered Greydie locked away in isolation, with no phone calls,
until fine paid in full.

   Fortunately, the afternoon shift supervisor who both of us had
driven from time to time in our swank yellow streak taxi, had time
to guide Greydie from solitary confinement to a phone mysteriously
sitting on the edge of the counter in the front reception area while
he, the supervisor, had business to attend to elsewhere in the prison.
Greydie got his phone call and our Jamaican friend the lawyer went
through every drawer and pocket in our Keddy Inn motel room coming
with the exact amount for Greydie's fine, about $3.00 dollars short
which he pitched in himself. By what are the odds, our friend the
lawyer later turned out to be the older brother of Rosemary Brown a
black MP who rose high in BC politics and had begun to catch national
notice as a politian until one day she abruptly decided to retire.

   So Greydie had called the lawyer and authorized him to go to
our place and pick up the money and go pay his fine, which he was
able to do first thing the next morning. When my brother got out he
had seven dollars left towards my fine. So he did a rock around the
clock taxi stint that whole night. By noon the next day had enough
for both my fines.

   When he went to pay it, the clerk said, "don't worry about it
for a while, the ten days of the contempt charge have to pass
before the remaining twenty days start for non payment of the
fine". But my brother's intuition prevailed and my brother came
back the next day insisting they take the money.

   Good thing. The judge had been so ticked at having heard
something expressed, that while it may not have been in the wisest
of judgments was at least in the fullest of truths, that he had
made the two sentences consecutive instead of concurrent.
Something completely unheard of at that time.

   Worse, he had put the ticket in front of the contempt sentence,
also completely unprecedented. That meant that every day missed
not paying the fine had to be served before the ten days for the
contempt charge started. Kind of gives you an uncomfortable idea
of what 'Hanging Judges' must have been like.

   Fortunately the clerk was more understanding. Because of his
mistake the day before, he made the payment retroactive to only
one day late. But I was therefore nonetheless in for a full eleven
days and not ten because of the one day missed in paying the
fines.

   I stayed in an open dorm with about twelve other guys. Some of
the guys in there must have whatever it was that got them in
there, in their blood. My shoes disappeared one day from the foot
of my cot while I slept.

   A couple of days earlier, the guy across from me had made a big
secret ceremony of showing me his secret little hidey hole he had
made in the wall under his bunk. I have no idea how long he had
been in there. It was long enough at least though to have loosened
the mortar around one of the concrete blocks in the wall so he
could pull the block exposing a cavity in behind.

   By his manner, I had to believe I had been apprised of the
covert of the century. So guess where I found my missing shoes in
the very first place it occurred to me to look. Having too many
brains wasn't the felony for which he was convicted, I have to
expect.

   The thing about it is he never said anything after I took them
back. Or even indicated that he knew. To my considerable relief I
might add, not been up for any appropriate Macho event that could
have just as easily occurred.

   It snowed pretty well the whole time I was in the pokey. On the
tenth day, not knowing about the extra day, I got up early and
prepared to leave. The sun was shining and the snow was melting.
At noon I heard the good news that I was in for another day. By
late afternoon it was snowing again, and all that night.

   But it's an ill wind that blows no one any good. The next
morning the sun was out, the snow was melting, and my brother was
outside the gate to pick me up and was all excited. The night
before the snow had really come down and just about everybody was
off the road. Even the cabbies were packing it in.

   My brother had become appraised of this when one of his fares
turned out to be a cabby on his way home after having to park his
cab at the side of the road because it wasn't going anywhere. It
was in fact the owner of Halifax's second largest taxi company who
was the fare and his taxi was deep in snow outside the Fleet Club.

   My brother was about half way up a fairly steep hill at full
normal speed when suddenly the cabby woke up to the fact my
brother was doing the impossible. How in the hell he wanted to
know, was the snow not slowing my brother down like everybody
else.

   It was because my brother was riding on a whomped up disposable
tire chain he had started using the day I went in the pokey. The
cabby's sudden big excitement about the non-slip driving had just
as suddenly brought home to my brother the previously unrealized
fact that he was definitely onto something pretty good here.

   They say the necessity is the mother of Invention. Better
believe it. You recall that the day after I had gone into the
pokey, my brother had started out with the less than seven dollars
to run double shifts in the cab to collect the money for my fine.

   But by suppertime a big blizzard had rolled in and the taxi
finally stalled solid in an iced parking lot in a plaza across
the bridge in Dartmouth. By coincidence, the cab had snowstalled
in front of a hardware store. So my brother had gone inside and
started asking about tire chains.

   "Not a chance", was the reply with a heavy maritime twang. "We
sold the last one day before yesterday and nobody else's got any
either. Everybody's comin' here asking. Greydie asked what about
wrapping strips of chain around the tires. As a matter of fact,
mused the maritime hardwarer, I might have something that'le do'er.
Turns out chains of all kinds simply could not work, too soft. He
happened to have a roll of case hardened still link chain of the
kind used to hang dining room chandeliers, the roll never having
sold a single foot in seven months for being nearly ten times
the price of normal chain. Lengths of chain were cut, clamps found
that could hook two ends together, out went Greydie to the snow
bound parking lot, worked links through the wheel wells of the
tires, hooked them together with the little clamps, and drove
away, back in business full time. Two hours had passed. By this
time he was close to being the only taxi still on the road in the
blizzard.

   My brother had fixed on two for each wheel, and didn't bother
with the others. Why get fancy. To his great surprise, half an hour
later he was driving faster than anyone else and putting money in
his pocket wholesale. The chains lasted about four hours and he put
stopped and put on another.

   By the next morning the blizzard was still blowing but he had
earned over 280 dollars, a completely unheard of amount for taxi
driving in that length of shift in Halifax. It paid my fines in
full.

   When my brother told me about all this I realized he was
definitely on to something too, I had been starting becoming
much better at coffee smelling the last few years.

   So started to do a little research. It turned out there was a
very sound physical reason why the things worked. First of all it
turned out that a spinning tire doesn't need constant friction to
get it going, and in particular keep it going.

   Just a tick at the right time is usually enough such as when a
single link comes around and grabs the pavement. The repeated
little ticks of the turning tire guarantees that you keep going
once you get going.

   Secondly, by chance he had been using half inch case hardened
pulley chain. Which turned out to be exactly the right thickness
for grip and durability. If the chain were any thinner, it would
have recessed into the rubber too much when the tire came around
to the ground and therefore wouldn't provide enough grip. If it
were any softer it would have ground away. I know because I
researched all of these things.

   Where the 'what are the odds' comes into this one, is that the
hardware store where he had just happened to bog down in the snow
had ordered ordinary soft chain seven months before and had
received the case hardened stuff by mistake.

   The chunks my brother took were the first pieces they had sold.
If it hadn't been for that, the whole idea of even testing the
chains would probably never have calved.

   Also by luck the chain happened to be just the right thickness.
If the chain is too thick I found out, it wouldn't recess into the
tire enough. So would grind and shear in friction with the
pavement and all too quickly break.

   In a completely counter intuitive way that is why regular tire
chains don't often last from lunch till supper. The chain material
is way too thick. Chains for a big tractor are a different matter.
A tractor isn't likely to go very far or very fast.

   We eventually found a case hardened half inch chain that would
go for eight hours without breaking, and cost only a about a
dollar and a half to make a chain. So I quickly envisioned a
little disposable tire chain kit consisting of a piece of chain
and two plastic tongues which fitted at each end allowing you to
slap the chain onto your tire through a fello and cinching the
ends in about fifteen seconds. Well thirty.

   The idea was to sell them at service stations across North
America as an emergency disposable. So I obtained some patents
for the patent office to use as a model for writing up a patent
application. We obtained a patent for it a year later. We passed
the rights onto someone to develop for remuneration's to come
from sales. But they never put it into production. At least
as for as I know.

   The idea of a disposable tire chain however had leaked out.
Probably by seeing the patent application at the patent office.
Because a couple of years later at least two different version of
the same idea were being advertised in Popular Mechanics and
similar magazines. Plus full page adds in the National Enquirer.

   The run only lasted a short while however. By the end of the
seventies, fully functional snow tires and the all season tires of
today had arrived. Tire chains were history except for dire and or
heavy duty emergencies.

   The long and the short of it is that I therefore consider that
the horror of meeting the sheriff in the courtroom after
sentencing, and subsequent untoward incarceration, and the
overwhelming possibility that we could have made millions with the
tire chain idea if only we had thought of it in the early
twenties, evened out the Karmic conditions of the whole affair.
And so nothing came in or came out my Karmic ledger as a result.
If you're happy with that I'm happy with that.

   The spring following my short vacation at the Vertical Bars
resort, I received another speeding ticket, as usual with one or
another mitigating circumstances, so it counts as an 'outie'.

   But this time, being more familiar with the way it worked
around there, I decided to play it safe and hired a lawyer to
plead the mitigating circumstances on my behalf.

   When he came out after the court appearance, he was beaming
from ear to ear. "How'd it go", I asked. "Fine", he said. "So
what's next", I asked. "Just pay the fine over there", he said.
"But didn't you plead not guilty", I said. "What!", he said, "Do
you think I'm crazy", he said. Then sent me a bill for $150.00 for
his services. Some guys have it made.

   Have you ever noticed how things don't seem to try and screw
you up until it's a given that they can. Or at least until it's
definitely worth it's while to try. Then they pounce. For example,
you may be working on a computer project. In keeping with all the
books about safe computing, you save your work diligently without
fail, every few minutes of every day, month after month.

   But then one day, because of a phone call interruption or so
you forget to save for while. This will usually be just when you
are in the middle of doing the final synopsis for the whole
monumental work, or at some other equally important phase. Then
suddenly, just like that, the power goes off.

   It hasn't gone off even once before in the past seven years. My
brother refers to things like that as, 'the cold white flash'. But
that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I figure it's because
someone is up there is keeping track and never bothers to make a
move until it's worth a good yuck at your expense. That's one of
the reasons why 'Murphy's Law' rules the planet so efficiently.
Murphy is in cahoots with whoever it is up there that's calling
the shots.

   The above computer example was just an example. Murphy has the
whole world taped. I had become so engrossed in my flower selling
activities in Halifax one time that I completely failed to notice
that the car insurance was coming up for renewal. Also because I
had recently moved around a bit at the time, the papers hadn't
caught up with me yet.

   You have to understand of course that I hadn't had an accident
in a car, except for the ride down the slippery snow in the big
Mercury Marquis taxi since I had front ended my TR3 eleven years
before.

   In the winter of 1977, I was parked in a driveway across the
street from one of my downtown Halifax flower selling places one
night, about 9:30 in the evening. The driveway was approximately
about half way along the block. I came out, hoped in the car, looked
up the street both ways, and saw that the only car on the road besides
me was up at the next traffic light intersection back, a good block
and a half away.

   So I put the car in reverse and slowly backed out into the
street. I looked up. To my shock the car was already coming
through the closest intersection only half a block away. What I
had failed to notice in my first look up the street, was that he
was really flying, doing at least 50 to 60 mph. I slammed the car
into forward, jammed on the gas, and stalled the car. Frantically
I tried to pull the car using the starter motor. But it was an
automatic. No go.

   A few seconds later I heard a violent screech as the other
driver finally woke to my covering at least two thirds of the path
in front of him and tried to veer around the back of my car. He
clipped my back end going around, splitting the gas tank wide open
and spewing gas in all directions like from a happy street
flusher. Think about that for a second or two. Had even a small
spark occurred I would be telling all this by poetry on a harp,
with wings.

   The fire hall was only a couple of blocks down the street so
they were there in no time washing down the street. The guy of
course was plastered. So didn't have a case. The damage on my car
was about $2,500.00, an awful lot more if it had been today.

   The next morning I went to the insurance company to file the
claim. "Tough Luck", said the clerk, "your insurance was canceled
just yesterday". I was both flabbergasted and dismayed. Well,
financially wiped out would be a much closer description. I
insisted the clerk have the company dig out my file and go over it
with a fine tooth comb.

   Sure enough, because of standard customer leniency policies
regards renewals, my actual drop dead cut off point wasn't for
another two days. So I gladly paid the premium and they covered
the accident. But you have at least have to give whoever it is up
there credit for trying. I also have to give myself both an
'innie' for ignoring to rebuy the insurance policy and an 'outie'
for nearly buying the farm.

   I figure whoever it is up there is also in cahoots with the
cops. Some policemen seemed to have a special little gadget or
antennae in their forehead that whoever it is up there must set a
buzzing to let the cop know when there's somebody around just ripe
for the picking.

   I had received another moving violation one day picking up
flowers from the airport early 1977. Because of all the tickets I
had received while driving cab and since, I was now over the
points limit for the given period. So my license was suspended for
six months. I went to pay the fine at three in the afternoon. I
paid the fine, handed the clerk my driver's license, and turned it
over to the clerk who stamped it on the back with a big fat sloppy
wet rubber stamp.

   But now I was in a bit of a dilemma. I had no cash in the bank.
Flowers always gave us money in our pocket but never money in the
bank. Likewise flower selling was my only source of income.
Likewise, between my happy hour run, two full night runs, I was
putting on nearly one hundred miles a day.

   So for me at the time, no car meant about the same as a cot at
the Sally. So no driving for me was no option and I continued
driving to the best of my ability not to look guilty of something.
But I had already used up my six months grace period of driving
without a license back in the mid sixties. The Karmic Car Gods
never forget.

   So exactly nine o'clock that same night, I was coming back over
the MacDonald Bridge from Dartmouth to Halifax. This was scarcely
six hours after the license had been officially suspended. A car
pulled up behind me with a Christmas tree on top and it was all
lit up. It was a cop pulling me over for something.

   The something turned out to be a missing taillight. A missing
taillight is one of those things you don't know about until
someone, like a cop or whoever gets there first tells you about
it. Same for front lights. In this case the cop had got there
first and now he wanted to see my drivers license with the big fat
sloppy wet kiss spelling 'suspended six months' stamped all over
the back.

   He looked over my license from the front. Opened it and looked
at it inside. Then he closed it again and read the front from top
to bottom again. Then did the same again inside. The poor guy's
antennae must have been crackling so loud it was giving him a
headache. But he never turned the license over and looked at the
back.

   Finally he gave me a warning for the missing light. Then handed
me back my licenses and was on his way. Once my heart returned to
its normal pattern of four beats to the bar, I continued on my way
to my next bar. I don't know whom I owe for that one for getting
me off the hook. But whoever it is I figure I owe them big time.

   Or maybe I had just lost track of the standings in my Karmic
Cycles for a while. Maybe I had got far enough ahead in it's good
books that despite the fact I was definitely in a big mode for
'innie' for driving without the license, it had graciously coughed
up a free balance of the books. At any rate, I thankfully never
saw the wrong end of a cop again for the whole rest of my time in
Halifax.





THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 3

`THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES'

CHAPTER 28

   Actually, a little bit of collateral good came out of our
experience with the tire chain even if we didn't make any money
out of it. It helped clear up one of the nagging little annoyances
in my life. I'm left handed. But unlike most lefties, I push the
pen straight across the page instead of hooking it around hunched
over the paper like most lefties.

   When I was a kid and started to write with ink, it was with nib
pen and ink. Since I pushed the pen, the nib would dig in and
create a horrible mess. So my handwriting was not good what you
would you call hot, not even legible in fact. When ballpoint pens
came along in the early fifty's they were a blessing in disguise,
sort of.

   There was no more tearing up the paper, but the ink would
smudge because my hand and arm would drag over what I just wrote.
So the paper would end up a blurry blue smudge making it equally
ineligible. Plus my hand and arm would be covered in blue ink that
rubbed off on everything and my Mom just loved it. I was screwed if
I did and screwed if I didn't.

   Eventually along came indelible ink ballpoints. At last my
problem with crummy writing and forever blue pages and
shirtsleeves was over. But it was very expensive. Every time I
bought a new pen, it would be out of ink in two or three days. I
spent a fortune on pens in university.

   I figured I had the world's worst luck for buying bad pens
since no one else seemed to be having the same trouble. But when I
was researching the disposable tire chains for patenting, on a
whim I decided to look up the patent for ballpoint pens. Sure
enough, there was an answer. The ball at the tip of the pen is
designed to ride in a little socket. Channels down the side feed
the ink to the ball by gravity.

   The channels were designed to let the ink flow freely when the
tip was dragged, repeat, 'dragged', across the paper. If the pen
were pushed, like by me, the ball would shove up against the
channels sealing off the ink flow. My pens weren't running out of
ink, just drying up. I must have thrown out about two gallons of
good ink over the years for nothing.

   Apparently the pen companies must have eventually hired someone
in design that was a left handed pusher like me instead of a
dragger. Because I can buy any ballpoint pen I want now and it
works fine. Of course with a computer, I don't write that much.
And a keyboard doesn't really care what hand you write with or
even your toes. Technology always seems to come through for you
after the fact.

   So now the problem is, because of lack of practice, I can't
write worth snit. My writing has gone from an unintelligible hen
scratching to a completely unintelligible hen scratching. My
writing's so bad that even I can't read it half the time. No lie.

   I was writing a note for one of our programmers the other day,
a Russian fellow, and he asked me with a grin what language I was
writing in. Doctors looked at my writing one day and said, 'we can
do better than that'. So now they're the only ones whose writing
is harder to read than mine.

   I think the problem is that I think so fast when I'm writing
that the pen is not only mightier than the sword, it's five days
behind the brain. So it doesn't know exactly what it should be
writing.

   So it tries it's best to guess, usually ending up as scrawling.
That's why I like a word processor so much. It's pretty hard to
scrawl out a stream of pixels. Spelling, now that's a different
matter.

   After my incident with the cop on the bridge between Dartmouth
and Halifax and I didn't have a valid driver's license, my Karmic
Car Cycles remained aquiested until I returned to Calgary and
Edmonton Alberta in the fall of 1977.

   As you may recall, Greydie had gone up into the North West
Territories to sell flowers and I had eventually returned west to
sell flowers and wholesale leather crafts with my original friends
in Alberta. This time I ran into a whole string of 'innie' 'outie'
events. Mostly 'outies'.

   It's proper to believe that the police do their job to the best
of their ability and in the highest standard of fairness. But
sometimes you have to feel that maybe they've stacked the deck
just a bit in their favor.

   High River is a small town about 30 mile due south of Calgary.
It sits about two miles straight west off the main highway. A
secondary back road also to the highway leaves straight north of
town and links to the highway about five miles up back toward
Calgary.

   If you leave town on this route, you pass over the bridge over
the High River. The river is a stony creek in the fall and rushing
mountain torrent in the spring. The river passes under the back
road link just outside the downtown core.

   After crossing the bridge you go about a half a mile up to a
hard right angle turn to the left. The turn has a very large
yellow checked warning sign which says, 'slow to 40'. After making
the turn, the road continues on for about four and a half miles
past cow pastures and wheat fields then hooks back up with the
main highway north to Calgary.

   Now anyone who drives into town off the main access south from
the highway and leaves town going out the back road going north,
would therefore naturally have to assume that the speed limit
after crossing the bridge over the River High would be greater
than 40 miles an hour. Otherwise why would the checkered sign at
the hard left turn further ahead clearly tells you to slow down to
40 mile and hour. So you would naturally think.

   "Not so", said the cop who hides behind the bushes about half
way up towards the checkered sign, and who roared out and gave me
a ticket for speeding on my next trip through town. Quote, "The
bylaw clearly states that the speed limit continues from downtown
at thirty miles an hour all the way out for two and half miles".
It was therefore thirty miles an hour way out into pastures and
wheat fields that you start passing, as a matter of fact.

   If I had been born and raised in High River, I would probably
have found out that little fact of bylaw bologna early in my
driving career after receiving a first ticket probably on my
second day out in a car.

   But I wasn't. So I didn't know. So I would have to call that
one a real live 'outie', being a duped out of towner caught cold
in a turkey shoot like that.

   Sinilarly, woops similarly Coronation was a small isolated town
in south central Alberta. It sat on a North South secondary
highway running nearly smack dab down the middle the province all
the way from the very bottom of the province to well past Edmonton
in the North. The main North South highway linking Fort Mcleod at
the south and Calgary, thence Edmonton, was well to the west,
sliding up just this side of the mountains.

   Coronation was therefore about sixty miles to the south east
from Calgary. Very little of excitement took place there. Except
for the nightly fleecing of the flock. I had been wholesaling for
nearly a week throughout the bottom west side of the province, and
planned to start the next morning at Coronation.

   So I phoned ahead and booked a room at the local hotel. I left
Lethbridge about nine in the evening heading north on the main
north south Albeta route. According to the map, the only road
crossing from the main highway I was on, and the secondary highway
through Coronation, was about ten miles south of Coronation.

   I made the cross connection and turned left onto the secondary
trunk to go the ten miles north into Coronation. It was about
11:30 at night and black as coal. The sky was overcast, so no
stars. There were no lights in sight on any horizon not even a
farmer's porch light in the distance. This was really desolate
stuff. Every once in a while I would see flashing red lights up
ahead by their reflection off the clouds overhead.

   I was driving along minding my own business, when suddenly,
right beside me about four feet away, a cop's red lights flared on
like an exploding supernova and I almost went off the road. After
I pulled over, the cop came up and told me I was speeding.
"Speeding where", I asked mystified. "I thought every highway in
Alberta except the four lane freeway joining Calgary and Edmonton
was the same 55 miles an hour".

   "They are. But the shoulder on this stretch of road for twenty
miles back is three feet narrower than normal", he explained
patronizingly. "Therefore the speed limit is five miles an hour
less through here than anywhere else".

   Well, I suppose if I had gotten onto the highway before the
cross cut, I might possibly have seen a sign. But I hadn't. And
the only next speed sign was just about a mile before Coronation,
quit conveniently too late to do anyone any good and quit
deliberately I have to suspect. So I got a ticket.

   When I booked into the hotel, I gripped a bit to the night
clerk. "Oh him", said the clerk, "he sits there every night
picking them off like flies. They've been doing that for years".

   Somebody should write a little red book about this kind of
stuff for travelers. You know, "If you're there, watch out for
this, if you're here, watch out for that", kind of thing. At any
rate, I know for sure that this one is about as 'outie' as it
gets. So an 'outie' it is.

   In all the years I wholesaled our leather goods in Alberta and
Saskatchewan, we only ventured into BC once. Good thing too. I
might have wound up barred from driving for life. The highway from
Jasper and McBride at the far east edge of BC, had long since been
punched through to Prince Rupert in the BC interior which was
already long since hooked up by highway to the west coast at
Prince Rupert.

   The highway in total followed exactly the main CNR line west to
the coast from Edmonton. After McBride the highway was barren
except for a number of saw mill camps until Prince George
including the Town of Penny where my brother and I once served up
fresh milk to some Portuguese during a summer break in high
school.

   Some places never get a break. Penny was still completely off
the beaten path. The highway swung north about twenty miles from
the Fraser River for a while. Just about where Penny was. I
haven't a clue why Penny had everyone so spooked. But it sure
seemed like nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. Maybe
because of all that drinking at weddings.

   My one and only wholesale trip into BC along the highway was a
two week affair. First going right straight through to the West
Coast following the string of towns along the original CNR line
west of Prince George. Then I went straight back to Prince George
and cut down to Quesnel south of Prince George. It was not very
efficient routing but that was the way BC was designed up there at
the time.

   On the day of the planned trip to Quesnel, I left downtown
Prince George via a side thoroughfare which went under the main
freeway south out of town and emptied from the north into a small
outdoor plaza where I had an appointment to see a country western
store.

   The south end of the plaza went straight up a ramp onto the
freeway heading out of Prince George south. When I finished my
call, I went straight up the ramp. Then I gunned it for out of
town and immediately got pulled over for a speeding ticket two and
a half blocks later.

   Turns out the speed limit was still municipal for at least a
couple of miles down the road from where the ramp had come up and
we were sitting. So no question about it. I was going to fast.

   If I had gone onto the freeway on the normal route from down
town, I would have seen the speed signs. But nobody on the
municipal board had though of putting up a sign to warn the people
coming up the ramp from the plaza. Or they had deliberately chosen
not to. You pick it.

   At any rate I tried hopelessly to explain my situation to the
cop. "Tough", said the cop as he wrote out the ticket. "Not a very
pleasant fellow", I thought to myself as he roared away in high
gear throwing up a huge shower of stones and dust onto my
windshield. Or they didn't like Albertans over there. Or maybe I
should have wondered how come he had been so on the ball in
picking me up just exactly after I had came up on the freeway off
the ramp.

   At any rate, it was probably the poorest attitude of any police
officer I ever encountered. Definitely an 'outie'. Two, because he
almost cracked my windshield with his rock shower.

   On the way back, I was ultra fortunate to pass through Jasper
National Park on a brilliant bright blue crystal clear winter day.
The scenery was spectacular, one of the reasons why Jasper National
Park is among one of top world famous natural scenic wonders.

   The highlight of the tour is Mount Robson, the highest mountain
in the Canadian part of the Rockies. Most of the time you can't
see the top because it's covered in cloud. On this particular day
the fates had decided to play me an overture in C sharp major, and
the mountain top was as clear as a bell with a spay of snow
blowing from the tip of the crown like a mist.

   The sight was so spellbindingly riveting that I neglected to
stay riveted on the speed signs. On days like this Mount Robson
probably comprises one of the most spectacular mountain views in
the world. Well, there are the Himalayas. But.

   Mount robson starts straight up from road level and rises straight
up to end in a jagged point of a crown. No foothills or parts of other
mountains obstruct the view. It's a perfect stand alone mountain, just
you and it right in front of you like a hollywood set. It's one of the
very few views like it in the world which is also yet bounded by
mountains on all sides.

   So I did what any self respecting tourist would do in a
situation like this and I gawked at the mountain instead of the
highway. So I never saw the cop coming and got a ticket for
speeding. Not by much just ten or so miles an hour over
the limit. It seems that the speed limit in all national parks in
Canada in ten miles an hour less than all non-national parks,
i.e., the rest of the country.

   If I hadn't been staring up at the top of the mountain all the
time I might have seen a speed sign. Or at least I might have seen
the cop coming down the highway in front of me long enough in
advance to instinctively slow down a little like you always do
when you see a cop coming down the road in front of you even when
your are only doing five miles an hour. But I didn't and I should
have. So this was one was an 'innie' plain and simple, no
arguments about it.

   As anyone knows who knows how Karma is supposed to work, what
you do unto others is done unto you a thousand fold. In the Karmic
Car Cycles, there's absolutely no doubt about that at all. In the
middle of winter in Edmonton 1979, I stopped for gas on my flower
route one evening. I was in a big hurry to get going, so after
paying for the gas I did a backup U turn right out from beside the
pump and right into the side of a car parked in the middle of
nowhere right in the middle of the lot.

   You always try and rationalize something done stupidly by an
even more stupid reason why it wasn't actually any of your fault.
So I went inside to check out who the dumb cluck was that had left
the car parked in such a stupid place.

   But the attendant said it had been parked like that for days
and had no idea who it belonged to. So because I thought it had
been such a dumb place to leave a dumb car, and because in my view
it wasn't that big a dent in the side of the car anyway, and
because I was in a big hurry to get going on my flower route, I
shrugged my shoulders and drove away without leaving my phone
number or any way to get in touch.

   Can't do that. No, no, no. Karmic Car Cycles are very specific
about this kind of thing. That very night the temperatures made a
fast dip down into the sub arctic regions of around 35 degrees
below, centigrade, almost 30 below Farenheight.

   The next morning the back window of the station wagon, the big
expensive curved roundy one, had cooled slower than the metal of
the car, and because of the compression had shattered into a
trillion tiny little pieces held together only by the thin layer
of safety glass plastic in the middle of the glass.

   This was a 100% cash and carry 'innie', which probably cost a
few times more than what the little ding, well biggish little ding
actually, in the other guy's car would probably have cost me out
of pocket.

   One of the nicer things about the Karmic Cycles however is that
the keeper of the books also evidently takes great care in looking
after your butte, both figuratively and literally. One day in the
same summer, the keeper came to my rescue. My life was never in
danger, but it could have been a HUGE expense on the car. Not to
mention the inconvenience.

   I was coming back from one of my occasional two week
wholesaling trips throughout Saskatchewan. It was the last day and
I was heading back to Edmonton just inside the Alberta border due
East near Loydminister Saskatchewan. I was traveling at a constant
sixty mile an hour on cruise control. Suddenly I got a tiny whiff
of warm water. Actually it was a lot more like steam.

   A few seconds later I smelled another. Alarm bells suddenly
started going off so I thought I better pull over and check it
out. I saw a big overpass just ahead so I coasted to the shoulder
safely out of harm's way just before the overpass. I got out to
check under the hood. When I opened the hood, the upper rad hose
had sprung a leak about the size of a finger just above the top of
the block.

   Water was shooting straight out like a small garden hose. In
about another minute or two at the speed I was going the rad would
have emptied and the engine gone blooie.

   But now I was out in the middle of nowhere without a rad hose
for that particular car and little chance of finding one. Full
sized station wagons of the time like the one I was driving, had
never been popular in the wake of the gas price explosion any
where in North America, let alone in the stretches of northeastern
Alberta. So I figured I was going to be facing a major tow job and
long delay waiting for a hose to come in no matter which way I
decided to go with it.

   Thinking that Loydminster at the Saskatchewan border about 50
miles back was my best bet, I climbed to the top of the overpass
to see if anyone was coming back the other way so I could hitch a
ride. When I reached the top of the pass, I saw this very old
country service station tucked quietly into the landscape just on
the other side of the overpass.

   Most highway places have signs a quarter of a mile high so you
can't miss them going either way. But this one was just sitting
quietly back there with a small little snip of a sign, absolutely
in the middle of nowhere off by itself out of the way.

   I walked down and told the old timer in the service bay what
had happened. He asked me what kind of car I had. I told him, and
he said, "you're in luck, somebody had ordered an upper rad hose
for that very same car last year and never came back". Twenty
minutes later the car was up on the rack. Half an hour after that
I was back on road like new.

   `What are the odds' you ask. I have no idea. A lot longer than
a country, at least of that I can be sure. Don't forget the hose
could have popped anywhere along the five hundred miles of thinly
populated road I had been driving from Saskatoon to Edmonton, and
I would have been day old soda.

   He didn't even charge me much for the service he was so
relieved for finally being able to get rid of the white elephant
rad hose he had been carrying for a year. Some days you win for
not trying.

   If I ever get to meet the guy or gal up there whose calling the
shots, I'd like to shake their hand for that one. Either that or
there are simply an awful lot of unused auto parts just sitting
around on service station shelves all over North America. Or my
Karmic Car Cycle had gone into such a credit on the 'outie' side,
that like a bank account bearing interest, it had simply decided
to spit me out a dividend.

   The same type of thing happened to me in Ottawa nearly ten
years later. I had been in downtown Ottawa. I had just picked up
$200.00 bucks and was heading back up to the freeway back to
Almonte about 35 south west of Ottawa where Greydie and I were
living at the time. I was on a commercial street just before the
freeway. The right front brake seized as I was stopping for a red
light.

   I hauled into the nearest service station, which by luck had an
empty bay. The guy took a quick look and said, "yep, caliper's
seized all right, you'll have to replace it". But it was nearly
quarter to six in the evening so now I had a big problem. Any of
the auto parts dealers who could deliver the part would be closed
by now. I was obviously facing a stay in Ottawa overnight, But
where and how except for an expensive hotel by bus.

   The mechanic said, "hold 'er a minute you may be in luck". He
was back in five minutes with a brand new caliper for that very
car. The car was eleven years old. So this was not stock off the
shelf stuff. Turns out the same as before, someone had ordered the
part a year ago and never came back.

   An hour later and $160.00 bucks lighter, I was back on the
road. Whether or not it was a Karmic dividend because of the
convenience of where the seizure had occurred, or the Karmic
keeper just taking care of me, or an 'outie' because of the money
it cost me, is probably moot. The point is I was back on the road
again, no muss no fuss. `What are the odds' is another aspect
again.

   Fortunately for all of us, there are also still other honest
mechanics around like these two guys in the pinches. Our original
personally owned taxi car in Halifax had developed some rather
scary acting transmission trouble one day. So I took it in to have
it checked. Four hundred was the prognosis. Not happy with the
sound of that I took it to two more places. About four hundred
bucks was the story at both.

   But somebody along the way told me about an old white haired
guy who knew what he was doing. 'If you're lucky I can have you
back on the road for four dollars and fifty cents. The problem
turned out to be a plugged filter. I have to believe that at least
one of the other guys knew that too.

   Not too long after we had bought the Ford van, the universal
joint just in front of the differential went. Warranty replaced
it. A couple of months later it went again. The problem was that
it was drying out. Nobody at Ford had any idea what was causing
the problem. But it was a big problem for Ford because it was
going on a lot in that year's release of vans.

   I was by the white haired fellow's one day about something or
rather, and happened to mention the universal. "Let's put it up on
the hoist and have a look", he said. A minute later he said, "yep,
look here, here's your problem right here, the exhaust pipe is
running right by the universal and the heat's burning er out".

   He moved the pipe out over out of the way and we never had to
replace another universal. Ford was notified of the solution right
away and the fix went in for the next year's release. You would
think that the engineers who had designed the van  would have been
able to figure that one out for themselves. But don't be too hasty
about that.

   The old fellow told me once about a guy that came in with a big
deluxe Chrysler in the mid sixties. The guy came in because the
car was only about four years old and running like shit. He'd
taken it everywhere, even had the plugs replaced twice. But
nothing helped and nobody had a clue. The old timer told me,
"without even looking under the hood, I told the owner exactly
what the problem was".

   The car had a 350 horsepower Hemni Chrysler engine, Chrysler's
pride and joy at the time. In that particular car, the engine fit
into the engine compartment such that you couldn't get a wrench on
the eighth spark plug. The car was running on only seven new
plugs.

   All the other mechanics that had fiddled with the car for the
poor customer already knew that. But they just hadn't wanted to
deal with the fix because the fix meant the irritating procedure
of cutting a hole through the firewall and going in from the
passenger compartment just to change a spark plug.

   Then there's not to mention the questionable safety of the
Chevy Monzas whose whole rear engine and trannie structure was
attached to the undercarriage of the car at the very back by
nothing more than a couple of U-bolts to the rear axial. Or
something like that.

   You have to wonder what's goes on with these guys who work in
the engineering think tanks where these cars are designed. I think
it should be mandatory that anyone who is going to start working for
somebody as an auto engineer, should have to work for two years first
in the service bay of an auto repair before being even allowed near
a drafting table. I mean there's a practical side and a theoretical
side to everything. When it's my money on the line, I'll take the
practical side every time.

   Maybe the automotive companies should seriously look into the
idea of hiring Inuit Canadians for their engineering arm. Inuit
have a fabled ability to be able to take, say, a four cylinder gas
generator completely apart and put it together again nut and bolt
perfect the first time they ever see it.

   Such a remarkable mechanical talent is not without a reasonable
cause however, if you think about it for a minute. The Inuit have
lived for thousands and thousands of years in the frozen Canadian
North. Their only natural resource for making utensils and the
other things they need is whale and or seal bone, or similar raw
materials.

   So to them, a small piece of bone is like a piece of platinum.
Therefore the piece's most practical eventual use, combining the
greatest amount of utility and smallest amount of waste would have
to be visualized out in advance. Somewhat like a chess player
visualizes possible subsequent board moves following a given
move by an opponent.

   So over the eons, the Inuit have simply evolved an uncanny
ability to visualize and comprehend the inter play of mechanical
parts. A lot better than I have at any rate.

   But on the other hand, you have to give the automotive
engineers credit for at least trying. What they're trying to do,
and some of the factors involved are not such a simple thing. Some
things just seem to go beyond the realm of physical engineering no
matter what. Like the famous Dodge product in the 70's whose
spark plugs couldn't be changed without unbolting the engine and hauling
the whole 8 cylander engine block out by hoist.

   When I was still in Halifax selling flowers I had changed the
tire on our converted taxi but I hadn't tightened one of the lug
nuts properly. Tightening the lugs nuts on a tire properly is one
of the things in life you usually never suspect the dire necessity
of, until one day you don't.

   Then the message comes through loud and clear. In less than
half an hour the tire rim had started to vibrate on the wheel
mounting so bad that I was back off the road. When I checked, the
lug nut openings had all been ground out to gaping holes in the
rim and the car was completely undriveable.

   I needed a new rim. So I started phoning around the auto
wreckers. Seems that the provincial crusher had been through the
entire region just about a month before. So there wasn't a rim of
that type to be had. I finally located a rim sitting as a
decoration on the front porch of a wrecker's house some distance
out of town.

   So rather than both of us being down for flower sales that day,
Greydie carried on with his route and I hitched out to get the
rim. But the old yellow streak wasn't finished with me just yet.
We eventually put it up for sale and picked up a small 1964 Ford
Falcon.

   Just before we put the add in the paper we had cleaned it up
inside and out, checked it over for faults, oil and lubed it, and
just made sure our Uncle Joe from the car lot in Toronto wasn't
running the sale.

   Two guys bought it to drive to Vancouver to save on airfare. We
assured all their concerns that the car should handle the trip no
problem despite being nearly thirteen years in age. And the broken
rear frames repaired twice by a welder's torch and metal patch plates.

   I was selling flowers nearly four years later in Edmonton and a
guy jumped up from a table at a bar saying, "hey, remember me, you
sold me and my buddy your yellow taxi in Halifax". Turns out the
car had made the trip fine. Then after a year of also fine, the
buddy had decided to go down to Los Angeles, where last word from
the guy was that the car was still running perfectly. The yellow
streak and back bumpers I'm sure probably nobody even noticed down
there.

   Nice warm and fuzzies like that I'm not sure whether they should
count in the cycles or not. The fact that we had gone out of way to
make it a nice purchase for someone I'm sure has to look good to the
car gods. But the cops weren't involved. So I've decided to call it
as a nice little warm and fuzzy and leave it at that.

   However, after picking up the rim, as I was hitching back into
town a guy about 30 years old picked me up in an early seventies
full sized dodge sedan.

   Gas mileage consumption must have been my subconscious
compulsive preoccupation in those days, because one of the first
things I asked him was how many miles to the gallon he got in the
thing anyway. "About 28", he said. "That's absolutely amazing",
said I.

   The car was dated from just before the Arab oil embargo of 1973
had forced the creation of economy class six and four cylinder
cars worldwide. The big V8s of the times got about eight miles to
the gallon in town and twelve on the highway if you were lucky.
Therefore, 28 miles to the gallon was, like, impossible.

   "It's true" he said, "I took it in for a tune up one day and
the combination of carburetor and timing settings ended running so
lean that I've been getting this phenomenal mileage ever since.
Plus, while it's not exactly a rocket ship, the car still runs
pretty good".

   He had even contacted Chrysler motors, which had sent out
specialist to try and figure it out. No luck. Despite going over
the car with a fine toothed comb twice they never came up with an
clear cut answer.

   It was probably one of those once in a while fluky un-
reproducible combinations, like cold fusion. Which is why you
never see high economy V8s on the road which would have been a car
manufacturer's gold mine.

   Actually, I could sympathize with the engineers on this one.
One of the only things in my life that I ever learned about cars
first hand, was the ephemeral subtlety of these kinds of settings.

   After we had bought the Ford Econovan in Halifax after the Ford
Falcon, and just after the ill fated Ford Mustang, I remembered
the guy's comments about his Dodge. So I started playing with the
carburetor and timing of the van to see if I could get me some of
those 28 miles to the gallon.

   After a while I determined that ultra fine hot spots did indeed
exist in the timing setup, such that you could set it to the book
setting, then with your arm resting on the upper rad hose to sense
the engine vibration as rough or smooth, you could tweak the
distributor back and forth by a split hair to find the hot spots.

   The hot spots were spikes in which the car suddenly seemed to
run smooth as glass and with jackrabbit sensitivity. The gas
mileage never went up a whole lot, about four miles per gallon
overall. But if you found the right hot spot the car would run
like a rocket ship and that was one heck of a good trade off.

   Around about 1996 in Ottawa, I had become aquatinted with a
mechanic named Jamie. Jamie worked full time for one company and
made spare change by doing small car repairs out of his house
garage. Someone had told us about him, so Greydie and I had been
taking our car(s) to him for a couple of years for the nicky nork
stuff like tires and plugs, or bigger stuff like transmission
repairs at half the cost.

   Jamie's passion however was racing. One day he was pleased to
tell me that he had gotten on as a crew member of a team racing
high powered stock cars at the bigger tracks around Eastern
Ontario and Western Quebec.

   At last seeing a chance to pass on to somebody the one and only
piece of hard core car information I had ever learned, I jumped on
the golden opportunity and carefully started to outline my exact
procedure for fine tuning the fine timing.

   Altruistism was also of course part of my motive. I had
naturally figured that such a subtle thing as this hot spot
discovery could well be the razor's edge to help his team win
races. After all Jamie was a friend.

   Well turns out Jamie was a country boy true and blue now
working in Ottawa. He had been born in the country, raised in the
country, looked like the country, thought like the country, was
humble like the country, and in particular talked just like Gary
Cooper.

   So when I was finished, Jamie just stood for a number of
seconds blinking his eyes. He was obviously at great pain to
respond to my suggestion without hurting my feelings. Then in his
long slow country way of talking, he said in a long slow Gary
Copper tone of voice, "well, we got over 500 horsepower under the
hood. So we got a waaay bigger problem trying to keep the car on
the track than trying to make it go fast". Thus ending my career
with a pit crew at the track.

   You also have to give the engineers a bit of credit sometimes
for knowing what they're doing. After I had split from my flower
partners in Alberta in 1975, and before I had joined with my twin
brother in Halifax early that fall, I had knocked around for a
couple of months in Toronto doing nothing in particular.

   My old business partner Karl from my mining promotion days in
Vancouver was now a big mucky muck in the Pierre Trudeau Prime
Minister of Canada privy council and administration. So one day
I decided to hitchhike to Ottawa and say hello to Karl for old
times sake. I took the subway and buses to the Far East end of
the city. Then worked my way up to the 401 to work my way east.

   It was slow going. After a few hours I had only scored a couple
of short rides of about ten miles each. So the thing to do I
decided, was to find a truck stop and see if one of the driver's
taking a break would give me a lift. Good call. I found a guy
eating pie who said he be glad to take me all the way on the
freeway to the Ottawa turnoff at Prescott and I would have to make
my way the last 70 miles to Ottawa from there.

   That was at least about 250 miles closer than I was at the
moment so I was delighted. We hoped into his big diesel rig,
and the engine went straight between us at shoulder height
disappearing into the depths at the back of the cab.

   "What the hell kind of truck is this", I exclaimed, thinking
something out of whatever came before the X Files. "It's a straight
line 16 cylinder diesel", he explained, "specially built to haul pig
iron from Montreal to Cleveland and rolled steel back". "There are
only two of these in the whole world", he continued, "when one of
us is on the way to Cleveland, the other is on the way back".

   "The best thing I like about it", he allowed, "is that all I
have to do once I hit the freeway is take it up to seventy and
throw on the cruise control. I never have to touch the gas or
brake until I get to the border. It stays flat at seventy over
hill over dale, fully loaded, fully empty, doesn't matter".

   Of course I also had to ask the inevitable question, "well so
then, how many miles to the gallon does this thing get anyway".
"About four", he replied. I did a quick mental comparison between
this thing hauling full loads of pig iron between Montreal to
Cleveland at a flat out seventy miles per hour over hill and dale,
and the young kid's joyriding Corvette back in Vancouver in 1965
showing off it's four miles per gallon at a Corvette convention. I
concluded that the diesel was probably the better value of the
two.

   Also one day in the summer of 1966, I was driving up through
the north end of Okanagan Lake in the BC interior in a rented
Japanese import. I was going up a long lazy turn to the left at
about 60 miles an hour. At this point the highway was cutting
along the mountainside about 500 feet above the valley below.

   I was in front of a big transport truck, which because of the
up grade was slowing down and slowing down. So I started to speed
up and swung out to go around. Just at that precise instant the
driver decided to economize on his speed and turning ratio and
started to cut the corner. I was over in the left hand lane and
saw the lane in front suddenly getting narrower and narrower.

   I jammed on the brake just as the side of the trailer was about
to sideswipe me and wrenched the wheel to the left. The curb at
the left was about a foot and a half high and on the other side of
the curb was a nearly vertical drop off over the edge a couple of
hundred feet to the valley below.

   The left side wheels of car did a slight bump riding up onto
the top of the curb like a stunt driver. I continued riding the
curb until I came to a full stop, the transport now 100% straight
in front of me all the way over into my lane. An 'outie' for sure.
But rightly or wrongly,

   I also always credited that particular type of car for saving
my life that day. And for some reason, even though Izusu's were in
Canada first, the other three Japanese guys ended up getting all
the business.

   You can also give engineers credit for designing rear end
differentials which could run with a screwdriver in them. I knew a
guy in Vancouver once who had a car in which somebody had left a
screwdriver in the differential. After two and a half years the
car was still running fine. The only problem was you could hear it
whining from over two blocks away.

   Good engineering or bad engineering aside, for the sheer
horsepower of looking after my butt in a crisis, neither the event
with the rad hose or the event with the right front brake can hold
a candle to something that happened to me in the winter of 1980
and for the size of the 'outie it delivered'.

   I had scheduled a leather wholesale trip along our one day
northwest runs out of Edmonton. When I got up early in the morning
a raging blizzard was blowing. The weather was so terrible the
radio was telling everybody to stay off the highways unless an
emergency service or absolutely necessary.

   I generally wholesaled out of a big heavy fairly new GM
passenger van. Plus the van had just been in just the day before
for steering repairs. Plus I always figured the need to make these
trips an absolute necessity so I figured I'd be fine on all
counts.

   I headed out about 7.00 Am in the morning. Thick snow whistled
along the highway in front of the car like writhing snakes.
Because of the weather, I abandoned my usual nook and cranny
approach on these runs and just hit the main places plus the ones
cued up.

   Thus I covered more ground than places. By the time I arrived
back in Edmonton at 8:00 PM I had logged more than 500 miles round
trip. An achievement given the raging blizzard which hadn't let up
all day until just before I arrived back in Edmonton.

   As I was coming up a side street towards our house, I had one
more left turn to make onto our street. I had already slowed right
down to about fifteen miles an hour a while back because the sun
had set at five and some of the side streets had developed
dangerous layers of black ice. As I approached my final turn, I
saw thick black ice in front. So I slowed right down to about
three miles an hour as I made my turn.

   But instead of tracking all the way around to the left in the
turn, the van just slowly drifted at a half angle, coming to a
gentle stop with the right tire up against the right curb after
the turn. Assuming I had merely slid on the black ice, I leaned
back to stretch. I was still gripping the steering wheel because I
had just come all the way through the suburbs hunched intently
over the wheel because of the black ice. The steering wheel came
off in my hand.

   I popped open the horn cover. There was no nut on the column.
The stupid idiot at the auto repair had forgotten to put the nut
back on when he had repaired the steering. I had just driven 500
miles round trip, in a raging blizzard, at 50 miles an hour, in a
heavy van whose steering wheel had been affixed to the steering
column by nothing more than sitting open on a half inch hex shaft.
That was the day I figured for sure that someone up there was
taking real good care of business.

   Actually, that was the second time in my life I faced possible
oblivion save a half inch or so of metal. When I was a kid in
Winnipeg, a small traveling midway used to ply the suburbs every
summer. It was your usual exciting fare. Five or so rides, five or
so sideshows, and about twenty carney games where the real money
was made.

   I hoped on the Ferris wheel as usual one summer. The guy locked
me in and off we went. You probably know how the Ferris wheel
works. You're way up there and your seat rocks wildly back and
forth convincing you that you're going to fall face first to your
death otherwise you wouldn't bother going on. And you hang onto
the cross-bar holding you in for dear life.

   When the ride was over, the guy reached over to let me out. But
the cross-bar hadn't been latched. The end of the bar had only
been resting about halfway in a little cup for the whole ride. I
figure another two or three degrees of swing up there and I
probably would have sailed of into space getting outfitted for
wings.

   If I had been an adult American I would have leapt out
screaming "lawsuit".  But I was not an American adult so it never
even crossed my mind. Same as always. Not my thing to look for
gory opportunities.

   My speeding ticket coming back through jasper National Park was
my last speeding ticket ever, including even today in early 2002.
But it turned out that my Karmic Car Cycles hadn't gone away, just
flipped to a different topic of conversation. I didn't have any
more run-ins with the Cycles until I moved to Ottawa in the winter
of 1981. Then I had a good one in my first week.

   As you may recall I had moved to Ottawa in early February 1981.
Greydie already had a flower business running and already had his
own car. We split his route into two and I rented a car from the
small agency Greydie had rented from when he had first set up.

   As you may recall we would run our respective routes in Ottawa
until 1:00 AM when the bars closed. We would then meet along the
strip in Hull. Hull was in Quebec. Quebec is French. The French
have always known how to party better than the English. Therefore
the bars in Hull didn't close until 3:00 Am.

   Ottawa was in the province of Ontario, and Hull was in the
province of Quebec an eighth of a mile across the Ottawa River.
The strip in Hull, actually the Rue D'Portage, was the scene of a
slew of clubs and restaurants catering to Ottawans who, like the
French, thought the night was just getting started at 1:00
o'clock.

   So every night Greydie and I would go to, er, Hull and back. I
hadn't been going over probably more than a week when I came out
from a club one night and a local Gendarme wanted me to accompany
him to the local Gendarme establishmentary. He had apparently
taken note of my license plate number as they do every night with
every car from Ontario, and had noticed six outstanding Hull
parking tickets against the car which was no doubt why they did
it.

   The tickets totaled $90.00. The car had been impounded. All I
had to do was pay the tickets and I could leave at any time. "But
it's a rented car", I protested. "Couldn't care less", was the
reply in broken English. Fortunately I had exactly $95.00 on me,
so I paid the ticket and left.

   Fortunately I was also able to deduct the $90.00 from my rental
fee. What had happened was, and probably still happens even today,
is that someone renting a car gets a ticket. But because it's just
a rental car, they don't say anything.

   Similarly because the offense is in Hull, the rental car
companies just ignore the summonses which come along because the
Quebec cops have no jurisdiction in Ontario. So it's a Mexican
standoff until some unlucky stiff like me comes along and sticks
the car right under the Quebec's cop's noses.

   Since my only interaction with this one was an inconvenience, I
take it off the ledger as only a little 'outie'.

   My next two Karmic interactions were a bit more sobering. We
were now living on the seventh floor of the twenty story apartment
in Nepean, working for coupon John. The only fly in the ointment
was that there was no simple way to get downtown from our place at
rush hour in the morning. So we went into town every morning on
the 417 Queensway which slices through Ottawa.

   Our main street to the Queensway was also the feeder for a very
large bedroom community just south of Ottawa. So the street was
bumper to bumper every morning. Similarly, the far west of the
city which also developing rapidly as another bedroom also came
into town on the Queensway at the same time.

   If your timing was bad, you could be stopped at the on ramp for
ten minutes waiting for a break in the Queensway traffic going by
with a bedlam of cars behind you trying to force you up onto the
ramp.

   So by an agreement with coupon John, we used to come in about a
half hour later to avoid the tie up. But one day he needed us in
early, so early we started out. We hit the ramp at a steady ten
miles an hour, cars in a solid line behind us half a mile back
including trailing through two major intersections with traffic
lights. The cars were urgently pressing from behind like a line up
at a rock show wanting to get tickets before they sold out.

   When I got up to the Queensway, the cars were locked bumper to
bumper streaming by at forty. No breaks. I was afraid to stop for
fear of stranding some of the cars behind me in the middle of an
intersection and causing a big traffic jam. The only way I was
going to get into traffic in the little Honda, was to run along
the shoulder until I was up to speed and could force my way in.

   But I never had the chance. Just down the way on the shoulder
was a cop car. As I went by, he pulled me over and gave me a
ticket. It was against the law to drive along the shoulder past a
certain point, which I had just past and which by a coincidence in
the extreme was also the exact spot where he happened to be
parked.

   Greydie was not pleased and said so to the cop. But what can
you do. An 'outie'. And thankfully Greydie didn't get arrested for
leveling highly dangerous noise levels at a cop.

   About six weeks later one night, we were heading home.
Likewise, while we usually went home a little later and missed the
tie ups going out of town, this time we were a little early and
got caught right in the middle of it. I wasn't used to driving all
that much on the Queensway, so wasn't up on all its quirky little
wrinkles.

   I was driving along in the slow lane approaching an overpass
and passed a sign that said, 'this lane must exit'. Taking the
word `must' to be in the lesser sense, I assumed it meant that if
I stayed in the lane I would quickly be off the Queensway. So I
forced my way back into the lane to my left.

   Apparently the word `must' was in the greater sense, and
actually meant, 'if you cut back onto the Queensway now, you will
get a ticket'. I found that out because I had no sooner passed
under the overpass when the same cop as a couple of weeks before
stepped onto the concrete and flagged me over to give me another
ticket.

   He had been standing quietly in the grassy round of the off
ramp, just on the other side of the overpass just out of sight.
Right busy little beaver was this boy. In the morning he sat on
the one side of the Queensway where the circumstances were good
for causing someone to officially break the law. In the evening he
was on the other side of the freeway getting the exact same crowd
going home where the circumstances were good for causing someone
to officially break the law.

   He put me in the back of his cruiser, called my license up on
the computer, and the computer crashed. After a long long wait, he
had the information he needed and started to write up the ticket.

   Because of the long wait and who the cop was, and because my
breaking of the law was as completely in innocence as the time
before, Greydie lost it and started yelling at the top of his
lungs. He never once swore. Just complained. But still I had to
slap him to snap him out of it.

   Well the cop either must have heard something the wrong way or
eaten something that hadn't agreed with him for breakfast, because
in a second he was on the 10-4 blower calling in a code red. In
less than ten minutes there were police cars converging from
everywhere.

   Seven cop cars were parked along the road and fourteen cops had
us circled in a ring around the grassy round standing with their
hands cocked at the holsters pull finger ready. No exaggeration.
There was even a paddy wagon, the big kind with double tires on
the back.

   Passers by must have thought they were watching the arrest of
America's most wanted criminal. But it was just my li'l old brother
and myself, in our li'l old Honda civic with it's embarrassing old age.

   After a few minutes a big guy with a flat hat came over, probably
the boss. He checked out what was happening. After a few minutes
discussion with our trigger happy friend he waved everybody off.
After a few more minutes the only one left was our trigger happy
friend who proceeded to write out my ticket as though nothing out
of the ordinary had just happened in the slightest. I have to hope
to goodness that he didn't treat everybody like that.

   But because fourteen cops had us circled in a ring with their
hands aquivering over their gun belts, I give this one a huge 'outie',
probably good for equalizing the last ten 'innies' all by itself.

   The other possibility was that maybe the cop was just sniffing
the vibrations from coupon John's illegal card game all over the
Civic, who owned the car. Because the cops could never get John
into Jail for his ongoing card games, maybe they just thought to
try and pass it all on to us. Don't forget they all have those
funny little antennae things that goes off whenever there's a
felon on the loose near by.

   As a last goodby on that episode, the daily press the next
day reported in a small box that an OPP Provincial Police officer
had been relieved of duty on the Queensway the previous afternoon,
being out in the middle of the flow of traffic, an assignment he had
not been given, signalling in cars and giving them tickets while having
a nervous breakdown, the breakdown was the code red. Aparantly code red
means red. Four months later his wife shot him, he apparantly was not
the nicest of guys.

   That is how Greydie remembers him, me in the back of the cruiser
locked behind the wire screen, he in the front driver seat patting the
gun lying on the passenger seat, quietly waiting for the crashed computer
to come back on line, after three quarters of an hour Greydie coming
back from the parked Hondo to let a third fusilage to the tightly
rolled up cruiser window when the cop just quietly reached foreward
and broadcast a code red. Code red is all points alarm, the cruisers
that arrived sirens screaming converging on us were from Ottawa
police, Nepean police, RCMP, and the OPP (Ontario Provincial).
No wonder he was relieved of duty.





THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 3

`THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES'

CHAPTER 25

   After the experience with the 14 cops on the Queensway, my
Karmic Car Cycles sort of went on hold for nearly eight years.
They didn't reappear again full blast until the start of another
cycle in 1994. In the meantime, I had a couple of episodes in the
interim involving cars which while not always Karma causing or
erasing, were nonetheless on record for being either irksome, and
or humorous, and or ironic.

   When we had started selling sweet corn roadside in 1985, a car
was an obvious necessity. By a couple of years, we were running
two cars every year, always junkers because of the workload we
subjected them to. Well actually, because of the money.

   The rule quickly became that at the end of every season, we
would get rid of the worst of the two clunkers and get another
one. For some reason, as soon as we would decide which one to
trade away, the unfortunate candidate would suddenly start acting
up and giving us trouble. We used to joke about. It was so
predictable that you could almost believe that cars knew they were
about to be forsaken.

   So, in 1987 it was time for a new clunker. I spotted a 1977
blue Honda in a guy's driveway for $250.00. Remembering coupon
John's 1975 Civic we drove for a while a year few years back,
and it was kind of a nice little car, I checked it out. It had
been parked for six months but it looked OK and was quite a
bargain at the price. So with Greydie's go ahead we bought it.

   The owner towed it over to the house. After he left I hopped in
to go get the license and registration which was only a couple of
miles up the road from the house. The car took off like a rocket
ship. It was one of the snappiest little things I'd ever been in.
About half way over to the motor vehicle branch little wisps of
blue started coming out the tailpipe.

Greydie had been driving behind all the way as a precaution, and
when the white smoke started obscuring the little blue Honda up
ahead hit urgency overtime, but I was so zealed by the peppiness
of the little thing there was just no way for Greydie to catch up.

   By the time I got back to the house I was trailing such a cloud
of dark blue smoke it was like a fog bank. The engine was toast. I
hadn't had a clue at the time that a sitting car had no oil in the
pistons. So you had to pull the plugs and squirt oil in on top of
the pistons and let it sit for awhile before starting it up.

   We had only had the car for twenty five minutes and I had
already blown the engine. At any rate, I now knew how it works
with cars which have been standing for a while. I sure would like
to learn some day in these kinds of matters how to put the horse
back before the cart where it belongs.

   It cost us $650.00 to get the engine replaced. But to its
credit, the car ran fine for a couple of years. We even sold corn
at roadside out of it for a whole summer, just lifting the hatchback
and putting up a sign. And used it to haul cargo from the farm back
to the corn stand, picture a two door hatchback Honda with corn ears
sticking solid out the windows and the only interior space visible
was the driver. The windows open allowed us to pack one more sack
of corn into the interior. We eventually traded it for a 1979 Chevette.

   For a while we also had a 1979 Ford Pinto wagon. I say for
awhile because the car stank of exhaust so we couldn't drive it
much. The exhaust pipe was fine. The heater was the problem.

   Call it Ford's most brilliant hour after the Edson. Heating was
accomplished by passing air from the passenger compartment through
a small chamber which ran parallel to the searing hot exhaust
coming right out of the engine in the manifold. Where exhaust to
say the least was at it's vile rawest.

   Now the brilliance of the system was that the air from the
passenger compartment, and hot raw exhaust was separated only by a
thin little wall of metal. Which tended to rust. So suddenly you
would wake up one day to discover hot raw exhaust pouring through
your passenger compartment, and out the window instead of going
the long slow original way down the exhaust system.

   I have to tell you that I had a lot of trouble dealing with
that realization in terms of my general assessment of auto
engineers. On the other hand it had all the outer appearances of
an absolutely brilliant system guaranteed to bring in lots of
necessary expensive repairs to Ford Motor dealers all over North
America. I figure Ford must have promised new dealers a minimum
business in repairs every year and were just living up to their
promise.

   Then suddenly one day, like a conspiracy theorist who sees
conspiracy behind every tree, I had the answer. The heating system
was actually a brilliantly conceived Government plot working through
the auto industry to slowly willow out the poor from society.

   It was brilliantly simple. Rich people would of course just go
out and replace the stupid rusted heater part. Poor people wouldn't
be able to. And since presumably, likewise, neither would they be
able to afford a brand new car, they would be forced to drive around
in a car equivalent to having their head sitting right in the middle
of the muffler.

   Before long they would fall asleep and go off the road. Or
their brain would just progressively melt over time until they
became completely dysfunctional. Either way society was ridded.
Brilliant. Mulder!, Mulder!, where are you Mulder. Scully!

   At any rate we barely drove the thing except in dire emergencies.
Then junked it and got by with just the Chevette for awhile which we
by now this time had. Then we got a clunky old 1976 Olds to backup
the Chevette.

   As a matter of fact, from my point of view at least, despite
the fact that Ford perennially turned out good award winning cars,
they also seemed to have quite a penchant for darned dumb
engineering.

   In the spring of 1999, while delivering pizzas as a consequence
of another on schedule downturn of our economic situation, I found
myself driving a newly acquired 1987 Ford Escort. The car had a
rebuilt engine with about thirty thousand clicks on it so ran like
a top. The car had enough rusted paint spots however to give you
the impression of a rooster tail of rust going up behind it going
down the road like a racer speed boat.

   Given what the car must have been like originally, it was no
wonder the Escorts were world winner hands down world wide for a
number of years through the era. A very nice solid good running
car. Good solid engineering throughout. Except for the bozo who
designed the head light switch.

   The head light switch was a big wide pull push button, about
the size of the throttle button on a D8 caterpillar bulldozer. So
far so good. Easy to grab, easy to pull on, easy to push off. But
now try and imagine what would happen if they put it at the bottom
of the dash, right beside the door. Right exactly where your left
knee would happen to be unless you were standing in your seat.
Like right.

   Now given the size of this big fat button sitting literally
eyeball to eyeball with your big fat knee, doesn't that seem just
a wee bit like asking for it. It wouldn't take a rocket scientist
to figure out how easy it would be for you to keep accidentally
turning off the headlights every time you shifted position, got
out of the car, or climbed back in.

   Unfortunately, rocket science couldn't have been one of the
course requirements for the engineers at Ford. Because that is
exactly where they put the stupid headlight button. So nearly
every time I wiggled, coughed, or sneezed, I had no headlights.
I even got pulled over by a cop one night Delivering pizzas who
couldn't figure how I got off driving around in a car that had no
headlights. I couldn't figure what he was talking about until he
got me to step out of the car and showed me.

   I quickly put two and two together, did a silent swear at the
engineers, pulled the light switch back on, did a silent swear at
the engineers, showed him the brilliant switch design, and then
did a silent swear at the engineers. He did a silent little swear
at the fact that the donuts were getting stale and let me off.
Like what else could he do.

   Like I've said before, "automotive engineers should spend at
least two years in a service bay before ever being allowed near a
drafting table". They should also have to drive around for a
couple of months in one their creations.

   The next year we traded the clunky old 1976 Olds for a 1984
Dodge Aries station wagon. You may recall the 1984 Aries. It was
the fastest $3,200 down the drain you ever saw. Because we were
driving clunkers, we tended to find guys working out of their back
yards to fix them for us.

   One of these guys happened by the corn stand one day and I
inadvertently mentioned that we were looking for another car at
the end of the season. 'Are you in luck', he said, the number one
indicator of bad news coming on the planet, 'my father in law has
a nearly mint condition 1984 Aries wagon you can have for $1,500.

   Well you know me. My ears went straight up at the sound of a
possible bargain. We went out to see the car. It was mint inside
and had only a few inconsequential rust spots outside. The father
in law had just put in $2,500 worth of new brakes, shocks, and
front end parts before suddenly deciding to lease a brand new car
instead.

   I paid the mechanic, who got it up and running and dropped it
off at our house. Then spilt in a hurry. I should have wondered
why he was in such a hurry to split. I couldn't get it to run
worth anything for a week.

   So I called him back. No problem he said. He could line us up a
rebuilt engine for only $500.00, and because he felt so bad about
it he would put it in for us for free. Well, since we were already
in for a penny, we said deal. Believe it or not it never occurred
me to ask how come he had gone straight to new engine, and not to,
"I'll come back over and see if I can find out what's wrong".

   I had it towed to a friend's barn where the mechanic worked for
fourteen hours straight doing the deed. Then he handed me the keys
and took off.

   I would have been better off leaving in the old engine. As far
as knowing how to put an engine in properly, I had apparently
bought the assurance of someone who didn't know if a yo yo went up
and down or sideways. When I went to take the car home, I couldn't
get it to go over fifteen miles an hour.

   Over the next few months, we had assorted kids and adults under
the hood with and without new parts, trying to get the thing to
run properly. But it never went better than about 40 miles an hour
downhill. The accumulated tab on the thing was now nearly $3,000,
and it still wouldn't run worth shit. We drove it that way most of
the winter.

   Early that spring someone told us about a mechanic for a Dodge
Dealership in Ottawa who worked out of his house at night. So we
called him up. Sure enough. He spotted exactly what the problem
was. A couple of hundred dollars later for parts and labor the car
was running like a top.

   With all due respect, once it had finally become happy about
itself, it was a great car. But it only stayed that way for
exactly six months. About a week before the end of the corn
season, a friend, his mother and myself decided to go down to the
US border about 70 miles away for the day. Shortly after we
started, the engine started missing.

   By the time we reached the town of Kempville about half way
down to the border, it was missing so bad I had to take it into a
service station in Kempville. I phoned Greydie to pick us up and
cued up the station to check out the car.

   I phoned back to the station the next day, and was told it was
only a shorted coil, easy to fix. So I gave them the go ahead. The
next day Greydie drove me down to pick up the car and the mechanic
assured me all was well. They had even taken it out on the highway
and gunned it to make sure there were no nasty surprises. As it
turned out, they had probably created one instead.

   It drove just like new back to Ottawa. About five days later,
we decided to pack it in for corn for the season. I made a couple
of trips taking things down and trucking the assorted
paraphernalia back to the house. All was well with the car. I came
back for the very last and final load for the season.

   As soon as I turned on the engine to leave the lot, it started
missing. By the time I got to the house only a short distance
away, it was definitely not running properly. The mechanic who had
originally got it up and running properly was by now set up with
his own little shop out in Stittsville. So I decided I had better
get out there as quickly as possible.

   By the time I got to his shop, the car would barely chug at ten
miles an hour. I got the bad news the next morning. Three out of
the four pistons in the engine had had the bottom punched right
out. I'm sure I know what must have happened, and if I'm right, I
had Donald Duck'd myself yet again.

   The car was an automatic with a column shift. So the drive
indicator was a little red pointer on the top of the steering
wheel by the dash. But the pointer was missing when we bought the
car. I had never bothered replacing it because I just kept track
of what drive I was in by keeping track of what drive I was in.

   But the mechanic in Kempville didn't know that. Because it had
never occurred to me that he would take it out on the highway for
a high speed test run, it also had never occurred to me to tell
him about the missing pointer. I'm willing to bet he ran the whole
high speed test drive in low gear and clobbered the pistons.

   Given the money that had already gone into the car, we decided
the best to do was to just sell the car and be done with it. The
guy in Stittsville said he had a buyer for $400.00 and I could
come by next week for the money. When I went back, the car was
gone, there was a sheriff's lock on the door, and the guy was
history.

   Now this definitely has a 'what are the odds' vibe all over it
with respect the fact that the car had waited patiently for four
days after Kempville before deciding to make it's crapolla
piston's move. Then at the exact tick of the clock, marking the
exact official end of our corn season for that year and thus
actual need for the car, it had decided to pack it in. You really
do have to feel sometimes that cars really do seem to care.

   In 1988 we almost bought a clunker from a former Rolls Royce
mechanic. John was Scotch, but now had multiple sclerosis. His
only mobility on good days was by the use of two short arm
crutches.

   John told me that when he had first applied to Rolls Royce as a
young man, they had given him a four inch square block of steel, a
glass smooth piece of half inch steel rod, and a rat tailed file.
He was instructed to use the file to cut a hole through the steel
block.

   When the rod would drop through the hole slip fit, he could
come in and they would discuss employment. Things are different
today. Imagine having to demonstrate the ability to slip fry a
hamburger to get a job at a fast food.

   Actually, I almost got to see a slip fit for real myself one
day, over ten years later while delivering pizzas in Manotik. The
pizza sauce was made by secret recipe once every couple of days in
gigantic polished aluminum pots. They had two, keeping them going
in rotation.

   One was getting pretty banged up. So one day the owner came in
with a new one. This time a stainless steel pot about three times
as expensive costing a couple of hundred dollars. He figured that
steel would last about five times longer than aluminum so he would
eventually come well ahead.

   Cleaning the pots after they were empty was a chore, entirely
dependant upon being able how to set each of the things into the
sink and giving it a go. The owner had the requirement well in
mind when he made the buy after working out that all the
respective measurements worked out.

   The same engineer that designed the sink had designed the new
pot, and also must have worked at Rolls Royce for awhile. Because
all I had to do was set it at the top of the sink and let go. Then
watch it slowly sink into the sink by perfect slip fit like a boat
with a leak sinking into water.

   After the multiple sclerosis had set in, Rolls Royce John had
moved around for a while and ended up in Ottawa. Now he would work
under a car in your driveway on days when his legs were a bit
better. He had a junker lined up for us.

   On his good days he did some work for a taxi company out in the
East End of Ottawa. The company had two cars off line, sitting on
the lot. One was ideal for us, which they were willing to give to
John for work he had done for them on their taxies. He was going
to sell the car to us. The car was in our price range, which was
usually not very much.

   But the transmission was pudding. The other car was all junk
but had a good transmission. The proposed plan therefore was simply
that John would switch the trannies. We would have our next junker
and John would have a few bucks for his efforts.

   John figured it would take about two hours to do the deed. So
the plan was that his wife and I would drive around doing her
shopping while John worked on the cars. We dropped him off at the
taxi yard and got back about two and a half hours later.

   A final pawl of smoke was just blowing off the yard. We had
apparently missed all the excitement and fire engines by just a
few minutes. Our next new junker was a smoldering black hulk.

   John hadn't been able to get one of the trannie mounting bolts
off. So he had pulled out the acetylene torch to loosen the bolt.
But in his anxiousness and frustration to get the job done, he had
failed to notice that a bunch of inflammable material had been
crammed into the front passenger area of the car for temporary
storage. The floorboards got hot, the flammables got hotter, and
the whole car went up in flames.

   The owner of the Taxi Company asked John to kindly leave and
never come back. What are friends for. It was a very bad day for
everyone except John's wife who had all her shopping done.

   So for almost eight years I had no specific Karmic Car
interactions with the police of any kind, good or bad. By now we
had a blue 1986 Buick Skyhawk. One summer day in 1994 I was
driving home in the Skyhawk via Colonel Bye Drive.

   The drive runs alongside the Rideau canal into downtown Ottawa.
In the winter, the canal is plowed free of snow and is in fact billed
as the world's longest skating rink. The drive itself is billed as
one of Ottawa's most widely touted scenic adventures.

   By this time Greydie and I were living in the place in the
eastern suburb of Orleans at the extreme East End of the city. I
was coming down Colonel Bye from the South Central Ottawa area so
needed to get onto the Queensway east.

   The hookup from Colonel Bye onto the Queensway was bad for
traffic at the best of times. I was just pushing into the rush
hour and so the hookup was going to be even worse. So as I a
drove, I mentally worked out a zip zap through some residential
areas that would still get me to the hook up but miss all the
traffic.

   When I came to the critical side street on Colonel Bye, I
hooked a right and had to stop. The street was under construction
with a big sign. But I looked around the sign and saw that the
street ahead was still open to local traffic. So I put the car in
drive and headed in.

   Immediately on my left I passed a short side street running
exactly parallel to Colonel Bye and dead ended at the street I was
on. It was only about 150 yards long and a full strip of bushes
separated the street from Colonel Bye. Two cop cars were parked by
the bushes and the two cops were standing beside one of the cars
having a yak.

   I carried on into the side street, then did a couple of
zigzags. I was about two block further up the next street over,
when one of the cops came whipping up from behind and pulled me
over. It appears I had made an illegal left hand turn onto the
side street, which had became illegal at 3:30 in the afternoon
just minutes before.

   "Well shit", I said to myself, I hadn't noticed the time and
for sure hadn't noticed the 'no left turn' sign because of the
construction. He took my papers and I waited patiently in my car,
rueing my decision to save a little time. Now I was going to get a
ticket instead. Then suddenly it hit me. I had made a right turn
onto the side street, not left. So I went back to the cop car and
told him.

   "No way Jack", he said. "You made a left turn and both of us
saw you do it", referring to the other cop whom he had been
talking with. Well I hadn't made a left turn, and I'm not that
stupid not to know the difference even during the times now and
then when I'm stupid. So I put up a bit of protest.

   We debated quietly back and forth about it for a few minutes.
Then the other police car came up. The first cop had apparently
called it over to back him up. "Yes", said the second cop, "yes
you made an illegal left turn all right and we both saw it".
Either I was in the twilight zone or they were.

   It was getting serious. But the real problem was that I
couldn't make too much fuss about it because my car, um, well,
didn't have back up lights, or a back brake light, or one back
turn signal, and one front light was also out at the time. So if I
ticked them off too much and they decided to run the car through
its paces, I would be a dead duck. Talk about walking on
eggshells.

   This was not because I was deadbeat or a drunk or anything like
that, every cent coming in at that time was going for disks and
packaging and postage for our fledgling small anti virus business
and light bulbs and fuses for the car were second level purchases,
they just had to wait it out until moola enough to buy a fix.

   I'm sure that what was really going on was that it was the
buzzing little antennas in cop's forehead's again. You remember
the ones. The 'whoever it is up there calling the shots' gives it
a little tweak whenever there's a somebody down here ripe for the
picking. Cops always seem to know when there's something wrong on
the loose.

   Therefore I figured the real reason these two had pulled me
over wasn't because of the left turn versus right, it was because
of all my lights. They just weren't focused on the channel well
enough to tune it in properly.

   So there I stood outside the cop car trying to stand my ground.
But definitely not standing my ground enough to tick anyone off.
Fortunately I just happened to mention having passed by a safety
belt check on the other lane on Colonel Bye just before the turn.

   The only way, it was realized, I could have passed that check
and seen it was driving straight into the right hand turn, as I
had claimed.

   It didn't necessary prove that I had therefore made a right
hand turn because I could also have gone past the turn and circled
back. But the cop realized I could make enough of a case in court
that it would probably buy the judge. So he wrote me out a warning
instead and the two took off.

   This was one of those things that sticks with you a while after
it happens. It was a close call both ways. But what really was
really under my skin about it was why the cops were so insistent
that I had made a left hand turn when I hadn't. I knew they were
serious enough that they weren't just faking it to write a ticket.
In their minds I really had made the illegal turn.

   For the rest of the day I kept putting myself in the context of
a courtroom. How would I prove that I had turned right and not
left. So I went back to the scene of the crime the next day to see
what I could find in my imaginary defense. The answer turned out
to be elementary my dear Watsons.

   The two cops had been parked along side the bush back a ways
from the intersection. There was a break in the bushes where they
were sitting such that they could clearly see straight through
onto Colonel Bye from where they were parked. But the corner where
I had turned was completely obstructed by bushes.

   Evidently they had seem a blue car zip by southbound on Colonel
Bye and a scant few seconds later had seen my blue car flash by in
front of them straight ahead immediately after I had started up
from in front of the construction sign.

   So they had merely put one and one together and got me instead
of three. To them the two events had looked completely contiguous.
For me the two events might just as well have occurred in two
different dimensions. Two blue cars had been waltzing a criss
cross tangle in front of the cop's single seeing eyesight. Talk
about wrong place and bad timing. Just goes to show.

   At any rate, because I figured I would have been in the same
amount of financial and or stress distress whether I had been
ticketed for the ticket or ticketed for the lights, I decided to
be fair about it and call it a nice even Steven in the Karmic Car
Cycles. Nothing like a little sugar to make the medicine go down.

   The only thing more irritating than politically correct workers
are politically correct drivers. You know the kind. They drive sat
at exactly thirty miles an hour in a thirty mile an hour zone while
traffic bunches up behind them for blocks. Or they come to a dead
stop in the middle of the road before making a left or right turn.
Then they slowly execute a perfectly described legal arc while
traffic bunches up for blocks behind them.

   The opposite can also be, well, unsettling. I was driving
down Main Street in Vancouver one spring day in 1971, and was
approaching a red light at the intersection ahead. The building
at the right crowded the corner. So to all extents and purposes
it was a completely blind intersection at the right to anyone
approaching.

   As I was slowing down, for no apparent rhyme or reason, I
suddenly stood hard on my brakes. I stopped dead in my tracks a
good twelve feet back of the intersection. Scarcely a split second
later, a small sports car shot out from behind the building at the
right, ripped left around the corner at top speed right in front
of me and was gone.

   Instead of making a normal slow rounded turn left, he had
cut the corner at an angle to preserve his high speed momentum.
Therefore he had driven right straight through where I would have
been sitting had I not stopped on the dime, intuitionally hit
twelve feet back from proper stop time.

   The police don't suspect that there is a 'whoever up there is
calling the shots going on'. They call these little goings on 'gut
feelings'. Everybody else calls them intuition. Kidding aside,
intuition has an important place in our lives and it is one of the
best life saving things we have going. Since intuition gets all
the credit for probably having saved my life on this one, can't
call it an 'outie'.

   Similarly, just before Greydie and I closed our flower business
in 1982, another Karmic interaction occurred, which was more than
just a little scary. We were coming home from flower selling late
one night in the spring of 1981.

   Because sales had deteriorate so badly over the last year, we
had given up my rented car and Greydie would drop me off to do a
walk route in the busy Byword Market area of clubs and restaurants.

   He would drive the rest of the places. Then he would pick me
up to go over to Hull to finish of the evening. We still lived at
the time at the swank executive bungalow low rented at fancy digs
as live in custodians on Holborn on the Rideu River shore about
fifteen minutes from downtown out the number 16 highway south
to the US border.

   Greydie was driving, I was half dozing. We had just broken free
of the in town portion of the highway and were up to speed. Suddenly
I noticed way in the distance a pair of headlights coming directly
at us. I presumed at first that there must be a bend in the road up
ahead making it look like his lights had moved over into our lane.
I forgot to mention, at that hour a raging blizzard was blowing and
snow was already inches thick on the highway.

   As my mind raced trying to remember the details of that
particular stretch of road, my brain suddenly slapped me in the
face to wake me up to the fact that the headlights were beading
down on us front face for true, and bends in the road had nothing
to do with it. I shouted for Greydie to get off the road.

   We hit the ditch flying and the other car went by like a race
car from hell, dead center in the middle of our lane. It had
either been someone on a death wish, or someone fulfilling some
kind of macabre initiation into a secret society.

   After we drove back up out of the ditch and started off again
down the road, we found a string of cars still in the ditch or
still at the side of the road trying to shake the dust off their
shattered nerves. Whoever it was in the thrill car had apparently
being running the gauntlet for some time.

Then a car approaching up ahead flashing lights got us to pull over,
and two frantic gals inside needed to know that we were all right.
Turns out boyfriend had had a row and blown his cork, his wrong side
drive up the highway into Ottawa at appallingly dangerous speed had
been his way of telling his girlfriend how much his cork had blown.
You know the type of guy, we've all met them.

   My nerves still quiver a bit when I think about it. The car had
gone by us at about probably 120 or 130 K's an hour. Only about two
and a half seconds had passed once we went for the ditch. That was
definitely a big big 'outie' and one of the closest calls I ever had
in a car face to face with certain death, intuition not a factor.

   My next 'outie' is actually near the front end of a nice
largess. In the late summer of 1994 as you may recall, we let
the front end operation of our Antivirus business go to a couple
of middle level executives who had downsized themselves out of a
large computer manufacturer in the area.

   One of the first things they did was move our computer anti virus
business out of our house into a nice location just a couple of miles
behind the airport at the far south end of the city. Our new CEO, Glen,
drove a large brandnew pickup and his wife drove a 1993 Ford Escort.

   This will all be news to you already, but for the sake of the
new context I repeat it. A new baby was coming along. And because
they lived rural they decided a four by four utility vehicle would
be safer for winter driving. The Escort was on lease. So rather
than loose their equity for retiring the car early, our software
company picked up the tab, and I got to drive it.

   It was a nice win win solution for everybody since the company
would have had to pay for a vehicle for me anyway whether though a
salary draw or direct, and they got to keep their equity.

   I stayed late one evening in late November, and by the time I
was ready to leave, a small dusting of snow had fallen. I could
have taken at least four different routes home. I picked my usual
route home which of course turned out to be the worse choice
because I all too soon discovered it had ice all over one of the
back road intersection.

   The particular intersection was a four way stop with a flashing
red light. As I approached the intersection I saw a cop car
sitting sideways across the road to my right up ahead, complete
blocking access heading right. I found out later someone had slid
into the ditch with injuries further up. When I saw the cop car I
braked and kept going for a while, the intersection was a sheet of
ice.

   So now I'm completely stopped  about 150 feet back of the
intersection. So I step on the gas and start inching slowly ahead
about three miles an hour. I could see another car coming to the
intersection from the left all this time. He doesn't brake until
just before the intersection, and sailed straight through. I
thought he was going to hit the cop broadside.

   But his wheels were turned hard to the right, and the tires
picked up a little traction, just enough to deflect him about 30
degrees to the right and just enough to be headed straight into
where I was heading at three miles an hour. I slammed the brake
and didn't slow a jot. He clipped my front end as he went by,
doing about $1,500 damages.

   There was about an, oh, twenty five dollar crease on the corner
of his front bumper. A perfect tit for tat for the 1994 Hillman
and the 1957 Ford incident nearly thirty five years earlier. The
Car Gods of Karma don't mess around.

   The car turned out to have two young teenagers in their Mom's
car going to a hockey practice. "Why didn't he stop when he saw
the red lights", the cop asked me later when he was doing up the
paper work. I figured the poor kid had probably never experienced
ice before and this was his official fast wake up call for
breakfast.

   I had a friend in Vancouver once, with an equally fast wake up
call. He was driving down a side street in the winter of 1971
during one of Vancouver's very infrequent snowfalls. He had never
having driven in snow before.

   He saw a small accident ahead and stood on the brakes. But he
just slid face first into the mess without even slowing down. The
cop told him afterwards to always snap the car into neutral as
soon as you suspect you might have to stop and you will always
stop at least 90 percent better. Automatic or stick shift doesn't
matter. Slap it into neutral.

   I have used that advice ever since with countless happy
results. But it just happens sometimes that things move on their
own, like on this particular night when the poor kid sliding for
the first time on black ice hit me royally with cruisers present.
So, because I wasn't much better than a sitting duck on this one,
I give it an 'outie'.

   Another good thing may have came out of the affair. On my way
home the next day I passed the same intersection as the accident
the night before. When the kid had hit me, his car had stopped in
its track and I took the momentum by being turned sideways
somewhat. If he hadn't hit me he would have hit the ditch and a
big telephone pole right between the headlights at a good clip,
maybe even been injured. So it was a double 'outie'.

  Our little Basenji pooch Quasar had a similar fast wake up call
for breakfast one day, just not involving snow. For almost the
first year after we picked him up from the pound as a four month
old, he insisted on walking up the yellow stripe on the road. We
never leashed him in his lifetime, so tried to break him of the
habit by 'bad dogging' him and other such pithy epithets. But it
didn't do any good.

   One day, while we were living in Almonte, I was walking up to
the store with Quasar accompanying. As usual he was walking up the
yellow stripe. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. As long as he stayed
in the middle on the stripe, the passing cars would miss him by
quite a bit.

   But he must have decided to come back into the sidewalk,
because suddenly I heard a racket of yelping behind me. When I
turned to look, I saw the poor guy tumbling like a beach ball
under a passing car which wasn't even slowing down. The car spit
the dog out from underneath like a peach pit, and he ended up
whimpering on the sidewalk.

   Now I did the one thing in my life I regret, whether it had
been the right thing to do at the time or the wrong, my heart
still pangs a little when I remember it. Instead of consoling him
I started to give him shit for being out on the street and he took
off down the street like a bat out of hell. At least he wasn't
injured.

   When I got home, he was sitting on the porch business as usual
waiting to go in. Whether it was the tumbling under the car that
did it, or my scolding immediately after, the end result is that
for the next while he hugged the walls.

   I would walk up the street and he would follow at my side
brushing hard along walls where there were any. Where there was a
recessed doorway he would follow the contour like an ant out on a
kitchen counter food survey.

   He eventually stopped hugging the walls after about six months.
But the good deed was done. He had never gone out onto the yellow
strip again. In fact over time he developed really good road sense
for a dog. He was the only pooch I ever saw, substantiated by
numerous amazed neighbors over the years, that stopped and looked
both ways before crossing a street. He had even, I was told, been
observed to wait for traffic lights to turn green when out on his
own. Greydie had reported once, watching Quasar manouver a tricky
multiple light busy intersection through three green lights, one
pause, then the next pause, then the next to get from the far side
to the near side where Greydie was waiting to take Quasar for a ride
downtown.

   I had one more 'outie' experience with the Escort before it was
traded for a Ford Tracker and I got the four by four on the same
win win situation where the company picked up the tab. The incident
also involved whoever it is up there tipping off the cops all the
time about felons sneaking around in proximity.

   The new location for the business was a long drive from our
house in Orleans. So by early spring of 1996 Greydie and I had
decided to try and find something closer to the new base. I spotted
a likely candidate only about ten minutes from the office, so was
taking Greydie over for a look.

   As I was driving down the access street into the neighborhood.
All I could remember was that the crossroad went in so tight between
trees on either side, that it looked like turning onto a lane or
driveway. So I drove slowly down the street, staring to my left.

   Suddenly I saw my street cutting through trees just like I
remembered. I cut a left and then a right at the next street
towards the house. Because I had been concentrating so hard to
the left, I failed to notice the stop sign sitting clearly at
the corner on the right. Worse. I also failed to notice the cop
sitting on a parking lot behind the sign waiting for dummies
like me to come along and miss the stop sign like I just had.

   I wasn't half way up the next block when he pulled me over
ready to write out a ticket for failing to stop at a stop sign. I
explained what happened. But while I was talking he was checking
out my license and registration.

   "Did you know that you only have the wrong half of the
registration card here", he asked. "No I didn't", I said. I had
taken everything handed to me from Glen as is, and just put it in
my wallet trusting it was everything I needed. "Did you know that
the 1996 license plate is six weeks overdue", he continued. "No I
didn't", I replied, obviously presuming that Glen had been taking
care of all that stuff.

   So the cop was kind. He only ticketed me not having the new
license plate. He tore up the no stopping ticket, and gave me a
warning for the improper registration allowing me twenty four
hours to present it at the police station. Then he told me not to
even think about moving the car until the new plate was affixed or
I could get a ticket and the car would be impounded.

   Since it wasn't my papers, but I should have taken the trouble
to check, I was even Steven for the cycle for the day. So far.

   I phoned over to the office to see if someone could do a run
for the new license. Someone could, but not for two hours. So
Greydie and I sat there twiddling our thumbs for about half an
hour.

   I couldn't stand it any longer and decided to make a run for it
back to the office. We were only ten minutes away and there were
lots of side streets down to our main road for me to slip and
slide through.

   Well you can probably guess how well that kind of stuff works
when you have a Karmic Car Cycle on the go. Off I went, watching
every driving P and Q ever written. I got down to the main drag to
our office OK, and turned left. I hadn't finished going even one
full block when a cop car shot out from a side street right behind
me and glommed down hard onto my tail less than five feet away.

   Fortunately it wasn't the same cop but who's counting in a case
like this. We drove together locked by a symbiotic tow rope for
nearly a mile. I knew I was breaking the law big time and figured
the cop must have been smelling the smoke like a five alarm fire.
I could hardly breath.

   That was easily the longest mile I ever drove in my life. I
don't know how good the antennae in their foreheads are supposed
to be. But I had to allow that this guy's antennae must have been
tuned all the way to South America to pick me up so fast like
that.

   Or the whomever up there is calling the shots must have been in
desperate straights to make a score for that day. But there must
have also been a misfire somewhere along the way. Because he
suddenly veered to the right and took off down a crossroad. But
regardless of who went where or what or when, since I had broken
the law, take it to the bank, I figure this was another 'innie'.
Forget about the five years off my life I'll be lucky to get back.
Talk about the 'great white flash' the instant the copper lept
around that turn and glombed onto my Karma vapour trail five
feet back. Knock... KNOCK.....





THE

CliffR

PROJECT

Part 3

`THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES'

CHAPTER 26

   By the middle of November in 1996 we were also still driving
our old 1986 blue Skyhawk. The car had given us seven or eight
years of yeomen service, didn't owe us a dime, and was passed its
last legs, way past its last legs. So we decided to sell it and be
done with it.

   I went over to a local auto repair in a small row of business
bays and negotiated $100.00 for the car because the engine was
still running fine despite having over 350,000 kilometers. A
living testimony to Slick 50 oil additive.

   It was also house to a very arcane piece of arcane history. I
pulled over the side of the road one day and crept it along as the
odometer slowly crept to exactly 22222222. Once it hit the exact
mark I stopped and savored the moment for a moment. Not too many
chances in a lifetime for that unless you're specifically into old
clunkers.

    By the time it was time for goodbye the blue Buick four door
small car Skyhawk had scarcely anothing left. The brakes were going,
with no door handles built in the design only one of the four window
button worked, to open and close the driver's window. Both windows on
the passanger side were permenantly locked shut, the fourth window
stayed partly open and was held in place propped on a piece of two
by four inside the door panel. You had to open the driver door by
reaching out. You had to open the passanger door by reaching in. The
rear passenger door didn't open or close at all. The carc was like a
geriatric, fine until all of a sudden woes start settling in, this is
how that car had deteriorated in a short short time. Forgot to mention
the muffler was completely shot, an emergany repair using a pork and
bean can engineered by a neighbor next door didn't work to cure the
loud noise but a second try with a V Eight vegitable can cut to size
with wire snips did work fine for a month but the roar was starting
to come back. Forgot to mention that the four way input into the
single front end output of the manifold off the engine block was
completely eaten through so noise from it plus exhaust fumes were
becoming problem number one. It was, indeed, time to retire the car.

    Greydie said he would take it over to the auto repair during
the day. I came by later to see how things went. As I approached
the location I could see the back end of a car sticking straight
up in the air out of a ditch like a finger giving an insult. The
car looked to be around about the location of the repair shop.
"Looks like an accident", I said to myself.

   As I got closer and closer, the more and more it started
looking like the back end of the Buick. Sure enough, once I got
close enough to see, there it was sticking bum up out of the ditch
like a bird drinking water.

   There was no sign of Greydie. I went over to the house and he
was working on his computer, business as usual. What had happened,
was that the drainage ditch along the front of the auto place was
so deep it was an almost vertical trench.

   When Greydie had been driving into the lot somebody wanted out.
The drive was so narrow, he had to wait. But he was so close to
the edge, that after about thirty seconds the edge broke away and
the car slowly slid into the ditch face first with back end
sticking up like a skunk ready to launch.

   It was the car's last indignant hurrah for giving it such an
unceremonious boot out the door after all these years of loyal
service. Not only do cars seem to know when you are about to give
them the boot, some of them seem to know how to respond to you
appropriately.

   Greydie had gone into the auto repair and suggested they just
come out with a rope and haul it out. But a politically correct
employee insisted they call a tow truck because of the insurance.
So Greydie just did what he always did when confronted by
politically correct thinking people when you definitely don't want
one and threw up his hands. He then went home to let me deal with
it because I had always shown somewhat more patience with people
like that.

   Well in the way that politically correct people always want
their personal policies accepted, a tow truck it was, and I
resettled with the shop owner for $50.00 instead of the original
$100.00.

   The car was safely on the lot the next morning when I went by.
But the owner told me to come back in a couple of days for the
money. A couple of days later the owner was out buying a
hamburger. I came back a week later and there was a sheriff's lock
on the door. Jeez, I've got to stop falling for that some day. So
since I was out a few bucks, I have to call this a minor 'outie'.

   Have you ever noticed in general that some cars have their own
distinct way of dealing with last legs. Every car has it's own
way. Our Buick did it one way, a friend's car in Vancouver in 1971
like to use it's own way. The car was a 1964 Pontiac.

   The car had been run for years as a regular courier vehicle
between Vancouver and Prince George about 600 miles north in the
interior of the province. Our friend had obtained it in the late
sixties. By 1971 it was still running OK despite its 450,000
miles.

    Somebody once said circa late seventies, that if you can get a
GM vehilcle past the first 100,000 miles without engine repairs,
you can likely go for the count. Had to be a bit of truth in that.
During the latter days of flower selling and leather wholesaling
in Alberta, with some newer vehicles we also had the 1794 Chev
station wagon, a 1792 Chev suburban, and a 1976 Chev Beaumont Van
for all our driving flower routes.

   The wagon had 320,000 miles on it, the Suburban 340,000 miles.
And the Beaumont 280,000. And all were running just fine. Not even
burning much oil.

   I borrowed my friend's Pontiac one day. As I was heading out
the door, he said with an emphatic plead, "don't let it run out of
gas, whatever you do, don't, don't, let it run out of gas". Well
the gas gauge didn't work, and I completely forgot to gas up. So,
yup, I ran out of gas.

   I was just going by a parking lot just off Marine drive when
the engine suddenly went dead as a doornail. So I cut into the lot
and coasted to a stop somewhere in the middle. I headed up the
road, picked up a five gallon can of gas, returned to the car, and
spent the next hour and a half trying to get the stupid thing to
start. No way, not a chance. Not even a single piston cough.

   The next hour after that, various people came along offering
their help and or an opinion of what to do. Or their friendly
expertise. I even had a professional mechanic at one point
standing hunched over in the engine well working intensively over
the carb with backside to wind.

   But to no avail. The car wasn't going to go, no way, no how,
take it to the bank, Jack. It was two weeks later before my friend
finally got it up and running again and off the lot.

   Why it wouldn't start was the same reason as a ninety five year
old falling down needs a week or two to recuperate. At 450,000
miles the car was like a hundred and five year old. The simple
shock of running out of gas had been so much for the poor old gal
she had simply needed a couple of weeks to recuperate.

   A trucker friend told me of a somewhat similar experience once
while hauling a fully loaded tractor trailer from the states to
Saskatoon Saskatchewan with a broken transmission. The low gear
ranges all were gone and Ray was trucking the entire route in the
high gear ranges.

   Having to stop on flat ground wasn't a problem. He could still
ease the truck up into motion a painful gear at a time. But if he
had to stop on an up slope, his goose was cooked. So the trick was
to give it everything it had going down every hill in order to
have enough momentum to get up the next while staying in the upper
gears.

   The trip through the Dakotas was up and down all the way. Ray
had one hill left to go near the north end of North Dakota. Then
it would be more or less flat hauling all the rest of the way into
the Saskatoon.

   He went all out going down the hill. But about half 888 way back 888
the next slope up a cop car roared up from behind trying to pull
him over for speeding. Well Ray knew he had been speeding. He had
to be in order to keep the thing going.

   So he kept waving frantically at the cop to let him get to the
top of the hill. The cop wasn't having any of it and sliced right
in front of the rig, forcing Ray to jam to a dead stop halfway up
the hill. When it was all over it cost Ray nearly $5,000.00 out of
pocket to have the company come and tow him all the way to
Saskatoon. Needless to say, Ray was not amused.

   Similalrly in the middle of 1996, Glen and his wife from our
antivirus company got a van only a year after leasing the Tracker
four by four. Women love the Tracker. So it was a no brainer
choice at the time. However, when the back seat is up only about
eight inches of usable space remains in the back.

   The first day Glen's wife packed her two kids into car seats in
the back seat and went to the supermarket, the only groceries she
could bring home were what she could fit on the front seat. Both
of them had forgotten to factor in the limited trunk space when
deciding on the particular car.

   In the late fall of 1996, I had moved the Tracker down to the
loading bay out back of our premises from some reason and had
forgotten to move it back up to the front when I was finished. I
headed out to go home about five thirty that evening.

   A farmer was pasturing his three horses on the two acre horse
pasture behind our building, one of which knew what a smuck was.
The farmer was in tending the horses. His pickup truck was parked
at the gate with the tailgate open. The tailgate had been
reinforced with a solid plate of metal.

   The pickup was dark red. It was almost past dusk into the
evening dark. If I had been fifteen minutes earlier the dark
pickup would have stuck out like a sore thumb against the lighter
background ambient light. If I had been fifteen minutes later,
then the pickup would have stood out like a sore thumb against the
black background ambient light.

   But at precisely the moment I had decided to leave, the photon
decibels of the pickup and background ambient light were exactly
the same. I'd walked almost right beside it going from the front
of the building down to the car and hadn't seen it.

   So the pickup was to all extents and purposes almost invisible
sitting right behind the Tracker. So assuming the coast was clear
I shoved the Tracker in reverse and gave it a real good goose in
reverse to get it turned around and up out of there and delivered
the back driver's corner of the Tracker straight onto the right
corner of the steel plate on the pickup's tailgate.

   The pickup didn't even know it had been hit except the farmer
had to shift the tailgate back into alignment since it wouldn't
close. But if I had put the corner of an edge like, say, a chisel
up to the corner of the Tracker and whacked it one hell of a bang
with a heavy mallet, I would have produced the identical deep thin
dent produced by the hard corner of steel plate of the tailgate
going into the soft corner of the Tracker.

   In the end result I figure light out, dark out, didn't matter.
I should have been looking out my back a lot more seriously and
been going a lot slower. So I count it as an 'innie'.

   As things currently stand at the moment, my half mile of terror
of the previous year in the 1963 Escort, and the little ding on
the back of the Tracker must have been the last of my last Karmic
Car interaction 'innies' and balanced the books. Because for the
first time in a long long time, I didn't feel any heebee jeebies
or experience any heart leaps whenever I saw a cop. I figured that
must mean I was at last Karmically even Steven for one of the
first times in my driving life. At least for the moment.

   Plus I know for sure my Karmic load had changed for another
reason. The whole late seventies I was in Edmonton Calgary I used
to get trucked. That meant that a big delivery truck, dump truck,
or transport truck would suddenly back out of a lane way or cut me
off coming around from a cross street. Then I would have to drive
for sometimes a long while behind a big lumbering truck.

   In Edmonton, this was not a particularly surprising occasion.
Half the vehicles up there were pickup trucks or larger. But in
Ottawa, a civil servant's haven, the same thing happened all
through the eighties and into the nineties. It hardly ever
happened to Greydie. Whenever it did he would immediately think of
me, because sometimes we would be driving around together and
truck after truck would slide right into place in front of me much
to his amusement.

   But it had only been happening occasionally now for at least
a year. Whatever got it going years ago finally seems to have run
its course. I must have cut in front of a real trucking big wig at
one time who had some major ire going to pay off with the truck
gods.

   Then the trusty old Malibu came into the picture on a whopping
big 'outie' while we were stranded in the Greely camp grounds, and
the whole thing started all over again because now I had some
'outie' credits to work off.

   I had bought the Malibu from my race car crew mechanic friend
Jamie. The deal was that Jamie would do the repairs sufficient to
get it certified, and I would run it around on a ten day pass in
the meantime.

   As you may recall, getting the rear view mirror, the one thing
needed to get done so I could drive it safely, was anything but a
picnic. The reason the rear view mirror was so necessary was that
the side view mirror was worthless. Wouldn't stay in place. No
matter where you set it it would just instantly slide back down
out of place.

   For probably five thousand years, man has been devising
substances to make things slip easier. Like Oil. In all that time
not even one substance has ever been developed to make things slip
worse that I know of. Which would have been the easy solution. I
tried gumming everything I could think of into the thing to try
and make it hold it's position but no luck.

   Eventually I went out to an auto wreckers and spent over two
hours trying to find something that would work. The problem was
the same as the Ford Falcon in Halifax years before. The crushers
had long since cleaned out anything from that vintage.

   I eventually found something that could be modified and Jamie
spent nearly another two hours drilling holes and jerry rigging
the attachment on the door panel. At least I could finally see who
was behind me at last without any problems. But you see what this
simple little episode was starting to entail.

   The next scheduled job was the brake lines which were all in bad
shape. Trouble was Jamie's boss used to let him use the service bay
after five for his own stuff. Problem was that if another car was
on the lift waiting overnight for parts or whatever, I would have
to wait another day.

   Weeks of waiting for another day went by. Then one afternoon I
got the cue up from Jamie and started heading over to his place. I
had hardly started out when a car in front of me stopped at an
open intersection to let somebody by. I tapped on the brakes to
slow down and went right to the floor. A brake line had burst.

   Talk about close clocking, not when I was driving to the store,
or somewhere unimportant. I was on my way straight to the mechanic
to get the brake lines replaced.

   I instantly grabbed the shoulder or the road, slammed the
automatic into neutral, and shoved down the emergency brake pedal
for all I could ha, ha, handle. Which was next on the list after
the brake lines. But it did enough to slow me down so my left
front bumper only made a dull thud when it hit the other car's
right back bumper.

   It was enough of a bump for the both of us to get out and
check. But fortunately not enough for us to chat about it except
for my groveling apology.

   But now how to get over to Jamie's with no stopping power except
for a ten percent emergency brake. I decided to end run for it anyway
but after only a half a mile of shear heart stop, decided to throw in
a towel and called Jamie to call a tow truck. You know the feeling,
driving a car with no brakes at all, not even the back alleys and
laneways looked safe, c'mon you must have driven no brakee no stopee
at least once in your life. The Karma was already on the run.

   To make a long story short Jamie finally certified the car in
/mid /February after I had ran it non stop for over three solid
months on a ten day pass. You can see where the Karmic thing is
going.

   Then we got the 1989 Hyundai Excel for the pizzas which took a
liter of oil very two days to keep it on the road. I eventually
took it back to the guy I had bought it from with a squalling
appeal about it who therefore agreed to replace the seals. I
picked it up a few days later and now it took a liter of oil every
day.

   Turns out the mechanic who had been working on it quite in the
middle of the job and the next mechanic had assumed he had been
finished just subject to tightening everything back down. Wrong,
he ended tightening down the old head seal which just mushed it up
even worse and the oil came out all around the head like the
thousand falls in Utah.

   The mechanic had it done again and this time it lasted the
whole winter of hard pizza driving. Then of course the relentless
blow by popped them all again.
I said fooie at this point and just accepted the two day liter
committment as a tithe to the car gods.

   But now I had a bigger problem. The hard wear and tear over the
winter had cause the smoky dislodge from the back to increase
substantially. Actually it wasn't all that bad. On the highway or
in town at posted speed and few stops it looked fine. If you
happened to be driving in heavy traffic and stopping and starting
a few time at every light it was a different matter.

   Not fully apprising the danger of this I headed down South Bank
Sreet one Saturday afternoon, right in the middle of it's once a
week 'don't go that way for any reason, or it will take all day',
period. The smoke started coming out the back in clouds.

   Right on cue a huge cop on a huge Harley pulled right in behind
me and followed me all the way to the plaza where I had been
heading. As I got out of the car, he was getting off his bike.
"you know you have smoke coming out the tail pipe there", he
asked. "You're kidding", I said, "I had no idea", one of the few
times in my life I actually lied. He of course didn't buy it and
gave me a ticket for excessive exhaust emission.

   I immediately start filling the oil with 50-50 grade, and
stuffed every smoke reducer know to man in as additives. And
stayed completely away from any part of the city where I might be
forced into short term stop and start driving.

   And got away with it for another year. But the Karmic cycles
were already  way out of whack because as you will recall we blew
nearly fourteen hundred dollars on a 1984 Ford Escort, and nearly
twelve hundred dollars an a pristine 1986 Ford Taurus. Both ending
up with bum motors.

   Then the starting motor started to go on the Hyundai and a
numerous other little woes were starting to add up to the point
where fixing it, including the engine was more than it was worth.
So I parked it in the spring of 2000 and we got a 1988 Olds
Cutlass Supreme Station Wagon.

   It had shown up one day parked behind a local convenience
store, just about when I was getting desperate to have to make a
decision about the Hyundai one way or the other. The car was in
beautiful looking condition, the owner only wanted $600.00 for it,
and it had never been winter driven. Only problem was that the
back brake line were gone.

   I has Jamie hustle over and give it a going over. "Do it".
Jamie said, the engine ran beautifully. Turns out the other
problem was that the gas tanked leaked so had to be replaced. Plus
it needed new tires.

   I become the official legal owner at eleven o'clock the next
morning. At one o'clock I officially moved it over to Jamie's
place. At about two that afternoon some vandals came by the back
of the convenience store and baseball batted out all the windows
of the other two cars that had been parked there for storage. Was
that a close call or what. Or, alternatively, just what the hell
was that. In either case, the car had got out of harm's way by a
split hair.

   Turns out the other problem with car was that the gas tanked
leaked so had to be replaced. Plus it needed new tires. All in all
it took about eleven hundred bucks to get it certified and six
months on the ten day travel permit due to add hock schedule at
Jamie's end.

   And now the final paragraph of the saga. I have to believe that
my Karmic Car Cycles have now been balance to a finality. Because
in the entire near two years time that we have owned the Olds, she
has not failed to start in the morning even once, nor stopped
running for any reason, nor has taken even a penny in upkeep
except for oil and lube.

   The only problem was an increasing whine in the power steering
as car time progressed into the second year. Checking the dip stick
told nothing. Quickie lube joints said its your power steering. A
wizened Hydro Ontario mechanic living at a camp ground where Greydie
was ensconsed for two months practicing drums and preparing a new
astronomy site using his computer carted every week and weekend
back and forth to the campground, said only 'she needs fluid'. A
lawyer also regular at the campsite was heading into nearby small
town and returned with a cantister of Canadian Tire power steering
fluid. The dip stick said nothing, leaving no choice but for Greydie
to fill the fluid reservoir to the top on a guess, not to the mid level
line where just below, the fluid level was sitting shimmering.

   The car has not made a noise in the eight months since. Turns out
the indicator line where everyone thought was the fill to level, was
the empty level. Huh. General Motors pulling another sly little sleazy
scam on car repair parts? Or is this just another one of those engineers,
designing, who didn't get to work in an auto repair bay for two years
before signing up designing. You would have thought they would have
at least stamped the word 'empty' into the plastic reservoir for
the brake fliud.

   And finally in all this time I have never seen the red lights
side of a cop, or a pencil and pad for anything. Not even a
parking ticket. The way it should be. I have to believe that the
car gods have gone off looking for another Joe to have sport with,
and hope it stays that way for all time. The one thing I do know
is that if they ever start knocking on my door again I'm probably
going to try and change my name.


Cliff Livingstone - Ottawa - March 16/2002.

Email: cliff@look.com