In the summer of 1978, I owned a 1974 Chevrolet Vega subcompact with an inline four cylinder engine and a lightweight aluminum alloy cylinder block. I had worked for the summer between years at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario at General Motors in nearby Oshawa, Ontario.
Near the end of August, as summer wound down, but before classes resumed, I pointed the Vega west. I got as far as Banff National Park in Alberta before the aluminum block decided it wasn’t going to like the Rockies much — and blew up. Since, I was travelling light and the car was beyond salvation on any budget I had, I hitched a ride into town to the bus station, packed up a few things and sent them back to Ontario. Seeing no need to let the setback ruin my trip, while a few of my things went east on the bus, I decided to carry on, hitchhiking to Vancouver.
That evening, I arrived at the youth hostel on Jericho Beach in Vancouver, named in the 1860s after a logger named Jeremiah Rogers. The Royal Canadian Air Force had built its famous “flying boat hangars” on Jericho Beach in the 1920s to chase rum-runners during the American Prohibition era. The nearby barracks eventually became the youth hostel.
I still remember the two posters that greeted me that August night in 1978 as I walked through the door to register for the night. On one wall was a poster that said, “Help Bring Back the Sixties.” On the other wall was another poster with a quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest.” I was 21. I’ve tried to take both admonitions to heart in my life’s work.
As for hitchhiking, it has entered the realm of the counterintuitive. A lost travel adventure art that has largely disappeared in North America (with the odd exception such as former Globe and Mail editor John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up, right?
Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking was alive and well in very rural, very conservative Prince Edward County as recently as 2007 anyway, and if you wanted to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, all you had to do was just stick your thumb out. I did it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route during my year-long sojourn in the County. One Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considered to be the two worst winters in the County to that point in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield.
In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owned it, with some help from relatives, he said, returned most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still lived there on Highway 33.
Another time, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home had been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she’d also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she was well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps was the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960.
As I said, true fact.
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