TERMINAL A chapter 2

by Jerry Donaldson

Chapter 2

In the summer of 1970 Garth and I quit the post office to drive to California.  I’d met Garth in the summer of 1969, while idling with a few of the other part-time mail handlers on the stone wall enclosing a small courtyard at the grand entrance to Terminal A.  We’d sit around and smoke cigarettes until we punched in at 6 pm.   Garth and I became best friends.

I wore the seat out of a pair of jeans that summer from sliding off that wall.  I loved those jeans, Levi’s 501zs they were, and a pair of originals in good shape might cost you $2500 today.  Levi’s re-issued those vintage dungarees in the mid-nineties and I scored a pair on E-Bay last week.  The re-issues are immensely popular, and tough to locate in my size.  They are also not cheap.

As I sail through my sixties I become more and more comfortable with that unruly, long-ago teenage me.  I’m free to re-experience many of the things that made me happy way back then, like hanging out on the beach every summer day.  Or wearing jeans and sandals everywhere.  My ex-wife used to tell me I was obsessed with the past, like Jay Gatsby, and maybe that’s true.  I once made a resolution to try to contact every person I’ve ever met, but that project has been placed on hold.

So anyhow, one June morning Garth and I loaded ourselves into his Ford Econoline van and pulled out of the driveway at 30 Admiral Road for the last time.  I hope we gave our landlord notice, but I’m not sure about that.  I deferred to Garth on business decisions and he handled all the financials. I was much better at hunting down good weed and arranging parties. 

We navigated out of downtown Toronto: up Poplar Plains Road, right at St. Clair Avenue, left at Forest Hill Road, right at Kilgary Avenue. Then left onto Avenue Road by Upper Canada College and straight out of town to Highway 401.  The 401 at Avenue Road was eight lanes then, I think it’s now about 18.  It’s also not “out of town” anymore.  A lot’s changed in 50 years.

Garth was what you’d call an anglophile, a lover of all things British.  He’d painted a large Union Jack on each side of his van and installed a framed photo of Winston Churchill on the dash.  Sometimes after a few beers he’d speak in an accent.  As well as the Econoline, Garth owned several British cars: two Austins and a Wolseley, which lived at his parents’ house in Forest Hill.  He stated many times that he would name his firstborn “Austin”, and in 1991 he did just that.  British cars in the sixties were abominably unreliable, but Garth didn’t care.  For him it was love, pure and simple.

The Econoline got us lots of attention.  It was colourful, ill handling and slow.  We heard all sorts of commentary from other drivers, everything from “Peace, brother,” to “Damn hippies,” to “Jesus Christ, is that as fast as it goes!”  We toodled along the 401 and turned right onto the 400, heading the 50 miles north to Barrie.  Many folks commuted daily from Barrie to Toronto and I suppose they still do.  Drivers passed us going 20 miles per hour over the limit, hands white-knuckling steering wheels and front bumpers half a car’s length from the vehicle ahead.  In the winter. blizzard conditions regularly caused pile-ups involving 70, 80, 100 cars.  The 400 will get you to Jackson’s Point on Lake Simcoe, but I’d always preferred the much more leisurely trip up Highway #11 on my weekend jaunts the previous summer.

At Barrie the 400 turned into a two-lane highway though Muskoka, cottage country.  Everyone from Toronto spent time up there, and it was customary to ditch work at noon on a Friday to beat the rush.  So Garth and I were still in familiar territory.  The Who’s “Tommy” was fresh in 1970, and we listened to it over and over on the van’s eight-track.  Eight track tape decks, you may or may not remember, were a curse.  It was great to play your music on the go, but every different music cartridge required a particular combination of matchbooks wedged in around it to make it play straight without warbling and dragging.  It was easier just to pick a cartridge you liked and let it play over and over, rather than fight to get a different one going while you were on the move.

And we were definitely on the move.  We bought bread and sandwich stuff and made meals on the go, stopping only to buy gas, cigarettes and coffee.  The plan was to drive to Vancouver, meet up with Darlene and then head south into the States.  Darlene was Garth’s summer girlfriend from last year.  In September she’d gone back to B.C., and Garth was hoping to re-kindle the romance.  At the age of seventeen I had not yet learned heartbreak, so maybe that’s what Garth was feeling.  Or maybe not.  My turn to cry over a woman would come in 1979, and I’ll tell you about that later.  I’d only met Darlene once and she seemed nice enough.

Late that first day we arrived in Sudbury, where the highway north met the TransCanada.  I’d been to Sudbury once before and it looked pretty much the way I remembered.  Stompin’ Tom Connors sang a song about Sudbury:

“The girls are out at bingo, the boys are gettin’ stinko,

They’ll think no more of Inco, on a Sudbury Saturday night”

Inco was the nickel smelter, and the main employer in town.  They say that in the old days a tree wouldn’t grow in Sudbury because of the pollution the Inco plant spewed out.  At some point prior to my time there the plant installed a gigantic smokestack to distribute the poison farther afield, but any improvement in the tree situation was not apparent to me.  Maybe things have changed by now.

We gassed up and blew town.  I was at the wheel as we drove through acres of slag moonscape, until the intersection with the Trans-Canada came into view ahead.  This was it, we were heading into terra incognito.  We rolled into the cloverleaf and down the ramp onto the T-C.  There were dozens of hitchhikers there, all headed west.  We saw patched blue jeans, guitars, headbands.  Folks hitched solo, in couples (the best bet to get a ride fast) and in groups.  People had children with them, some had dogs.  A few were sleeping on the shoulder, heads on their packs.  Garth and I would learn that it was not unusual to be stuck for days hitching in particular spots on the road west.  Wawa in northern Ontario was legendary for this.  Or so the stories went.

I pulled over and we welcomed a young couple aboard: “Where are you headed,” Garth asked.  “West,” was the answer.  So I pulled the Econoline back onto the travelled portion and we were off.