The Summer of 1976 a True Story

...and Frank and I were on the last leg of circumnavigating Nova Scotia on our motorcycles, he with the ever reliable Honda Four, and me with my temperamental BSA Thunderbolt. We had been on a pub crawl ever since we started and had spent a happy week cruising and boozing, all in the pursuit of improving international relations.

The last day, we had some time to kill and went out to this lighthouse on a peninsula. It was built up fairly high, and there were a lot of huge boulders that had been dumped to keep it from washing away I guess. We were there by ourselves wandering around, middle of the day, waves crashing on the rocks and Frank says to me, "Is that someone thrashing around in the surf?"

I looked down and I could see a person in a lot of distress and could barely hear cries for help.Down we went through the boulders and there was a girl, desperately trying to climb out of the surf and getting washed off and struggling. So Frank gets himself wedged in good and grabs my leg at the ankle. I reached out as far as I could and when she got thrown forward by the next wave I grabbed her and Frank reeled us both in.

It was a fine looking Canadian bird, and when we struggled back up to the parking lot and attended to the cuts bruises and scrapes all over her knees and hands, she went to her hotel to get shaped up and met us later in a bar where we all got royally smashed.

She'd be about fifty now.

Sometimes on one of Poe's midnights weary when I've got As It Happens on and there's some nobody from Moncton going on about the yanks this and the yanks that I wonder whether she's sitting up in bed somewere in Ontario, house all quiet except for the radio humming softly in the background listening to the same program, the old man snoring away beside her...I wonder whether she ever thinks that if it hadn't been for a couple of gringos on a pub crawl, none of this would have existed.