Summer, 1971
To this day I do not know whose idea is was to go to Nova Scotia.
But Jimmy during those years was willing to travel almost anywhere as
long as it involved someone else’s car and someone else paying for the gas.
Frank already owned a 1966 beige Dodge Dart, which had been worn out by
its previous owner.
To help defray costs, Jimmy hoodwinked Bob Warren into going. But all
three refused to let Alf make the trip, convinced all he would do it get drunk
and start fights – possibly evoking a war between Canada and the United States.
Alf was among the first of the Garley Gang to own a car. In fact, Jimmy
met Alf when Alf picked him up hitch hiking in Little Falls a few years earlier
and continued to exploit Alf for rides and would have voted to include Alf had
Frank’s car flaked out.
Jimmy, however, did feel some remorse about rejecting Alf, and made a
point of mailing him an empty corn flakes box from their breakfast table in
Nova Scotia as a souvenir.
Over the protests of his two companions, Frank insisted on taking the
land route north with one relatively short ferry ride at the end.
“He kept telling us he wanted to see the trees,” Jimmy recalled,
bringing along a portable cassette recorder to better document the journey.
At intervals, Jimmy stuck a microphone in people’s faces and asked them
their thoughts about the trip so far.
Jimmy cautioned Frank not to pick up any hitch hikers along the way.
“I was afraid we would pick up a draft dodger and get ourselves busted
for helping him,” Jimmy explained.
Jimmy was also concerned about the condition of Frank’s car, knowing
that the weather was fickle and repair stations remote the further north they
went. Even a flat tire in the wrong place could strand them.
“I didn’t want to end up in the middle of nowhere with those two,” he said
long after a later trip stranded him with Ginger in Nebraska. “Neither one of
those two had much stamina. If we had to hike for any distance they would
likely wither and die.”
He also didn’t trust their common sense, thinking as city boys they
would panic if confronted by a wolf, mountain lion or bear.
None had brought more than a pocketknife, let alone a weapon.
Confirming his worst fears, the car began to fall apart as they
drove. Jimmy tried to roll down the
window and the knob came off in his hand. When he tried to get into the glove
compartment, it resisted, and then sprung open dumping the contents into his
lap, then refused to close regardless of the number of times he tried to slam
it shut, and when it finally did, it was spring open again whenever the car hit
a bump.
Well after they finally crossed the border into Canada, Frank stopped
to pick up a couple of hitchhikers. Because the car was a two door, these
people have to climb into the back forcing Jimmy to fold the seat forward. When
they were seated, he returned the seat back to its proper position, sat down
and had the back of the seat collapsed into their laps so that he was looking
up at them. He eventually managed to wedge something into the mechanism to keep
it in place, but each bump then caused the seat to fall back just as the glove
compartment popped open -- a duality he
managed to avoid later by sitting on the edge of the seat while holding closed
the glove compartment with his knees.
As testimony to advanced planning, none of the three had thought to
make motel reservations and so drove until they saw a “vacancy” sign and then
stopped. Because finances were tight – needing to cover the cost of gas, oil,
food and cigarettes – the motel had to be in expensive.
Jimmy had lot of complaints.
“Nobody thought to bring an alarm clock,” he said. “We relied on the
clock radio. When it went off one of them slapped the snooze button or slept
right through it even though we knew we had to check out early.”
This generally wasn’t the issue Jimmy made it out to be since he was up
at the crack of dawn with worry.
Somewhere along the road, he did manage to buy a clock.
“I only found out the alarm didn’t work at the next motel when it was
too late to go back to where we bought it,” he said. “So, I had to go and shake
them awake, first one, then the other. I would shake Frank until he said he was
awake, then I went over to Bob. By the time I got Bob up, I could hear Frank
snoring.”
Sleeping arrangements also posed a problem. The rooms they rented came
with two beds. While both were wide enough to accommodate two people, Jimmy
soon realized he could sleep with neither of the other two. He tried with Frank
the first night and Frank thrashed around so much Jimmy woke up with black and
blue marks in the morning. He tried sleeping with Bob only to wake with Bob’s
arms and legs wrapped around him as if in a python’s death grip.
On the third night, he slept on the floor, and woke up so stiff he
could barely stand the ride the next day. On the fourth night, he demanded the
other two share a bed while he slept in the second only to wake in the middle
of the night to a ruckus as one of the sleeping figures thrashed as the other
figure attempted to clutch, both howling like fighting cats.
Jimmy then accepted his fate to sleep on the floor for the rest of the
trip.
Perhaps the most memorable motel moment came when they finally arrived
at Inverness where the female motel clerk took a liking to Frank, and both took
off with the car to go to a rock and roll club on Prince Edward Island, leaving
Jimmy and Bob standing on the gravel driveway with their bags.
“He didn’t even tell us where he was going or if he would ever come
back,” Jimmy recalled. “We didn’t know what we would do if he didn’t.”
Adding insult to injury, Jimmy soon discovered the TV didn’t work.
Nova Scotia got its name because it resembled Scotland. Frank and Jimmy
always craved to visit England and Ireland. Although born in Paterson and lived
most of his life in West Paterson, Jimmy actually lived in England briefly
before he turned five and he retained a hazy memory of the experience.
Jimmy was every bit a tourist during this trip, collecting brochures at
every stop, and would lay them out on the bed to map out where they would go
and what they would see. He created a schedule that stuffed in as much as they
could into each day and hoped to avoid aimless wandering.
While the trio did seek out some local points of interest, browsed some
local gift shops and took photographs at local monuments, much of their
adventure involved pointing to a spot on the map and going to see what was
there. If some odd named popped up, Jimmy insisted they go there, often going
off the beaten path to places tourists rarely went.
On one particular jaunt to the high lands, Jimmy got worried because
Frank had forgotten to fill the gas tank and the driving had taken them up to a
particularly remote region with few houses and – as far as they could tell – no
gas stations. They wandered around, climbing higher and higher as the road
narrowed and one side suddenly dropped sharply, leaving them no room to turn
around.
“The tops of the pine trees were eye level with us,” Jimmy said. “The
ruts were so deep they alone kept us from slipping off the side of the road.”
Bob yelped each time the car veered, fully believing they were going to
go over the side.
Jimmy kept telling Bob to shut up. Frank – who was driving – screamed
at them both, claiming they were making him nervous and that he WOULD fall off
if they didn’t stop.
All things were at full volume when they finally reached the top where
Frank pulled over, turned off the engine and then in a fit of frustration
thrust the keys out the window.
For years, Jimmy was convinced that Frank meant for those keys to go
over the edge of the mountain, stranding them in that remote place. As it was,
they had come upon one of the oddest aspects of the local landscape, a fenced
in field just wide enough to accommodate a patch of grass and a cow.
The keys had landed somewhere in the grass. Jimmy and Bob went out to
search for them, while Frank sat on the hood of the car, hitting a tiny gong
with a tiny hammer he had purchased at a local gift shop.
When Jimmy finally recovered the keys, he ordered Frank to turn the car
around. They slipped their way down the muddy road scared to death that they
would slip off the side at any moment.
The trip bound these three together.
As they wandered this world of mostly dirt roads, countless rivers and
an occasional ruin, something changed in the three of them, some secret Frank
could not later explain, this experience remembered throughout the rest of
their lives as something special.
They seemed to love the misty world of Inverness especially, but the
trip to a local racetrack remained a point of contention long after they
returned home.
Jimmy, who viewed himself as an intelligent gambler, insisted on
dragging the other two to the track where with all the appropriate racing forms
he bet on what he assumed would be the logical winner.
Frank with no calculation picked the horse whose name he liked – a name
since forgotten but at the time had some symbolic importance. Then a frustrated
Jimmy watched as Frank’s horse came from behind to win.
Jimmy refused to let either of the other two talk about it for the rest
of the trip, and still was bitter about it many, many years later.
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