Anyone who passes cars recklessly and at great speed on Highway 8 between Mitchell and Stratford in my home county of Perth, Ontario, Canada, is begging for an early appointment with a judge or an undertaker.
There are a lot of roads around these parts with far more hills than this stretch, but for some reason, the old Huron Road is just busy enough and rolling enough along those 12 miles of pavement to make it a very frustrating piece of highway for a man or a woman in a hurry. And if you can name me 10 people left in this world today who aren’t in a hurry, you’re either counting five of them twice or you live in a place which doesn’t yet have (a) an automatic car wash (b) a 24-hour donut shop (c) a bank with an instant teller or (d) all of the above..
Trying to shave five minutes off the normal 22-minute trip from Mitchell to Stratford is about as easy as getting a cat to fetch a stick. The highway is, at times, a very busy truck route between Highway 401 and Goderich and to further reduce your chances of achieving a successful speedy flight from the Mitchell birthplace of hockey’s first superstar Howie Morenz to the home of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival Theatre, police cars dot the landscape along the route. Actually, they try their best to hide behind the landscape, their favourite spot being the east side of St. John’s Lutheran Church at Seebach’s Hill.
Anyway, this literary meandering is my little preamble to a story I’m happy to relate happened to me a few weeks back.
For years, I have ground my teeth and cursed the skies while driving the Mitchell-Stratford road, angered to distraction at the pilots who fly up behind me like cougars gaining on an antelope just as I head east out of Mitchell and then sit there on my back bumper for the next 10 miles or so, finally passing me in a Star Wars-like flourish. For years, I’ve looked imploringly around for a policeman in a cruiser who would just once give me the satisfaction of seeing my pursuers caught and punished. For years, the men and women in blue have let me down.
Until that fine Sunday afternoon three weeks ago. I was putt-putting along the road at my usual 80 kilometres an hour, the speed limit, when a young man came bursting over the hill like a shotgun blast and then parked his shiny, chromey, flashy, speedy bumper on my little red car’s rear end. We danced so entwined for the next several miles – me speeding up and slowing down, trying to shake him off like I might a pesky bug on my arm – and he hanging on like a dog to a tasty bone.
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Finally, this important young man, who just had to get to Stratford RIGHT NOW on a sunny, Sunday afternoon to waste his time doing who knows what, shot past me quicker than a kid fleeing a bumble bee and disappeared out of sight over a hill.
I eventually composed my frizzled nerves and was gradually forgetting all about the mad astronaut in the dyno-charged, super-turboed, doubled-cammed, white-hot speed machine, when I came down over a rise on the other side of the village of Sebringville to see what I have long wanted to see: a police cruiser, lights flashing, had my pursuer pulled over to the side of the road and was about to administer a little Perth County justice.
This is what I did. I drove by, gave a happy, sideways glance, and wandered on into Stratford and home.
This is what I wish I’d did: I wish I’d pulled over behind the cruiser, got out, approached the policeman, shook his hand vigorously, looked in the driver’s window of the car which had chased me, laughed heartily, climbed aboard his hood, danced a jig, turned a cartwheel – and left.
I wonder what Tiger Dunlop would say if you could tell him about the circus that performs its death-defying acts daily in 1986 on the route he helped carve out of the bush from Galt to Goderich in 1827. He’d think you were lying to him. Wouldn’t he?
Sure he would.
Right after you explained to him, of course, what an automobile is and also described the concept of horsepower.
©1986 Jim Hagarty
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