My bike got stolen once. Actually I’ve had many bikes stolen from me. Not elaborate heists either. Just taken outside of a store or, like in this story, from my front yard cause I was too dumb or lazy to lock it up. Between the ages of 8 and 16 more than one of my bikes found themselves under some other dude. ONE is too many. Hand me downs from my big bro in some cases, but whatever. Gone. Growing up, this caused my parents no end of consternation. “Jesus don’t you care about anything?”

One summer afternoon, I ripped home and dumped my bike in the front yard. I raced inside ’cause I’m 10 mins late for dinner (again). After dinner? Eat. Read. Goof off. Annoy my older brother until he lets loose a stampede of Charlie Horses. Before you know it, bedtime. This night, however…I never put my bike into the back yard. Lost or stolen, whatever word you wanna use. It wasn’t just bikes though.

I lost shoes, books, toys, boots. I lost wallets. A velcro wallet with a zipper that wrapped around my wrist. I managed to lose that. I lost short pants, sweatpants, snow pants, regular pants. I lost full snowsuits for Christs’s sake, and all of the above in the plural. Didn’t matter. I didn’t lose one watch. I lost several over the course of my youth.You name it. If it was an item of clothing or a personal possession that my parents had provided, chances are I didn’t know where the fuck it was. When I was adopted, the adoption store threw in a baby blue elephant whose floppy ears were a pink and blue flower pattern. Gone in like, grade 2. I think it might be down Ronny Delmage’s basement in Yellowknife but y’know, it’s gone. In a landfill somewhere (and Momma don’t think I don’t think about that). Talk to my older brother Cayle Vermeulen for the full tally of wool mittens I misplaced in grade 2. In the North West Territories. Somehow I would come home mittenless. In. The. Arctic. Trust me, my big brother keeps this knowledge like a gun on his hip when we visit Carol Ferro. I can’t ask anyone where my phone is or if they’ve seen my earbuds. Even if I say nothing but have the APPEARANCE of looking for something, that’s when Cayle sounds the alarm. After 30 years without fail, some variation of ”UH OH MOM WE’VE GOT ANOTHER MITTEN SITUATION!”I never reeeeeally got the full weight of the shit my parents did for me. They would never attach a dollar value to raising me and my siblings. They never bitched and moaned about taking me places I reeeeeeally thought I needed to go, at least, not at my volume. We didn’t get everything we wanted but we sure got what we needed. The honest truth is they were loving parents and great providers.I sure I get it NOW as I fork out bucks for Talia’s stuff. It’s not even money, though. I realize now how much they were doing for me every time I have to get my ass up off the cou­ch to clip, cut, push, move pull, twist, measure, adjust, lift, drill, make, feel, bend, buy, check, hang, cook, bake, build, break, mend something, drive some­where or meet someone or tape something up or wipe away a tear from The Rotten Kid’s cheek. Its 10:00 pm as I write this and if I hear her say “DAD?” with a certain inflection right now I will fucking explode. AND I ONLY HAVE ONE CHILD. They raised four, each with their own wants, needs, pains, put-ons and proclivities. Each with their own personalities and all that those entail. Part of MY personality was that I was bit of an idiot. Back to the bike. They bought me a beautiful brand new Raleigh so I could roll with the neighbourhood kids and be part of something, however fleeting. Now I was moving from Humpty Dumpty banana bikes to the world of BMX, and this bike was really something. Structurally it was metal, like all bikes, but coated in gleaming chrome. The seat which sat high on a post was made of molded high density red plastic. Red brake lines piped out from dark red brake handles which snaked their way down through chrome past the cross bar (!) around the handlebar stem to red calipers. These brakes were ready to do my bidding as they clutched like claw around knobby red tires on silver rims. Across the lower bar were scarlet letters framed in black. RED BARON. Ho ho holy shit this baby was beautiful. This thing glowed. If it was noon under a Saskatchewan sun, you couldn’t look directly at it. It was Street Hawk. It was Bandit’s Trans-Am. It was an X Wing Fighter with foils locked in attack position. This bike, this bike, it was…It was no longer in the front yard…Raising a child, what I’m about to illustrate may never happen to you. If it does, hopefully just once or twice and that’s the end of it. You may hear something your kid says from the other room. They might make a remark to the TV or ask a question to some other kid or visiting adult. Could be when you’re picking them up from or dropping them off to school. You’ll hear it and despite the training, teaching, showing, educating, explaining and lesson learning… Despite all of your efforts, you might hear them say something or see them do something and you will wonder to yourself…”Is my kid stupid?”This inevitably leads to other, larger questions like, “He’s 12. Is it too late to turn the idiot bus around, or will he be stupid teen?” Stupid teen begets stupid adult and that right there is when you’ll cease these thoughts and stamp out the vision of your child as a full grown adult, head down, wandering past multiple signs that read TEST RANGE as he searches the ground for unusually smooth or shiny rocks. You may never wonder this, but I know my Mom had concerns. Especially that night.“Ummm, Mom, have you seen my bike?”Mom with her back to me doing dishes. What she wanted to say is, “Why the FUCK would I know where your FUCKING BIKE is. I’ve been HERE all day and you’ve been out doing GOD KNOWS WHAT Mister GOOD TIME CHARLIE!” But she did not say that. She calmly puts her hands out on either side of the counter. Soap bubbles up to her elbows. The only sound in the world is a plate’s muffled bump as it hits the bottom of the sink. Never been religious, this woman. Least not since I’d known her. So like, a few weeks after I was born. I doubt however, there was a woman looked to the sky more than Mom when she dealt with yours truly. “How.” She must have wondered to [insert higher power here]”How? How among the hundreds of thousands of lone, orphaned and/or wayward children… How on earth did I end up adopting this tool?” I really put her and the Old Man through the ringer by virtue of being a clueless dolt for a great many years.Ok so the bike. I’ve misplaced it. It’s not as though it’s “a set of car keys now is it?” Mom still over the sink. Head down now, still praying for some hairy thunderer to please SMITE her son with a [I swear to god, Chris I wish a] BOLT OF LIGHTNING [would hit you and you’d snap out of it!] She began to rattle off one of about 8 or 10 places it might be. The first location wasn’t even out of her mouth, and I knew the bike was gone. I head out the front, heart in my throat as the screen door slams behind me. Mom still rattling off spots stream-of-conscious;“izzitinthega-RAGE izzitinthefront-YARD izzitatyour FRIENDS place”I’m now out of earshot as I wander the yard and pretend to search for something that I know is, by now, over the hills and far away. Dad is going to fucking KILL me… Night has fallen in suburbia and a small, doomed boy lopes across the lawn. I ponder running away.. But wait! Lo! Just beyond the cone of the streetlight, barely lit! What… What dim thing rests there? I stride over hoping the night had deceived my eyes, and all would be well again. What lay at my feet bore no resemblance to my shining steed. There in the gutter, half on and half off the sidewalk rested an old, beat up 12-speed.How am I gonna spin THIS one?I stood over the thing, bent down and pulled her up on her worn wheels. My mind was trying to understand how MY Bike Is Gone, but THIS Bike Is Here. I took stock. The shit had been beaten out of this bike. No way to tell if it was years of wear and tear or just a good solid month of ‘ride-it-like-its-stolen’ thrash. It had those gear shifters on the neck that stick up like two thumbs. Brakes looked like they’d been rewired, and poorly. Haywired would be the word, with a lot of frayed spindly splinters everywhere.It looked grey or else the paint was gone where there wasn’t dings. No rust, but this thing had seen some shit. The seat was crooked but I gave it a twist back and forth until it straightened out. It hadn’t been cared for maybe ever and nobody loved it. There had been SOME maintenance, I noticed. I don’t know if this was a Regina thing or a nineteen eighty thing or what, but at some point the bolt on the neck had been loosened, the handlebars had been pulled back up then the bolt tightened again. The bottom of the curved bars now pointed forwards, like the horns of a bull, if a bulls horns were wrapped in blue “GRAB-ON” foam and pointed straight ahead. I wheeled her into the sodium light, and held this behemoth out in front of me at arms length. It dawned on me. Who ever rode her past out yard must have purloined the Red Baron! I’ll never make detective.Y’know in those murder shows where the special guy/girl envisions the crime scene just by walking into the room? They see it play out as though they were there. I had a vision of this dude careening down the road in front of my house, freewheel spinning. Clicketty Clack Clicketty Clack. Suddenly on his left he sees a bike laying on new-mown grass. Chrome glistens under twilight. The star field in the wide Saskatchewan sky spins above as he ghost rides the whip, a beat up 12-speed. It slows wobbles but before it even falls near the streetlight he’s already on the Baron and gone. All full piston pumping action go go gone off into the night.Could I blame him? I saw this interview once with a con artist. I don’t remember most of it but what stuck with me was, when he had decided on someone as target or a ‘mark’, he’d see the Rolex and think to himself, ”Thats MY watch. it just happens to be on your wrist for now…” Whether the bicycle thief felt he owned it upon first sight, we’ll never know. Standing on the sidewalk I thought, “He sure as shit owns it now”. And I own this.Speaking of con artists, earlier I wrote, “How am I gonna spin this one?” and I think its fair to tell you that I used to be be quite creative with the truth. I’d lie to get out of shit. I’d lie to get INTO shit. I’d lie about this, I’d lie about that. I’d lie in a rhyme like The Cat in the Hat. Some kids in my kindergarten class asked why I was black (or brown, I can’t remember). I told them IT WAS BECAUSE I’M FROM HAWAII. Now everyone was fine with this, even the teacher. We coulda just kept crooozing along with me as the King Kamehameha of my kindergarten class. But NOOO! My meddling mother had to go and stick her nose in MY business during a parent teacher interview. The teacher asked why (in hell) we would come from Hawaii to Yellowknife, NWT. Wouldn’t be the first time my bullshit caught my parents flat-footed. At this point, in grade 6 I think, I was a prolific purveyor of half- truths, lies of omission and full on boldfaced falsehoods, each with their own intricate and intersecting webs of lies layered upon layers of lies. You can’t BE that way without an active fantasy life. I was a voracious reader of fantasy books in those days and I knew two things, right then. 1) It had been written in the stars and foretold by the ancients; This bike was my Destiny. 2) Taking ownership of this bike right now, fully and completely, would allow me to walk inside and, when Mom inevitably asked me “Did you find your bike?” I could, with unflappable confidence and ease reply, “Yes.” Dad would obviously see the thing in the garage. A garage also curiously absent of one Bloody Red Baron. “The truth will out”, as the bard once wrote. The bike was mine and it remained so for a number of years. Shit went down. I got busted. I took whatever pain and punishment I got. Probably still in Dad’s ‘Bad Books’ for that one. Thats not the point of the tale. Before the lie was discovered, there was a weekend where I took that beast out for a rip (are ya bud?). I’d gone from trike to Bump-Mobile (another tale) to banana bike. My BMX phase was rather short lived, but I now rocked a 12-speed built for a Full Grown Man. This was Quantum. I had EVOLVED. That weekend, myself and David Gaffney took turns tearing up Windfield Road. It was a revelation.We’d start from Dave’s house ‘cause he had a steep driveway. Haul ass in lower gears up the street. The Vermeulen home was on the left about 8 houses up the and at this point I’m cooking pretty good. Shift. I Keep pedalling I keep cranking the gears up and I’m now at about 8. Now 9. No real readout for the gears, I’m guessing. If I had looked down I’d have missed seeing Andrea Gibson‘s place ahead on my left. I shift up now to 12. Holy shit Shauna Kazeil’s place is a blur on my right. The speed and the danger was incomparable to anything I’d experienced. I could have easily been killed.In “The Right Stuff” (1983) Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeager. In one scene he takes an F-104 to the very edge of the atmosphere and peeks into space. It’s so dope. You should watch it. Anyway thats what it felt like, but better ‘cause remember, my handlebars were up and back with brakes on them like laser triggers and that made it feel like I was flying an attack ship off the shoulder of Orion.Nothing holding me back. Now what I do is I pray to some God my parents don’t believe in that there will be no cars as I lean, lay it down low and move left up and across a T intersection. I make the turn wide. It’s all me now. I get upright. On my right, Riverside Memorial Cemetery whizzes by. I’m literally whistling past a graveyard. A boy atop his rough beast, speeding towards Bethlehem. There was an arcade game at the local waterslides called “Lazarian”. Like many games of that day, Lazarian required sharp reflexes to turn and dodge while firing weapons. Dave and I were obsessed with it. A soon as he’d taken it for his first spin, that’s what he christened the bike. DECADES later we met up. We’d finally finished filling each other in on our lives for the last 30 years. There was a long pause. I smiled and asked him, “Hey remember Lazarian?” “Holy shit.”, he responded.

I lost my mother to cancer. She outlived her prognosis by six years. I wrote this not long before her death.

Six-and-a-half hours later Its 9:30 and I’m hammering down the hill from Rossland towards Trail, BC in the dark. I do what I always do at this point of the journey, which is to feel fully free to wander across the double yellow line hitting the apex of each of those 18 corners, its great man. Whether I shave any time off of my trip by doing this, I dunno. I used to run with a rag-tag bunch of devil-may-care skaters affectionately known as the Litigators, and we’d would howl down this same hill in the dark of night, at speed. I know this stretch like the back of my hand. Well past Wedding-Cake and I’m at Waterhole corner now, then I keep it easy through Warfield. I tap the brakes as I pass the fire station and I come upon a well lit intersection, right by the school my little brother went to. I pick up speed now past the community pool on my right, under a bridge and around a few more bends. Maybe I pass someone here. It’s miles in my rear view, but the freedom that slipping along relatively vehicle-free Crowsnest Pass affords me on a Thursday afternoon still courses through my veins. I slide into the gulch.

All lit up.

I do what I always do at this point of the journey. I make certain that Matt Good’s ‘Last Parade’ is cued up to play through the speakers and I drive in silence. I Slow things down now and rightly so. The streets are empty In Trail but I’m an adult for fuck’s sake. I behave! I come past some bar that’s had a hundred names and take a look to see what its called this time around. Now I take a right at this big intersection. Industry hums over the hill directly in front of me and some sodium lights beam upwards. Its Cominco, Teck or whatever. A ruinous blight on the land, the smelter swelters in the twilight. The financial heart of this community with a thready pulse.

Burnin’ futures in the mountains.

I take that right and head down a hill, past what was once a 7-11. Used to be a rag-tag, devil-may-care group of skateboarders would congregate there. I maybe see the ghost of one or two of those boys out of the corner of my eye. Victoria St. A.K.A. Hwy 3B cuts like a knife through this town, and on it I cross what is known as the Trail Bridge. I’m all brakes and easy does it because I need, for the first time on this trip, I need my progress slowed.I’m at the intersection of Third Ave and Vic. The light turns green and I press play. Gas. First little bit of this song is like a dirge and I calmly take these next left and right rolling corners at the speed limit. My headlights quickly haunt the entrance to the local landfill until the road straightens out. I’m whistling through what’s known as Shaver’s Bench, past a Husky station into a hamlet known as Glenmerry. The strings come in. In about 10 seconds I pass an RCMP station on my left.

It feels like time to let it go.

Probably no safer place to do so. I see, like, four or five police vehicles in the parking lot but I mean, the cops are all in there doing paperwork or hitting on whatever bored admin staff remain. The likelihood that these guys are gonna pour out the front entrance, sliding over the hoods of their cruisers eager for hot pursuit after they see me whip by is so fucking remote it gives me a little charge. I mat it into a mild left arc on the road, then another right. I head downhill now.

It feels like time cut your brakes.

I’m at 70 km now seeking 90, diving into this natural valley now where on my left, shacks and shuttered quonset huts lie dormant in the foothills of an unnamed mountain that juts up high and blocks out the night and its stars on that side.

It feels like just another day, like one more dead town’s last parade. Like we’re takin’ pictures of a tidal wave. On the shore, grinnin’ a hundred feet away.

To my right, I know without looking that there are a few rock islands out in the water. I look anyway. I can’t see their slick surfaces but I know they’re there. The Columbia River, as deep and black in the night now as oil, roils and churns around them. I breathe in and

It feels like time ain’t time at all.

Gas again ‘cause there are lights up ahead and to have a red one impede my progress at this late stage would just be too much to bear. It is green, I capitalize and rocket past the lumberyard where some thirty years ago, this boy stumbled around for a paycheque. Still more pressure on the pedal now ‘cause here we go uphill and this is the “home stretch”, son. In every sense of the phrase. Two lanes. At this point I usually pass maybe one other traveller. The only sounds are my engine with Matt’s stellar accompaniment. I feel like he’s both sad and angry here, but I don’t attach myself to that end of it. Whoever is doing the guitar here in the song, its like that sound has been in my soul for as long as I’ve been alive. I love hearing this yearning riff tonight in the hills, this close to Momma’s place. There is just so much hope and despair in the back end of this song and it just loosens up all of the wires I keep around my heart, if only for 90 seconds.

Just black out. Wake up foreign. Wander home, Oh, wander home

Heart is cracked open and I speed toward the last turn into Montrose. Fists at ten and two. My head tilts forward and I stare at the road ahead like Max Rockatansky might . If I wanted to, I could shoot right off the cliff two or three hundred feet out into whatever air that hangs past the road on that final turn. Just pull a Slash “Don’t Cry” move right off the edge and soar into the night time sky. I’m not gonna do that though. I hit that last left turn easy. Streetlights whip by at a frequency that suggest I oughta slow down to 60. 50, 40 now then 30 Almost no speed now as I take a right off the highway, then a quick left toward Mom’s place. In the middle of the dark I’ve got about a hundred yards to go. So close! I do what I always do at this point of the journey. I gas it to the end of the street because fuck you. Right then Matt goes, he goes, he’s all like,

Take me out, lay me down, let the dirt fall all around me now

And if I’ve played my cards just right, I pull into Momma’s driveway just as he wails,

Baby, ain’t it good to be back home?

Ain’t it good to be back home?

And it is, man. Its fucking great to be back home. I shake the road off a little while the guitar ends importantly. Momma comes on outta the house and greets me with the same wide and lovely Cheshire grin I know she has for all of you when you come to her door. The piano outro ensues and before the song is over, before the last note is struck, I’m in my Momma’s arms.