- Martin Aller-Stead
Each year the leaves turn. They turn to golds, russets, soft fawn colours, painting orchards, copses and brakes. Nothing else is like fall colours ... no experience, no action, no thing at all. It is, perhaps, one of those interesting “Canadian” things to do ... to go out into the country and enjoy autumn.
The terms differ, but mostly it is city people who go into the country, out near Cambellville, into Haliburton, circling the Kawarthas. It is something I could not do when I lived in western Canada ... the colours were so, so, well, so little and diminished. The poor trees just know what is coming (another –40 winter) and simply give up when the weather tells them to.
In Quebec the colours are lovely, too, in Ste. Agathe, St. Jerome, Ste. Adele. Go up to Val d’Or via Maniwaki, or visit La Tuque. Travel up to see Mont Gabriel, Mont Tremblant. Go to places few people live but are part of what makes Easterners Easterners.
It is part of the Canadian myth ... tooling along the lisping hills, ripe with sheets of colour, each little valley and dip a reflection of rainbow.
Eastern Canada is a place of small sky and big land ... westerners know all about Big Sky ... it is not here, in the East. That is part of our problem, we Canadians, isn’t it? There are no burnt sugar maples in western Canada. Why should there be pride in a Canada when the national symbols either aren’t shared (the red maple leaves) or are a pestilential nuisance (the beaver)?
And eastern Canadians go out, into the country and are re-affirmed and re-imaged by their magnificent surroundings.
Starting a motorcycle is a dodgy business, especially one as animate as an old BMW, which is my contraption of choice through this world. I have to get the gas just right, and add octane boosters and carburetor cleaners and check the oil and generally fiddle around for a while before I am able to go.
Swooping along back roads at less than the legal limit is a delight; it is what this old bike was built for. A 750cc opposed piston ‘flat twin’, it was the finest motorcycle of its era, perhaps of any era. A blend of experience and excellence, it was made for the enthusiast, not the expert. Anyone can be an expert on a motorcycle. Enthusiasts are the artists, leaving a clean line behind them.
Sounds change when I go up hills, and the old bike tells me that gas today ain’t nearly what it used to be, now it is minus the lead and all. It is only a 750, and Rattlesnake Park switchbacks make the gearbox work, clunking through first and second, back and forth, up, up.
It is part of my life, this old bike ... traipsing the backroads of my country ... each hollow, each curve another challenge to skill, making memory.
The road is a big place for a little motorcycle. There are potential problems all over the place ... trucks, large bees, loose leaves, which may be wet, and traffic lights that can’t recognize a motorcycle on the road. I wait, with my riding buddy, and finally, a little guilty, just go through the red. Red and green and amber ... colours of security, permission and the free road.
And bikers go out into the country, and I am reaffirmed and reimagined by my skills, this little, antique wonder and the friendship of sharing.