Finger Lickin’ Good……..

May 17, 2006
While Fernie was checking Maggie’s tires, a valve stem popped out and the tire started to hiss, losing air. Fortuitously, we were parked beside the Walmart Tire Shop and one of the guys just about to report to work, passed by as it happened. He whipped out a tool and in a flash – fixed! We just had to backup to their large bay door to pressurize the tire. “No charge!” they said.

We only travelled a short distance and were settled by 11 am at the Walmart in Hanover in the heart of Southern Ontario’s agricultural belt. We chose a quiet spot beside a pond that was home to scads of frogs and redwing blackbirds were nesting in the reeds.

With a long day ahead of us, we took the Honda on a circular drive on secondary roads to the coast of lake Huron. Passing through Walkerton, I suggested we fill our fresh water tank – ooohhhhhh such sick humour! It’s such an idyllic and pristine locale that it’s hard to believe it was possible for the water to be tainted.

We were approaching Paisley when suddenly something huge and white fell from an oncoming vehicle and landed right ‘slap-dab’ in the middle of the road. I managed to swerve around it and I pulled over to the side of the road when Fernie noticed it was two women driving the car and we figured they’d need help. Their car was towing a homemade plywood utility trailer, atop which they’d balanced two immense white wooden chickens with hinged wings. Thank goodness, another vehicle pulled over to help and a muscular man emerged.

The two women, visibly upset, were a 40ish mother and her 20ish daughter. The six-foot (high, long & tall) chubby chickens were destined to be part of a float for the Canada Day Parade in Hanover. It took all five of us tugging and pushing the chunky chicken, while traffic whipped by us at full speed, to eventually slide the fat fowl onto the gravel shoulder.

“Can any of you back up a trailer?” the Mom asked. We all chimed “No” in unison. Fernie suggested she just do a U-turn and come up closely beside the hefty hen. Now we were faced with the task of boosting the big bird on top of the four-foot high trailer. Again, all five of us huffed and puffed until we got it up.

No wonder it fell off; it was just sitting across a flat-topped trailer with only flimsy door hinges attaching it. I advised them to put on their flashers and drive very slowly along the shoulder. “Oh, we don’t have any lights on the trailer” they answered. If the police had come along, they’d have thrown the book at them. I do hope they made it all right. I’ll watch the news in case there was another corpulent chicken catastrophe.

Ontarians are different from BCites. They build their houses on the lakefront with vast vistas to enjoy and then they plant huge trees and shrubs across the front to block out their view. What British Columbian would do such a thing? We put in floor to ceiling / wall-to-wall windows and let nothing interfere with our ocean views.

The populace in this part of the country has a mostly Anglo-Saxon heritage. When traipsing through the cemeteries, the names on the gravestones are English and Scottish, even in Owen Sound, where there’s an African Canadian contingent. Churches galore, but they’re Presbyterian, Lutheran or United. We never did see a synagogue, temple or mosque.