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Small stuff vs my dad
by
Jo Slade - Story:
69268
Jan 5, 2012 / 5:00 am
Jan 5, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed
I trusted this man not to drop me on my head? What was I thinking?
And that’s the thing, it would be completely insane to drive through Stanley Park (or any other park full of big old trees) during a severe windstorm. Yet on October 12, 1962, my dad, a stubborn man at the best of times, did just that. Hurricane Frieda (or Typhoon Frieda, or Freaking Big Storm Frieda, whatever) was raging at the time, and was beating the living hell out of Stanley Park. Frieda was called the West Coast’s Storm of the Century, and for good reason: In the park alone, it downed over 3000 trees.
Now, my father had some favourite pastimes, and little got in the way of doing them. One of the things he liked to do was drive through the park on the way home to the North Shore after forays into the city. It was a nice diversion that we all (usually) enjoyed. On that day in October, despite winds that were causing neon signs to crash and windows to smash in the city, my father took his usual detour through the park. He saw no reason to make an exception because of a mere bit of wind. He was a man who didn’t sweat the small stuff.
So drive through we did, and soon we had trees falling around us. Literally falling around us. To be fair, I think at some point Dad secretly realized that being in the park at that particular time was a mistake, but once you’ve enter Stanley Park it’s one-way, which means you have to keep going until the exit at the other end of the park. My mother, a serene woman who took everything in her stride, calmly (with ever so slight an edge) suggested that we kids might want to get down on the floor of the car. We were surprisingly obliging. And somehow we managed to get through the park without the car becoming a final resting spot for a fallen cedar.
I was not surprised by my father’s idea to drive through Stanley Park during the Storm of the Century, not at all. I would have been more surprised had he not driven through. This was, after all, the man who once drove in the rain from Hope to Vancouver without turning on the windshield wipers. You see, that day had started out sunny, which he liked, and when it started to rain, he felt grievously betrayed, and flat-out would not use the wipers. He had no intention of giving Mother Nature the satisfaction of acknowledgement.
This same man once drove us from Vancouver to Calgary in one day, which is a tough haul these days, but in those days of two-lane winding narrow roads was something you simply didn’t do. Ever. That is unless you were my father. Distance, like the weather, was something my dad felt he could control despite the reality. He was embracing Steve Job’s ‘reality distortion field’ approach to life a few decades before Steve himself.
To get to Calgary in such short order, it was necessary for my father to pass a few cars (read: every single car on the road). Typically, people pass cars when, say, there’s a gap in traffic that makes passing safe. Others (hint: my dad) feel that any car in front is a challenge to be met. He didn’t ask himself silly questions like a) is that oncoming large truck too close for me to safely pass the car in front of me? or b) could there be a car coming around that completely blind corner up ahead? or c) I wonder what’s on the other side of that hill crest? or d) there are five cars driving close together in front of me, should I really try to pass all of them all at once? He didn’t ask those questions because they were small-stuff, and he, for one, wasn’t about to sweat it. He just went ahead and did it.
By the time we arrived in Calgary, I had long since passed the point of worrying about dying in a horrific car crash. No, I had accepted that as inevitable, and was more focused on the upside: at least it would bring an end to the trip. We didn’t have an accident, though, and over the years my father, as reality-distorted as he sometimes was, managed to avoid ever having an accident.
It is a testament to my father’s ability to reasonably manage his reality distortion field that we all survived (or was that just luck?) and we even grew up to be reasonably sane adults. So sane that I would, for example, never drive through Stanley Park during a storm. Jim claims that my whim one year to take an all-night drive from Kelowna to Lake Louise for a cup of coffee then drive back hardly qualifies as ‘reasonably sane’, but you know what? That’s just totally sweating the small stuff.
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