Friday, October 7, 2011

Hillbillies race cops in 340 Dart GTS

Winter '75 or thereabouts.

Winter for sure.

Kipling and me were gonna head out to Alberta and make our fortune.

A quick look at the map and you can tell the shortest route to Alberta from south Ontario goes through Detroit and Chicago. We packed up my '69 Dart GTS with all our worldly possessions and it was Motor City here we come.

Motor City, Chicago, and maybe around Bismark North Dakota we'd make a right turn and hit the Trans-Canada Hiway.

I know there's a lot of Chevy guys will want to dispute this, but back in the day I believe that pound for pound it was hard to beat the 340 Mopars. In a flat out drag race the solid lifter small block Chevies were quicker, if they were tuned.

That was the problem. To have them running right meant you'd be doing an hour of dinking around with the valve springs for every hour of driving time. With a 340, all you had to do was put gas in it and drive, and you were running with pretty much anything out there.

Can't say we got a very warm welcome when we hit Detroit. We got us a particularly snotty Border Patrol chick who had it in her head she was going to teach these young long-hairs a few lessons about respect. We sat in her office for hours while the guys were rummaging through all our stuff. Have to say it was a stroke of genius for Kipling to put the vial inside the dirty socks.

Long story short, we were gonna have to drive to Alberta the long way.

Driving north Ontario in the dead of winter is something everybody should experience at least once. There's lots of snow and it's really cold. Then there's more snow, and it gets colder. Next day, more snow, and it gets colder. Day after that, guess what?...

Somewhere around Sudbury Kip wants to visit his sister. She married a native guy and lives on a reservation up there. Holy shit! I couldn't get outa there fast enough. I'm pretty well acquainted with your basic white trash homes and gardens, but your double-wide with cement blocks holding it up at the corners is a friggin' palace compared to what I saw there. We're talking no indoor plumbing and a wood stove fashioned out of an old oil drum.

In Canada, in the latter half of the twentieth century.

How is such a thing even possible?

Any of the small Dodge or Plymouth models with the 340 and the 3:23 rear end could make a serious run at 150 miles an hour. My GTS had the torqueflite, and you'd be well past 100 in second gear. You could routinely twist these motors to 6500 without hurting anything. I was giving it a good twist, Kip was having a snooze in the back seat, we're on the Trans Canada highway just where it becomes four lanes, fifty miles east of Winnipeg, trying to make up the time we lost to that bitch in Detroit, when whoopsie..... to this day I can't say for sure what happened. Black ice or something. The Dart so deep in the snow we have to open the windows and make a snow tunnel to get out. Kipling is wedged into the floor with three hundred pounds of shit on top of him.

First thing he says is are we in Calgary yet?

Well, taking stock of the situation, it was a good news bad news scenario. The good news was the motor would still run so we weren't at immediate risk for freezing to death. The bad news was we had to hitch into Winnipeg to get a tow truck at three o'clock in the morning. We'd take turns. When we saw lights one or the other would run to the edge of the highway and put the thumb out. Not a lot of people wanted to stop in the middle of the night. Where the hell is the milk of human kindness when you need some?

There's a car every fifteen or twenty minutes. After a couple of hours we got lucky. Carload of Newfies on their way to Fort Mac to make their fortune. There was already five guys in the car, but you have to tip your hat to the Newfoundlanders. They're more concerned with lending a hand than worrying about the resume of some sketchy-looking dickhead standing beside the road in the middle of the night.

We got us a tow truck. I'll always blame Kipling for the life-altering decision that was made next. To me it was obvious - we forge ahead. Our fortunes were awaiting us. Kip suddenly had a whole lot of other ideas. The tow had been a little costly. According to Kip we had enough gas money for sure to make it back home, but probably not enough to make it to the promised land. I was all about, well, if we run out of gas, we can always borrow some, you know, pay the gas station back after we strike it rich.

Sad to say, I finally went along with the quitter. So, you give up your job, tell everybody you're going to the land of milk and honey, and you'll be seeing them when you fly back (first-class of course) next summer. Forty-eight hours later you drive back into town, the mangled grill of your car hanging out the trunk, broke and unemployed.

Did have a crazy dream on the way back, that the cops were chasing us.

I'm napping in the back, and the g-forces as we rocket through the turns were shaking me awake. Kipling says over and over like a broken record just say we're doing 60 just say we're doing 60.

Then I'm hearing sirens.

Cop comes up to the driver window, hand on his gun.

"Lettin' er dangle a bit, were ya?"

 Just doing 60 sir.

Yup, 60.

But holy shit, that red Dart that passed us a minute ago was really flying!!!

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