How’s It Goin’, eh?

Happy Birthday, USA!

Yesterday, on July 4, Americans celebrated Independence Day with an orgy of picnics, parades, and red-white-and-blue fireworks displays.

Happy Birthday, USA!

Sarah and I spent the better part of the day in Redstone, a charming mountain town of 135 residents. Redstone sits on the Crystal River about 25 minutes south of Carbondale. Redstone’s Fourth of July includes a pie sale, ducky derby, F-16 fly-by, and a parade on Redstone Boulevard featuring fire trucks, horses, Airstream trailers, Jeeps, kids on bicycles, and a lady ukulele band on a float.

The July 4, 2019 parade in Redstone. It’s a quintessential small-town (population 135) celebration, and is now an annual tradition for Sarah and me.

In a few hours, I begin my own celebration of summer.

Tomorrow morning, I climb aboard my Harley and begin a three-week, 5,500-mile odyssey through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington – and ultimately, to our northern neighbor, Canada.

It’s the tenth anniversary of my first overnight trip on a motorcycle.

Vroom, vroom!

***

Canada’s “living flag,” on the lawn of British Columbia’s Parliament, where we’ll be in 12 days. More than 3,600 humans dressed in red and white created the maple leaf flag to celebrate Canada Day on July 1.

Happy Birthday to Canada, too!

On July 1, Canadians had their own national celebration: Canada Day.

Monday marked the 152nd anniversary of the 1867 Constitution Act, originally called the British North America Act. On July 1, 1867 Canada became a self-governing dominion of Great Breat Britain, and a federation of three provinces: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec).

Four years later, British Columbia joined the federation as Canada’s sixth province, extending the dominion of Canada to the Pacific Ocean. It’s a darn good thing that happened, otherwise we’d be visiting a UK outpost when we arrive in Victoria, British Columbia, on July 17.

Canada Day celebrations are typically understated outdoor public events such as parades, carnivals, barbecues, air and maritime shows, fireworks, concerts and citizenship ceremonies. They are tasteful displays of red-and-white national unity.

No tanks.

***

Now, a story about me and Canada.

Fifty years ago, there was about a one-in-three chance I’d end up living there. The Vietnam war was raging, and the US government decided to use a lottery system to remove perceived inequities in the Draft — the war was being fought disproportionately by those on the lower rungs of America’s socio-economic ladder.  The lottery would eliminate “1-S” student deferments, meaning being a university student no longer provided shelter from the war.

The December 1969 Draft lottery affected about 850,000 men.

At the time, I was a sophomore at the University of Utah, bumbling my way through school by skiing, partying and maintaining an embarrassingly low GPA. Then came December 1, 1969 — a day many of us will never forget. It was the first Vietnam-era Draft lottery, and the first time a lottery system had been used to select men for military service since 1942.

The bounce of a ball could decide the course of one’s life.

One of those blue capsules played a large role in determining my draft status. December 1, 1969, was an evening to remember.

There were 366 blue capsules in a large tumbler, each representing one day of the calendar year. Your birthday matched up with a number, 1-366, and that number determined the order in which men would be called to duty. It was pretty much a given that the lower third (1-120) would receive a Draft notice and be sent to Vietnam. The middle third (121-240) were less likely to be drafted, and the highest third (141-366) could rest easy. No one knew this at the time, but the highest draft number called for induction from the 1969 lottery was 195.

Vietnam was an unpopular and highly divisive war. Like a lot of Americans, I thought it was a war not worth fighting, and I had decided that if drafted, I’d head for Canada, as an estimated 125,000 draft-eligible men did. About half returned to the US when President Jimmy Carter granted them amnesty in 1977.

Nearly 49,000 Americans had already died in the Vietnam War, when, on the evening of December 1, 1969, millions of young men like me gathered in college dorms and friends’ homes to learn their fate. The lottery, with an air of high drama, was broadcast live from the Selective Service headquarters in Washington DC, hosted on CBS by Roger Mudd.

The first number picked was September 14. Most Draft-eligible men with that birthday would be fighting in Vietnam within a year. Much later that night, a blue capsule with the number 236 landed on my birthday — February 24.

Two-thirty-six. I never received a draft notice, never put on a uniform, and never went to Canada — except as a tourist many years later.

That Draft lottery affected every American male between 19 and 26. An unknown 23-year-old New Yorker who already had a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels, received the number 356 in the December 1969 lottery, further guaranteeing he’d never serve in the military. That New Yorker, of course, was Donald Trump.

***

As followers of this blog know, I have a habit of blogging nightly while on the road. It gives me something to do after parking the bike at the end of a long ride, and lets Sarah know where I am – and how my day went.

Glad you’ll be along for the ride, too.

Every ride has its own rhythms. Sometimes, there’s a culinary imperative. Last year, it was all about ribs.

Ribs and beer in Estes Park, Colorado. Last year’s ride was a rib fest.

This year, we’ll be doing meat and potatoes on our way north as we head through the Sierra, Siskiyou and Cascade mountain ranges. We’ll enjoy Canadian food – whatever that is – during our stay in the Great White North. And then, as we head down the west coast of Washington, Oregon and California – we’ll have seafood, likely sourced from the nearby Pacific Ocean.

Halibut and chips, anyone?

***

As someone who once lived a stone’s throw from Canada, and often sailed in Canadian waters, I have a fondness for Canada. I love the people. I admire their politics and politeness. I appreciate their obsession with hockey. It’s cute that they enjoy curling – even if it began in Scotland.

And, I love their linguistics. I’m fascinated with the “eh” up-inflection at the end of a sentence, as in: How’s it goin’, eh?

It’s like a Canadian version of, you know?

Eh is a filler word, often obscuring the meaning of what you actually meant to say.  Think about the last time you listened to someone with the filler habit. Chances are good you spent the time he or she spoke either being annoyed, or counting the number of times you heard the filler phrase.

How’s it goin’, eh?

In my corporate life, I was fascinated with exec-speak that gorged on the throwaway end-of-sentence filler phrase, “going forward” – as in, “This program is gonna achieve 10 percent profit margins, going forward.” As if you can do anything going backwards.

I often sat in meetings and presentations, making tick marks on a notepad, counting the excessive use of going forward. Not exactly a period of language enlightenment. Going forward was similar to eh, eh?

Eh is also known as an invariant tag – something added on to the end of a sentence that’s the same every time’s its used. For more on why Canadians say “eh,” check this out.

It’s good reading, eh!

To help you discover the joys of Canada, I’m including a Canadian Fun Fact at the end of each day’s blog post. These fun facts come at no extra charge to you.

Over the next few weeks, if you learn anything about Canada – or any of the other amusing destinations on this year’s route – you’re welcome.

Vroom, vroom!

***

Today’s Canada Fun Fact, eh?  The longest highway in the world is the Trans-Canada Highway. It’s more than 4,860 miles long, and crosses six time zones. We’ll ride a few miles of the Trans-Canada Highway on this trip.

Trans-Canada Highway: the world’s longest!