The Red Brick Times

One of my motorycle friends died last Friday. His sister talked to him at 11AM. His brother talked to him at 3 PM. His brother went to see him at 9 PM and found him on the floor at his house and gone from our lives.

Al had been having a bad week. For Al, having a bad week meant that he couldn't go to work for eight hours each day as was his habit. He only had enough energy to work for a few hours. He was a machinist and made complicated things that were parts of larger machines that were, in turn, installed in factories that made things like flashlight batteries and other technical bits.

I first got to know Al when I went to Alaska on my motorcycle for the first time ten years ago. Al and his brother Phil and Byron and I rode together to upper Michigan, across to Montana, and North, through the Yukon to Alaska. We cheated a bit on the way back, taking the Alaska Marine Highway ferry down the Alaska coast back into Canada.

I never saw Al without either a cup of coffee, a cigarette, or both simultaneously. When the summer sun was the hottest, Al needed a cup of hot coffee because, he claimed, "It cools me down."

At one point along the "Top of the World Highway" between Dawson City, Yukon and the Alaska border, Al's bike got loose where it was more rut and swamp than road, and he wound up off of the left side of the road, axle deep in wet mush, still upright, but with a badly sprained ankle.

The three of us hooked nylon straps to the rear frame of his bike and physically lifted both Al and the machine back onto the roadway so we could keep going. He could barely walk, but he kept riding, mostly because that was the only way to get from HERE to ELSEWHERE, where ever that might be. That day, ELSEWHERE turned out to be a motel, bar and country line-dancing barbeque restaurant in Tok, Alaska, which was the Garden of Eden after a day of roads-that-weren't.

Al gobbled up his share of BBQ, with coffee, and left his boot on for a few days until the swelling went down. I think he took an aspirin or two. He was walking gingerly for the next year, but just waited until it didn't bother him any more. "What about a doctor?" I asked him. And he said "They don't know anything more than I do."

For the past year Al was fighting lung cancer. He had good and bad weeks, and long spells where he could not lie down to sleep, but propped himself up at his kitchen table, leaning on a pillow, napping when he could, with a pot of coffee always nearby.

Phil found Al on Friday night, and let us all know later that evening. We will meet in Wellington to visit with the others he has left behind, and will follow the hearse to the cemetary to mark and remember the things that happened to us because we knew him. I wish the weather was better. I want to go for a ride with Al and my friends.
Posted 4:52 PM by Andy (0) comments

       Comments:

Post a Comment


---