ON THE ROAD WITH MURF THE SURF

by Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

In the Spring of 1968 I got a letter from my friend Jonathon Ross. Jonathon’s mother was originally from Nova Scotia and every couple of years Mary, her husband Ernie and their family would travel from Hawaii to spend the summer at the family home near Digby. Jonathon spent quite a bit of time on Brier Island and, because of where he was from, the local kids of course had to label him, "Murf the Surf".
The Rosses had arrived the previous summer, but because Ernie was on sabbatical from his job as a university professor, they didn’t go back to Hawaii when the summer was over. Instead, they headed south to Gainsville, Florida where Ernie was doing research at the University of Florida. Jonathon soon found himself an after-school job and used his earnings to buy a motorcycle. When spring arrived and Mary and Ernie began planning their return to N.S. Jonathon thought it would be great to make the trip north on his bike. Although far from thrilled, his parents agreed on the condition that he find someone to go with him. A few days later I got the letter.
Jonathon’s plan was that I would arrive in Florida just as he was finishing his school year and we would return to N.S. together. The previous summer I had bought a second-hand motorcycle; actually it was more like third-or-fourth hand; a 1960 Honda that had seen better days. On my way to the Yarmouth ferry it started leaking oil and a mechanic in town discovered that a gasket needed replacing. When I told them I was on my way to Florida, the whole shop had a good laugh and told me this old junker would never make it. With a new gasket installed and those less-than-encouraging words ringing in my ears, I made my way to the ferry.
On the long trip across the Bay I passed the time by talking with the man in the next seat who was on his way home to Bangor after attending a church event in N.S. As we neared the Maine coast the sky darkened and it began to rain. Before we parted, my new-found friend handed me his address and told me that if I didn’t want to ride in this weather, he and his family could put me up. I hoped that once I got inland things would improve, but a half hour later it was pouring even harder, I was soaked and cold and the offer of shelter for the night started looking pretty good.
Arriving in Bangor, I was greeted with a hot meal and the opportunity to dry my clothes. Warm and fed, I was just getting ready to settle in for the evening when my host informed me that we were off to a Christian revival meeting. This meeting was held in a huge high-school auditorium with a couple of thousand people in attendance. The program involved performances by the school ROTC drill team, which consisted of marching back and forth while spinning and twirling rifles, which seemed a bit odd to me, it being a religious meeting and all, but everyone else seemed to enjoy it. The main speaker of the evening was Doug Anderson, an Olympic weight lifter who at one point was the strongest man in the world. He spoke about how religion helped him to overcome the effects of the flu to win a gold medal at the Olympics in Russia. He finished off his speech by lifting up a wooden platform with several football players and the cheerleading squad on it.
At six a.m. the next morning I was asked to help set up tables and chairs at the church for a breakfast meeting. It looked like it was going to be a nice day and I was eager to get on my way but I was reluctant to pass up free food so I packed up my bike and drove to the church. It turned out that the weightlifter from the night before was a special guest at this gathering. I had a very good breakfast and a nice chat with Mr. Anderson, who was interested in my trip and also in motorcycles, he said he used to have a Harley he rode around his farm, but it fell apart under his weight. He weighed about 350 lbs, all of it muscle, and had at one time set a world record by lifting more than 6000 pounds.
I finally got on the road and headed south. I had a tent and my plan was to camp out on the way. By the time I got to the State of Georgia, I had my system down pat. Just before dark I pulled off the main road onto a side road, found a field full of cornstalks, drove my bike around the perimeter of the field until I was out of sight and set up my tent at the edge of the woods. I felt pretty secure with this system, no one could see me, and nobody knew I was there. At some time during the night I was awoken by the sound of a loud roaring and thrashing going on somewhere in the woods. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer and eventually died out so I went back to sleep. The next morning I had just got back out on the main road when I noticed a large sign reading, "Warning! You are entering The Okefenokee Swamp. Please stay in your car and beware of alligators." I had camped on the edge of an alligator sanctuary! My sleep had been disturbed by alligators fighting! I wouldn’t have dozed off again so easily if I had known what was making all that noise.
I was now only a day or so from Gainsville and was just thinking how well my bike was running and how wrong the motorcycle shop guys were when the engine suddenly quit. I coasted to the side of the road and kicked the starter a few times, but no luck. After checking the gas, spark plug wires and everything I could think of, I took off a side cover to see a wire hanging down, vibration or wind had broken it off. The problem now was that there was no way to re-connect it to the small spot of solder that held it except by re-soldering. Stuck on the side of the road in Middle-of-Nowhere, Georgia, I couldn’t see how I was going to be able to fix this problem. Suddenly an idea occurred to me. I took a walk along the shoulder of the road and within a few yards came across just what I needed, a piece of scrap wire lying in the dirt. I twisted the bare end of the broken wire to the middle of the scrap wire and then tied it to the bike so that the wire made contact with the solder spot. I kicked the engine over and away she went. My side-of-the-road repair worked so well I left it like that until I got to Florida.
After a week in Gainsville, Jonathon and I were ready to hit the road north. We took a westerly route and rode up through Georgia on the Blue Ridge Mountain Skyway, a beautiful ride through a gorgeous part of the country. On our second day out we were cruising through a rural part of Georgia close to the Alabama border when we drove past a car with a flat tire. Four women dressed for church were standing by the open trunk obviously trying to figure out how to change the tire. We turned around and went back to see if we could help. When we got off our bikes one of the women announced that their husbands were fishing in a stream nearby and would be right back. It seemed a little odd to me that their husbands would leave them in their good clothes to change the tire, but I said "That’s OK, we don’t mind doing it", and I took the tire iron she was holding out of her hand. We changed the tire, the husbands still hadn’t returned, the women thanked us and we left.
It wasn’t until years later when I was thinking about this incident that I finally realised what was going on. The four women were black, we were in an area of the south where just a few years before and a few miles away in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, race riots and anti-segregation demonstrations had taken place. When two white guys on motorcycles pulled up to their disabled car, I’m sure we must have looked like their worst nightmare. There were no husbands nearby, that was just a story to scare us off. I probably came within a hairsbreadth of getting that tire iron upside the head. But being a naïve guy from Brier Island, I was oblivious to all that at the time, I just saw some people who needed help and lent a hand.
The rest of the trip involved a two thousand mile detour to Cincinnati, Ohio to see a girl I had met for three days the previous summer, getting frisked at the border, rear-ending a taxi in Toronto and getting peppered by beetles while driving all night through Vermont to catch the Bar Harbour ferry back home. Except for the broken wire my bike ran perfectly the whole trip. I sold it a month later to someone in Digby, he came to Westport to pick it up and it died at Lake Midway on the way back. I guess the guys from Yarmouth were right after all, they just had their timing off a bit.