Through the breakdowns
We woke up the next morning and found our room without heat or hot water; we looked outside and saw snow.
Critter and I were the first to reach the lobby, and the rest of the Sadies were close behind. Mike and Sean tried to get discounts for our rooms, none of which had heat or hot water. They were persistent: The man at the front desk threatened to call the police before relenting and discounting our rooms to $50 each.
I had forgotten my winter coat in Cuff The Duke’s van, so Mike lent me a windbreaker to put over my hoodie. It was very thin. I sat on the van’s back bench with Mike. There were no seat belts that I could find — the Sadies don’t seem to believe in them — so I stared out the windshield at the snow and wondered how fast we’d have to be going for the impact to kill me. The weather forced us to drive very slowly, and Mike assured me that at such a low speed I might break an arm or bruise my ribs, but that death was unlikely. I dug my nails into my palms and stared at the ceiling.
On the highway, it was a whiteout. Travis was driving, and he could barely see one car ahead of him. With a trailer full of equipment behind us, we weren’t sure we could make it up a ramp to exit the highway. We also couldn’t stop because the trailer would get stuck in the snow.
Travis followed a transport truck, using its tracks to keep the van on the road. “If he drove straight into a ditch, I’d have to follow him,” Travis told us. He wanted to find somewhere flat where we could pull over and wait out the storm, so we welcomed the transport truck’s decision to pull into a weigh station. (The entrances and exits to weigh stations are flat, so we were less worried about getting stuck on our way in or out.)
We watched the snow for half an hour, and it didn’t slow down. The highway was becoming more traveled, though, and we thought it might be safe enough to try driving again. We decided to get back on the highway, but blowing snow had created drifts around the van; we were snowed in.
With a trailer attached to the van, being snowed in took on interesting new dimensions. There was no way we would be able to move with the trailer attached, for a start. Without showing signs of strain, the Sadies decided to detach the trailer, get the van out of the drift it was trapped in, turn around the trailer, push the trailer out of the drift, reattach the trailer to the van and hope we would be able to make it back to the highway.
By the time we had accomplished the first three steps and were trying to push the trailer out of the drift, the snow that covered most of my body was beginning to melt and Mike’s windbreaker was failing miserably at its job; I stood outside thinking about the symptoms of hypothermia and seeking shelter behind the trailer during breaks from pushing it or moving equipment out of it and into the van. We were still pushing the van around through all this, and every time it became stuck its tires would spray me with more slush and snow. I wasn’t very good at getting out of the spray’s path once it hit me — the instinct that would normally cause me to jump away from jets of icy snow was becoming less and less responsive each time I drained more of my energy pretending I was strong enough to contribute anything at all to the Sadies’ efforts.
After almost three hours, we still hadn’t been able to move the trailer close enough to the van for us to reconnect the two. We’d moved a lot of equipment out of the trailer and into the van to give the van more traction and the trailer less weight, but there were only so many amps that would fit in the van and still allow us places to sit. I sat wedged between stacks of amps worth thousands of dollars each and listened to the Sadies reassessing the situation. Then Captain Kick-Ass arrived.
Captain Kick-Ass was a man wearing a “No Guts, No Glory” baseball cap and driving a pickup truck. He shot into the weigh station like there was no snow and offered to attach the trailer to his truck and take it to the next town. Sean, still thinking about making it to Red Deer and playing the show, wanted to pay Captain Kick-Ass to take the trailer all the way to Red Deer with us following behind in the van. Everyone else was so excited by the prospect of leaving the weigh station behind that the matter of our destination seemed irrelevant.
Mike went in the truck with Captain Kick-Ass and the rest of us followed in the van. The truck almost slid off the road, and the van almost certainly would have if the trailer had been attached. Even without the trailer we slid around a lot, and we were lucky to have the weight of the equipment on the rear axle to give us more traction.
The next town was Airdrie, and we exited the highway. Captain Kick-Ass unhitched the trailer and would accept no more than twenty dollars in payment. (Mike later told us that Captain Kick-Ass’s real name was Len, and that Len responded, “Well that makes sense: My mother was a virgin,” when told that he was our saviour.)
Dripping wet and very cold, I followed Mike and Dallas to a Tim Horton’s. I drank two hot chocolates even though I hate hot drinks, and I tried not to be rude to the staff, keen though they were to cheerily ask me how my day was going. (Whenever the power flickered off for a moment, the staff would cheer and then groan when it came back on.)
I called Cuff The Duke hoping to tell them to stay in Calgary, but it was too late, and they were also stuck in Airdrie. I thought it too much of a coincidence at first and had to look around for an Airdrie sign before being convinced I was trapped in the same town. Cuff The Duke had found a Best Western willing to let them sleep on the floor of a banquet hall, and I decided to join them. In a crisis, I knew I would only get in the Sadies’ way; I felt I’d been in their way all morning, and I wanted to return to my winter coat, a van with seat belts and my friends.
The Sadies regrouped at their van and decided to return to Calgary and stay at a friend’s house. Dallas told me that I was more than welcome to go with them, but I decided to wait out the storm with Cuff The Duke on the banquet hall floor.
The Best Western was on the other side of town and in the opposite direction of the Sadies’ route to Calgary. With few other options, I stood outside a community centre planning to ask every Airdrie resident I saw to drive me until someone said yes. The first person I asked agreed to take me, and I hurried back to the Sadies’ van to get my bag.
Mike said I was their albatross, a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that went over my head. Then he said he’d see me the next day, at the next show. Later, Wayne told me that in eight years as a band, the Sadies had never missed a show before they invited me along for one day.
The Airdrie resident I’d found to drive me was a teenager keen on detours and intentionally fishtailing his car around corners. When we were stuck in a drift, he told me not to worry, that Johnny, his friend in the car behind us, was a linebacker and that he’d have us moving again in no time. To their credit, we were never stuck for very long, and we arrived at the hotel in one piece. I offered to pay him knowing he wouldn’t take my money, and then I dragged my luggage into the hotel’s lobby.
Seeing Jeff, Brad, Wayne and Paul again was a relief, and changing into dry clothes was more pleasurable an experience than I’d expected to have on our trip. The hotel had no electricity, so I changed by candlelight in a public washroom, happy to be dry and beneath a roof.
It took me more than an hour huddled beneath a blanket to feel warm again. I can’t remember ever feeling so deeply cold.
We spent the night playing cards and letting time pass. There were many thoughtless people sharing the banquet hall with us who talked late into the night, but I eventually fell asleep.
At 4:00 am it was announced that the highways had reopened, and most of the room emptied. We barely lifted our heads.
At around 7:00 am, hotel staff started noisily cleaning the banquet hall and making the lights brighter and brighter. Of the dozens of people who spent the night there, we were the only ones left. When we finally dragged ourselves out of our sleeping bags, we were as keen to leave Airdrie as Airdrie was to be rid of us.
Jeff dug the van out with the shovel they’d stolen the day before, so we didn’t have to worry about being snowed in. When Wayne went to start the van, though, it wouldn’t turn over. It was 8:00 am Sunday morning, and nothing was open. Because of the storm, CAA was unreachable. We learned how to take off the inside panel below the van’s dashboard, and we considered changing the spark plugs even though none of us knew how to change spark plugs or if the old ones were faulty. In the end, we bought a space heater and 100 feet of extension cord.
Brad was on space heater duty for much of the morning, rotating it to different areas of the engine and occasionally verifying that the van still wouldn’t start.
We met some people who had tried that morning to travel north to Edmonton, to where we wanted to be, only to catch up with the storm and turn back. We also heard that in the direction of Canmore, the location of the following night’s show, the roads were clear. We weren’t sure if the van would be going anywhere that day, but if it did, none of us wanted to risk driving into another storm and waking up to a van that wouldn’t start for a second day in a row.
By noon, I had given up on any resolution to our problems not involving a tow truck. I wandered in and out of the banquet hall and stared at the vending machine in the lobby. Then Jeff came inside and told me the van had started.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not joking?”
“It really started.”
Then I hugged Jeff and hurried outside to listen to the van’s engine.
After thanking the hotel’s staff and letting the van warm up for 30 minutes, we left Airdrie behind and decided to drive to Canmore.
The drive from Calgary to Airdrie took almost two hours during the storm; our return trip took less than 20 minutes. There were cars in impossible places, deep in ditches or halfway down hills. We knew things could have been a lot worse.
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antigreg : other content : the albatross did follow...
1. “The albatross did follow...”
2. Jeff's tour journal
3. Twenty-two pictures with captions
4. Tour schedule