The Angel of Mercy at Halifax
What happens when you run out of money, in a foreign city, on a cross country trip, three thousand miles from home? Will an angel of mercy appear and help you out? You can only hope.
M3 - #3 of 4 stories, describing certain events on a 12,000 mile motorcycle journey across North America in 1971, including the Trans-Canada Highway, from Victoria to Newfoundland.
It’s a weird feeling to be absolutely broke and a few thousand miles from home. But that was my situation. I’d left St. John’s Newfoundland a couple days before on my motorcycle with about fifty Canadian dollars left in my pocket and made it as far as Halifax, Nova Scotia, after gas and ferry tickets. I’d been on the road now for almost three months. I don’t know what my plan was, maybe there was no plan, just something like ‘keep riding until you run out of money and then figure something out.’
I filled my bike’s gas tank in Halifax with the last of my funds. ‘Better to be destitute with a full tank rather than broke and running on empty,’ I reasoned. I ended up in a city park to sort things out. Halifax Public Gardens. Parks are nice places to go when you have no money because you can enjoy the outdoor space, they have bathrooms, and they’re free.
I was sitting on a park bench, wondering what was coming next, when an angel of mercy sat down next to me. Though to be honest, I didn’t realize that she was an angel until later. She smiled at me. I smiled back. She was dressed in a light green medical technician’s uniform and was on a lunch break. We didn’t say much at first. She was from a nearby medical facility and was having her lunch in the park.
Angels are nice. They’re not suspicious, judgmental, or paranoid about strangers on motorcycles, drifting through town. They’re actually quite curious. As we sat on that park bench a conversation started to unroll.
I asked her some questions about her medical studies. She inquired why I was so far from home and wondered if I liked Halifax? She seemed like the girl next door in some ways. One thing led to the next and pretty soon she realized three things about me - that I was broke, that I had no place to stay, and that I might be a trustworthy person. Angels are like that.
“I know some pre-doctoral students at the university,” she said. “You might be able to stay at their fraternity.” She eyed my reaction.
“Okay, how do I do that?“
She wrote down an address, told me how to find the frat house, and said, “Just go there and see what happens. They’re nice guys.”
She would call her friend at the frat house and let him know that I was going to stop by. She finished her lunch and left. I would never see her again. I still didn’t realize that she was an angel. That would appear later. But I had the frat address.
I found the place. A big two story, old world type home. Walked in the front door. Found the prospective young doctor who knew the angel. Told him my story - I’m broke, no place to stay. Headed West. He got it.
“You ever run a floor sander?” he asked.
“Yes,” I lied. I’d seen those machines. I thought I could figure it out on the fly. An on-off button, don’t dwell too long in one place or you’ll fry the floor.
Here was the proposition - they needed to sand down the whole second floor. Some new candidates were coming to the frat. They wanted to refresh the place. If I could do that, he’d give me free room and board for a week.
“Deal”, I said. “Can I do it in the evenings?”
“Yes.”
That freed me up to find a day job. I landed one at an employment center. I signed on with a moving and storage company. It was one of the hardest jobs I ever did in my life. That, and moving cement. I spent eight hours each day on the truck lugging people’s stuff up and down stairs, pianos and hide-a-beds were the worst, loading and unloading the truck, trying to get back to that frat house to run the floor sander till 10pm each night. Then go to sleep. I did that for a week.
Then it was time to move on. I had money in my pocket.
I motorcycled south along the coast from Halifax and took a ferry across The Bay of Fundy to New Brunswick. The bay’s legendary fifty foot tides were awesome. That’s when it slowly dawned on me that this young woman from Halifax, on the park bench, had been an angel of mercy. She’d found me on that park bench and offered me a path to salvation and a road home. I’d taken that path and now here I was on a ferry with enough money to press on.
But not enough money to get home.
The Angel And The Road To Rockport
It’s funny how one event sets up another when you encounter different people. You start to cascade into situations, with one dependent on the other. How paths offered or chosen can determine the next opportunity. When timing is everything. It’s like that saying about a butterfly fluttering its wings in the Congo Basin, how it spawns a small breeze, that crosses the ocean as a wind and becomes a hurricane in the Caribbean.
In that way, the angel of Halifax had altered my path in a meaningful way. She caused me to spend a week in her city, which led me to the Bay of Fundy on a certain day, where I met a Massachusetts couple - Rye and Kathy - who had a Honda motorcycle, identical to mine. They were on a road trip, touring the amazing splendor of Maritime fall colors. We hit it off.
As our stories unfolded, Kathy handed me a phone number and an address of her brother in Rockport, Massachusetts, who was painting a large house. I might be able to work with him. I could feel the hand of the angel still guiding me along the coastal roads of the Maritimes and New England, all the way into Rockport. It was the most colorful display of foliage I’d ever seen anywhere in my life.
I got a job with Kathy’s brother, Brian, painting a lobster fisherman’s house. Brian was house sitting at a lovely home by the bay, owned by a Boston family. He and his girlfriend had an extra room for me. For ten days, I painted the fisherman’s house, sometimes at the top of a thirty-foot extension ladder, ate lobster every evening brought to us by the lobsterman, fresh from his traps. Slept in a warm comfortable bed in the house that had a view of the harbor. It was like a vacation … courtesy of the angel at Halifax.
It was hard to leave Rockport, but after ten days I had plenty of cash to make the trip back home to the Wasatch Mountains. I secured my gear on the motorcycle and headed west. I thought about the angel a lot on that ride. Maybe I should have gotten her phone number. But do angels have phones? I still think about her today, fifty years later. But I would also soon miss her guiding light. As I rode farther west, perhaps out of her divine jurisdiction, events would begin to spiral downward.
jhg - 1971
Stay tuned for the finale to that trip that occurred on a Wasatch Mountain pass, after midnight, in a winter snow storm, when I crashed my motorcycle.