Peter Behrens's Blog, page 446

1959 Rambler American

Armistice Day (Remembrance Day) in Montreal.

Sgt John J.K. O'Brien, RCAF.  Jack became very ill in Africa and was flown home to die at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal.
November 11th. At 11pm there was always the 2-minute silence in the city. Lingering ghosts from WWI (as well as WWII) haunted Montreal when I was growing up. There was the soldier at the Cenotaph, with the angel fluttering over his shoulder, pointing the way--to where, exactly? The sound of the guns? Death? Afterlife?  And at Lower Canada College, all those portraits of Old Boys, with their slicked-back hair and itchy woolen hockey sweaters, killed in the trenches.  There's a chapter in The O'Briens that's on Dominon Square (now Dorchester Square) in Montreal during an Armistice Day commemoration in the early 1920s.
Jack's name is on the Westmount (Montreal) Cenotaph.

1958 Apache 36 3/4 ton

from Alex Emond in southern Saskatchewan:
"The Apache was in Piapot, SK and a long-haul trucker dude was home and doing yardwork. He was happy to show me the truck. He did a number on the truck himself to double up the rear wheels. Had to fatten up the fenders. Great-looking shitkicker of a truck." --AE
(here's a '58 Apache Suburban from Marfa TX
a '55 from Colorado Springs,
another '58 (1/2 ton) in Santa Barbara,
and another '56 or thereabouts in The Springs.)

Magnum P.I. The Streets of Montreal car chase

A pretty amazing chase sequence through the streets of Mo ray al in 1976. Thanks to Coolopolis for the heads-up on this clip.
More Montreal , here.

Textile Town, or Outer Borough? Biddeford, Maine Part 3: The Palace Diner

Maybe you've seen our previous posts on Biddeford, Maine a city that continues to fascinate. Hidden treasures of Biddeford: The Palace Diner, which has been around since 1921. That means HBB's great-grandmother, and likely his great-great-grandfather too, no doubt would grab the occasional cup of java here. The Palace is now owned by Greg Mitchell, and the menu has been considerably tuned up, as Biddeford seems to slowly be morphing into an Outer Borough of Portland.

Colin Washburn, San Mateo High, and the Packard One-Eighty

  

 From our man in the Sierra foothills, Colin Washburn: 
"My father saw an ad for the Packard in the San Mateo newspaper back in 1947, when he first came to Cali from Iowa. He saw it, put $10 down to hold it, and went and hustled up the remaining $390 immediately. Yep, only $400! The original owner had been killed in WW II and it had been parked in his parents garage for some six years. They finally decided to sell it to be rid of a painful memory of their son. I assume they wanted it gone ASAP, and put a lowball price on it. Dad lucked out and got there first. It was our family car and we drove all over the country in it. My sister and I had the luxury of the HUGE back seat, that was equipped with individual heaters, Belgian carpet, a liquor compartment built into the back of the front seat ( we stashed our comic books, snacks, and other road gear in it ), and silk curtains on the wind wings. There was always a desert water bag hanging off the front bumper, and we used it often, especially when the flathead 8 -- 356 c.i. -- overheated when climbing the Sierra Nevada passes. I remember drinking out of it too, the taste of canvas somehow pleasing to a kid because it was the taste of the road, of adventure!
    Anyhow, when I turned 16 the old man gave it to me as a birthday present. It was by then in rough shape and not driven much. I fixed it up, got a $29.99 el cheapo paint-job, and drove it to high school. Nearly all of the San Mateo High School basketball team would cram themselves into the back seat, and we'd make grand entrances to games, resplendent in our bright orange warm-up suits. Most of my teammates were big black brothers. They loved cruising around in the big, black Packard.
    Yeah, lots of fine memories of that great car. Like a fool, I sold it when I got drafted and went off to Viet Nam. ( I didn't have a place to store it. Fortunately, the man who bought it had it completely restored. ( It's the grey one. ). Today that car is worth in excess of $200,000.
 "More Packards at the Ironstone Vineyard Concours d'Elegance..."--CRW 

1940 Ford Deluxe, Biddeford Maine

 

Gary Snyder: Finding the Space in the Heart

                                                                                                               both photographs©Michael S Moore 2014from Michael Moore, in Nevada, referring to the AL post on Gary Snyder & Wendell Berry: 
"Gary, writing about [almost exactly] where we are in the Great Basin...the elephant in the room here being the Black Rock Desert, our next door neighbor, now famous for techno-hell despoilation of Burningman, but, once upon a time..."Anyway, to think that he and Ginsberg wandered through Vya the same year as I first did..."I gotta get those letters [the Berry ones; already have the Ginsberg ones];  thanks for yet another great post."--MSM
Finding The Space In The Heart 

I first saw it in the sixties,
driving a Volkswagen camper
with a fierce gay poet and a
lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice,

we came down from Canada
on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue
Mountains, lava flow caves,
the Alvord desert—pronghorn ranges—
and the glittering obsidian-paved
dirt track toward Vya,
seldom-seen roads late September and
thick frost at dawn; then
follow a canyon and suddenly open to
         silvery flats that curved over the edge

         O, ah! The
         awareness of emptiness
         brings forth a heart of compassion!

We followed the rim of the playa
to a bar where the roads end
and over a pass into Pyramid Lake
from the Smoke Creek side,
by the ranches of wizards
who follow the tipi path.
The next day we reached San Francisco
in a time when it seemed
the world might head a new way.

And again, in the seventies, back from
Montana, I recklessly pulled off the highway
took a dirt track onto the flats,
got stuck—scared the kids—slept the night,
and the next day sucked free and went on.

Fifteen years passed. In the eighties
With my lover I went where the roads end.
Walked the hills for a day,
looked out where it all drops away,
discovered a path
of carved stone inscriptions tucked into the sagebrush

         “Stomp out greed”
         “The best things in life are not things”

words placed by an old desert sage.

Faint shorelines seen high on these slopes,
long gone Lake Lahontan,
cutthroat trout spirit in silt—
Columbian Mammoth bones
four hundred feet up on the wave-etched
         beach ledge; curly-horned
                   desert sheep outlines pecked into the rock,

and turned the truck onto the playa
heading for know-not,
bone-gray dust boiling and billowing,
mile after mile, trackless and featureless,
let the car coast to a halt
on the crazed cracked
flat hard face where
winter snow spirals, and
summer sun bakes like a kiln.
Off nowhere, to be or not be,

         all equal, far reaches, no bounds.
         Sound swallowed away       
         no waters, no mountains, no
         bush no grass and
                   because no grass
         no shade but your shadow.
         No flatness because no not-flatness.
         No loss, no gain. So—
         nothing in the way!
         —the ground is the sky
         the sky is the ground,
         no place between, just

         wind-whip breeze,
         tent-mouth leeward,
         time being here.
         We meet heart to heart,
         leg hard-twined to leg,
                   with a kiss that goes to the bone.
         Dawn sun comes straight in the eye. The tooth
         of a far peak called King Lear.

Now in the nineties desert night
         —my lover’s my wife—
old friends, old trucks, drawn around;
great arcs of kids on bikes out there in darkness
         no lights—just planet Venus glinting
by the calyx crescent moon,
and tasting grasshoppers roasted in a pan.

         They all somehow swarm down here—
         sons and daughters in the circle
         eating grasshoppers grimacing,

singing sūtras for the insects in the wilderness,

—the wideness, the
foolish loving spaces

full of heart.

         Walking on walking,
                   under foot   earth turns

         Streams and mountains never stay the same.




                             The space goes on.
                             But the wet black brush
                             tip drawn to a point,
                                      lifts away.




                                                           Marin-an 1956—Kitkitdizze 1996

- Gary Snyder

1946 Chevrolet 3104. Cape Porpoise, Maine

We've seen these trucks before--one for sale in Wichita last year. And check http://www.46chevytruck.com  My father went out lobstering a few times from Cape Porpoise with Mr Emmons.

GM New Look Bus, etc.

 I donut know how the Saskatchewan plate got there, but these were all for sale at Motorland in Arundel, Maine.