|
Urban bush pilots
Toronto Star, December 28, 1991
By Frank Jones Toronto Star
I had one question for Terry Cantwell and Shannon Reiner: Why?
As I slogged through the drifts to the red door leading to their
warehouse apartment, snow stung my face and the weatherman was talking
about a windchill of minus 20.
Driving over I'd had to skirt around a couple of cycle couriers, just
like them, fighting the furious wind and trying not to fall off on the
icy streets.
It must be one of the worst jobs in the world. You see them, male and
female, in office lobbies, in elevators, stamping their feet, trying to
rub warmth back into frost-nipped faces, and you wonder what sort of
desperation drives people to take a job like that.
I never expected the answer to my question would involve some
thoughtful insights into the human condition.
The first surprise was the apartment. It's up an alley, a stone's throw
from the Royal Alex. As I came up the stairs I thought for a minute I'd
wandered onto a stage set for Les Miserables.
Picture a long sparse room, a platform in the centre with seats and a
chess-board set up, the spiral blade from a combine harvester winding
around one pillar, and bikes and bike parts hanging from beams. Along
one side are Shannon and Terry's bedrooms, each with a rough-hewn
sleeping platform up near the roof. In the bathroom the ancient tub,
with a trickling tap that takes half an hour to produce a bath, stands
on another platform like some beggar king's.
They made tea, dripping dollops of honey into the cups from a large
can, and we sat down to talk.
Why do couriers face the elements so fearlessly? Terry, who is into his
fifth winter as a bicycle courier, looked puzzled as if he'd never
considered the question before. "It's the challenge first of all," he
said. "It's exhilarating. Every day is different. Riding a bike 10
hours a day I get to see things, smell, hear, touch things that people
in cars don't know about."
Danger? He's separated both shoulders and fractured his wrist in falls,
said Terry, 30, last Sunday. "But the worst is the warm kind of day,
it's just started raining and the roads are still greasy." In winter,
he said, it's safer because the traffic is slower.
Shannon, 28, with waist-long dreadlocks, started as a courier in 1985
after art school. Today he owns his own courier firm, with five bikes,
a bicycle store that caters to couriers, and is a DJ on Ryerson's radio
station, CKLN, Saturday nights (he rides to work).
Now he works as a courier only when he has to. "There's a lot of
physical pain," he said. "The lactic acid builds up in your muscles. If
it was a hard week, you really start to feel it by Friday." Then he
said something very interesting: "I think a lot of couriers have
emotional pain, too, that they ride with."
The bicycle courier industry arrived in Toronto in the late 1970s from
New York, Shannon said. A lot of firms wanted to do away with their
mailing rooms, and bicycles were the perfect answer to the gridlock of
downtown traffic. The year-round couriers - as opposed to summer
students - are a special breed, "a sub-culture," he said.
"They have an attitude, it's not anarchistic, but they are
angst-ridden." Outsiders, I suggested. He nodded.
It's knowing you can take a day off when you feel like it, Terry said.
More than the $100 a day a good courier can make, it's not working for
someone else. It's the special relationship you have with the
dispatcher over your little two-way radio. It's knowing he or she will
give you the good jobs in the summer because you were out there on the
worst days in winter giving your all.
He remembered one of his best days, when he picked up 10 packages at
Eglinton and Yonge and had to make a run downtown through an ice storm.
"I was like so happy because people in offices you meet are totally
mesmerized that you're out there delivering."
You'd be amazed, he said, how, with the right clothes, cycling keeps
you warm on the coldest day. Not like those airless summer days when
the carbon-dioxide from cars makes the job a pain. "Then it's really
hard."
The car, said Shannon, symbolizes everything couriers, whose lives are
cycle-centred, reject in the consumer society. "I look behind me on a
hot day," said Terry, "and I see a driver revving away, and he's taking
my breathing space."
Climbing a little shame-facedly into my car afterward, I thought of
what Terry had said: "It's the rush of adrenalin you get doing a run as
quickly as possible."
I'm reading Max Ward's autobiography describing his early days as a
bush pilot in the north. Suddenly, I realized the couriers are in a
great Canadian tradition. They are modern day bush pilots. Urban bush
pilots.
|
|
