Drinking Stories (1)

For some reason, I like reminiscing about dumb things I did before I knew better.

I used to live behind the Pay & Save gas station in a one bedroom apartment, a dive, but the cool thing was I owned a Chrysler 300 with a 383 and electric everything (mostly working). I paid $500 for it.

A friend of mine showed up one day. He said he had broken up with his girlfriend and needed to go up to Williams Lake to pick up his stuff. The Chrysler was the car for the trip. When we got to Willams Lake, he cleaned out his place and then said let's drive out to Bella Coola. Bella Coola's a couple hundred miles from Williams Lake, on a dirt road over the Chilcotin Plateau and through a mountain range in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. Before starting out, we stopped by the liquor store to pick up a jug of wine and two-four of beer.

We had a blast driving across the Chilcotin, drinking and looking at turquoise rivers and grasslands out of an African safari. We played with the electric windows and bombed down the road with no cares. One time we saw an old guy with Fedora in a black Cadillac. He looked like "The Godfather" of the wilderness. We laughed a lot about that.


But by the time we got to the Tweedsmuir we were hammered. I was driving and crying and slugging him about shit that went on in high school, and he was slugging me. It was not a good time to be doing that because the road through the Tweedsmuir's a narrow, dirt track that takes you down couple or three thousand feet. Some catskinners build it on their own because the goverment said it couldn't be done. They call it "The Hill."


We sobered up by the time we reached the bottom. In Bella Coola, we dragged ourselves into the cafe for pie and coffee and when we came out I noticed all the Chrysler's tires were flat. I guess I was so drunk I didn't notice how rough the road was.

What did I learn? Nothing.