The first year I was at school in Philadelphia, in the 1970s, a friend in my dorm told me that he had a motorcycle that he had left in North Carolina. He was going to ship it up to Philadelphia but it was expensive to ship it.
I had only recently come to the East coast of the US, and had never been to the Carolinas, so I volunteered to ride it up to Philadelphia if he could send me down there.
He thought that was an excellent idea. It was cheap to fly to Durham where his brother lived and where the motorcycle has been stored. So off I flew. I met the brother and his wife and spent the night at their place ready to head off in the morning.
Carolina looked nice. Like spring in Canada, but with smaller trees.
I can now confess, as I write this. that I had never driven a motorcycle before, but I figured, “How tough can it be?”
Now they had to confess, the “motorcycle” was a Honda 50 which was more like a scooter than a real motorcycle. That meant my plans to use highways was probably not practical since I couldn’t achieve the minimal speed required. I had maps for the trip, now I had to improvise.
When we got up, I got in two hours of training on the Honda 50 – up and down their street. The top speed was around 40 mph, but it felt like slow motion. Trained on how to ride it and ready to go, I left just after lunch and was on my way.
I tried the four lane divided highway for a couple exits, but every semi truck that whizzed by me almost blew me off the side of the road. I concluded that there had to be a safer way.
There was an old highway, Highway #1, that used to be the main north south road. It was now mostly a commercial road lined with stores, car dealerships, gas stations and restaurants. It had traffic lights regularly and went through the middle of towns. It also had a speed limit that was closer to my own speed limit.
What I thought might only take one day was now revised to three days and two nights. There was no way I wanted to ride this scooter in the dark. It had a light but I didn’t want to be daring on my first long distance motorcycle ride.
I made it into Virginia the first day. As the sun was going down, I saw a motel that looked inexpensive on the side of the road. I pulled in and went to the desk. I asked for a room and how much it might be.
The clerk looked at me puzzled. He looked me up and down, shuffled a few papers and then looked up and told me that they had no rooms. “But,” he assured me, “there is another motel about a mile down the road that might have rooms.”
What did I know, I was just a dumb Canadian who had never been in the area.
I went back out, got on the motorcycle and headed down the road to the next motel. Sure enough, the next motel had an inexpensive room for me.
The following night I was on the outskirts of Washington, DC, just south of the city. I had had a problem with an oil leak that day and had to continually refill the crankcase with oil. I spent the night and then late afternoon I arrived in Philadelphia and found my way to the university. I parked the Honda 50 in the parkade below the university residence,
I was tired and went directly to my friend’s room to announce my arrival. He was quite excited. I told him about the oil leak and he immediately wanted to go down to the parkade to see what needed to be done to fix it.
We went into the now darkened parking lot where I had left the motorcycle in a corner near the stairwell. The parking area was empty of any people. Our footsteps echoed on the cement floor.
We got down to work on the motorcycle and took apart the casing around the motor, We were focused on getting it fixed and back to work without leaking oil. At that moment, we were interrupted by a nervous voice shouting “Hold it right there! Don’t move! Freeze!”
We slowly looked around and saw a university watchman, in his uniform, slightly crouched, with a gun out pointed directly at us. His hand was shaking a little. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“We are repairing this Honda 50. I own it,” my friend said, “and it has an oil leak”
The man with the gun seemed to relax a little and asked for ID. Since we both had university student cards, we showed them to the watchman and he finally lowered and holstered his gun. I was in a state of shock, partly due to being tired but also having the first experience of my life with someone pointing a gun at me,
The watchman mumbled something about there having been many thefts in the residence and his job was to make sure no other thefts were taking place. And he wandered away.
We did a little more repair work on the bike. It was dark, so we headed upstairs to our rooms. I was really tired and still a little shaken by being on the wrong end of a gun held in a shaky hand.
Much later, I was talking to my roommate who was African American from Baltimore. When I told him the story, particularly the part about not getting a room at the motel in Virginia, he laughed out loud at me. “You dumb Canadian! Don’t you know you stopped at a ‘coloured motel’? No wonder they had no room for you!”
I had no idea what he was talking about. We had nothing that compared to that in Canada. He explained what it was as I tried to understand my mistake. Apparently, no white people is also a policy at some places, as well as no coloured people.
That was how I dramatically learned that the US was fundamentally a very different culture than Canada – despite so many superficial similarities. All in a couple of days.
It was only years later when I saw the movie Green Book that I fully comprehended what my roommate was talking about. Segregation in the US was a very deep social tradition of exclusion and lasted long after it was officially illegal. I had witnessed it personally in the 1970s on my first visit to the US South.