The Beaver Bus
It’s been a long week and I have a few hours to kill before getting home after seven days spent on the road, meeting, greeting, and selling concept in two different venues in the same week, running from airport to hotel to airport. I’ve known many forms of transportation in my insignificant life – Sante Fe Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago, CP Rail and Canadian National (CN) across Canada, EuroStar under the Chunnel, Pan Am from Los Angeles to Bangkok, Greyhound from San Diego to Winnipeg to Montreal and back, a 1963 four-door Rambler from Montreal to Orange, California, but none of these journeys compare to my rides on the Beaver Bus from Winnipeg to Selkirk.
The concept of the Beaver Bus never challenged the intellectual capacity of my fifteen-year-old self, it was the bus itself that issued weekly challenges. It got me from here to there; the hell of St. John’s or heaven was the all-you-eat restaurant in downtown Winnipeg. I first boarded her early in September 1973, somewhere near Portage and Main at the Winnipeg Bus Station and she took me into the bowels of Selkirk, depositing me right at Howard’s Lunch Bar with enough time to suck down fries and gravy before the green van from school came to pick me up.
Every Sunday off, I rode her into Winnipeg, usually to see Phantom of the Paradise, the Paul Williams Brian de Palma directed vehicle (y’all know how I feel about Scarface). I was young and drunk on the gravy covering my fries. I don’t even think that poutine had found its way out of Quebec, no one had added the fromage en crotte to the English dish yet, at least it hadn’t made its way to Selkirk. God bless the Beaver bus.