In 2011 my plan was to ride through Labrador again and pick up the girl I was seeing at the airport in Montreal to spend a week touring around and taking in the rally. The day I left to ride nine hundred kilometers across Newfoundland and up the Northern Peninsula to catch the ferry to Blanc Sablon I had the pleasure of beating my way through hurricane Maria’s wind and rain. In Deer Lake I stopped for gas and put on a dry pair of gloves before heading north. Fighting sustained 80-plus KMH crosswinds riding three hours up the Northern Peninsula to St Barbe made for a long day. Upon my arrival in St Barbe I discovered the boat was not sailing due to the high winds, so I checked into the motel in hopes of a crossing the next day, then I stayed another night. I got up to see a friend who was heading the same way roll into the parking lot with another couple on bikes; we talked to the ferry people and they still couldn’t confirm a sailing time. I looked at my schedule to be at the airport three provinces away and came to the conclusion that I didn’t have time to ride Labrador and still make it on time so I gave my ferry reservation to my buddy and high tailed it south to Port Aux Basques to get the ferry to North Sydney. Taking the main highway route would save me at least a day of travel.

Five hundred and sixty kilometers to get there, the weather was decent by now without the high wind and I was making good time running back down the west coast of the island to get the night crossing from Port Aux Basques. It’s a scenic drive all the way down with mountains on the left and ocean on the right and as I came to the southern end of the Long Range Mountains the sun was starting to set giving the beautiful light of golden hour.

With the sun on my right shoulder I saw my shadow following me on the road to my left with the end of the mountains in the background. I looked down to grab my camera out of the slash pocket on my tank bag to get a shot. When I looked up a car was coming head on towards me in my lane; it was passing another car. I clearly remember the maroon colour and the Chevrolet logo in front of me, but I didn’t see what the other car was. I was in the left lane of two lanes going uphill in a left hand bend with nothing in the right lane beside me.

I dropped the camera and put my hand back on the bar and waited. I did not make the instinctive move to go right. I knew I had a second, maybe two to make a decision. The only place for anyone to go was the empty lane next to me. All of a sudden, he swerved and went around me on the right. I held my position as a car on each side passed me at speed; I kept going shaking my head at the idiocy of other drivers. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a puff of dirt as he hit the shoulder on the outside but didn’t go off the road. I rolled on.

Fifteen minutes later I gassed up in Port Aux Basques, then went to Tim Horton’s for a coffee. When I came out a pickup truck pulled up fast in front of my parked bike and a guy jumped out and opened a badge in my face. The police officer was pretty amped up and said there had been an accident and the driver of the car said I was in their lane. I said, “Hold on - let me tell you what really happened,” then proceeded to tell him my side of the story. He quickly calmed down and asked me to come down to the station to give a statement. I said no problem as I still had plenty of time to catch my boat.

I sat down and listened as he told me one vehicle had gone off the road and into a pond. The driver and some of his buddies came out, but one guy didn’t. The interview over, I left and caught the ferry to North Sydney.

In the morning after trying to catch a few zzzs in one of the sleeper chairs on the boat I heard a woman in front of me on her phone talking about a kid who’s always in trouble being in trouble again. I realized they were talking about the accident the night before and was tempted to comment, but walked away to disembark. When I got to my friend’s house in Fredericton later that day I called the officer back to see if there were any more details. It turned out the two cars were racing, a bunch of kids. When the car that went around me pulled back into his lane, he clipped the other car and went off the road into the pond. Unfortunately for the driver of the car that went around me, he was 22 and he just killed his buddy - there would be big consequences.

He almost killed me, too.

I made it to the airport on time and we spent a fun week seeing friends at CroMag, riding up Mt Washington and camping on various islands on the way east through New Brunswick. We did a little surfing near a friend’s place in Nova Scotia before I dropped her back at the Halifax airport to fly home while I spent a couple more days riding home. I didn’t dwell on how close I came to dying on that trip. I’ve been close to death before in the pursuit of fun in high risk sports, so I moved on to enjoy life as it came along and continued putting miles beneath my tires. The odd time I do think back to that particular day, I remind myself that when the shit hits the fan, rule number one is “don’t panic!’ It might just save your life.