Cascades Ride - a personal journey, with literary allusions, like a wanker - a JF story

Cascades ride – also a personal journey, with literary allusions, like a wanker

So we beat [ride] on, boats [bikes] against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

With a confused notion of the route to take from the RYCT – was it to be via King Street, Churchill Road, Derwent Boulevard, or some other road of Porter’s dissolving memory? – we four lit out for Cascades territory on what, for me, was to be a ride in remembrance of things past.

Contemplating the gradient, endpoint and main road traffic ahead, I comforted myself with a corruption of Emma’s words: ‘Distance [and heart strain] is nothing if one has a motive’. I think she meant from Hartfield to Box Hill; can’t see her on a Malvern Star.

So, with Porter ready to go (pret a porter?), Larkey astride the bluebird of happiness, Phil’s legs aKimbo and unpunnable me, we headed up King Street.

First memory blast: 98 King Street, where my flatmate hurled drunken racist abuse from the garden to the Chinese students on the first floor, and where he constantly outplayed me in backyard cricket. Then we swept by Pillinger St, where my first owned house, no. 26, is probably worth a bit more than the $25,000 we paid for it in 1978. 

Up to Fitzroy Place, on which’s corner with Quayle St I knocked Maloney’s Beetle’s wheels out of shape on the gutter in a beer-induced fog in 71.

Straining past pubs of my youthful acquaintance – Globe, Aberfeldy - (at least I was straining, cursing Porter for choosing this subtle hill climb so cruelly early), we hit Davey Street and sashayed into Macquarie. Easy enough for a while, so I could give glancing memory to my dad’s demise in St John’s Hospital 18 years ago (lung cancer, after 60 a day for 60 years).

Then the ride got serious. Hey, this is the brewery! Weren’t we turning round here? It appeared not. Lung-busted, I took a couple of 60-second dismounts to recover.  Amazing how such a little break re-energises. Porter and Kimber waited patiently (I think) while Larkey and I caught up. At least Pete had the excuse that he’d stopped to check out a stack of good-looking firewood in someone’s garage, and made a mental note to accost them later re the source. Resourceful chap, as usual.

Nicely downhill on the way back– made the stats look a lot better as revealed over coffee at Lola (15k, 50 minutes, av speed I didn’t get). To get there, we glided down Regent Street, or, as Porter would say, Derwent Crescent.  

Larkey smiled quietly to himself passing his first owned house but grimaced at the audacious new build next to it (I quite like it). I smiled quietly to myself passing the grey apartment block where I wooed a certain someone – successfully, apparently, as she’s still with me after 42 years. To re-work a phrase, ‘Reader, I married her’. 

A couple of blocks further, I called to mind Sunday mornings in '72 in the weatherboard on the corner of Princes St, watching the AFL replay, nursing a hangover. And where Scotty got coward-punched by a hood from Warrane who crashed our party with his thuggee mates. 

It’s a good thing the past is another country; they do things differently there.

And so to Lola, where I was reminded that that castle has a pleasant seat; the air doth sweetly and nimbly recommend itself to my senses.

Pret-a-Porter predicts: more to come

 The Larkey: finds reminiscences in Jeff's intensely personal retrospection