Riding in the East End

            On Saturday in the late afternoon I took a bike ride and found there weren’t many other cyclists out on Bloor or Danforth. Maybe they just use the streets for commuting and go riding on the trails or the boardwalk on the weekend. I guess there also could have been Pride events that people went to. I actually wasn’t sure if the Pride parade had happened that day or if it was going to be on Sunday. There were a few people walking around decked out in rainbow colours.

            I rode out to Woodbine and then north to where it ends at O’Connor, and then I crossed the bridge over Taylor Creek and started exploring the streets on the other side. The first was Glenwood Crescent, which had a lot of fancy, well to do houses. At the end was a gate, behind which was a driveway leading to a rustic cottage.

            I went back to O’Connor and then up to St Clair. I went east for about four blocks until St Clair is cut off from where I assume it was chopped when they built the Don Valley Parkway. It of course continues on the other side of the expressway and the green spaces that surround that. Where I was this time, St Clair splits into Parkview Hill Crescent, which continues briefly east and Woodbine Heights Boulevard, which if you look at a map lines up perfectly with Woodbine Avenue. It just goes a couple of blocks to the north though until just after Parkview Hill Crescent crosses it again on it’s way back west again.

            On the way home along College a tough looking woman passed me. I think she had a faster bike than I do but she also seemed like a pretty serious fast rider. She had her feet on her pedals in stirrups and she rode hunched over. The first bike I had as an adult had those stirrups but I didn’t like them. I found them confining. I passed her once for a while but she got ahead again. I caught up with her at traffic lights a few times until she finally made it through on a yellow.

            That night I watched an episode of Maverick. One unique thing about the character is that he never drinks. Another is that he always keeps a $1,000 bill pinned on the inside of his coat for emergencies. That would be like carrying $22,709.87 in US currency around in your pocket “for emergencies” today.

            In this story he had just left a poker game and was walking down the street when he saw a woman crying. He went to talk with her and she said that her name was Mary Shane she’d lost her ride home, so he rented a buckboard and drove her out of town. He’d draped his coat over her shoulders so she wouldn’t be cold. At a certain point she warned him that there was a dangerous bridge up ahead and that she would walk ahead to guide him over it but she disappeared in the dark and there turned out to be no bridge. Back in town he asked around for Mary Shane but he was told that she had died nine days before that. The next day he followed the same road in the light and found a graveyard where his coat was draped over the grave of Mary Shane.

            We find out later that there was no ghost. The real Mary Shane was indeed dead but the woman posing as the deceased was part of a larger conspiracy involving a buried strongbox full of stolen bank money.