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Deep Fried Dreams Revisited

Creative Commons Licence from SBC9

I live in a city. Now there’s any number of problems that can scare a person about a city, violence, crowds, pollution… For me it’s just one thing: Grid lock. Sure, everyone gets frustrated by it, angry. It’s not a pleasurable thing. But me, it actually scares me. My knuckles turn white, I start sweating, my heart rate picks up, my mouth gets dry, and I run from it, like I do my imagination in a midnight woods. It’s a bad thing, so call me a coward, but I just don’t want to get involved. That’s when I head north to escape to the open fields, the fresh air, the sandy beaches and pristine waters, joining the Friday night traffic that stretches like a tapeworm on Hwy 400. I guess that’s why they tell you to face your fears.

But there’s something else out there on those bare county roads. Not a thing so much as a business, a rare trade, and one particular to these parts of Ontario. As you crawl into Perkinsfield, in a township called Tiny, past summer signs that boast of giant “asparagus – 20 feet”, you’ll find the first hint of their kind. Just off the dirt shoulder, where brake lights are filtered by dust, sits the truest answer to grid lock. This one’s an old TTC street car, propped up on a set of aimless tracks. The trolley was carted up to these parts a year ago, retired from its public duties and, under a fresh coat of paint, found a new persona. The RED ROCKET was freshly toasted as the latest addition of the Chip Wagon industry.

Yes the Chip Wagon. Whether you’ve bathed in the masterful brilliance of a “fry” well done or suffered in the bowels over a bad batch of gravy, these double parked beauties are a salute to the idea of stop and go. Locomotive burger shacks, a Meals on Wheels of sorts. Sure it’s not low fat health food. If you’re lethargically overweight, with high cholesterol, maybe you should reconsider that meal plan, and if you’re an ardent supporter of the benefits of trail mix, then drive on. But there’s no denying the place they have in the landscape.

In Tiny there are three, a trinity of sorts. PERKIE’S is the cleverly named trailer hitch cabin that sits by the amber flash crossroads of Perkinsfield. The Red Rocket is an eye catcher that’s opened up just down the road, the smell of competition wafting out of the smoke stacks or maybe that’s poutine. But that would be Vinnie’s, they serve poutine. The Grand Daddy of the bunch, Vinnie’s is the blue and white reformed ice cream truck, whose tires have dug deeper with each spring thaw. They’ll have seen 16 summers this year. Their flabby rubber and grinding rims assured me that this vehicle has no grand illusions of global road trips in its future. Vinnie was the founder and the man who first applied the emergency brake off the main drag in Lafontaine. Whether it was careful market research or a dwindling gas gauge, it’s there he stayed to build his reputation each summer since.

In the industry of Chip Wagons, a trade that lives and dies on word of mouth, your reputation is your prize. Everyone knows this. Greg Forget who now carries the spatula behind Vinnie’s banks on it, as do the big boys like McDonalds. No the mighty McD isn’t a wagon but Vinnie’s is, after all, in the same business. It’s the burger, fries and coke, three words that should be added to the Constitution. There’s our distinct society. The car and the burger and fries. Whatever you might think is our cultural identity, that’s a huge piece of it right there. Of course the great scourge has become fat. Deep fried means tasty and deep fry means fat, right! I could hardly contain my scared laughter when I read about Procter and Gamble’s latest invention called OLESTER. A fake fat, what they call polyester sucrose that tastes like fat without the fat content. Polyester was something I wore in the 70’s, not something I want to ingest. The FDA approved it with the mention of the possible side effects for the digestive system. it seems that any large dosage of OLESTER, that is anything larger than a bag of potato chips, turns it into an instant laxative. And, ok ya, it removes all nutritional value from the food as the food can’t be digested. Oooh yummy, sounds great to me. To think how many of these things go on behind those vaulted doors is a little unnerving. But that’s the world of big business, where massive quantities are sold, and huge amounts of money are stuffed away.

That’s where such Frankenstein theories dwell. And then things get smaller, and you slow down a bit and there it is again, just off to the side of the road, a little smoke stack pumping out that familiar smell and some guy’s smothering his poutine with ketchup. It’s a pure Canadian pit stop and it’s here in our backyards.

NOTE: I published this story some summers ago, hence the OLESTER reference may be dated, at least I certainly hope it’s dated and remained so, but none the less I felt this piece deserved it’s timely place on Relative Strangers as I look forward to my own trip up those famous autumn roads to cottage country this week.

Tags: burger, chip wagons, coke, deiren masterson, fries, lafontaine, perkensfied, relative strangers, Relative Strangers Interactive
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