Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [31]
Even with the prevalence of alcohol, my intoxicant intake plummeted all the way to a joint and a six-pack a day. An oak. A rock. A paragon of willpower. Phrases that defined me. Pam and I settled into Moncton life. We tucked in early every night in our summer cabin on the side of a stream as the loons sang us to sleep. On Saturdays we would join other Monctonians on Magnetic Hill, a point in the center of a gravitational anomaly. We’d park our cars in neutral in the center of a grade and watch them roll uphill. Could kill a whole day doing that.
We spent another weekend in Grand Falls, a town not far from Moncton in the western portion of New Brunswick. Turned out the place did not have a falls, but it did have lots of potato farms. One farmer told me with great pride of a recent study that had ranked Grand Falls as the largest potato producer in the world. He taught me the names and distinguishing marks of every grade of spud known to man, knowledge I have not used since, but you never know when it might come in handy. Pam and I later took a vacation in Shediac Beach, renowned throughout New Brunswick as the Bahamas of the Maritimes. We found it under ice.
Living laid back suited us now, but one afternoon that old wild and crazy feeling overpowered me. I went for walk in a cemetery overgrown with weeds and wildflowers not far from Moncton. There I found the headstone of Ronald McDonald. Oh, how sad, I thought, no one told me he had died. It occurred to me that I had stumbled upon the lost Cemetery of Clowns. I spent the next three days searching for the graves of Bozo and Emmett Kelly. Never did find them.
Nothing else happened in Moncton during our stay there.
Nothing much ever does.
All right, that’s not quite true. For instance. One afternoon the Mets played a game on the Wanderer’s Ground, the only true hardball field in Halifax. In the sixth inning of a scoreless tie, I hit a home run that soared over the fence, over the trees lining the fence, over the street behind those trees, and into a park, where it rolled to the lip of a pond. Must have traveled more than 450 feet.
Afterward, an eighty-year-old man approached me as we packed up our equipment and said, “The only hitter I ever saw hit a ball that far on this field was Babe Ruth during an exhibition game back in the thirties. He hit his shot to the exact same spot you did.” I played throughout Saskatchewan two weeks later. An elderly local said I was the first major-league pitcher to appear in that area since Satchel Paige.
Babe Ruth and Satchel Paige! Wow!
I’m not going to tell you that I ever forgave McHale and Fanning, but the praise I received tempted me to write them thank you notes. Let’s face it. If those two had not exiled me from the majors, no one would ever mention my name in the same sentence as the Bambino or the mighty Satch.
Oh, and this happened too: I conducted a clinic for the Mic-Mac Indians at their reservation near the town of Sillicers on the northern branch of the Little Southwest Miramichi River in central New Brunswick. This is where Ted Williams spent many summers refining his salmon fishing technique. Eight young braves sat around me on a mound while I demonstrated the basics of pitching. Midway through our lesson, the tribe’s chief walked up to home plate carrying a bat and announced that he wanted to hit against me. He was maybe thirty, a tall, long-muscled man with leonine features and long silky indigo hair. The chief carried himself with the quiet arrogance many great athletes exude. He looked as if he could strut sitting down.
Sadly, he did not own a dime’s worth of hitting talent. I tossed him one lollipop after another. He either swung over pitches or nubbed weak foul balls to the right of third base. I called time for