THE LUNATIC IS IN THE GRASS

The Palmy Swap Meet — who hasn’t heard of that? It’s a great swap meet with all sorts of interrelated events within it that has been around forever, and it remains as popular today as it was 40 years ago when I first went. Back in the day, a bunch of us young Wanganui blokes — all teenagers back then — would do the short drive of about 45 minutes from Wanganui to Palmerston North, usually in convoy, on the first weekend of every August for the swap meet. Despite being such a short road trip, funny stuff still happened during those drives from Wanganui to Palmerston North, and back again, which were memorable enough for me to still recall them four decades later. Old mate Grant Rivers and I were coming home from the swap meet in Grant’s jailbar truck hot rod one time when we hit a big bump on the busy state highway and the truck’s overly stiff suspension sprung the tailgate open — sending Grant’s big toolbox sliding down the wellside tray, off the edge, and out onto the road, demolishing the toolbox and spreading its packed contents along 100m of both lanes of highway and into the roadside grass. That took some picking up as we dodged the cars and trucks, all occupied by startled motorists wondering what the hell two long-haired lunatics were doing running around in the middle of a busy state highway, and in and out of the roadside grass. We never found everything, and the toolbox was completely rooted, but most of the tools eventually ended up back on the jailbar’s tray. Another time, Grant was driving home with a load of rusty old crap that he dragged across to the Palmy Swap Meet year after year for nearly a decade, convinced that sooner or later someone would give him some good money for this pile of old rubbish. There were old mudguards and motorcycle frames and wheels and a chassis, and it was all junk. Unsurprisingly, commonsense prevailed among the swappers and, 10 years later, Grub still owned his stash of rust. On this particular return trip back to Wanganui, with

Grant’s treasure unsold once again, he’d run short of room at home, and finally came to the realization somewhere between Turakina and Bulls that all this shit on the back of the truck was never going to sell. So he made a spur of the moment decision, pulled over to the side of the road, and threw the whole truckload of shit over the fence into the long grass of a cocky’s paddock. Problem solved. It’s probably all valuable now!

On another trip to the Palmy Swap Meet, I was with the infamous Brett Guthrie in his equally infamous ’58 Ford Customline, and we witnessed a memorable display of skill and stupidity by one of the Wanganui lunatics by the name of John Ward. In his younger days, ‘Wardy’ displayed phenomenal confidence both behind the wheel of a car and on a motorcycle. He had a few particular stunts, on two wheels and four, that he was wellknown for, and it would be fair to say that he was one of the many guys from that period who really had no right to survive his youth yet somehow did. The Customline was, as usual, stacked to the ceiling with teenagers having a good time. As we were driving along a straight section of road, somewhere around the Sanson area on our way to Palmy this particular time, sitting on a steady normal speed of 70 or 80mph — around 120kph in today’s language — Brett became aware of a motorcycle in his rear-view mirror slowly closing in on us. By the strange look of the approaching bike, Brett soon realized it was Wardy.

“Hey, check this out,” Brett announced to us all as he kept half an eye on his mirror. We turned around to see Wardy on his big Japanese bike — perhaps a CB750 Honda, which was popular with the bike guys at the time — pulling out and overtaking us, doing probably 140kph, lying fully outstretched on the bike; his shoulders and head hanging out in mid-air past the end of the seat out behind the back wheel, his arms folded up under his head as if was fully relaxed, and steering the bike and holding the throttle open with his feet. Somehow, with his head cocked to one side, he could see where the bike was positioned in relation to the road and even us in the Customline as he went past us, and managed to steer the bike perfectly well back into his lane once past us carrying on like that away into the distance until he was out of sight. The smart bastard even gave us a grin and the fingers as he rode past us. That sight sure must have freaked out normalminded people driving past him in the opposite direction who’d never experienced that kind of thing before.

I guess stunts like that are no big deal in the extreme sports world we live in today, but 40 years ago that was on-theedge stuff, and we thought Wardy’s stunt was pretty damn skilful. With the advantage of a bit of maturity 40 years later, of course we can look back and say it was stupid — but it was still bloody clever. If Wardy was a young guy today, he’d have become one of those genius riders doing stunts on bikes in the entertainment periods of Supercars races.

By the time we all got into our 20s, we were all a whole lot tamer — we had kids and responsibilities by then — but a big group of us could spice up our lunches at the Cobb & Co during road trips by making paper darts out of our napkins, pouring molten butter into the ‘V’ of the paper darts, setting fire to them, and then hurling them at each other across the restaurant. Even though it pissed the Cobb & Co’s managers off something fierce — and we got tipped out of the Napier Cobb & Co for it once — no-one was going to die. Much more sensible …