About 300 metres beyond the Highway 402 overpass, the two-lane road cuts across a farm country panorama. Ahead is an elongated incline that requires extra exertion. The landscape to the south gives way to pasture, but the grasslands are submerged in a metre of water and look like a small lake. The riders have never seen such massive flooding here before. The dilapidated, weather-beaten grey barn up ahead appears to be floating on a bright reflection.
As the Wheelers approach the barn, Roger Williams exits onto Highway 2 from Barrie and heads west in his pickup truck. He accelerates to a cruising speed of around eighty kilometres an hour and comes upon the Magritte-style vision of the floating barn. He can’t take his eyes off it.
Thud! Something hits the truck. Smacks the windshield. Shatters the reinforced glass.
The windshield holds together but turns opaque, and Williams can’t see.
Thud! Another smack on the windshield.
What the hell?
Thud! Another.Williams is terrified.
Thud! Again.
He slams on the brakes, but he keeps hitting things.
Thud! Lorne Falkenstein lies on the hood.
Thud! John Thompson, a bruiser of a man, pushes Falkenstein through the windshield.
Williams receives Falkenstein and shattering glass.
Thompson slips off the hood, rolls onto the ground, and sees scattered bodies and bikes everywhere. It looks “like a war zone.” He hears Williams say, “Oh my God, what have I done?”
The decisive moment — no more than several seconds — is over. The peloton, as seamless and fluid as a school of fish, and seemingly impervious to outside forces, lies wriggling on the asphalt, destroyed. Mike Lesko had been leading the pack. When he looked over his shoulder, he says, “all of a sudden, they just seemed to bunch up and fly everywhere.” Curnoe, Dale Nichol, Jorn Pedersen, and Bill Harper were the first four human dominoes. Falkenstein did cpr on Curnoe. Green and yellow bile came out of the felled cyclist’s mouth. It was gruesome, but the cpr worked. Curnoe was breathing. Then Falkenstein went off to help other riders. The ambulance arrived and whisked Curnoe fifteen kilometres to the regional hospital. In all, six men and one woman required medical attention, but Curnoe, fifty-five years old and in great shape, was the only rider killed. Falkenstein’s sense of guilt was profound. What if he hadn’t left Greg’s side, he kept asking himself.
(Months later, the doctor who treated Curnoe ran into Harper. The medical opinion was that the injuries were so massive no one could have survived them. Harper asked the doctor to emphasize this point to Falkenstein.)
vote nihilist — destroy your ballot
Harper, the fourth rider, remembered seeing the floating barn, and then waking up in the hospital two days later with a concussion and double vision. His ear had dangled by a thread of flesh but had been sewn back on. Gradually, he realized he’d be in a wheelchair the next day, Tuesday, attending his buddy Greg’s funeral. He pictured his first ride with Curnoe two decades earlier, an eighty-kilometre tour to St. Marys and back. Curnoe was riding a civilian bike, not a racer, but he completed the entire loop.
Curnoe’s death was bitterly ironic. Biking had been central to his artwork for twenty years. He was first exposed to Dadaism, cubism, and Surrealism in 1954, when he enrolled in a special arts program at London’s H. B. Beal Technical and Commercial High School. Three years later, drawn by the gravitational force of the larger city centre, he moved to Toronto to study at the Ontario College of Art. He didn’t have much time for his professors, but one of them, Graham Coughtry, was knowledgeable about the art movements that so piqued his curiosity. Then, in 1958, he met Michel Sanouillet, owner of a French bookstore in the Gerrard Street Village and the author of a book on Marcel Duchamp. The young artist couldn’t believe it — stuck in a city where no one seemed to share his love of Duchamp or, for that matter, the German expressionists, he’d found a Dada scholar in a modest shop in Little Bohemia!
Back in officialdom, oca returned Curnoe’s lack of respect by failing him in his final year. His response? Tear up the big city script, vow never to return, and head back to London, where he hooked up with Michael Snow, the filmmaker Jack Chambers, and the poet James Reaney, and where regionalism quickly became a defining feature of his work. In 1961, Curnoe’s first solo exhibition was mounted, and his magazine, Region, published its inaugural issue. His first gallery (also called Region) opened in 1962, and the next year he formed the Nihilist Party of London, Ontario, its first political campaign launching with a poster of then premier John Robarts, his eyes covered with the slogan Vote nihilist — destroy your ballot. In 1965, he formed the influential noise collective the Nihilist Spasm Band (which continues to this day), and the National Gallery of Canada bought its first Curnoes. From there, it was straight up: Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants; infamy for his anti–Vietnam War commentary, in a large mural at Dorval Airport in Montreal in 1968; representing Canada at the xxxvii Venice Biennale in 1976; and his large show, Retrospective, touring the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery, and the London Regional Art and Historical Museum in 1981. Curnoe’s mixture of regionalism — what critic Sarah Milroy described as “the notion of making art out of a passionate loyalty to one’s immediate surroundings and community and not in slavish imitation of international styles” — and Dadaist tendencies would remain potent throughout his career.
long shadow
Ignited by that first road trip with Harper, Curnoe’s art intersected with riding in 1971; after that, vocation and avocation became impossible to separate. Writer, poet, and Curnoe friend Christopher Dewdney says, “It was as if Greg had been made for cycling. His art, which had always been part of his life, became even more inextricably bound up with his physicality in an intense symbiosis. Bicycles represented the stripped-down relationship between form and function that so appealed to him.
“I begin to get a sense of Curnoe’s long shadow when Harper shows me around London on a gorgeous summer afternoon. Our first stop is Harris Park, where a red maple was planted in Curnoe’s memory in 1993. Sadly, we can’t find it. (Hours earlier, Curnoe’s widow, Sheila, had mentioned to Harper that the tree might not have survived.) Undeterred, we hustle up the hill. A University of Western Ontario philosophy of science professor, Harper is sixty-five (fourteen years my senior), but he maintains a three- or four-step jump on me. He tells me, “Greg and I were mystified when people said they rode to look fit. He used to say, ‘I don’t ride to look good. I ride to wear people out!’”
We reach Museum London. Three Curnoes are on display, including a radiant, life-sized Plexiglas painting of one of his cherished Mariposa bicycles. Then we head over to the Greg Curnoe Connection, a tunnel that links a bike path from Wharncliffe Road to Greenway Park. Completed in May 1995 and dedicated to Gregory Richard Curnoe: Artist, Writer, Musician, Athlete, November 19, 1936–November 14, 1992, the tunnel allows cyclists safe passage beneath the train tracks.
Finally, we drive out to the crash site. Just before Delaware, Harper catches a lump in his throat. A couple of kilometres past the village, out here on the gravel shoulder and trying to locate the precise impact zone, he regains his composure. It’s me who’s spooked. Vehicles whisk by. I feel the blowback of a half-ton pickup truck and see the lack of room on the road. There is no plaque to commemorate the tragedy. We stand there for a while looking out, and then silently drive back to London.
speed demon
