Going all CMG: Our 2019 fails and recoveries

MARK: The April Fool

I’ve had my fair share of screwing up over the last 40 years of riding motorcycles: misreading the weather to end up cold or wet, running out of gas, even falling off a few times, though never seriously.

Once, crossing the line at a small border post between British Columbia and Washington state, the guard waved me through and my dirt bike refused to start; she had only a kickstarter and the splines had finally worn out on the shaft, so the pedal got no grip and couldn’t turn the shaft. It took several hours of bodging a solution with Vice-Grips before the guard finally took pity and helped push the bike for a bump start. Ridiculous.

This year, maybe I’ve finally learned all the lessons to be learned, because although I got caught out in the rain a few times, every ride went well. Every. Ride. And there were a lot of rides.

At CMG itself, however, things went pear-shaped on April 1 – April Fool’s Day.

On that day, we ran a straight news story announcing that the famous Cabot Trail on Cape Breton Island would be closed to motorcycles for the season, because RV drivers had complained they were getting stuck behind long processions of slow moving, loud bikes on the trail’s many hills. Zac and I wrote the story together and we thought it was hilarious. The premise is so absurd that nobody should be fooled for long – drivers are routinely stuck behind slow-moving RVs, after all. We littered the story with clues that acknowledged the joke, but even so, it wasn’t enough…

That one story was picked up on social media and went everywhere. It became our most-read story of the year, with more hits than the next two stories combined. I added a very clear confession at noon, but people were still taken in. I wrote a separate confessional column the next day, but still people were taken in. Many thought it funny; some were seriously pissed off. The Nova Scotia and Cape Breton tourist boards worked overtime to appease people who were calling in to cancel their vacations.

Later that summer, Zac stopped for a break from riding at the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou, owned by the Rankin Sisters on Cape Breton Island. He got into casual conversation with a guy there and discovered he was a representative for the Cape Breton Tourist Board. “He put two and two together,” said Zac, “and though I certainly didn’t volunteer the information, he realized who I was and which website I worked for.” Uh-oh.

“He said it had been a very busy day, fielding calls, but he was a good sport about it – I think he thought it was funny in the end.”

Let’s hope so. It’s worrisome that people are so easily fooled in these days of “Hillary Eats Babies” and “Trump From Mars.” But we’re unrepentant. Our April Fool story is half-written for 2020 and we’re looking forward to it.

Happy new year!