On a mild midsummer Friday night many years ago, while traveling through the woods of northern New Brunswick to join some buddies for a weekend of fishing, I was stopped by two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and nailed for speeding on their turf.
The senior officer, who turned out to be judge and jury as well, said my crime against humanity would cost me 25 dollars. Payable to him. On the spot. Now.
When I objected to what I perceived to be highway robbery, the man suggested that perhaps I might prefer Plan B, which involved them escorting me back to the regional jail in a nearby town, where I could spend the weekend waiting to tell my version of the facts to a judge on Monday morning.
Ever the optimist, I figured that my chums, who had arrived at our fishing site earlier, had put the Mounties up to this practical joke. Any moment now the gang would step out of the bushes, we would all have a good laugh, and the officers would wish us Godspeed.
Wrong. The RCMP dude was definitely serious, and I was definitely soon to be lighter in the wallet. Since I had only about 50 bucks in cash on me, I asked the officer if he would take a check. He asked me if I thought he had been born yesterday.
Then, ignoring a monetary exchange rate in my favor, he relieved me of 25 American dollars right there at the side of the road, in the middle of the boondocks in a foreign country, under cover of darkness, by light of a humongous six-cell flashlight. But he did give me a receipt, which I discovered earlier this week while purging some of the accumulated flotsam of a life in the newspaper business.
The receipt, invoking fond memories of those carefree days when my right foot was much heavier on the gas pedal than it is now, was included in an envelope with other law enforcement-related stuff that I had found amusing back in the day, and still do. Take, for example, the statistics provided by the police department of a small Maine town for publication in the town’s annual report to residents. In its summary of incidents investigated during the past year, the department noted: “Bicycles stolen, 2. Bicycles recovered, 3,’’ and “Lost items, 22. Found items, 26.’’
I sensed an interesting trend here. Accordingly, by the time I got to the “missing persons’’ category I was pulling for the guys to find more bodies than they had lost during the year. Alas, it was not to be: “Missing persons, 5. Found/located persons, 5.’’ When supply equals demand in these things, it can reasonably be said that all’s well that ends well, I suppose.
My memorabilia stash included a 1992 newspaper clipping datelined St. Augustine, Fl. concerning the devil of a time county commissioners attempting to write an anti-nudity ordinance were having in defining body parts. Herewith, a portion of the mind-numbing legalistic 328-word definition of “buttock’’ they drafted:
“Buttock: The area at the rear of the human body (sometimes referred to as the gluteus maximus) which lies between two imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is standing, the first or top of such line being one-half inch below the top of the vertical cleavage of the nates (i.e. the prominence formed by the muscles running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the second or bottom line being one-half inch above the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy protuberance (sometimes referred to as the gluteal fold), and between two imaginary lines, one on each side of the body (the ‘outside lines’), which outside lines are perpendicular to the ground and to the horizontal lines described above and which perpendicular outside lines pass through the outermost point(s) at which each natis meets the outer side of each leg …’’
Like many of us when it comes to decoding certain works of art, the Florida authorities may have had difficulty in interpreting the object in question. But they likely knew one when they saw it.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.