Drew Shannon
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I’m in the midst of a typical male midlife crisis. I won’t bore you with the details. If you’re a man and you’ve already had one, you know what I’m going through. Many men in the throes of a midlife crisis run out to buy a sports car or a hot rod. I bought a bus. An ancient, 10-tonne, 40-foot-long transit bus with two speeds and no power steering. It’s my midlife-crisis bus.
At the age of 9, my life plan was to be a teacher in the morning and drive a Toronto Transit Commission bus – the Bathurst 7G – in the afternoon. When I was 18, I dreamed up the idea of buying a vintage bus, painting it in 1970s colours and driving it across Canada. I even managed to get my name on the TTC’s asset-disposal list.
Early one June morning in 1993, I found myself among scrap merchants and transit buyers at the TTC’s Hillcrest Yard in the west end of the city, poring over Detroit diesel engines in a line of 1975-built General Motors “New Look” buses. I had no idea what I was looking at, but I figured with the right hemming and hawing and “That’ll need some work,” I was playing the part. I had calculated that the $2,000 in my bank account was enough to buy the bus and get a bus driver’s licence. I hadn’t calculated that I needed money for bus driving lessons, insurance, repairs, parts, maintenance and storage. My bus-owning dreams were put on hold and eventually forgotten.
As I entered my 40s, the midlife crisis was in full swing. I had the inspiration to escape from my existential thoughts on a London Routemaster double-decker bus. I heard there were some for sale in Niagara Falls. The friendly conversation with the owner was going well until I found out the selling price was $60,000 each. This was further complicated by the fact that at 14-foot-6-inches tall, the Routemaster was too high for most streets in Ontario. I would need to predrive every route in my car with a ping-pong ball on a 15-foot-high stick, hoping I wouldn’t hit anything. That didn’t sound like much of an escape. Common sense squashed my short-lived, double-decker bus plan.
In 2016, a friend who worked for the TTC asked if I was still looking to buy a bus. He’d heard about a New Look for sale in Calgary. After being passed through several layers of bus enthusiasts, I found myself on the phone with the seller in Calgary. “I was head of maintenance for Calgary Transit for years,” he explained. “This was the best New Look bus we had. I kept it for myself.”
I tried not to get excited. “When was it built?”
“1967.”
“It’s almost 50 years old? Does it drive?” I asked.
“I was driving it on the Deerfoot Trail yesterday.”
“What kind of condition is it in? Is there any corrosion on the bulkheads?”
“We don’t use a lot of salt here. It’s in beautiful condition.”
When I was in university, I had a recurring dream that I would get to the bus stop on Steeles Avenue and drive the Steeles West 60 home myself. It was always TTC bus 8629, a GM New Look built in London, Ont., in 1982. Upon waking, I could still feel the big steering wheel under my fingers, rattling over the catch basins. On the phone to Calgary, I began to feel that steering wheel again.
“How much do you want for it?” I asked, my heart pounding.
“Well,” came the measured reply. “I’ve put a lot of work into it so I’m going to have to ask you for a thousand dollars.”
There are moments in your life when you don’t think – you just do, and damn the consequences.
Four days later, I was in Calgary, being driven along the Deerfoot Trail at 92 km/h (top speed!) in my new bus. The seller took me to see Adam, a friend of his who was about to retire from the bus-rebuilding business. “Adam will take care of you,” he assured me.
Less than three hours after landing at Calgary airport, I was now the owner of a 49-year-old New Look transit bus and had arranged to have it restored and repainted into the TTC’s 1970s colours.
Upon returning home, I promptly enrolled in bus-driving lessons and arranged insurance. Insurance was a challenge. Surprisingly, “vintage bus collecting” is not a widespread hobby in Canada.
Five months later, I was on the Trans-Canada Highway, driving my own vintage New Look bus home from Calgary. Adam did a great job: The bus was restored beautifully and he threw in all his spare GM replacement parts at no charge. At a gas station in Medicine Hat, I suddenly remembered that visit to Hillcrest Yard 23 years earlier. I had completely forgotten my old dream of driving a restored TTC bus across Canada, and here I was actually doing it.
When I was a young man, I would laugh at older men and their midlife-crisis cars. The cars were a waste of money. They were an obvious attempt to escape from the inevitable. They were gaudy and trite.
Now that I am that middle-aged man going through my own midlife crisis, I understand all of it. Every Maserati, every vintage Jag, every Mustang. I will never again laugh at another man for trying to squeeze some extra joy out of his life, for just doing it and damning the consequences.
When I drive my lumbering Midlife Crisis Bus on the streets of Toronto I feel completely alive. I am nine years old riding home on the Bathurst 7G. I am 18, poring over diesel engines at Hillcrest Yard. I am 24, dreaming of the Steeles West 60. I am 43, doing what I have wanted to do my entire life.
Jason Shron lives in Vaughan, Ont.