The Pursuit Of Dragons

I feel like what I’m coughing up. It’s green and slimy and could be used for carpet glue. I think I caught this at the hospital. I spent Sunday in bed and took yesterday off as a sick day. Yesterday I woke up at 3:45 PM – only 7 hours late for work.

This past weekend was “How to have a baby classes” at the hospital. If they had given those classes about 9 months ago, we wouldn’t be having a baby. If the video and graphics weren’t enough, the nurses descriptions of things that sometimes ("don’t worry, it won’t be you") go wrong would have surely scared us off.

Only 1 in ten babies need surgery of some kind to be born. There were 20 couples there. That means that at least 2 of us would either be having C-sections or some other form of surgery. Only 1 in 20 is born “sunny side up”, and that apparently is worse than a C-section. If your baby is breech, you get a C-section. If you don’t have coverage you share a room with 3 other moms and their babies. I guess in that case you just don’t sleep.

Husbands are encouraged to spend as much time with their wife and baby in the hospital as they can, but no food or place to sleep is provided for them. Moms spend 2 days as a minimum. So I have this image of OHIP families packed into a room with 3 Moms, 3 babies, and 3 Dads stuck sharing one room, all the dads trying to sleep standing up, or in the very hard chairs that hospitals seem to look for to put in their wards. I thank God I went back to school and got a job with good insurance.

So now the debate is whether to take a semi private room which is 2 moms and babies and dads, or get a private room. I think there are good things to be said about a shared room. Making a friend would be good, and there would be a chance for me to escape while LW chats with the other mom. On the other hand, the private rooms are beautiful, and look more like a hotel suite than a hospital room. I think the private bathroom alone makes it worthwhile. This is one of those decisions I leave up to Herself and smile and say yes dear when she makes up her mind.

No matter what she decides, I will end up in the same place. A hard chair beside the bed smiling like a goof. Apparently Dominoes delivers to the maternity ward. So does Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’ve looked into it.

If herself gets sick with whatever I have, I fear for her. I can’t imagine going through labour while choking up green goo and not being able to breathe. Could you imagine what those breathing exercises would sound like? Huh, huh, huh Ackck Hork spit, repeat. She is due in the next 3 to 4 weeks. That means she could go anytime. This morning her throat was scratchy.

After the baby courses, we went out for dinner, and enjoyed the quiet of earth hour. Earth hour and a baby. It makes you think deep thoughts. What will this little guy grow up to? Will the planet he walks on be very different from the one I did? Already so many places I’ve tried to take DD to have changed since I was a kid, and it’s not like it’s been all that long.

I wonder what we’ll catch when we go fishing, or what will be there to catch, and I wonder if we will still be able to plan canoe trips that avoid portages through clear cuts and hunting lodges and power dams. It’s getting harder all the time, and we don’t seem to learn.

Let’s move on to something a little lighter.

Boat launch is coming up. The backyard is covered in water, and the snow is mostly melted. We have spotted a number of spring birds in the area including Robins, purple finches, red-winged blackbirds. The temperature today was convincingly above zero, and more trucks have gone through the lake. Spring has sprung. Yesterday lying in bed I looked up and saw a red tailed hawk perched in the tree next to my window. I could wax poetic about it, but let’s just say that had deep significance to me.

I sent all the gauges off the boat to a place in Buffalo for reconditioning, and they were mailed back to us about a week ago. In order to avoid extra brokerage fees I requested they be sent USPS regular mail, and so far there is no word of their return. I am beginning to wish I had gotten them sent by someone faster. Of course I have to complete other jobs before I get to fix the boat up, but I am growing impatient. I really need to put these gizmos on Iris. Maybe tomorrow I’ll talk about the other jobs I have to do. Maybe I’ll take another sick day.

I have been in toastmasters for a few years now and have been working on delivery and speaking skills. The meetings can be a little corny, and like most community groups suffers from a difficult time in maintaining its volunteer base. Right now I sit on the executive of our local club as both the past-president and the VP of membership since no one else could be found to replace the past VP of membership when he left.

Since I am on the executive, and our club needed representation in the speaking contests that were in the area, I was put in the agenda. I spoke and won, and went on to the next level. Won again. Next level. Won again… Now I am at the District level. A district in Toastmasters can include a load of clubs. In our case it is pretty much all of Ontario with the exception of Ottawa and Windsor. This will be a big crowd. I wonder how I’ll do.

I am in the evaluation competition. In this scenario, you are giving feedback to a speaker. It’s basically a contest to see who can have the speaker feel happiest after they rip apart their speech. You know how after you do something, there is always someone who steps forward and says “I would have…” and as soon as they open their mouth, you know you don’t want to hear the rest? I am being tested on how much they want me to keep talking.

The format is pretty simple. Someone will stand and give a speech. Then I and about 6 other competitors will be given 5 minutes to come up with our critique of the speech. While we deliver, a number of judges will score our abilities, based on things like poise, value of input, positive tone, and so on. The scores are averaged, and the winning evaluator is announced.

I like to turn the whole process on its head by deflecting the whole evaluation process off the speech topics and delivery and looking at the mechanics of what was said, and how the audience was reached. Sometimes the judges respond really well to this, sometimes they don’t. Lately I’ve been on a run of good luck. Then again when you think of it, I’ve beaten out 20 competitors who each beat out 20 other competitors so far, so I can’t be doing too badly.

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Taking a position at the new firm meant moving across Toronto, and leaving the Little House behind. It was a difficult thing to do. We had lived there nearly 5 years, and it represented much more to me than just sticks and mortar. In the time we were there we had planted the entire yard with lovely gardens, built a pond and vegetable garden, completely rewired and replastered the house. It was a place the had my heart in it. If I am on that side of town, I still often drive by and see how the Little House is doing. The new owner has changed it to his liking. I know it isn’t mine and I have no business in it, but I wish he hadn’t.

Our new home is on an acre and a half on the north side of Toronto. It has a big stone fireplace and soaring cathedral ceilings. We bought it as a property with potential, there is certainly some fixing to be done, and I would like to change a thing or two. The day we moved in I picked up my new car – a Volvo C-70 convertible (of which I am quite proud…) A month after moving in, LW and I got married. Somehow between the two we managed to fit in a positive pregnancy test.

In the time since school finished, we had taken up sailing as a hobby, and spent a summer sailing OPB’s (Other people’s boats), and racing on weekends as crew. In that time LW had also convinced me to give God a second chance, and we have been attending an Anglican Church (Episcopalian in the USA). I feel like things are beginning to be stitched back together. I knew things were going right standing up at the front of the crowd at the wedding.

The wedding was held on the waterfront of a local yacht club, and was a perfect blend of religious rite and informal fun. A squall blew through the ceremony, and was just enough to make everyone shudder, but the rain seemed to go around us without actually hitting. Our friend sailed back and forth on the waterfront to “provide a backdrop to the ceremonies.” I arrived in the canoe, and paddled right up to the beach. LW arrived in the Volvo, driven by her Dad, looking stunning. My beautiful daughter came behind them in a friend’s Cadillac.

Now when exwife and I got wed, I knew as soon as she arrived that things weren’t right, but with LW I was simply overjoyed to see her. She was smiling, and beautiful. Nothing else mattered. We had planned this day for months, we were going to be having our own child soon, and she and my daughter and I were going to be a family. Officially. For real. We were both in good careers, we had a good house, we had a church community that was supportive and cared, and we had friends and interests that we shared. The night was a blur of dancing and laughter, and keeping LW’s beer bottle full of ginger ale so that no one would offer her a drink. It worked.

In the months since that day we have endured morning sickness, and bursts of tears and joy. We have shared our joy with family and friends, and we have fixed up a few things on the house. And we bought a boat.

A family of three can fit in a canoe and have a nice trip, but a family of four in a canoe for a week is a little cramped. Certainly we have the gear and could pull it off, but we also live next to a beautiful lake, and we have some wonderful places to explore nearby. And just beyond them, well, “There be Dragons.” Since the opportunity presented itself, and we have a little experience now is a good time to pursue those dragons. Our new boat is small by yach club standards but adequate. It is a 25 foot Catalina Sailboat, we plan to name her Iris at spring launch.

I’ve faced the dragons of career change and self discovery. I’ve chased dragons of divorce and love and religion. You have read some of those in the past few days. New dragons are waiting for sure. Careers will evolve, and growing families provide new chances for adventure and fun, and eventually the epic journey that I mentioned not so long ago will begin to be stitched together. Today the journey involves legs of yachting and paddling, possibly with some hiking in the north country. As we go along the journey will make itself plain. But for now, the seed exists, it is in fertile ground, and slowly, it will grow.

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Getting an apartment for 4 months in a boomtown is a difficult thing. Either you pay $2000 a month in rent, or you live on the street. Both are a strong reality in the oil boom that is happening out west. We went for the overpriced option, and hoped for the best. It worked out Ok. Kind of.

We arrived in Calgary at close to dinner time on New Years Day, found a burger joint and called our landlord. She asked where we were. All our previous contact had been over the web, and understanding her through her thick Russian accent was difficult. She said she would be over to meet us shortly. We had dinner and waited. I have always said that being late is a way of showing someone they aren’t a priority to you. This lady drove the message home when she arrived.

She arrived at close to 9:00, pulled up beside our van, got out of her car and told us she didn’t have a place for us. The house she had planned to rent out was taken by someone else, she had spent our deposit, and she couldn’t help us. She had thought we weren’t really going to show up. Now I don’t know about you, but there aren’t a lot of folks I know who mail out a cheque for $1000 with the intention of not showing up. I held myself together. Did she have any other units? Were any of them vacant? Did she know anyone who had a place?

She said she had another unit, but that it wasn’t ready to be moved into. I told her that if she didn’t make it available to us we were going to sue, and her response was that we could live there as long as we were willing to help with the work. LW pulled out our contract and made it clear that we expected our rent to remain the same, and that we did not intend to pay for anything extra. The Landlord led us to the property, and we moved in that night. The renos that the landlord wanted to complete were splitting the house to make 2 apartments, and hooking up a laundry room. I wasn’t worried about the first, and the latter I could easily complete.

The night was spent sleeping on the floor of the living room since the knots on the trailer had frozen solid, and we couldn’t untie the straps. The girls got settled in and I worked the ropes with my hands until I was able to free up some boxes of clothes, and empty the van. The rest of the unpacking would have to wait. The cold was so deep, and so piercing. It was the dry cracking cold of the prairies. We came to be seasoned to it eventually, but in that first night it was new to us, and took our breath from us.

The drive to reach Calgary had brought us across the American border at Detroit, and then we angled across Minnesota and North Dakota. The drive had brought us through whiteouts, and snowstorms. We had followed blindly behind the taillights of tractor trailers for entire days without seeing much. What pictures we have are all labeled “Nothing in North Dakota”, “Absolutely Nothing in Saskatchewan”, and so on. It was nice to feel like the trip was over, and we were finally someplace. There is something special about being “home” whatever home is.

Calgary turned out to be a great thing for us. We treated the work term as a vacation. I would go to work each day, and LW would job hunt. At the end of the day we would plan what great places we would visit. In the 4 months we were in Calgary we saw every attraction, museum, art exhibit, and event between Edmonton and the US border. It was fantastic. We saw dinosaurs at Drumheller, and buffalo at Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, we skied in the Rockies, and walked through the parks and nature reserves near Calgary. All too soon I was nearing the end of my work term, and I was called into my boss’ office.

I sat across from him and he asked me what I thought of working for the firm. “Its great!” I said. And honestly it was. It was the best place I had worked. I felt like I was accomplishing things, and moving forward. I felt like they were willing to allow me to stretch and try new things and that with effort and application I would progress there. Evidently, they felt the same way. They offered to make my position permanent.

Have you ever stood at the brink of success, knowing that you have it made, but unable to accept what is being handed to you? I knew this firm was everything I had wanted. Its principals were diametrically opposite to the machinist’s world I had worked in before. It was a place that put its employees and clients ahead of its profits. It was a dream. I turned down the position. I had to finish my diploma, I explained, and then I would consider the position.

Their counter was that the company would pay for me to continue through school part time while working for them. They wanted to train me their way anyway, and a lot of what I was learning in school would be different. Why not go through training at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, and work at the same time. I went home and talked to LW about it.

What would happen to her education? What about mine? Would I actually finish, or would the school get in the way of work and making money. I needed to make another conscious decision, and I already knew the answer. The first week of May we packed the van and drove back to Ontario with a glowing reference from the firm, and the promise of a position at graduation.

The drive back toward Toronto was exciting. We decided to stay in Canada for the trip home, even though it was a longer drive. On the first day we drove from Calgary clear across the prairies to the Ontario border. There we pitched a tent on the frozen ground since we couldn’t find a hotel, and the girls slept while I sat up thinking about what we had done and where we were headed. The next day we drove to Thunder Bay to visit some of LW’s family, and then we continued to our home.

I remember driving, no floating in a strange euphoria down main street to the Little House. Was it OK? Had it been broken into over the winter? What was growing in the gardens? I was barely aware of the town as I passed through it, and then arrived home. Safe.

If finding home in Calgary had been comforting, this was different. It was like the Little House reached out and hugged me. As I opened it up it felt warm and familiar. It was a good thing to be back. A year later I would graduate from college and turn down that firm again – this time because of my ex-wife not wanting us to leave the province, but at that moment, I knew we had made the right choice.

As graduation approached I had commendations for a number of positions, but none of them looked exciting to me until a position came along with a firm that exported engineering knowledge overseas. This looked interesting, and I took a position with them. The environment was very stuffy, but the position was pretty cool. I was working on projects in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and across Canada. It was a fantastic resume builder, but really quite unfulfilling. First there was the hierarchy within the firm, and then there was the lack of reward in that I would never see any of the projects completed. I stayed a short while, before getting a call from one of the other firms I had spoken with at the college.

Was I interested in different environment? Did I want to work someplace where the employees were treated differently and there was no hierarchy at all? Where creativity and problem solving weren’t formulaic?

Did I? Was making a switch so soon the right thing to do? I agreed to a lunch meeting, and a tour of the office. I would base my decision on that.

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Driving home from my appointment with Mr. B. I was a wreck. I had been accepted to go back to school, no question that I could get in if I could pass their entrance exams, and the time I had considered lost in the machine shops wasn’t such a waste after all. I recognized I had started to move forward. I needed to build on the momentum, but I wasn’t sure that I could. The challenge was money. I stopped by Jim’s place hoping that he could help me see my way forward.

Jim’s outlook was simple, and positive. “You’re a smart guy” he said, “Way to smart to spend the rest of your life in a factory. This is Canada. People here don’t starve. You may have to humble yourself to getting food at a food bank, you may have to work all night to go to school all day, but I know you can do this.”

That was a lot better than my parent's  response  when I told tham I was going back to school. They responded with a comment along the lines of "We'll be impressed if you get it done." For financial assistance they chipped in to pay my parking pass for 2 semesters. Thanks guys.

Jim and I worked out a plan so that I could qualify for retraining. It was a little dicey, but do-able. Since there was about 4 months until school started, and in order to qualify for the benefit to get the government to pay for training you had to have been employed beyond a 3 month probation period, I would have to take a minimum wage job and start living on a student’s budget right away. Then I would have to get laid off (not fired) within 2 weeks of the college start date. If all went to plan, I would qualify just barely in time to go to school. The next day I quit at the temp agency and took a job working retail at under $8 an hour in a business run by a friend.

I worked with him through his summer peak period, then he let me go just in time for me to go to school, and I applied for government money to get through school. This was where the plan crumbled. The government money paid tuition, but not books, and not enough to cover the mortgage on my very cheap house. On the day of our entrance exams I went and talked to Mr. B. again.

He asked why I was so determined to go through school on government money, and advised me to look into a student loan as a single parent. If I could maintain high enough grades, a portion of it would be forgiven, I would win student awards, and I could work on campus to make up any shortfalls. His plan was much better than what Jim and I had stitched together, although it meant I would graduate deep in debt. I decided this was better than not making it at all, and signed up for a student loan.

Standing in the lobby of the entrance exam, it seemed as if everyone in the world was enlisted for either architecture or civil engineering. I worked my way through the crowd looking for other Transportation students, and didn’t find any. I did however meet LW, a girl close to my age who had graduated from University with a history degree, and was now retraining since the history field turned out to be less than she was hoping for. We struck up a conversation, and got along quite well together.

We went into the college gym, and wrote the entrance exam surrounded by some 1200 other students. I went through the questions which started simple and became progressively more difficult, until toward the end of the exam we were working through equations that were quite difficult. For the trig and geometry sections, my machinist’s math came in handy, but for some of the other questions, I was forced to dig deep in my memory for things I hadn’t used in some time.

I left the exam feeling that I had done quite well. LW wasn’t so confident. Her strength was in writing and memorizing facts and dates, she would have to retrain her mind to see things differently. We agreed that if we both passed we’d let each other know and work together through our common classes. We exchanged email addresses, and went our separate ways.

It was an interesting thing that LW was very strong in some areas, while I was very strong in others. She really was a godsend in that by coupling our strengths we were able to cover off most of our first year classes, and each of us was able to learn and present things to each other in a way that empowered each of us. By the end of the first semester, LW had switched her major to transportation, and we were a force to contend with.

On campus I worked in the alumni office, I got to be known among the students, and was recruited as a peer tutor. I ran for student government. Soon I was known to most of the engineering students, and professors and deans would stop me in the hall to chat. In the student government I was considered someone who could handle situations fairly, and I wasn’t afraid to approach a prof and let them know that their class was unhappy. Similarly, profs would approach me to take up issues with their students. By the time I was done at the college I was leading my class academically, had my own office on campus, was part of the program’s academic advisory board, was an executive member of a number of other boards, and had won a number of academic and involvement awards.

When employers came to the college, I was being called on to greet them, and show the campus. Often I was being called into interviews I hadn’t applied to, and profs were personally introducing me to firms that were visiting the campus for various reasons. Things were looking very bright. Through all this LW and I maintained our team approach to learning, and worked with absolute integrity. I was still very afraid of screwing up this opportunity, so that even when students offered previous year’s exams or cheats, we consistently turned them down. Some exams this worked very much to our favour, on some to our detriment, but the college staff came to recognize that we stood for integrity. I took great pride in that.

A funny story, many of the exams in the college were recycled from year to year with a slight change. On our materials lab exam, the previous year’s teas had a question dealing with strength of concrete in relation to the mix used (water, aggregate, cement, cure time). In our exam the quantities and question were all the same but rather than solving for – say cure time, it was asking for the amount of water. Since LW and I hadn’t seen the previous exam, we worked out the question and came up with our answer. Better than half the class though solved for the wrong variable, and came up with the previous year’s answer. The prof couldn’t help but see the pattern.

Since I was doing so much on campus, sitting through so many meetings and making so many presentations, I figured that I should brush up on my public speaking skills. I signed up for a local Toastmasters club, and began working on image and presentation skills. I quickly learned that saying the right thing the right way is a very powerful tool. Soon I was vaulted from participant to chair in a number of committees. I managed to have the curriculum changed with some courses dropped entirely, I was called on to make presentations to liaise with other colleges. Things were quite rosy indeed. One day I was called on to speak with an employer visiting the college from Calgary.

The employer was very interesting. They worked on a different model from most consulting firms, and wanted transportation students to join their firm for short co-op placements. They were interviewing within our class, and I told them I would be interested in meeting with them. 2 positions were available, one in Calgary, and one in a satellite office in B.C. they were only interested in interviewing within our class, and were very limited for availability. I told LW how amazing these folks were, and she also signed up to meet with them. A number of other students in our class also requested interviews.

Of the 12 or so students interviewed, LW and I were chosen to fill the positions. Then they found out about the situation between us. LW had moved in with me, and we were working very closely together. The firm wasn’t willing to break up a relationship. We would have to choose between ourselves who would take the position. They needed an answer by the next day.

LW and I spoke for a long time about it, and it was a tough decision. The firm had said that if we moved out together they would assist the other person in finding a related job. LW offered that she would look for work, and that I should take the position with the firm. The day after Christmas we loaded all that we owned into a minivan and trailer, boarded up the house, and drove from Toronto to Calgary.

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In Canada, the Unemployment office is the place to go to when you need career guidance. Here you register to collect a handout until you find work, review job listings, moan about life and hope someone listens. I had been in and out of the offices for the past few months but really didn’t qualify for the government programs since I had taken temp work, and therefore was not unemployed. I knew that, but hoped that a chance existed for retraining or something similar. It was early in the summer, and college applications were well past due, although the start-up dates were still months away. The government worker looked at me like I was crazy. My only hope would be to get into a program that was only available to recently let go workers who had a steady employment history. If I had been let go from a steady job, then I could go back to school. As long as I was temping, there wasn’t much they could do for me. Besides, my high school transcripts didn’t show a stellar performer. There was no way I would survive University. Maybe I should consider something else. Like College.

College. My parents had always described college as the place where losers who weren’t good enough went. It was that in between place where you would be lost from, never finding work and never finding success. College was a world of dope-smoking losers, while University was a world of Ivy-league geniuses. I had never considered college. I didn’t want to be a loser. The career counselor was surprised by my response.

I can remember her comment that College grads were coming out of school with a lesser debt load, and were finding jobs faster than university grads. That the hands on knowledge and practical experience gained through college was very much in demand with employers and that even if you didn’t find work out of college, you could transfer your credits toward university. Although I didn’t qualify for any government assistance, the counselor offered to put me in touch with the chair of engineering (Mr. B.) at Mohawk College to further explore the opportunity that might exist for me. I accepted and grudgingly went to the appointment.

I went to the college more than a little nervous. I was sure I was wasting the time of this man, and I wasn’t sure how I could make things work to my favour. I would have to give it an honest try though, or live forever knowing that I had given up on myself. The words of Dylan (Bob) ran through my mind… “When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.” Mr. B. heard my concerns and told me not to worry. He looked at my transcript, and his comment was that these marks were less than acceptable even for college entry. I was a little ashamed. Then he mentioned that he had searched my name on the college records and that I had come up as having apprenticed as a machinist – was that true?

I had taken my machinists apprenticeship through a satellite campus of the college, and had really applied myself since at the time I thought my future would rely on the success of my apprenticeship. I hadn’t realized just how much that was true. Mr. B. became much more interested in my success after seeing how I had done so well in the apprenticeship. I ran through my history with him, and as he listened he began to smile.

He asked me why I wanted to become an architect, and I related to him that I loved the idea of creating something spectacular within a framework of rules. I loved the idea of creating a structure that could touch lives of hundreds or thousands of people. I loved that I could, at the end of a project see something, and that my work would be real and tangible and have meaning and form and be at once a work of art and science and mathematics. All of that appealed to me.

Mr. B. looked at me then and asked something that changed my outlook on a perfect career. It was a simple question. “What happens to the building industry when the economy slows? And what do you think happens to the Architectural Techs when that happens?”

My father had bought a business right at the beginning of the downturn of the 1980’s, and we had nearly been bankrupted by the circumstances then. I didn’t want my family to endure something like that. I wanted to be recession proof. I wanted to have a career that would survive downturns, and thrive in upturns of the economy, and Mr. B. was right. Housing, and building have always been a prime economic indicator. I felt that returning to school as I was, I had to get things right in the first go. I felt immense pressure to get this right. I couldn’t afford to not succeed.

I mentioned the possibility of continuing to university if I did well at college. I thought that maybe by having a degree I would be more recession-proof than with a diploma. He shook his head. In good firm they will look out for you but you would still be on your own. But there is another option, another path that meets all your expectations, but that you likely haven’t thought of. In fact in this path you would touch more lives, be more "recession proof", and make more money than you would on the architecture path. He definitely had my attention.

I remember him telling me how my history was unusual, but that it made me a perfect fit for a career that would involve reaching out to the public and winning their endorsement of touchy projects, and that I would do well in difficult calculations and mathematical problems if I could learn to apply the maths used in the machine shop to a different kind of problem, and that my evident love of art would lead me to be able to design a built form that would be more than utilitarian. Rather than build a single structure he suggested that I could build cities and neighbourhoods and networks that would carry people and good s across not only town, but across continents. I should become a Transportation Technologist, with the possibility of becoming a Transportation Engineer.

It was a career I had never heard of, but it all made sense. By specializing in the building of roads and transit networks, I would be protected from economic downturns. When the economy tanks, governments fund infrastructure improvements to keep things rolling, and I would be at the forefront of the design/build process. When things are good, private developers need infrastructure built to serve their new construction starts and to support their initiatives. New retail needs parking, new cities need roads and transit networks, growing countries need goods movement studies and rail movement studies and airport designs, and the list goes on and on and on. And what’s more, the field is so badly under serviced that there is a 5 year backlog of available staff in many areas.

I handed him an application at the end of the meeting with a thick black line through the words “Architectural Technologist”, and written in “Transportation Engineering Technologist.” I had signed up for 3 ½ years of college with a mortgage and a kid and no chance of paying for it. I figured I’d wing it. Again I had made a conscious decision. The Black line was the most important element of the application.

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Not long after being removed from my religion a second time, I went into the bishop to discuss how I could overcome and return to the mormon church. It would be one of my last visits to them. In the meeting the bishop made it clear that I had turned my back on the religion, that I was more dedicated to my own ways than God’s ways and that He would never love a person like me. Meanwhile my ex was openly in a relationship, and was not contested. She after all was not an enlightened holder of the mormon priesthood. She didn’t bear the same responsibility that I did. Where expectations are great, so are punishments.

I was losing 2 days a week to marriage and religious counseling appointments and my daughter was not coping well with living without her mother. At the marriage counselors it became increasingly obvious that my ex had no intention of returning to the relationship. She was already living with some guy in a neighbouring town. She was hit and miss with her visitation schedule, and worse with making it to the counseling appointments. Eventually I made things painfully clear.

“I cannot be married to a party girl, either you are with me, I forgive everything, and you come home, or you aren’t and we file the paperwork”

Her response:

“I don’t think party girl is the right word. I’m not coming home.”

We were divorced a year after that day. I walked away from the relationship with $2500, my daughter, and a monthly rental unit in a house where I literally had to shovel the snow out of the bathroom before bathing my daughter. The missed time at work cost me my job, and I quickly found myself without work, without money, without religion, and without stability. I spent the next few months temping, and taking odd jobs where I could. I hated renting. I always have. The thought of building equity in someone else’s house has always reviled me. I started building funds and saving wherever I could. Soon I had $5000 saved up, and called a real estate agent.

They asked what my down payment was, I bluffed. They asked what my income was, I lied. They asked if I owned the rental unit, I said I did. I was ready to do whatever it took to rebuild, and I needed a house. In our town you could get a nice house for $100,000 - $120,000. I would be lucky to get financing on half of that. I told the RE agent that I was looking for an investment property. I told them I wanted something run-down that I could rent out or fix up.

Since you need a 5-10% down payment to buy here, and all my legal fees, land transfer taxes, and so forth would have to come out of my $5000, I was in a corner, but every time the agents came over, I put on a collared shirt, dressed up the baby, and tried hard to look successful, but cheap. They started showing me properties in the $100,000 range; I pushed them down to $80,000. Then I pushed them down again, and again, until I was looking at only properties on the first page of the listings book. Nothing over $65,000. Most of these houses were derelict, abandoned, falling apart, but they were what I could afford, and I kept telling the agents that I was looking for an investment.

Finally we came to the house we called “The Little House.” It was 400 square feet. Had 2 bedrooms, no basement, and a washroom that was in an unprotected shed built onto the back of the house. It was listed at $60,000, and had been a rental unit for years. The lot was big, really big, but it had never been cared for, and the house was in very poor condition. I low balled the price on it, and my offer was accepted without a write back. After some creative financing, I was able to get things squared away, we owned it.

In order to get insurance on the house (to cover the mortgage) I had to do a few things on moving day. The list was not long, but was difficult. The chimney was at a precarious angle, and had to be rebuilt, the house was wired at 30 amps, and had to be rewired, the roof had to be replaced, and the insulbrick exterior had to be replaced with siding. It was a daunting task.

The chimney was the easiest repair. I put a pipe down it, leaned hard, and it fell off the house. Fixed. For the electric, I put a 200 amp breaker panel up in place of the 30 amp switch that had been there. Not fixed, but it looked shiny and new. That day a friend came over and we began re-doing the roof. It took us through the whole night, but the next morning when the insurance inspector arrived, it had been replaced. The only thing we hadn’t managed was to replace the insulbrick with siding, and if he looked closely at the breaker panel, there would be trouble.

The insurance inspector was probably 25 years old or so. He really didn’t know much about construction, or if he did, he wasn’t too smart. He asked about the chimney, I told him we didn’t have one. He asked about the roof, I showed him it had been replaced, he asked about the electric – nope, brand new panel. He asked about the insulbrick… then answering himself, “this house has a brick exterior. I think I have the wrong file. You’re fine.” And that was the last we heard from the insurance company.

We moved in, and I started earnestly to repair the house. We insulated, we rewired, we replumbed, we rebuilt rotten walls, and we excavated the basement, and built ponds and gardens. I loved that little house. I lost my worries in it, and I realized that I had done this thing. I realized that rather than accepting that I would be trapped in a rental situation forever I had worked to make this happen, and that I didn’t have to accept whatever was handed to me. I could make things happen, and if I did, then whatever the outcome, I could be proud of it, and feel fulfilled.

With an empty bank account, no real job, and no clear path into the future, I decided it was time to take control, and I was going to take my daughter along for the ride. I went to the unemployment office and asked about going back to school. I was going to be an architect.

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My mission did do a lot of good for me. Growing up in Canada, I had a sort of big brother image of the USA. Our foreign policy seems to be more reactive than proactive, and at times it can feel like we are being pushed into things in the name of neighbourly relations. Living in the Georgia for the better part of 2 years changed a lot of my image of the USA and Americans in general. The warmth and kindness extended to me by the folks in the south was amazing. No matter how much they didn’t want to hear our message, we were generally treated warmly, were cared for and well fed, and I made a lot of good friends. A few of them I can still call up today (some 15 years later) and talk about almost anything.

Among the best things the mission experience did was to force me to question things. I already knew I could survive some pretty challenging circumstances (thanks to Cadets), but here without parents to look over my shoulder, and having a religion I wasn’t sold on in my face, I was able to make my own code of living. I found myself more and more unenchanted by mormonism, and less and less believing what I was telling folks. By the end of the time I was in Georgia, I had pretty much stopped spreading the word, and was in a relationship – something that is definitely no approved of by the mormon church. With weeks to go before I would have returned home triumphant and with honour, I was called into the mission president’s office.

I remember sitting in the office lobby from 8:00 in the morning until late in the afternoon without anything to eat or drink, and then being pulled into the mission presidents office where I was demanded to give a confession. I told him what I had done, and was told that my confession was inadequate. I was handed a pad of paper and was told to go into a private office and document every relationship I had had in my life. An interesting challenge.

After a couple more hours of being left alone, I was called back into the office, and made to go through each relationship in detail. Who was the person – describe them. Describe the relationship. Describe the intimate moments. Describe how you felt. Describe where you were. Describe, describe, describe. It came to be more and more like the confessions of St. Augustine – reliving the ecstasy of the moment, while begging forgiveness of it. I am sure the president had an interesting evening with his wife that night.

I was loaded onto a plane and flown home the same day, arriving as a disgrace to my family. Before seeing them, I was made to sit with local clergy and redo the whole repentance process (another exhausted clergyman’s wife), and then go through it a third time with the Stake president (area clergy). In the third time through (by now it was just a story to spit out without much meaning) I was excommunicated from mormonism and given the map to get back into the church. In order to make things right, I would have to make written apologies to the everyone I had had an ungodly relationship with, I would have to marry quickly and raise a family unto the Lord, I would have to seek forgiveness from God, and from the mormon community by committing acts of service and giving to the church. The list was lengthy, and in order to be sure I was on the right track, I would have regular meetings with the bishop where he would go over my written confession with me to remind me of failures and then would give me readings to complete from mormon writings.

Within 18 months of returning home, I had married a mormon girl, bought a home and was well on my way to getting right with the church community. I had also been kicked out of meetings, had gossip and rumours spread about me, given a pile of money, and been used for every sort of project from cutting lawns to moving to repairing cars and cleaning houses and building sheds and doing renovations. Not that I mind lending a hand and helping out, but when you are constantly being told you are inadequate and that this will buy favour, it gets to being a bit much. I am still not sure why setting things right mattered to me so much but I went through the process with diligence. It was a difficult time.

Through all this I developed a close friendship with Jim. Jim is a friend who still stands for all the positive things in the mormon church. He and I spent a lot of time canoeing together. Whether we were floating down the Grand River, or crossing Algonquin Park, it was a great escape. We shared secrets across campfires, and lent a hand to each other in our families. What was even better was that my wife and his were close friends, and our families would often get together to watch movies or have barbecues. It was great to have someone who could still show you brotherly love regardless of what you past held.

Since I had married so quickly, I needed to find work to support my family. Between my mission and the cost of buying a house to keep my wife happy, I had drained all my savings. I took the first job that came available to me, and went to work in a factory. Now I am not a dummy, and I was able to churn out some pretty good work. I was quickly moved into an apprenticeship, and got my ticket as a general machinist. I don’t regret that. The trouble was that I had never yet made a decision; I had simply taken what came to me. Everything from school to career now was a history of taking what was easy. Taking what was handed to me. Working 12 hour shifts and coming home covered in cutting oil and metal filings was the reward.

A year into my career as a machinist, my daughter was born. She was a ray of joy to me and continues to be to this day. But it is a difficult thing to raise a family while working 12 hour shifts, four nights a week. I would come home and find her lying in her crib, her diapers overflowing, while her mom lay in bed, or sat on the computer. Diaper rashes and sickness were a problem. My wife eventually got a job at a fast food restaurant, and decided making $8 an hour was better than sitting home with a baby. “I’m just not cut out to be a Mom” was her explanation. Now my wages had to cover daycare and family expenses. My wife considered her money to be hers alone since it was the man’s job to support the family.

About a year into this arrangement, I went on a solo canoe trip into Killarney Provincial Park. My daughter went to stay with my parents since my wife would be working through much of the weekend. The park offered me the solitude and the escape I had come to relish in a wilderness canoe trip. The first day went by without mishap, it was good. Sometime in the night rain began. The rain was steady but not especially heavy, and on the second morning I quickly packed and headed on into the wilderness through the rain. After a slippery portage, I made my way to the base of a trail leading up Silver Peak, the highest point in the park.

As I started my ascent of the peak, the rain picked up in intensity. Now Silver Peak is hardly noteworthy as a peak. It is long walk to the top, but there is no climbing, and no challenge to reaching the top of it. It is barely a hike, let alone a climb. About halfway up, I twisted my ankle, and limped the rest of the way to the top. When I arrived, the rain was falling with such fierce intensity, that you could barely see beyond the end of your outstretched arm. It was a disappointing way to reach what is supposed to be a great destination. I made the decision to cut the trip short, and instead of camping out that night, drove home through the night.

When I got home, I was met by my mother, who was livid. She gave me my daughter, and advised that I keep closer tabs on my wife, then left without saying much more. My wife got home around 4:00 am dressed in a miniskirt, with smeared makeup. She was dropped off by someone I didn’t know. Our marriage ended shortly thereafter. Again I was called into the church offices, and questioned why I had allowed the marriage to disintegrate, why I hadn’t acted as the man of the house and prevented this. My wife meanwhile began spreading rumours that I had not been canoeing at all, but that I had cheated on her before she did anything to me. Once again I was removed from membership in mormonism. I was now a single father with no support network working long shifts at a job that didn’t bring either happiness or money in the sort of supply I needed. My bright spots through this were in my friendship with Jim, and living for my daughter. It was time for some serious reconsidering, and it was Jim who kept saying to me that this was temporary, and that I was better than all this. Between his belief in me, and the unconditional love of my then 2 year old daughter, I knew that eventually I would overcome this.

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So how do you go from teenage badass to wannabe engineering geek/Dad/lost in the crowd? Transitions are something that has always amazed me. The quote “all things are temporary" applies, doesn’t it? We are never who we are, we are always evolving into who we will be, and working towards what is next. One of the greatest realizations in my life was that allowing the world to decide what is next, or simply taking what is handed to you is never the right choice. It may be the convenient or simple choice, but there is always a better one.

Let’s go back to formative years and work forward.

High school. I hated High school. I hated everything from being a “Minor Niner”, through to grade 14. Yes, I did spend a couple extra years there hiding from life, and lost in a world of self-loathing and self pity. I was the kid who never quite fit in but sure tried hard. I shaved my head, got all black clothes and Doc Martin’s. I tried to be bad to the bone, but somehow my shoelaces came untied, or my pants weren’t torn quite right, or my fly was down. And I never smoked, let alone doing the drugs and so forth that the bad to the bone kids did. I was a wannabe and I knew it. It lasted about 2 years. In that time I had become quite an actor. I could fake stoned, I could fake angry at the world, I could fake everything, and most of the crowd believed it. I joined our high school drama club.

It was in the world of literature and drama that I adopted Anne Frank, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Tennyson, Longfellow and Robert Service as the folks who would write the credo for my being. Through all this I was happily attending the mormon church with my family week in and out. Folks respected me there. I could be who I wanted. It was a safe haven. At the same time, I was in Sea Cadets. If ever there were two diametrically opposite worlds, the world of Cadets and the world of the church were them. At church you were hugged and things were warm and fuzzy. In cadets it was people yelling and pushing it was urgency and strength of mind. I liked both for different reasons. I hated both for different reasons. I ended up a jumbled confusion of rules and repentance, of acceptance and except-ance. The world of cadets taught me survival, and canoeing and clearness of mind in desperate situations. The world of religion taught me respect for the majesty of nature and love for others. I could never go to war and kill, but I could never accept full control of my life by a group like the mormons either. More actions without meaning, but also some very deep understanding came from both of those groups.

In around Grade 11 a teacher in a drafting course struck a chord with me. He showed that architecture combined the worlds of art and engineering to touch more lives than either could individually. Consider this – a Picture hanging in a private collection will only affect as many people as enter the museum or home to see it. Even if it goes to print copy, it will only be seen by as many as take the time to shop for that type of image. A building on the other hand, can be a work of art on such a scale that every person who passes sees it. This notion of touching so many lives appealed to me on a deep level. I worked my heart out in the class, and got the highest mark in my high school career. Suddenly math and physics meant something more than scribble on notepads. I wasn’t a stellar student, but I became adequate.

In an appointment with a guidance counselor I shared my dream – I wanted to be an architect. I wanted to build something great. I left the appointment with my dream shattered. By the end of our session he had convinced me to drop an academic level, to be happy to learn a trade, and that maybe setting my sights so high was foolhardy. I would never have the acumen after all to achieve what was needed for entry, let alone graduation from higher education. I returned to my previous level of performance, drifting. Accepting what was easy, moaning about what wasn’t. I was hiding from the world in a cloud of self pity.

So here I was a typical muddled youth entranced by theatre and spoken art, bewitched by science and built form, and not excelling in either. I needed to keep on hiding, but I looked a little ridiculous in high school. What could I do next? The mormons provided the escape. I went on a mission.

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Where does a dream begin? Is it something that is born with us, that grows in meaning as we grow in stature until it works its way from the cerebral and the hidden into our very being and purpose? Is it something that we consciously conceive and then set out to accomplish? I think a dream is a little of both of these and maybe more.

I have said before that the difference between goals and dreams is simply planning. I believe that. I believe that more people would be living more dreams if they simply planned their lives so their dreams could have a chance at becoming reality. I also believe that a lot of people in the world today don't believe in themselves, and that dreams are such an integral part of who you are that if you can't believe in yourself, you can't believe in your dreams, and you won't ever begin to form a workable plan.

There are things I have dreamed of doing all my life, and the chiefest of them is the "epic voyage" dream. I am not alone in this passion to get someplace, and then to move on to another place and another and another. Robert Service called it "The Wanderlust." I call it "Pursuit of Dragons". On mariner's charts, in the times of square rigs and unknown horizons, uncharted waters were labeled "There be Dragons." My goal is to visit those places. The dusty corners of the world where no one goes, and where the sailors feared what the sea would throw at them.

In the past I have backpacked, snowshoed, canoed and climbed through Canada's interior. I have loaded my life onto a train, and been dropped at the trickle of a stream in the remote wilds to paddle for weeks to find my way back to civilization. I have snowshoed through Algonquin park in the cold of January. I have found inner peace and been lost from the bustle of the world for brief fleeting moments, but never have I felt that my travels were enough to beat the dream of the epic adventure that lies just beneath the surface.

I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I do...

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