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.