In the early years of my working life, the main context in which I felt engaged and fulfilled was when I was learning a new skill, providing something that someone else needed or wanted, or discovering that my fear of being trapped in some narrow cage of limited options didn’t have to be a life sentence. At least once, I was stunned into an amazement that has remained a window into the natural world.
Years later, I also discovered the pleasure of working for my own satisfaction on my own initiative, and on behalf of a wider community than just myself.
Working for Others
I expect we all have ways, looking back, that we divide up our past work environments into different companies and cities, different skills and kinds of training that were required for the positions we held, and different kinds of fulfillment and frustrations that accompanied those various phases of our working life.
I sort memories into those kinds of categories when I look back and see myself responding to whatever life dealt me, usually seeing no alternative but to play the cards as they fell.
But there were also memorable moments that remain in my mind more vividly than those surrounding contrails of time and place, lifting me beyond the job titles and assignments in which they occurred.
I’m remembering a work situation in Montreal shortly after I graduated in May 1964 with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Mathematics from Bishops University. This first job was a plum position in which I worked in the head office of CIL (Chemical International Ltd, although I never saw any chemicals beyond the soap in the company bathrooms), where I perused monthly financial reports and wrote non-technical overviews for upper management to draw their attention to trends and significant departures from the expected. I imagined myself using my education in Economics and also exercising my untrained interest in writing, which a few years later led to me enrolling in a Master’s program at McGill University in English Literature. Perhaps in another lifetime this position with CIL could have been the start of life in a grey suit with a house like my parents in the Montreal suburbs.
However, after just a few months in this promising position, my friend, D’arcy, who didn’t have a job, plum or not, at the moment, talked me into quitting my potential forever job, leaving my college girlfriend, whom I believe still felt love for me, and—after removing the backseat of a Chevy sedan and putting in a double mattress that filled the entire space behind the front seat including the trunk—we headed off towards South America. I recall a few Molson’s Ales being consumed at the Maples Inn during D’Arcy’s sales pitch and I still find it surprising that a month later we crossed the border into the USA, headed towards some rather vague image of that the future might hold.
D’Arcy is Irish so he comes honestly by his wanderlust and a few years later he sailed halfway around the world ending up in Australia where he lived for a few years, before returning to North America to become Editor in Chief for the Wall Street Journal in New York, also publishing best seller books, and producing several CBC series on WWII. So, he hasn’t been unemployed except when he had something better to do, and clearly hasn’t lost the powers of persuasion that got his friend, Michael, who has little wanderlust and is not Irish, to pull up roots and act as if he also had those qualities.
It occurs to me that this was not the first nor last time that I caught onto the coattails of someone who had a passion for travel and then found myself living in a new place myself. The most consequential instance of this burr-on-the-pantleg-of-another-tramping-through-the-field-mode-of-transport, occurred a decade later when I met a woman looking for a place to train to become a psychiatrist; and this led to me spending three months in Peru and then moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her, where we married, divorced, and I have lived ever since.
Of course, work is only one dimension of the changing give-and-take of a human life, but let me continue the theme I have started and look at multi-dimensional life as if it were a clothesline strung between poles, where the poles are places that I exchanged my time for a pay check and then found myself in new and unexpected situations as a consequence.
There is one notable exception to that coattail-travel-pattern. When I finally left Montreal for good, in the mid-1970’s, I was fleeing from the only world I knew; and when I finally broke free from a way of living in which I had become claustrophobic and felt barren of trust in the future, there was no-one else in sight who could have joined me on that solo flight into the unknown. But that juncture arrived a bit later in my life.
Back in the late summer of 1964, D’Arcy and I headed off, travelling South, gradually discovering that Canadians had to produce American Social Security numbers in order to get even short-term employment; and it became increasingly evident that we hadn’t thought through how we would finance our planned journey into the Southern Hemisphere.
We enrolled in an orientation to sell encyclopedias, but when I discovered that we wouldn’t have a single volume of an actual encyclopedia to show prospective customers and were told what to say as we waved a gold-embossed cover, while proclaiming that (“for less than the price of a cup of coffee per day”) she could have the world’s knowledge at home, so that her children would have better opportunities (than she had had?), I told D’Arcy that I just couldn’t do that.
We did succeed in getting a job working as busboys in an upscale restaurant in Mobile, Alabama, where we received a share of the tips that were left on the tables for the waitresses. I remember the perk of being able to eat untouched leftovers in their sophisticated sauces, left in the serving platters that we cleared from the tables after customers had paid and left.
That job provided a memorable evening that we could never have experienced any other way. The other busboys, who were all black, invited us to a club. I remember it as a sprawling one-story building with many rooms, each with its own band playing. We stayed close to our hosts, since our presence was attracting hostile looks from the sea of black faces that filled every corner. But as soon as our fellow busboys explained that we were from Canada, that hostility instantly vanished and we were surrounded by warm smiles and interested questioners wanting to know what it was like living up there in the North.
The farthest South we reached on that trip was New Orleans, Louisiana. I no longer recall how much cash we left Montreal with in the fall of 1964 but with the exception of tips we received at the restaurant in Mobile, the flow of cash was all one way. A final blow to our financial situation landed while we were visiting the Latin quarter in New Orleans.
We felt immune to the parking tickets that were accumulating under the windshield as we visited clubs on Bourbon Street, reasoning that because we didn’t plan to stay there, we wouldn’t have to pay them. Then we returned from one final club to discover that our car had disappeared.
After paying to retrieve the car from impound and paying our bill at the motel, we had $50 between us. Gas was cheap in 1964 ($0.18 a gallon in Texas), but even so, we drove across the US from New Orleans to Vancouver in three days, without stopping or eating more than a few crackers until we arrived back in Canada with a few nickels.
There, we found jobs in a carwash that paid twice a day, so that we could buy lunch that first day and the days following. Soon we rented a cheap room with a toaster and a hotplate.
Now that we could work legally again, I remember two jobs in the next few months. In mid-December, we both found work at the Vancouver post office during the Christmas rush. Then D’Arcy, who had surveying experience, found work in northern British Columbia and I was on my own.
One day, walking around the Vancouver docks, I noticed a man in one of the boats moored there.
We struck up a conversation and I discovered that he was the skipper of that 60ft boat which delivered supplies to communities north of Vancouver. I asked him if he ever hired people like me to work on those weekly trips, and to my surprise he said that if I showed up at 6:00am the following Monday packed for a week onboard, I could sail on his next trip.
That remains one of the most memorable jobs I have ever had. I think it gave me some of the experiences that any venture out onto the ocean must provide, but without having to kill animals or work underdeck in the boiler room of a large ship. I can still remember moments from those weekly supply runs. Standing at the bow, as we sailed north up the coast of British Columbia there was a moment when, passing out of the lee of 290-milelong Vancouver Island, we were suddenly in the middle of the Pacific Ocean swell that had had thousands of miles to build up. In an instant, the bow was climbing up towering waves and then plunging down into deep troughs on the other side. Some miles later, we sailed up inlets, like Knights Inlet, that wound their way into the Rocky Mountain foothills, to deliver supplies to communities that were isolated from the rest of the world except by water.
One gift of my time on this boat, which I couldn’t have come by working at a desk in a CIL office, is that I was face-to-face with the power and beauty of the natural world. During the months I worked on the supply boat I remember pulling up to the landings of logging camps and First Nation communities in the darkness, with the towering mountains, sometimes with snow on them, looming beyond the field of sight, as we unloaded bags of potatoes, boxes of cigarettes, crates of canned goods, and whatever each community had ordered for that week.
The boat never slept and after each delivery we would continue on to the next stop deeper inland, with the Rockies on either side becoming higher on both sides. One night, the captain, who also had to get some sleep, asked me to pilot the boat that night. He introduced me to the navigation charts spread out on a table in the wheelhouse, and explained the operation of the sonar, which measured the depth under the boat, and the radar rotating on the roof of the wheelhouse, that constantly refreshed a map of the terrain all around the boat. It didn’t take me long to realize that without that radar screen showing me which way the channel was going, I would have felt completely lost in space. Looking out the windows of the wheelhouse, there was nothing to indicate which way the channel was heading. There were only mountains rising up on all sides around the moon-lit water. The boat seemed to vibrating in place, going nowhere, motionless in the middle of a bowl carved out of rock.
Perhaps not then, at the age of 22, but in later years, that image of time and space embracing my life in the world, evokes a deeper understanding and acceptance than do the anxious thoughts of what’s coming next, that remain an all too familiar companion of my days.
I don’t know how I expected my college girlfriend to be still waiting for me when I returned almost a year later to Montreal. But it was a shock to discover that she wasn’t.
I’m discovering that sadness isn’t as memorable as depression. With sadness there is a feeling that something has been lost. With depression, which came into my life with a vengeance a decade later, in the mid-1970’s, there is a belief that everything has been lost. My experience of being sad in the mid-1960’s feels in memory more atmospheric than a core inner pain.
I remember my mother driving me to the Montreal airport for my flight to Happy Valley, Labrador, for a job I had been offered by the man who owned Snelgrove’s Supermarket. Once I arrived there, it felt strange that he had hired me when he already had a competent woman who had done his bookkeeping for years. I think he was impressed with my degree in Economics and probably thought that included training as an accountant, which it didn’t. It was raining as we drove to the airport and, sitting beside my mother, the windshield wipers beating time, I felt grateful that there was one person who would always love me.
Not for the Claustrophobic
During the months back in Montreal, after learning that my college girlfriend didn’t want to continue our relationship and before heading up to Happy Valley for the rest of the summer, I worked under the Saint Lawrence River where an extension of the Montreal subway was being built, to provide transportation to an island that would be the primary site for the 1968 Montreal World Trade Fair.
I joined a crew that assembled each morning on the surface before being driven underground to the point where the concrete tunnel had reached. The process involved blasting and excavating a new section of the tunnel and then adding the concrete interior that would become the new subway line under the river. I must have had a variety of laboring tasks involved in this process, but only one experience stands out in my memory.
After the blasting and jack-hammering of a new section of tunnel was completed, an arched structure of the same length was pushed forward on tracks into the new space. Once the structure was in place, both ends were boarded up so that the space above and on each side of this structure was enclosed. Then a caravan of cement trucks backed down into the tunnel, their diesel engines spewing exhaust and their rotating mixer drums spinning, as one truck after another pumped their load of cement into the space between the outer walls of the structure and the newly blasted wall of bedrock.
One of my jobs during this time under the river was to stand inside the gap between rock and structure, while the trucks pumped their contents inside. Gradually the space filled, but concrete, like lava, tends to solidify. To help keep the cement flowing, I threw a vibrating rod, connected to a compressor outside, into the new cement as it poured in– until the current truck was empty and the next one arrived to keep the process going.
Like everything I remember from this time and from other times in my life (now only present in memory), what remains are a sense of phases, places and relationships, punctured by periodic moments of delight, of fear or a sense of lessons learned. In this particular task–standing inside this structure while I used the vibrator to encourage the cement to remain fluid so it wouldn’t harden in place where it landed–I had to keep walking on top of the cement; moving forward toward where the truck was pumping new cement and then backwards toward where earlier loads had already been laid down. On this occasion, I must have stood too long in one place, because as the cement kept flowing toward me, as intended, I found that I couldn’t lift my rubber boots and step backwards. As I stood there. I suddenly felt trapped and imagined the cement building up on top of my boots until I was bowled over and buried beneath the still flowing concrete.
That can’t have been a real danger. This moment must have been quickly over. I imagine that I quickly used both hands to pull my boots out of the sticky cement and then paid more attention to the danger afterwards.
A flash of fear can suddenly change how the world looks, and sometimes it can make us a more fearful person, because we keep imagining that the danger will reappear. In this case however, it only left a memory and seeded no lasting fear.
Moments of fear leave vivid memories in the midst of an otherwise vague sense of months and years, like singularities in a smooth flow of creation. I don’t remember where I spent the nights and how I got to the worksite on this island in the middle of the Saint Lawrence, but I remember that brief moment when I felt a pang of fear Something similar happened in the panic attacks I experienced a decade later. I still remember where I was, how I felt, and how I escaped those dreadful claims on my future life; while the surrounding months have very few vivid memories that stand out from the lava flow of those days. The moments of grace in which I was delivered from those times of panic are also still vividly present along with the gratitude I own them.
Moments of fear and redemption help me to recover the life I have lived. It’s not as if my usual interpretations are inherently wrong, but there is a cover-up going on when I don’t honor the moments of grace without which I would be an ice sculpture melting away–not taking a step.
I can’t change the decisions I’ve made, the course I have followed, or the outcomes that ensued. But, even now, late in the day, I hope to shine a light on what is diminished in memory, and honor the moments when life opened its doors, in spite of how hard I tried to keep them closed.
Venturing into the shadows of decades long past, I see three times in the mid-1960’s (in Mobile, Alabama, on a supply boat in BC, and under the Saint Lawrence River) when I was given opportunities to experience other parts of life that, in their different ways, could not have been more different than the college-educated office job I walked away from. It’s not as if I haven’t remembered those experiences all these years. But I must not have given the world credit for its gifts, and its capacity to offer them, or I would not have collapsed in fear a decade later.
Now, in another century, many of us feel that the fate of our very world is no longer in our hands. I want to ask myself, as a concerned watcher of our aging democracy, whether I have the eyes to see the light beckoning through the branches where I least expect it. Do I still have it in me to show up with a heart that hasn’t forgotten those unexpected moments of grace?
At another time, I’d like to ask another question. To be present to this life, do we have to go more deeply into our own being, whether we’re struggling with depression or comfortable for the moment; do we have to venture into the world, seeking paths we haven’t trod before; or have we just forgotten the paths that brought us here, which haven’t yet finished carrying us?