Work

When I was 23, I graduated as an electrical engineer and started to look for a job. The work situation was not so good and I was tired of writing application letters and receiving polite rejections, so I decided to get on the train and go across Canada to look for work. I started in Ottawa, and stayed in a youth hostel that was at one time a prison. My first visit was to Leigh Instrument in Carlton Place. The company, Leigh Instruments was in a hermetically sealed building. A few years later, after an increase in flu cases, it was discovered that the air conditioning and filtering system was not working properly. The company built flight recorders that recorded the movements of planes. The company's claim to fame was to have their system on the Air Force One, the airplanes used by the American presidents. The black boxes were designed to survive a plane crash and contained a recording of the plane’s movements before the crash and a beacon to help locate it. 

I presented myself and asked to speak with the chief engineer. I immediately got my first job. I was just in the right place at the right time and met the right person. I enjoyed the occasional test flights I had to go on to calibrate the equipment as the pilot flew the plane to its limits making steep turns and climbs and drops recorded for later analysis.

The moped that took me all over Europe started to take me all over the wonderful area I lived in. It was filled with historic left behind places hidden from the main roads. I did a lot of exploring. There was an abandoned pink quartz quarry that was especially interesting. Once I found a hidden historic building to find it guarded by 2 black Danes who forced me to a slow backward retreat back to the main road, which suddenly seemed much farther on my retreat than on my entrance. 

I soon bought my first car, a red VW bug. I bought it before I had a driving license and had it delivered to the big parking lot at work on a Friday. After work when the parking lot was empty, I drove around till the man in a house nearby came out to see what I was doing driving around the parking lot. When I explained that I was learning how to drive, he offered to teach me the next day if I stopped to circle around the lot because my headlights were shining into his bedroom and he couldn't sleep. 

He drove with me around the back roads on Saturday and on Sunday we advanced to the main roads. A few days later I got my driving license and the next Friday after work I drove the highway to Montreal, which was a horrifying experience. Hitting Montreal at rush hour reminded me of my first moped ride around the Arch de Triumph. I surprised my mother by picking her up from work in the hospital and driving her home in my new car.

During the winter, I drove it to go to skiing. I went once to Vermont and remember the beautiful piano music in the bar, and the nice cross country skiing in the woods. Mostly I went up north to the Laurentians. The first time I went skiing, I fractured my leg, and surprised my mother by showing up in the emergency for an X-Ray during her shift. The VW always started in the coldest weather, and never got stuck in the snow. The main problem was that the windshield was very close to my face and was continually frosted in winter. I had to continually scratch the window with a key to be able to look out thru the scratches. But for starting and going, it was the best. I was able to help many bigger cars that were stuck and needed a booster or a pull.

One weekend I went skiing in the Laurentians and driving back home on a clear winter night I was shocked to go thru the same place and town a second time. According to the map, I must have driven unintentionally across a frozen lake. Many times I would end up arriving home without ever remembering going thru the towns along the way. It was great to have a car. Many times I would on the urge of the moment drive to far away places. I made friends with Pierre, a brilliant technician who lived in the next town. I would visit him and his wife who was a great fan of Elvis Presley. I had a great boss, a young engineer from Holland whom I also found brilliant. I was very happy with my car and felt free to go when and where I wanted. Once I ran out of gasoline at top of a hill and was lucky to be able to coast to a gas station at the bottom of the hill. 

I was very happy with my first apartment. I made my own table which was a very low round coffee table with pillows for seats. I made shelves from boards and even had parrots that I let fly around the room. I did not have a TV and read a lot. One of my work colleagues, Marie took special care of me at work and treated me as a son. She had a sewing machine and offered to help me make a gigantic foam stuffed sofa couch that I used as my bed. The stuffing was electrostatic and she found bits of it in all odd places months after our comical ordeal of stuffing it. 

I felt very comfortable and was very happy with my independence. What I wanted and needed most was a girlfriend. So I invited Sylvia who I met 2 and 1/2 years ago in Europe. She was from Saskatchewan and she was my first guest in my first home. We eventually took a holiday together and had a brief but memorable love affair that gave me wonderful memories of her magnificent diner she had waiting for me in my mother's apartment and of making love on the beach on Prince Edward Island and that night in the tent during the fierce storm. We kept in touch for a while with many midnight telephone calls.

I met Hyme in 1973, a teacher who lived close by in Carlton Place. We went to Quebec City once and unfortunately slowly found out over a few months that we had practically no common interests except sex. We went on short holidays together. I was very lonely and had few friends. David Whiteley from England was one that I admired greatly. We started work at about the same time. He soon got married and started a family and was very involved with the boy scouts. He invited me to many of his outings and he did really crazy things with the young scouts like canoe outings to break up the ice and walks in the woods at night in winter. 

David married Katherine who had a family summer cottage that was very remote. It was very easy to get lost in the dense and rugged woods filled with cliffs, lakes and rivers. If you lose the road, then you can walk in almost any direction for hundreds of kilometers without finding another road. The mosquitoes are so hungry and aggressive that people who got lost usually die from attacking mosquitoes. They are very big and can bite thru clothing and they are relentless, attacking till you have no more energy to keep them away. David and Kathrine invited me to spend one week with them in their cottage. It was at the edge of some dense woods and one day we went a bit farther than we should have and we were lost for a while that seemed to last a lot longer. 

I got involved in the canoe club, and we did the annual river rides. I cross-country skied in the winter and white-water canoed in the summer. I tried everything from piloting, parachuting and gliding. All my friends were married and I was very lonely. I tried to find companionship in the nightclubs and the more I went the more frustrated I became. It is not that I didn't find people there. It was frustrating that they were only one night stands. I joined an esoteric group called IAM and took their courses. But I just could not find a lonely girl to do all of these thing with.

I wanted to try everything. I was afraid of heights, so I took a coarse in parachuting. On my very first and last jump I momentarily forgot where I was after jumping out and when I finally pulled the cord, I did not recognize where I should land. I ended p landing in a field very far from where I should have landed, I met a couple Brian and Diana Jess and we immediately bonded when I told them that I was raised up in a Weredale House. Diana was a social worker who worked in a house for kids just like the kids in Weredale House. She was the live in mom in a house with about 10 kids. It sounded a lot more personal and like a family when compared to the institutionalized Weredale House which was more like a jail. They looked very comical together as Brian was very tall and skinny and Diana was very short. They lived on a farm close by. And their dream was to open up a “farm“ for troubled kids. 

Diane was from Quebec and she invited me to her family's maple sugar farm. In April when there is still snow on the ground, and the days are longer and warmer, the sap stored in the roots flows up to the top of the trees to nourish the twigs that will soon form buds in the spring. The trees are bled or milked of the sap by hammering hollow nails into the trees and hanging a bucket to collect the sap drop by drop. Horses pull a sleigh thru the wood to collect the sap from the forest and to bring it to be boiled into a syrup over a huge outdoor fire. The syrup is poured on a ball of snow and everyone has a taste to determine when it is ready. 

One night I had a very interesting out of body experience. I was lying on my sofa/bed and felt too heavy to move. I felt myself rolling off the bed thinking I would hit the floor. To my amazement I floated out thru the door and down the stairs, as if slowly sliding down a slide. I found myself hovering over the street looking at an old woman with a scarf walking away.  

Then I just got bored with the past 3 years and yearning to see the Rockies once again, I decided to quit my job and move out west. 

In the summer of 1975 I packed my VW and started my drive across Canada. On my first day, I picked up a hitch-hiker and we rented a canoe and paddled to a remote lodge in the Canadian wilderness. It was very exciting as we had to do a lot of portaging to get there. A few times we were not quite sure if we would find the remote island with the lodge but in the end we managed to find it and we stayed a few days swimming, eating, reading and talking. We were all alone. 

I went bicycling in the prairies before reaching Vancouver Island and taking a boat up to Alaska. 

I followed the Chilcoot Pass that the gold miners used during the gold rush of 1900. They ended up in Dawson City, a thriving city of 40,000 from all over the world hoping to strike gold and become rich. It was like walking thru a bit of history. The trail was cluttered with abandoned machinery like rusted skeletons.

I saw Mount McKinley pink as a crystal so high that the earth's horizon cast a shadow on it when the sun was setting.

I was hiking by myself in the back country going to a hikers cabin when I met Linda. It was like finding a gold nugget. All she was wearing was her shirt and her boots. She was going to the same cabin I was going to. It was like a dream. The valley was filled with streams that we had to wade thru to get to the cabin. Before we arrived at the cabin, she stopped at a stream and washed between her legs. When we finally arrived at the cabin, we jumped on the bed and we made love. She laughed at me for being so inexperienced. She was from California where she worked as a kindergarten teacher. We had a few nice days together and when she had to return home, we exchanged addresses.

I went back down to Vancouver and hiked the famous West Coast Trail that saved many ship wrecked sailors in the past. Without the trail it was impossible to walk along the rugged coast overgrown by the rain forest jungle with trees 100 meters high and trunks 3 meters wide. There were 20 meter ladders going up the slopes that were too steep for a trail. 

I visited Terry, the daughter of Marie with whom I worked with in Carlton Place. Her boyfriend was Ben and they both had a big motorcycle in their garage. They had taken the bikes apart and were in the process of putting them back together. He sold cannabis and showed me his suitcase of all his products like they were bottles of rare wine. He chose his highest quality and I had my very first experience of being ”high“. We went walking in the park nearby with his big dog. I remember as the cannabis was taking effect, it was like putting on glasses and seeing really clearly for the first time. I did get a bit paranoid that I would lose him and be more than just lost in my mind, but lost in a neighborhood not knowing how to find his apartment again. We had a great evening and when it was time to go to sleep, I was really concerned that I would end up peeing in my bed. 

I met Willy Carpenter, a boy who lived at Weredale Home at the same time I did. Willy Carpenter was married and he was going to set up a gas station somewhere in Alberta. We reminisced how he protected me from one of the Malerik brothers who had a habit of terrorizing me. I was happy to meet his wife. They were going to set up a gas station somewhere between Calgary and Vancouver. I also met Kay Howe who I knew from four years before where I worked at Jasper Park Lodge. Both of them had found partners and were married. 

Then I started to look for work. I got a job right away with a small upstart Hungarian Consultant firm and got to know Zsigmond and Palma Pal, a newly arrived young family from Hungary. I remember seeing the finance director, an elderly man, crying because business was going so slow. I quickly changed jobs and ended up at the Alberta Gas Trunk Line Company in the department that was automating their control systems along the 5,000km pipeline. I had an office on one of the top floors of a newly built 35-story office block. The site of Calgary and the Rockies were magnificent, but I hated the work. I did enjoy the trips up the barren north to the isolated stations along the pipeline.

Computers were available for the first time that could be built as kits by soldering components on a circuit board. My boss came up with the idea that instead of driving 500km to a remote station to close a valve along the gas pipeline, sensors along the pipeline could be used by these primitive computers to control the valves automatically. Most thought this idea a little foolhardy and opposed it. My boss was able to convince the company to give his project a try. My job was to write and test the programs and punch them out on paper tapes. Then I had to drive to these remote stations and install these computers. Every letter and document that I wrote took a few days. First to write it so that the secretary could type it and send it out by express post which took 2 or 3 days to deliver.

The University of Calgary Orchestra was open to outsiders and they were looking for double bass players and I was accepted. I enjoyed it very much and spent many evenings spaced out listening to the pieces we were practicing. I was lucky to have beside me another bass player who was more professional than amateur, so I got away with playing the easy parts, and faking the difficult parts. I joined with the hopes of meeting a lady. After one of our performances, dressed in my tuxedo, I hit enough right notes to get invited home by a cellist. She had a well illustrated table top book on sex and before I knew it, she was waiting for me in her bed with her legs spread out wide. And we made wonderful music together. 

I met women in bars and when I told them that I was an engineer, many were willing to start a relationship which eventually ended up in bed which was my goal. When the ladies realized that I was a dope smoking hippy who wanted a girl companion for white water canoeing, skiing, hiking, and camping, most of them quickly disappeared. There was a girl named Nancy who had the biggest breasts that I have ever imagined. We went hiking in the mountain in the nude. Most of my search for a steady girlfriend ended up to be one-night stands. 

I met Ronay Moritz in 1976. She was very religious. One day we went to a movie that had a scene where children were peeking thru a hole in the wall to see their parents making love. She got so upset at the scene that she got up and walked out. She convinced me to buy a house in the suburbs of Calgary. It was a split level with the 2 stories looking like 4 floors. It was in the suburbs of Calgary and the back yard faced the empty foothills where I could walk a few minutes and find myself in nature as if the houses suddenly disappeared. Living in my own house was very nice but commuting to work was very difficult, especially in winter. The buses did not have special lanes and were stuck in traffic with the cars. The ride took nearly 2 hours each way and the people were packed in so tight that we could not remove our winter coats. When I got on the bus, it was already full and I had to stand the entire way. Going from minus 40 degrees below zero into a bus so hot that it seemed to be like a sauna, caused me to have constant colds. 

I was very active in my free time on weekends going skiing, hiking, crawling around caves, canoeing, riding horses, and taking flying lessons. It was only when I was sick in bed with my cold that I felt relaxed enough to do nothing but read. 

Ronay and I had great sex. She really knew how to please a man no matter where - even in a camper with my family when one summer Shah and my sister drove my mother and David up from Welland. I wanted to travel and have a good time; she wanted to settle down and have a family. She was very conservative and we had very few common interests other than sex and she eventually scared me away.

I ended up driving alone to California in my VW for a holiday. I walked down the Grand Canyon which really amazed me. It was snowing on top of the rim, and warm 2km below on the canyon bottom. Walking down was like tripping thru time. Each meter drop signified one million years it took the river to carve out.

In Las Vegas, I played 10$ which lasted only a few minutes, and walked around all night dazed by all the lights. I drove thru death-valley before arriving in San Francisco where I was amazed by the talent displayed by people entertaining for pennies in the streets. I was amazed by the size of the Golden Gate bridge, and the size of the giant Sequoia red wood trees, up to 200m tall and 10m wide and a few thousand years old.

Then I saw the billions of Monarch butterfly come from 1000s of km away covering the eucalyptus trees as part of their cycle of life. I wanted to see a bit of Mexico, so I decided to go down to San Diego, and to visit Tijuana. The road suddenly ended up in what I assumed to be a garbage dump with garbage strewn all over the place. When I had a closer look, I realized that the pieces of tin roofing scattered about were shacks with people living in them. I got such a shock at this realization that I immediately had to leave. My VW died and I left it behind in Mexico.

I bought a small Toyota Corolla pickup truck with the back covered that I used to camp out in. Many times after skiing, I took an outdoor bath in a hot pool. I was looking for a fun mate and just could not find one. I took various courses from rock and ice climbing, to edible plants mainly with the fading hopes of finding and falling in love with a lonely girl that had the same interests as me. I had many magic moments canoeing down rapids, cross-country skiing in the moonlight, nature hikes, and even taking flying lessons and doing my first landing. But I did all of that alone and I was very lonely.

I didn't have any luck in finding a partner, although I had many short lasting romances. I went out to the mountains nearby. In winter I cross country skied into remote valleys, and stayed overnight in cabins that were always empty. One weekend I made a trip with a colleague I worked with. We took the ski lift up to the top and cross country skied down the valley on the other side. It was more difficult than I thought to go down the valley and I felt lucky I was not alone. We found ourselves in the middle of a steep slope when the sun went down. As soon as the sun went down and everything turned dark, the full moon came up and the fresh fallen snow glittered in the moon light.

The moonlight cast a very dark shadow on the sparkling fresh fallen snow. It was like wearing sun glasses on a sunny day. We could see the cabin in the distance from above and it was like skiing in the day. We could even read our map in the moonlight. Once we settled down, I went out by myself for a ski along the valley. I was so dazed, that I skied almost into a moose. I was about 5 meters away when I saw him. He looked at me, I looked at him and I turned around and skied away. I suppose the moonlight enchanted him into a daze just like it did to me.

I met a very interesting polish family who were friends of my mother. The grandmother was a very famous writer and painter. She had 2 daughters Julia and Magdalene. Julia, an artist, had a skiing accident where she fell into a crevasse too deep for the ropes to reach her. When she was finally rescued by a helicopter team, she was close to being paralyzed from the neck down. Lulu, her daughter was studying to be an archaeologist. 

Lulu was a very shy and reserved girl who I tried to get into my bed, but could not. We went dancing a few times and I fell in love with her. Her house was a very large villa on the banks of the stream from the water reservoir for Calgary. On hot summer days, we took air mattresses to float down the stream like it was a water ride in an amusement park. 

I had an aluminum canoe and was looking for a partner to go down white water rapids in the rivers nearby. Unfortunately for me, Lulu thought I was a bit crazy. They had a cottage near Banff in the Rockies, and we went cross country skiing around the cottage. I was looking for a partner who would cross country ski up to the glaciers with me. Lulu thought that that was crazy as well. 

Magdalene was a geologist famous for discovering coal in Alberta. Her husband Harold just finished building a sail boat that he wanted to sail around the world in. Thru them I met Julius, an architect my age who immigrated from Poland, and a cowgirl called Cass who lived on a ranch a few hours away. I was invited on occasions to the ranch to help out. I was able to do a bit of everything from ploughing the field to riding the horses. I rode so much that I got to the point of occasionally feeling one with the horse. In return, I invited her for canoe trips.

I wanted to try everything there was to do. Not so much to do them, but more to just try them. There were many caves in the area where you walk the insides of mountains. Instead of open trails, you were in tunnels. I took a basic climbing coarse both on rocks and glaciers. 

I took flying lessons. I reached the point where I could land a plane with strong crosswinds all by myself. But when I was finally allowed to go up by myself, without an instructor to continue for my pilot license, I decided that the expense was not worth it. I was satisfied with knowing that I had tried flying a plane by myself. 

One day Cass and I registered as professional photographers to reserve a place at the Park for watching the grizzly bears and the bald headed eagles compete to catch the dying salmon on their way to spawn at the place where they were born. 

I had many visitors from friends that I left behind back east. Diana and her husband Brian Jess with whom I parachuted, and David Whitely and his wife Kathrine with whom I canoed visited me in Calgary. And so did Linda, the girl I met in Alaska. I took Linda cross country skiing and we stayed overnight in a cabin. She thought I was a really tough and wild cowboy.

But the visits were short and I felt very lonely. I just could not find the right partner. Either they had or wanted to have children right away, or they only wanted to have sex. I was looking for someone who wanted to travel and have a good time before having children. So I spent my weekends hiking, caving, skiing, and canoeing mostly alone. I bought a house, and rented some of the rooms out to try to get some company in my loneliness but couldn't attract the right people. I wanted someone to go travel and share my interests with. And I could not find anyone. To soothe my troubled soul, I wrote poetry.
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