Could've Been a Canadian

  “YOU’RE MORE CANADIAN THAN I AM!”

  Those words were blurted out at me at the height of an argument between me and a co-worker who was, indeed, a Canadian.  He had made the USA his home a few years earlier.

  I don’t remember what the argument was about, it was probably about politics, something The Canadian was really into.  He was really into conservative talk radio…Rush Limbaugh, guys like that.  One time I told the boss, no, make that a couple of times I suggested to the boss that he should give The Canadian his own talk show.  We might have to hire a security guard, we might have to invest in a delay mechanism but I believed a radio talk show with The Canadian would boost the ratings of our little AM radio station.

  I suppose I irritated The Canadian with my nonchalance about something political, with my live-and-let-live view of the world.

  But anyway, that’s what he yelled at me.

  “YOU’RE MORE CANADIAN THAN I AM.”

  I took it as a compliment.

  Here in angry, rabid, hyper-partisan 21^st century America my appreciation of things Canadian would probably be misunderstood. 

  I love my United States of America, but back when I was a boy, when I was a Boy Scout, Canada was a Boy Scout’s paradise:  Hundreds of thousands of square miles of deep forests for camping, mountain ranges for hiking, vast freshwater lakes for canoeing, and big ol’ rivers like the north-flowing Mackenzie for adventuresome canoe trips.

  My appreciation of things Canadian was probably helped along by having a scoutmaster who was French-Canadian and spoke of a bygone day growing up in Quebec and Maine.

  Plus I had a subscription to the “old school” outdoor magazine “Fur Fish & Game” that had stories of “bold adventure” in the Canadian wilds.

  And I’ll be real with you…The Vietnam War was going on and I was seeing it every night when Walter Cronkite came on with the evening news.  From a distance it seemed the Canadians weren’t too interested in waging any kind of war anywhere.

  So when my dad, The World’s Greatest Hotel Manager, spoke of possibly landing a job as the manager of a huge hotel in the Canadian Rockies I got all hopped up.

  This was around 1972.

  “How would you like to live in the Canadian Rockies, boy?” he asked one afternoon when I came home from school.

  Dad and Mom were sitting at the dining room table.

  “I’m being considered for a job with the Canadian Pacific Railway running their big hotel in Banff on Lake Louise.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Then his face turned stern as it usually did.

  “Now don’t tell anyone,” he said.

  Dad was like that…never tell anything to anyone.  Including me.  I never knew much about his work and God forbid I ask him how much money he made as I did a time or two out of curiosity.  The answer was “None of your damn business, boy.”  I wondered if he got that from being in World War II, not letting anyone know your business…’cos what I did know about his job in the Army was he had to keep a lot of secrets.

  It didn’t make for good storytelling, but then Dad never told many stories about anything.  Now his mom, my grandmother?  SHE could tell stories, but that’s another story.

  Dad never usually told me anything about his job plans.  I reckon age had mellowed The Old Man.  Dad’s frequent changing of jobs in pursuit of personal glory was taking its toll on him getting gigs.  Here we were in 1972 and he was out of work.  In the fall of 1971 he quit his last job in Baltimore over some disagreement with the owners of the place he was managing.  Dad, Mom and me were living with his parents back in his home town of Roanoke, Virginia.

  I looked up all the stuff I could about Banff.  It was in the high Canadian Rockies in Alberta.  The hotel was a HUGE thing.  I don’t know if they still do but back then they closed up for the winter, I wondered what we would do in that time.  The place was by a giant blue lake with huge rocky peaks rising in the background.  Moose and elk moseyed over the hotel grounds grazing.

  I started taking an inventory of all my camping and hiking stuff…backpack, sleeping bag, mess kit, Coleman stove and lantern, axe for cutting big ol’ trees to make a cabin.  Who was I kidding about THAT?  I never got the knack of sharpening an axe.

  It would’ve been a Boy Scout’s dream come true.

  It was not to be.

  A few weeks later I learned that Dad simply didn’t get the job.

  Dad wouldn’t work again until early 1973 when he took a hunk of his life savings…it might’ve been all of it… and bought into a hotel in Michigan. 

  Sometime in between then and then I stopped being a Boy Scout and took an interest in girls and rock ‘n’ roll.

  I took French lessons in high school and fantasized about going to live in Maine, cutting trees, becoming a writer, getting checks in the mail for my writings, meeting a French speaking girl from Quebec and having a couple of curly haired kids that just laughed all the time and live happily ever after.

  And there was no one around to slap me in the face and say, “WAKE UP, DUMBASS!”

  To this day when “National Geographic” magazine has an article on Canada’s mountains, forests, rivers, lakes and wildlands I pore through it….

…and wonder.

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