Chapter 9 — Canada

A country I had imagined before I saw it, a journey that began with a relationship, years of driving and travel, and one of the patchiest periods in my memory.

A Country I Had Heard About Before I Saw It

Canada existed in my imagination before I ever went there.

Part of that began when I was about sixteen and working at The Yea Chronicle.

Late one Friday afternoon a Canadian came into the newspaper office looking for a place where significant fossils had apparently been found.

I did not know about anything famous.

I did know where very old fossil leaves could be found in a council gravel pit.

That turned out to be the place he was looking for.

He stayed with my family overnight and spent time telling me about the country he came from.

He had grown up with the plains of Alberta and the Rocky Mountains in the distance.

He spoke about Calgary and about the enormous rodeo held there.

I had never seen Canada.

But he gave me a picture of it.

Years Later

Several years passed before Canada became something more than a story told to me in Yea.

By then I had been driving coaches.

I had travelled around Australia with geologists and other scientists.

I had seen deserts, mountain ranges, tropical country and landscapes I had previously known only from maps.

Then I met a Canadian girl.

I fell in love.

And I followed her to Canada.

My memory places this around 1972 or 1973, when I was in my early twenties.

The exact chronology is one of the things I still need to reconstruct.

Calgary

When I eventually saw Calgary, another old memory returned.

I remembered the Canadian who had walked into The Chronicle years earlier.

I remembered him talking about the rodeo.

I remembered his description of the plains and the Rockies beyond them.

Now I could see the country he had been describing.

There is something strange about arriving in a landscape that has already existed in your mind for years.

The place is new.

But part of it feels remembered.

That happened repeatedly in my life.

Someone would describe a place or an idea.

Years later I would find myself standing inside it.

Learning to Drive There

Driving had already become one of the things I knew how to do well.

But knowing how to drive Australian coaches and trucks did not mean I could simply arrive in Canada and continue as before.

There were licences and different rules.

There were also air brakes.

I remember having to qualify for a heavy-vehicle licence involving an air-brake examination.

I studied the material intensively for perhaps a couple of weeks.

My recollection is that I achieved a perfect result on the test.

That pleased me.

Driving machinery had always made sense to me when I could understand how the machinery itself worked.

Air

Air brakes also introduced me to problems I had not encountered in the same way in Australia.

Moisture could collect in the reserve tanks.

In severe cold that moisture could freeze.

A system that worked perfectly in one climate could become dangerous in another.

It was another practical lesson in something I had already begun to understand:

the environment matters.

The same machine does not behave identically everywhere.

Continental Trailways

I also spent time connected with Continental Trailways and its driver training.

Again, there are parts of the sequence I cannot now place with confidence.

I remember the driving school.

I remember learning the local systems.

I remember adapting skills I already possessed to a different country.

What I do not yet have is a clean line telling me precisely what came before and what came afterwards.

That absence of sequence is characteristic of much of my Canadian memory.

British Columbia

Vancouver and British Columbia became another part of that period.

I remember travelling north.

Prince George appears in those memories.

There were trucks.

There was work.

There was an enormous country stretching north and west.

The scale of it suited something in me.

Australia had already taught me to think in large distances.

Canada gave me another version of that experience.

Mountains, forests and long roads replaced some of the deserts and open country I had driven through at home.

Stanley Park

One of the useful things about memory is that sometimes a small event provides a date anchor when years themselves become uncertain.

For me, one such memory involves Stanley Park in Vancouver.

I remember an Easter event there involving the Easter Being.

That memory has helped me work backwards and forwards trying to establish when I was actually in Canada.

It also made me realise recently that I may have been a couple of years older during parts of this period than I had previously thought.

The calendar and my memory had not quite matched.

That is precisely the sort of thing this book needs to preserve rather than conceal.

The Patchiest Part

When I try to tell the Canadian period as a continuous story, I run into difficulty.

I have described it as perhaps the patchiest part of my life.

There are scenes.

There are roads.

There are people.

There are incidents I can describe in considerable detail.

But putting them into the right order can be much harder.

At times the memories resemble photographs that have fallen from an album.

The individual photographs still exist.

The pages that told me where they belonged are missing.

North

One of those fragments involves trying to travel towards Alaska.

I remember attempting part of the journey by hitchhiking.

I also remember being robbed.

There are details around that episode that I do not yet trust myself to place accurately enough for a finished account.

So for the moment I leave it as a marker.

I was young.

I was travelling a very long way from Yea.

And I was living with a degree of risk that, looking back now, sometimes astonishes me.

Work That Is Harder to Explain

Some of my recollections from Canada involve people and work that I later understood as connected with activities well outside ordinary employment.

I have previously described driving trucks for people whom I understood or believed to have connections with organised crime.

There were also memories involving drugs and money.

Those are claims I want to handle cautiously.

At present I can describe what I remember believing and what I remember doing.

I cannot yet document the identity or affiliations of everyone involved.

That distinction matters.

This book does not improve by turning uncertain memories into confident accusations.

Across the Border

My Canadian memories also spill across the border into the United States.

One fragment involves Las Vegas.

Another involves money and what I understood at the time to be a form of repayment or retaliation connected with people I had worked for.

Again, I have fragments rather than a chronology I am prepared to call settled.

These stories may eventually require a chapter of their own.

For the moment they belong here as evidence of how difficult it is for me to make the Canadian period behave like an ordinary travel story.

The Visa

Eventually there was also the problem of my immigration status.

I overstayed my visa.

The journey that had begun with following someone I loved did not end with a carefully planned flight home.

It ended with immigration authorities.

I was detained.

Ultimately I was deported from Canada.

That is a stark sentence.

There is considerably more around it than the sentence contains.

A Psychologist

One important consequence of that detention was an encounter I did not anticipate.

I met someone trained in psychology.

As I remember it, this was the first time I had encountered a trained psychologist in circumstances where my own history could become part of the discussion. In writing that I recall that this infact was a second psychologist although in very different circumstances.

That matters because psychological language would later occupy an enormous and often troubling place in my life.

At that stage I had little idea where that road would lead.

I was simply a young Australian in Canada whose life had become complicated enough to attract the attention of authorities.

Coming Home

Eventually I returned to Australia.

I had travelled through country that the Canadian visitor to Yea had once described to me.

I had driven.

I had worked.

I had fallen in love.

I had encountered people and situations that I still struggle to place properly.

And I came home with another set of experiences that did not fit easily into the story of the person who had left.

What Was I Doing?

Looking back, I sometimes wonder what drove me through those years.

Some of it was work.

Some of it was love.

Some of it was curiosity.

Some of it may have been escape.

I do not know that there was a single explanation.

I had already learned that movement could change the world around me.

Driving a coach through Australia had shown me landscapes that existed beyond the boundaries of childhood.

Canada took that much further.

The Boy From Yea

There is a line connecting some of these events that I could not have seen at the time.

A Canadian walks into a small newspaper office in Yea looking for fossils.

A sixteen-year-old sends him to a gravel pit.

The Canadian tells the boy about Alberta, Calgary, the rodeo and the Rocky Mountains.

Several years later that boy is driving scientists across Australia.

Later again he follows a Canadian woman across the Pacific.

Then one day he finds himself looking at the plains and mountains he had first encountered as somebody else's description.

Lives contain connections like that.

They are obvious only afterwards.

Memory Without a Map

The journey with the geologists had no fixed route, but I can still reconstruct a great deal of it from places, landscapes and events.

Canada is different.

The difficulty is not merely geographical.

It is autobiographical.

I know that these things happened within a period of my life.

I do not always know where one belongs in relation to another.

That is frustrating when I try to write a conventional autobiography.

For this book, however, it may be useful.

It demonstrates something I have been trying to understand throughout these chapters.

A memory does not become worthless because its neighbouring memories are missing.

Nor does vividness prove that every interpretation attached to the memory is correct.

The task is to preserve what I know, identify what I think, and leave space around what remains uncertain.

Canada Is Not Finished

This is not yet the complete Canadian chapter.

There are people whose places in the story need to be reconstructed.

There are journeys whose order needs checking.

There are probably documents, photographs and old writings that will supply dates I no longer carry reliably in memory.

There may also be things I have not remembered yet.

When I return to the early pages of my blog and to other records, I expect this chapter to change substantially.

That does not trouble me.

The incomplete version has something to say too.

Canada is where the gaps themselves become unusually visible.

For now, I leave those gaps open.