Dear all,

An American blogger based in Cologne whose writings I’ve only recently started to follow in any depth came out with something today that made me think hard about why I left Canada. In his Karnaval 2007 entry he says, “anyone who leaves the known for the unknown has to be a little desperate, a bit brave and a little bit of a dreamer, and it is the dreamer part of the equation that interests me.”

Is that why I left? Was I a bit desperate? Was I a bit brave? Was I just a dreamer?

Just the other day I got into a taxi and after a while the guy says to me, “hey, you’re not from around here, are ya? You from Denmark?

Then I tell him that I grew up in this little town just up the road from Vancouver half-way to the tiny little ski hill where they are going to hold the 2010 Olympics and if you’ve seen the movie Cousins or dozens of other films and TV shows you’ll know the road. It’s cut into the side of a fjord and incredibly beautiful!

Having already launched into my schpiel I go on to tell him that the mountains plunge straight into the ocean, the town where I went to High School is right at its head and calls itself the Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada because you’ve got the ocean and rivers and lakes and a 300-metre-high waterfall and hiking and fishing and camping and mountain-climbing and mountain biking and kayaking and windsurfing and sailing and lots of wildlife such as whales and bears and more bald eagles than in Alaska! Even if you live in the city you can be on your windsurfer in the morning, get bored, pack up your gear, strap the skis on the roof and be skiing a half-hour later overlooking the city. Hey, they call it Lotus Land!

As I’m saying all this I can see out of the corner of my eye he’s looking at me like he’s picked up a REAL LOSER for this fare, boy, cuz why would anybody with the birthright to stay in such a place pick up and leave to go live in what he called a dump like Germany? By then of course the ride was over and I never got a chance to say much more than, “cuz I just NEEDED to…”

Canada may be a magnet for people from all over the world and the West Coast the place many born in Canada dream of living one day, but I always thought I was destined for somewhere else. Though I grew up enjoying most of everything this treasured jewel has to offer, it wasn’t me. We grew up with the sons and daughters of miners and loggers, pulp- and sawmill workers: solid, salt-of-the-earth people who would go out of their way to rip the shirt of their back to help you, and then give you their back.

Not all of their kids grew up to be miners or loggers or millworkers, but many did, some starting out by lying about their age so they could get summer jobs at those high union wages. Once out of school, they were there full-time. I admire them immensely, but it wasn’t a life I saw myself leading. Teaching? Nope. I neglected to consider all those little brats running around. Journalism? Great, but by the time I figured out that’s what I wanted to do, from my vantage point in Sherbrooke, Quebec I saw myself moving on to Flin Flon, Manitoba, and then, if I got really, really lucky, Winnipeg and maybe even Edmonton. Nothing against any of those places, but by the time you’ve worked your way through them, you’re 40 and frost-bitten.

So if there was desperation and courage in my decision to pack it all in and drive a fully loaded car clear across North America – twice – once to leave Vancouver for Montreal, and then back to Vancouver again four years later to sell everything before flying to Hong Kong – it was grounded more in a desire to jump-start my life to the next level than anything else. It stirred up the pot, forced me to tackle new challenges, surmount new difficulties, make mistakes, fall down and get back up again.

Then I look at the boatloads of desperate and courageous Africans and Asians who spend their life savings to make their way through perilous seas, risking their lives in leaky tubs to arrive in the Canary Islands or Lampedusa, hungry and drawn with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and no guarantee they won’t be sent from this far-flung toehold on European affluence back to the life with no future they left behind and I think: not only do they have 10 times the courage and desperation, they have their dreams of a better life, too. We all do, wherever we’re from, wherever we’re going.

© 2007 lettershometoyou