An Ever Wrong Direction

By Mark Anthony Bernard

This is the true story of a boy growing up in post WWII London, England, with the dark aftereffects of the war still visible in some of the buildings and the personalities of the people who suffered through it all. The occasional family outings to beaches, parks, and the green rolling hills of Wales to visit relatives triggered a dream to one day explore and live in a wide-open country far away from the gloomy, crowded city life. The Canadian adventures that follow, some fun and some almost fatal, are a fulfillment of that dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886447255

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1: Hitchhiking and Reminiscing

Chapter 2: Looking for Meaning

Chapter 3: Hopping Freight Trains

Chapter 4: On the Road Again

Chapter 5: Rodeo Time

Chapter 6: Sixty-five Degrees Below Zero

Chapter 7: Prairie City Blues

Chapter 8: A Trail, a Beach, and a Bear

Chapter 9: From a Ranch to a Mine

Chapter 10: Back to the Big City

Chapter 11: Yukon Bound

Chapter 12: The Moose Hunt

Chapter 13: I'll Be Home for Christmas

Chapter 14: My Northern Refuge

Chapter 15: Keno Hill Silver Mine

Chapter 16: Dangerous with a Gun

Chapter 17: Trial by Marriage

Chapter 18: Dawson City—Good and Bad

Chapter 19: Trying to Be a Family

Chapter 20: Involuntary Time-Out

Chapter 21: A Second Chance

Chapter 22: The Mouse in the Honey Jar

Chapter 23: An Almost Fatal Moose Hunt

Chapter 24: The Cardboard Cabin

Chapter 25: The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits

Chapter 26: The Turning Point

Chapter 27: Sabotaged by the 1898 Goldrush

Chapter 28: The End and Beginning

Chapter 29: The Old Man Fights Back

Chapter 30: Moose, Lucifer, and a Broken Arm

Chapter 31: A Hopeful Reunion

Chapter 32: Trying to Work It Out

Chapter 33: God's Jailhouse Visit

Chapter 34: Inner Change that I Could See

Chapter 35: Free Again

Chapter 36: Grizzly Bear Stories

Chapter 37: Doomsday Approaches

Chapter 38: The Reckoning

Chapter 39: A New Job, a Dangerous Bear

Chapter 40: An Iffy Decision

Chapter 41: Miraculous Answers to Prayer

Chapter 42: A Taste of Missions

Chapter 43: A Novice Lumberjack

Chapter 44: Back in Town

Chapter 45: Three Blind Men and an Elephant

Chapter 46: Director God

Chapter 47: A Match Made in Heaven

Chapter 48: The Three-Month Countdown: Part 1

Chapter 49: The Three-Month Countdown: Part 2

Chapter 50: The Dreaded Border Crossing

Chapter 51: Dodge City, Here I Come

Chapter 52: The End and the Beginning of the New Road

About the Author

cover.jpg

An Ever Wrong Direction

Mark Anthony Bernard

ISBN 979-8-88644-724-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88644-725-5 (Digital)

Copyright © 2023 Mark Anthony Bernard

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

This book is dedicated to my wife, Shaunna, without whose encouragement, patience and help, it would not have happened.

Chapter 1

Hitchhiking and Reminiscing

Standing on the shoulder of Highway 400, a multilane highway running north out of the city of Toronto, in the province of Ontario, Canada, I watched my father's yellow Chevy Blazer drive away. He'd given me a hundred dollars, said, I wish you luck, Mark, asked me to keep in touch, and then, with what I sensed was a mixture of sadness and relief on both our parts, he left. Everything I owned was in a backpack at my feet. It was July 1973, I was twenty years old, and at the beginning of what I hoped would be a great adventure. I was headed West, leaving the big, crowded city behind me, drawn by the vast areas of Canadian forests, prairies, and mountains that promised freedom and a new start to my restless young soul.

I never imagined that my adventures would include hopping freights, encounters with cougars, bears, and working in dangerous underground mines, plus living in places where minus sixty below zero was considered normal for midwinter. But then the word adventure has a two-edged meaning—excitement and risk—and the next seven years of adventures would certainly confirm this truth, so much so at times that in hindsight, I'm amazed that I'm alive to tell the story.

To think that only eight short years earlier I'd been a twelve-year-old kid living in England and reading books about such adventures but never dared to believe that one day I would be actually living them. It just goes to show that you never know what your future may hold.

So why was I taking this unorthodox and risky step of hitchhiking west, leaving everything familiar behind? Well, my teenage years leading up to this point were something I was eager to leave behind, so I had no real regrets or sadness. In fact, I was relieved to be trading the destructive lifestyle of the '60s and '70s hippy drug scene in a big city for a backpack and the refreshing freedom of the Trans-Canada Highway, which was not too far north from where I stood and stretched from coast to coast with endless possibilities for adventure and a fresh new start.

As I waited on the side of the road for someone to give me a ride, I found I had a lot of time for walking down memory lane and taking personal inventory. I let my mind wander back over the events leading up to my present, rather desperate attempt at what I hoped would be a fresh new start. As close as I could figure, it began when I was fourteen and walking with my twin sister, Linda, on our way to school. She hung out with the older, more hip crowd of that era, and she handed me a small piece of folded tin foil that had a hit or single pill of acid (LSD) in it. I asked her what it was. She said with a daring smile, Try it, you'll like it.

I wanted to prove to her that I was as cool as she and her culturally in-tune friends were, rather than the socially clumsy adolescent I felt like when I was around them, so I tried it. It wasn't as hallucinogenic as I thought it would be, but I still spent the rest of the day lying in the park, staring up at the clouds instead of going to school. And so began my initiation into the '60s drug scene. I went from LSD to marijuana, not the usual progression, and that was the beginning of the end of my education. I decided I'd drop out as soon as possible. I can't really blame it all on the 1960s drug culture or my sister and her cool friends because if the truth be known, I'd never liked school anyway, not since my first experience of kindergarten in London, England.

Ah, please indulge me as I share those fond memories of early academia. My mother liked to tell the story of when she took me to my first day of school. She said I screamed and cried and begged her not to leave me there. The teacher told her to just leave me, and I would settle down, so she did, but I didn't. She said she went around to the outside of the classroom and peeked through the window, and I was still screaming and crying. I wasn't a clingy mama's boy, so she just couldn't figure out why I was acting that way.

What she didn't realize was that as she and my sister and I had been out for a walk that spring and had passed this school during recess time, I had lagged behind, looking through the iron bars in the high brick wall that surrounded the schoolyard. It was recess, and curious, I watched the kids playing. A boy bigger and older than me came up to the bars and said, Hey, kid, come here! So I moved closer, and as I did, he quickly reached through the bars and tried to grab me. Terrified, I jumped back, barely eluding his clutching hands, and ran to catch up with my mom, relieved to have escaped and glad I wasn't on the other side of that wall. What a scary place. In my little boy mind, I figured that must be a kind of a prison where they sent all the really bad kids.

When we got home, my mom enthusiastically told us what she thought was good news, Next year, you'll be going to that school that we walked by today.

I was horrified! Why would my mother send me to such a terrible place? I thought I was a pretty good boy, at least most of the time; I kept hoping it was all just a bad dream. I later learned that during World War 2, less than a dozen years earlier, that the school had been used as a makeshift morgue for bombing victims. I guess, given its former tenants, it's no wonder it had such a dark, oppressive feel to it.

One of my earliest memories of attending this ominous institution was of standing in the playground, watching a group of kids organize a game of tag and asking if I could play too. One of the kids said no. When I asked why not, he replied, Because you're wearing glasses, and ‘four-eyes' aren't allowed to play. I'd never heard this insulting term before, and it left me hurt and confused. Why would wearing glasses ban me from playing tag? That was just plain mean. My academic future was doomed from that point on, all because of my optometrist and a school that looked like a prison and used to be a morgue. At least that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it!

Eventually, I had to learn to stand up for myself in school. And in England, when I was a kid, if you didn't stand up for yourself, you became a victim, and this was especially true in the higher grades as I would find out firsthand, up close and personal.

In England, when a child turned eleven, they were required to take an exam called the eleven plus. Based upon your scores, you were sent to a high school that taught either higher academics or a trade skill. My sister and I ended up in the trade school category, which I didn't mind. These schools were no longer coed but segregated into boys and girls schools. It was a whole new experience. We were treated like young men now, not boys. It felt like a rite of passage, and I liked that feeling.

The downside was as first-year students, we were at the mercy of the second, third, and fourth years. The second-year students were the worst. There was a gang of about seven or eight second-year boys run by a mean, tough-looking bully. These up-and-coming predators roamed the school grounds at recess time, forcefully taking snack money from any first-year prey too slow or unwary to get away in time. My best friend, Nigel, and I were pretty good at avoiding them. When we saw them coming, we'd quickly move to another part of the schoolyard. It kept us alert and safe. Then, one day, my luck ran out.

After lunch, on my way back to class, I stopped by the restroom, a large echoing room with tiles on the ceiling, walls, and floor. As I was standing at the urinal, I heard some kids coming in behind me. I didn't think much of it, and then to my surprise and irritation, someone kicked me in the rear. My first thought was that it had to be my friend, Nigel, who obviously thought he was being funny; certainly no stranger would do such a rude thing. I wasn't amused, so in anger at being treated in such an inappropriate way, I swore at him. Then I heard an unfamiliar voice say, What did you say to me?

Surprised, I looked over my shoulder, and to my horror, I saw the dreaded second-year gang blocking my way to the door, and their leader, standing right behind me, had obviously been the one who kicked me. I quickly told him I was sorry. Boy, was I sorry! And I said I thought it was my friend who'd kicked me.

One of the gang members said, It doesn't matter who you thought it was, you swore at him. Now you have to fight him. After all the months of successfully evading these hoodlums, I was finally cornered with no way out. I couldn't believe this was happening to me. It was like my worst nightmare. It made my old prison/morgue/four-eyes elementary school days seem almost warm and homey.

I was terrified, so I resorted to a defense that had worked in my favor before. I said, I can't fight him, I'm wearing glasses! I'd learned that wearing glasses wasn't all bad; it could sometimes work to keep me out of fights, but not this time. One of the gang members kindly offered to hold them for me, but before I could decline his offer, he reached over and pulled them off my face. I was all out of options. Short of falling to my knees and begging for mercy, which would have made me their pet victim for the rest of the year, I had no choice but to fight him. Things happened fast; they formed a circle and then pushed me into the middle, facing their champion.

He had his fists up in a boxing stance and looked like he knew his stuff. I guess you don't get to be a gang leader by being a bad fighter. As for me, I knew only two self-defense moves. The first one—I can't fight him, I'm wearing glasses!—hadn't worked. The second one, a real self-defense move my dad had taught me a year or two earlier that he had learned in the air force—put your fists up and feint a punch to your opponent's mid-section. As they instinctively dropped their hands to block the punch, move quickly behind them and get them in a chokehold. I'd only ever practiced it on my dad, who was over six feet tall, and needless to say, as a ten-year-old kid, I was a little shorter than that, and our practice was awkward at best, but it was all I had. So out of desperation, almost instinctively, it seemed, I tried it, and much to my surprise, it worked perfectly.

I had this gang leader in a textbook chokehold, and I wasn't about to let go. He struggled briefly, but my fear gave me strength, and I held on tight. His gang stood there, shocked, speechless, and unbelieving, which quickly gave way to alarm. One of them shouted, Let him go! You're killing him!

Another shouted, Let him go! He's turning blue!

I was too scared to let him go until I was sure I'd beaten him, so a couple of them stepped forward and pried my arms off his neck, and their leader slid to the bathroom floor like a limp fish, out cold. We all stood there, temporarily united in our amazement, looking down at their leader. No one said a word or moved. After a long minute or two, the gang leader started to come around. He looked up, confused and disoriented at everyone looking down at him, and then as the realization that he had lost the fight sank in, he rubbed his throat and said in a raspy voice, After school, outside the main gate and fisticuffs this time, no wrestling!

There was no turning back now, so with a false bravado, I said, Okay! I'll be there! What else could I say? Then I reached my hand out to the guy holding my glasses and said, Give me those!

He eagerly, almost apologetically, held them out to me and said politely, Sure, here you are and flinched when I reached out and took them. It seemed almost surreal. As I walked out of the circle of gang members, they all quickly moved out of my way like the parting of the Red Sea to let me through. I was ecstatic! I couldn't believe my luck! I, a skinny little first-year student, had stood up to the toughest second-year kid in the school and won. However, as the day wore on, so did the realization that it was pure luck, and I had no confidence that I could repeat my victory in a rematch.

I couldn't wait to tell my friend, Nigel, about this, and he was appropriately impressed and somewhat envious, but as gratifying as this was, it was still a very long and stressful afternoon as the hours and minutes to the showdown drew near. But at four o'clock, I was waiting outside the main gate after school for the rematch. What choice did I have? To back down now would be to reinstate my status as a helpless victim, and the payback would be merciless and cruel. I kept telling myself that maybe I could beat him again, but more realistically, I convinced myself that, win or lose, I had to at least show this gang that I would not accept being a victim and that I would stand up and fight.

To my great relief, even though I forced myself to honestly wait long enough for him to show up, he didn't. For the rest of the year, this gang, with their same leader surprisingly still in place, roamed the school yard, preying on the first-years. But now, when they saw Nigel and me in a particular part of the yard, we no longer had to worry about avoiding them. They were the ones who avoided us. That year, the school yard taught me a couple of valuable lessons that the classroom did not: One, glasses are unreliable protection against bullies; and two, don't give up when you think you can't win. Stand up for yourself. You just might be surprised.

This incident set a precedent in my life and taught me to stand up to bullies when necessary in England and in Canada. When I did, they more often than not would back down, but even if they didn't, and I lost or broke even, they'd leave me alone and look for easier prey. I believe that such people were motivated by feelings of insecurity and fear, and losing was unthinkable and not worth the risk if they found someone was willing to face them. Of course, there were always genuinely tough guys in schools and other social settings, and they rarely had to prove it; most smart people just left them alone.

Between the drugs, skipping school, not studying or doing homework, and being suspended for fighting, my school years were nothing short of a disaster. No fond memories there. My first day of grade 10, I looked into the classroom and realized I was a year or two older than everyone else, due to a failed grade and being put back a grade when we first immigrated to Canada, and I said, No way! I turned around and walked out, feeling relieved. I went back home and told my mom that I'd quit school. She didn't seem all that surprised; maybe my response to my first day of school in London had prepared her for the eventuality that her little boy was not destined for academic greatness. All she said was, Well, you'd better go and get a job then. So I did.

My first full-time job paid a dollar an hour, forty hours a week, minus tax. Maybe I should have stayed in school after all. Oh well, too late now. Welcome to the world of adult responsibility. I wasn't impressed.

Chapter 2

Looking for Meaning

My roadside reminiscing was interrupted by a 1970 Chevy four-door pulling over to give me a ride. The driver, a middle-aged man, asked me where I was going. I told him I was headed for the mountains. He asked, Why? I told him I wanted to get away from the city and see the country. He admitted to being somewhat envious of my carefree attitude and gave me a ride 120 miles to Parry Sound on the shores of Georgian Bay, Lake Huron. As I watched him drive away, I had to admit to being somewhat envious of his car. Sure, I thought, a car would be nice, but it required money for gas, tires, etc.

Then my memory took me back again to a couple of years earlier, when on an impulse, I and two friends had driven out to Vancouver, British Columbia, in my '63 Chevy II on a wing and a prayer. Well, okay, forget the prayer part. Being an atheist, I was not a praying kind of guy, but we definitely winged it and amazingly made it there and back.

As I thought about that trip, I realized that it had started not too far from where I was standing. We'd spent that day swimming in a small lake and enjoying the beautiful summer weather. About midafternoon, as we were getting ready to reluctantly head back to the city, someone suggested we drive out to Vancouver instead. What started out as a crazy idea (none of us had much money and only the clothes on our back) quickly became the beginning of an adventure as we discussed how and if we could actually do it.

Malcolm, who had a rather sketchy past, said he'd been to Vancouver, knew the city and how to get there. Obviously our lack of money was an issue when it came to gas and food, but again, Malcolm claimed to be an expert at siphoning gas and also said there was a series of summer youth hostels all the way across Canada where we could stay and eat for free. That settled it. What had seemed like a crazy idea now seemed to be doable. So we did it, hoping Malcolm knew what he was talking about.

By the end of that first day, we'd made it to the large nickel mining town of Sudbury. I don't remember there being a hostel. I think we spent the night sleeping in the car. We did, however, learn from Malcolm how to siphon gas. I already had a gas can, so all we needed was a length of garden hose, which we cut from someone's lawn. Then, later that night, we siphoned gas from a newer car in a nice neighborhood. We did this to try and justify our theft. They were obviously rich, and we were poor, so they could afford it. We were regular Robin Hood's, taking from the rich, them, and giving to the poor, us. I guess that unless you're a sociopath, you feel compelled to somehow justify your antisocial behavior, no matter how lame your excuse might sound to a rational person.

I remember siphoning gas as being scary and smelly—scared of getting caught and smelly by getting the taste and smell of gas in my mouth by trying to get the gas to flow by sucking it up the hose. But there was an element of excitement in the risk and, of course, in the reward as we got enough gas to continue on our trip.

The next day, we were truly on our way. We were now on the Trans-Canada Highway that ran from St. John's, Newfoundland, off the East Coast, clear across Canada to Victoria, British Columbia. It is the longest national highway in the world from an island in the Atlantic, to an island in the Pacific, 7,821 kilometers or 4,692 miles. It's no wonder it's officially called the Number One Highway on the maps. I prefer the name Trans-Canada. It has a more adventurous ring to it.

Again my memories were interrupted as another car stopped and took me all the way around Lake Huron's Georgian Bay to the town of Sault Ste. Marie, pronounced—Soo Saint Marie—at the southeastern end of Lake Superior. I spent the night at a youth hostel and made friends with a guy from Quebec, and we decided to hitchhike together for a while. As we were walking through town the next morning, a middle-aged family man, eating his breakfast in his yard and obviously enjoying this beautiful Saturday morning, called us over and asked us where we were headed. He was a very friendly, likeable fellow, and he invited us to join him for breakfast. His wife cooked us a wonderful meal of bacon and eggs with orange juice and milk. We had a great time talking about traveling across Canada. I was amazed that this middle-class respectable guy would invite two hippy-looking hitchhikers with their backpacks into his yard and feed them like special guests. I had never experienced such genuine, spontaneous friendliness from a complete stranger. It was one of those random acts of kindness that reinforce your faith in humanity and make you feel valued.

His generosity also seemed to validate the uniqueness of our journey and reinforced our sense of being carefree adventurers. In hindsight, I don't think we were really on a legitimate journey, since a journey implies going to a destination, and we didn't have one. We were just going. By late morning, we had walked to the other end of town and made a cardboard sign reading Thunder Bay, a town about 430 miles away. We may not have had an ultimate destination, but we felt we had to give any potential drivers a definite place they could relate to.

It was about this time that I began to realize that I had become a part of a cultural phenomenon that I couldn't fully comprehend and sometimes found frustrating because, almost without fail at either end of every city or major town, where the city limit ended and the good old Trans-Canada Highway began again, there was a long line of hitchhikers. I mean a long line! Not just several, but as many as twenty or more. The only realistic possibility of getting a ride was to be the first in line or the last in line. No sane motorist would stop in the middle of this lineup to give a ride; they'd potentially be swamped with a crowd begging to be picked up.

Most drivers would only pick up one or two at a time, so we walked to the end of the line, then at least a quarter of a mile beyond. It still took two or three hours to get a ride, and we were lucky to get one that quickly as we would soon learn. This was beginning to be not such a fun adventure after all. Why were there so many? Where were all these hitchhikers going? Probably like me, they couldn't say. They just hoped they would know when they got there.

Unknown to me, this mass movement of young people, hitchhiking back and forth across the nation, had no precedent in Canadian history or any nation's history, for that matter. It had started about 1968 and continued into the mid '70s. The main bulk of the hitchhikers were middle-class youth in their teens and early twenties. They had dropped out of school, put their education and careers on hold, and rejected the cultural norms and status quo of their parents' generation, and they were just drifting, looking for maybe more meaning in life? Individuality? Freedom? Adventure? Who knows? Probably like me, they would have been hard-pressed to answer that question. They had no set goal. They were just carefree travelers with no commitments, living for the moment.

So disturbing was this cultural phenomenon to the older generation that in 1969, Prime Minister Trudeau ordered an official government study to be conducted to determine why thousands of Canadian youth were involved in this seemingly meaningless, social irresponsibility. To quote a research article by Linda Mahood, a professor at the University of Guelph, Ontario, In 1969, the Trudeau government struck a task force to investigate why thousands of middle-class young people were observed hitchhiking along the Trans-Canada Highway. To the best of my knowledge, they never came up with a concrete answer to that question.

Even though I was right in the middle of this unique mass movement of young people, I do not claim to really know the answer, but I don't think it was really that complicated. For many, it was simply a rejection of society's expectations that they spend their life working in a factory, an office, or a business, seeking promotions and raises and living a materialistic, uneventful life. They were looking for something more exciting and meaningful. Did they find it? I'm sure, like me, they did for a while, simply in the carefree journey itself of traveling to new places and meeting new people, without the restraints of timelines, schedules, or even definite destinations. My guess is that many eventually quit drifting, went back to school and work, and caught up with their lives. Probably just as many were caught up in the cycle of transience, addictions, and homelessness and wasted their lives.

Me? As I already mentioned, I was heading west to get away from the east. I was trying to break my ties with a drug culture that was destroying me and my friends, to find a new, freer, less-destructive lifestyle. The mountains, forests, and Pacific west coast seemed to hold that promise of a new and better life. I think most of us just didn't want the twentieth-century's stereotypical version of adult responsibility.

Chapter 3

Hopping Freight Trains

We made it to Thunder Bay. There the mass movement east and west seemed to bottleneck. The large youth hostel there probably had a hundred or more transients camping out every night. I got stuck hitchhiking from sunup to sundown for three days, trying to get to Winnipeg, Manitoba, the next major city on the Trans-Canada and a real milestone on the journey west. Three days in the same spot was not my idea of an adventure. On the third day, as I was sitting around a campfire with several other new friends, complaining about not getting a ride, one guy suggested I hop a freight train.

I was immediately intrigued by the idea, remembering when I was thirteen and fourteen and we lived near a railway track that we had to cross on our walk to school. More than once, unknown to our parents, my friends and I trotted alongside slow-moving freights and hopped up onto the boxcar ladders, riding along for a hundred yards or so and jumping off before they began to move too fast. It had been exciting then, but I couldn't see how you could actually get into a boxcar of a moving train when the ladders were on either end and the door was in the middle.

This fellow, who was an apparent expert, seemed to have it all figured out. He told me, Nah! You don't mess with the boxcars! They're too dangerous to get into when the train's moving. You could slip, and your legs might end up under the wheels or you get in and the doors slide shut on you, locking you in, and you end up parked on a siding somewhere for days or weeks and die of thirst. He proceeded to tell us a gruesome story of this actually happening. My interest in hopping freights was quickly evaporating until he said, Forget the boxcars. What you need to do is get into one of the units (engines) that are pulling the train.

That sounded really risky, too, so I asked the obvious question, What about the engineers? They're not just going to let us do that, right?

He said, That's not a problem. Freight trains in northern Ontario have at least three units pulling them. They are locked up in series with the engineers being only in the first one and remotely controlling the other two.

I asked, But they're obviously going to have the doors locked on the empty engines, right? And even if they don't, they're obviously going to see us in there, and then we're in trouble.

This guy seemed to genuinely know what he was talking about, and he patiently explained, First, the doors to the units only lock from the inside. They have little padded seats beside the windows that slide open, porta-potties for bathrooms and speedometers. It's really neat! And the engineers usually won't bother you as long as you don't bother the instruments.

This all sounded too good to be true, but after three fruitless days of hitchhiking, I figured it was worth a try. My last question was, How do I know where the train is going and when it leaves?

He said, Go down to the train depot and look around for some guys working around the yard or on the tracks. They're just regular working joes who don't care if you hop a train or not. Ask them what time the next freight leaves for Winnipeg and where the best spot is to hop on.

I was hooked. I was going to give it a try. But I didn't want to ride all that way, about another 430 miles, alone. The guy who professed to be the expert was hitchhiking east, not west. It never occurred to me to ask why he wasn't hopping a freight east himself. Maybe he wasn't hitchhiking. Maybe he had a car? Who knows?

That night, I found a couple of guys who were traveling together and were, like me, desperate enough to try it. Since it was still only early evening, we walked down to the train station and asked a couple of maintenance workers about the train schedules. They were very helpful and even pointed to a spot about seventy-five yards from the station where we could hop on unnoticed on the far side of the train from the depot building, where the train would still be moving slow enough to get safely aboard. So far, everything the guy at the campfire had told me was proving true. This was really going to be an adventure. I could hardly wait.

The next morning, the three of us were at the preplanned spot. Sure enough, the freight train was there, idling, getting ready to leave the station. It was a typical Great Lakes summer morning, sunny and warm with a bright blue sky, although in a town with a name like Thunder Bay, I'm guessing it wasn't always like that. The train began to move, and as it approached us, we quickly went over our plan once more: wait for the lead engine to pass us, and then start running alongside the second unit, let the third one catch up with us, then grab the handrails on the front or back of that engine, and climb aboard. It seemed simple enough. Since I was the one who recruited the other two guys, I took the lead. Running alongside a slowly accelerating freight train on sloping, loose rock fill while avoiding the butt ends of the railroad ties with a sixty-pound backpack and a dismantled fishing rod in my left hand was a bit of a challenge, but not as difficult as I thought it might be. I was able to get a good grip on the front handrail with only a bit of a jolt on my arms as I swung my feet up onto the steps.

Ecstatic, I looked back, relieved to see one of the other guys already on the back steps of the engine with the third guy just grabbing the rail. He seemed to be having some trouble pulling himself up, and as the train was picking up speed, we started shouting at him to hurry up and get aboard. He continued to struggle, then somehow lost his grip and stumbled and