Two things that I remember about myself as a child… being curious and being by myself.

I grew up on a farm near a small hamlet called Treesbank in Manitoba. I’m not completely sure how much land we had but it was a pretty small farm by today’s standards. I remember the yard being pretty big.. maybe a few acres surounded by a planted hedge that was twice as high as the peak of our roof. Around the yard was flat prairie grass for our cattle to graze and the gophers to dig in. Across the southeast corner of our property was my favourite playground. It was defined by a steep bank into the Souris river valley that quickly turned into a marshy pond that had once been an oxbow off the Souris river itself. This valley was a heavily wooded forest where I did science projects, skated on the pond, swam in the river and sometimes just wandered around to see what I could find.

As I got older the valley could not contain my curiosity. I saved up my money from working on Dad’s construction sites and purchased my first 10 speed bike. These were the hottest trend and soon I was riding my bike all over the area. Although the narrow tires were probably not ideal for gravel roads they didn’t really find pavement until I reached junior high. I spent a lot of hours riding around and on occasion I was joined by my friends for bike rides to the nearest pavement about 5 miles away where we rode for hours to the nearby towns. Traffic was usually pretty light on these rural roads and we would slalom from one edge of the pavement to the other to see who could lean over the most in the tight corners back to the center of the road. This feeling totally came back to me later in life when I learned to carve my snowboard from side to side on mountain slopes.

In the last few years we were on the farm ( grade 7/8 ) my Dad bought us the neighbour’s snowmobile when they decided to upgrade. This first machine was a single cylinder, mixed gas, sno jet that I used to explore the sand hills across the road from us. I’d be gone for hours and always found my way home. One day however, the engine gave out with a large bang and I had to walk home. This blue beast sparked an interest that my dad and I shared a lot in junior high and early high school. When the blue beast died we parked it in our hedge beside the shop and replaced it with a few more modern sleds that made the move to Brandon with us when I was in grade 9. The blue beast will always be our first.

Not all my time was spent exploring but I’ll save my stories of building things in the shop and raising livestock for another day. The freedom I had to explore and find my own way through these early years has given me so much more boldness to try new career paths and venture into activities that I may have played it safe on