Yearly Archives: 2018

20-years-ago today I was in Kelowna, British Columbia as we were beginning our descent down into the Okanagan Valley. We were half-way across province number ten, and as 1998 was coming to a close, the snow of the past couple of weeks switched over to rain.

In this week’s story, I’m going to jump ahead to New Year’s Eve 1998 even though the story is a little bit more like Valentine’s Day.

We are heading south and have left the Trans-Canada Highway and are now on Highway 97A, which takes us through the heart of Canada’s ‘fruit basket.’ We will rejoin the Trans-Canada at Hope, British Columbia, after making our way through lots of little Okanagan towns like Peachland and Summerland.

On New Year’s Eve we are in Penticton when we finish our final road day of the year.  When I called home it was just three hours until midnight in Ontario. Sherene sounded tired and hearing her voice made me very aware that so many people were paying a price to make this project work. While the daily road routine had been taking its toll on everyone on the road for almost ten months, far from the spotlight, Sherene was often on her own looking after three boys and quietly taking care of everything that needs to be done to keep a household running, and to make a house a home. I may have underestimated the workload Sherene would face while I was away, but I didn’t underestimate her ability to cope with it. We ended the call by wishing each other a Happy New Year and as I said goodbye and hung up the phone, I thought about how it was now January (at least in Ontario) and we are into our final month. And then, we can all go home.

At dinner on New Year’s Eve we took a picture of Bevin Palmateer, our advance man, who was wearing six wrist watches on his arm, so he could tell when it was midnight in each of the time zones we have experienced.

Still thinking about Sherene, I toasted the New Year with a non-alcoholic wine and went to bed, leaving the road team to ring in the New Year and hopefully have some fun. Tomorrow would be another day and another year.

As I looked back on 1998 I didn’t know that in the years ahead I would joke about how I felt personally responsible for three marriages that grew out of our adventure on the road.

Bevin Palmateer and his girlfriend Renata Van Loon would marry in September of the year that was about to begin.

In August of 2000, Maureen Golovchenko, who managed the ‘home team’ in London would marry Phil Spencer, another road volunteer.

But the love story that began to unfold on the road at Christmas time was the one that I’m most certain was  sparked by Jesse’s Journey.

The story begins in Revelstoke, British Columbia, a couple of days before Christmas.

It’s minus 16 Celsius on the morning of December 22, and the sky is bright blue, as we hug and say goodbye to Peter Garland and his wife Ann Hutchison who are heading home for Christmas. They are tremendous volunteers, and between the two of them, they have been with us in seven provinces.

There’s quite a lot of shuffling going on at this point. Kay Coxworthy, the wife of our motor home driver Ed Coxworthy, has arrived for Christmas from Bell Island, Newfoundland. I think this is longest time they have ever been apart.

On balance, the departure of volunteers leaves us with a very small crew for the holiday period, but we’re sure we can manage.

We are really counting on the arrival of one new recruit who is on the way from London to spend Christmas in the Rocky Mountains with Jesse’s Journey. We have no idea how more than one life is about to be changed.

Dianne Steward is a pretty lady who was born in the south of England. With strawberry-blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, she has a lovely English accent.

Dianne had called our office one day to say, “I don’t have anyone, so if somebody on the road team wants to go home for Christmas, I could go to British Columbia.”

After a snow-delayed flight to Kelowna, Dianne was met by an RCMP officer who made a late-night drive through the mountains to bring Dianne to Revelstoke.

Dianne arrived at 2:30 in the morning and five hours later she was ready to go work. Dianne Steward was now officially a part of the Jesse’s Journey family.

My friend Ted Eadinger, who was with us in Quebec and Saskatchewan, is back for another tour of duty as Road Manager and it doesn’t take him long to notice the new volunteer with the delightful accent.

Ted and Dianne had both recently found themselves alone. While I wasn’t trying to play Cupid, it was beginning to look just a little bit like it was going to be a very nice Christmas.

After a crash course about how things work on the motor home,  Dianne was out on the road with me when we were well south of Revelstoke. I never took any pictures while we were on the road, but when we caught up to the motor home at Craigellachie, British Columbia, I made an exception.

I took a picture of Ted and Dianne standing in front of the stone cairn that marks the exact spot where the last spike was driven to complete the Canadian Pacific Railway on November 7^th, 1885. I had a feeling this might be a picture they would keep for a lifetime.

On Christmas Eve 1998, we are settled into our motel in Sicamous, B. C. and looking forward to having Christmas Day off.

I’m not sure if counts as a real date or not, but at the end of our day on the road, Ted and Dianne spent Christmas Eve having dinner at the Chinese Restaurant in Sicamous. I was beginning to wonder if Cupid’s work here was now finished.

And so it went on Day number 267.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues…..

PS:  Ted and Dianne have now been married for almost 20 years. Nice.

20-years-ago today, I was in Revelstoke, British Columbia and in a few days, we would be taking the day off to mark what would become the most memorable Christmas of my life. That event would be taking place in the little town of Sicamous, British Columbia, halfway between Calgary and Vancouver.

But before we reached Sicamous, there was another adventure about to unfold in Glacier National Park, high in the Rocky Mountains as we made our way through the Rogers Pass.

Picture this. It was dark and just before 7:00 o’clock in the morning. Inside the motor home it was nice and warm. Outside it was bitter cold. Ed Coxworthy was stirring his famous Newfoundland porridge on the stove. You could smell the coffee that was being brewed and the toast in the toaster. On the kitchen table there were mugs, tea bags, knives and spoons, milk and cream, brown sugar and strawberry jam. It was looking like a routine morning. But things were about to change.

The windows of the motor home were all steamed up (sometimes we drew happy faces on the windows just for fun). We could hear the comforting hum of the motor home engine as it was being warmed up for the day.  The two mini-vans were also being warmed up as we were getting into our road outfits and preparing for another day on the Trans-Canada Highway.

Suddenly there was a huge BANG!!

Ed Coxworthy shot out the door of the motor home without even grabbing his coat, even though it was almost minus 30 degrees outside. He headed right for the mini-van where the noise was coming from. After turning off the motor, Ed lifted the hood of the engine compartment and there he found what was left of the fan belt that had been flopping around in the engine compartment after it ripped apart. That’s when Ed’s street smarts kicked into gear.

After shutting off the second mini-van, which was running just fine, Ed carefully removed its fan belt, and using a fishing knife, he gingerly sliced that fan belt all the way around to make two fan belts. He said to me in that familiar Newfoundland accent of his, “By the Jesus Johnny, I don’t know if this will work or not, but it might.”

Well, it did work. It worked all day long until we were able to get things fully repaired at the end of the day.

Seeing what Ed had done, I thought to myself, ‘Not bad Ed Coxworthy from Bell Island, Newfoundland. Not bad for a guy with very little formal education.’ Then I thought about what that action said about someone. And what it said to me is that, it doesn’t matter how many initials you have after your name, or how many titles you have in front of your name. What really matters in life is what you are willing to do in any given situation. That is what determines your character. Ed Coxworthy wasn’t short on character.

It’s snowing heavily on Christmas Eve when I ended my day on the road in Sicamous, nestled in a mountain valley on the shore of Shuswap Lake in the North Okanagan.

Getting set for our one-day break, I’m excited because my son Tyler, Jesse’s older brother, is coming by bus from Vancouver to join us for Christmas. When I reached the motor home at lunch time and asked Ed why Tyler wasn’t here yet, he said, “I think he’s going to be late because the buses are running late in the snow.”  Ed, who always had lunch ready, was a bit quiet and didn’t tell me that there had been a crash involving a Greyhound bus and a tractor-trailer. I didn’t know that the whole road team was holding its breath. A short time later, Tyler arrived safely. We found out later that no one was killed in the accident and there were just a few minor injuries. Tyler was on the bus in front of the one involved in the crash. I was a dad who was very thankful for his son’s safe arrival for Christmas.

Our rooms in Sicamous are on the second level of the two storey Monashee Motel and in true Canadian fashion, Lions and Rotarians have worked together to make sure the rooms are decorated just like home, because for us, that’s exactly what it is. There is a Christmas tree and decorations and Christmas lights. There are even lights along the railing outside our rooms and the bright colours really sparkle in the blanket of white that’s been falling steadily for several hours.

Another surprise was my brother-in-law Glen arriving after flying from London to Vancouver and driving through the mountains to Sicamous. In his usual casual manner, Glen just opened the motor home door and said, “Hi. It’s me.”

Inside our rooms, the real meaning of Christmas continues to unfold, and it’s wonderful. We are complete strangers to the service club folks in Sicamous, who have filled our little kitchen with lots of food, including a big turkey and all the fixings. Somehow it’s just what Canadians do for each other.

From our rooms we pulled together a couple of slightly wobbly arborite tables with chrome legs. With a tablecloth decorated with holly and berries, plates that were a little chipped and silverware that didn’t exactly match, it was perfect. We even found a couple of tall white candles and some glass candle holders in the kitchen drawer to make things feel even more like home.

Christmas morning dawned with a clear blue sky and a remarkable stillness as we walked across the Trans-Canada Highway to have breakfast at the Husky truck stop with about 35 people who were also having a Christmas breakfast.

Walking across the Trans-Canada Highway on our way back to the motel there was no traffic and if we’d had hockey sticks with us we could have set up nets and played road hockey right there on our national highway. Only in Canada!

Before sitting down to Christmas dinner, we opened some small presents and I was amazed at how people had been able to hide all these little gifts on board the motor home and in the mini-vans. I didn’t quite feel like Elvis, but my brother-in-law Glen did give me a pair of blue-suede slippers for Christmas.

There were lots of laughs as we sat back enjoying a day when we weren’t on the road. There were lots of phone calls made to families back east in Ontario. And yes there were a few tears.

And after the most memorable Christmas dinner in my life, we settled down for an evening of sharing road stories from all across Canada to keep our minds from thinking about how much we all missed being home for Christmas.

Tomorrow we will be back on the road starting into the final week of 1998.

Maybe you should write a story and paint a picture about your most memorable Christmas. It will probably mean a lot to someone who finds that piece of paper and reads that story many years from now.

And so it went on Day number 261 – Christmas Day 1998.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues…..

PS:  I still have the slippers.

20-years-ago today at 5:00 o’clock in the afternoon, it was dark, and snow was falling when I stepped into British Columbia. (see video below)

The snow was wet and because it was dark, the road crew had me wearing my orange rain gear, which also made me more visible in traffic.

I remember thinking to myself, “I didn’t come to the tenth province to quit,.” Even though at this point I sometimes feel like I’m running on fumes. Our first stop in province number ten is Golden, British Columbia.

We often started our day on road the when it was still dark and sometimes I was so focused on pushing west that I would forget to look east. The road crew or the RCMP would sometimes honk to get me to turn and look at a glorious sunrise in the mountains.

Earlier in the week we left Calgary and after six weeks of crossing the Prairies, we are now completely surrounded by mountains. The road surface is also changing.

The Trans-Canada Highway back in Alberta is very wide with four lanes, a huge median and a spacious apron of asphalt for walking on the edge of the road.  Here in British Columbia, the highway is soon going to narrow, making things just a little more dangerous.

One of the first things I noticed as we started into the mountains is the coarseness of the sand they put down on the road when it’s snowing. It’s more like gravel than sand and when trucks pass by and the wind they create whips the sand up, it stings. It’s as if you are standing next to someone who is welding, and the sparks are hitting your skin.

And still, day after day, people continued to stop. A transport truck driver who stopped to make a donation said, “I’ve passed you every week for the past eight weeks, and I decided today is the day I’m stopping to make a donation.”

When we reached Banff National Park, park officials welcomed us and gave us a free pass for the motor home and our mini-vans. The owner of the Timberline Inn, which has a gorgeous view of Banff from up in the mountains offered us free accommodation and meals. This was a real treat and I remember having my picture taken beside the flag pole at the inn and thinking that the Prairies were definitely behind us.

Somewhere along the road earlier in day, a little girl and her mom pulled to the side of the road and came back to make a donation. I don’t know how she knew our story, but the little girl said, “I hope your sons going to be OK.”

I had talked to my son Jesse and my wife Sherene a couple of days earlier. They were just back from France, where they had taken part in a telethon for the French Muscular Dystrophy Association. I was happy to hear that Jesse had been able to go up the Eiffel Tower, take a boat cruise on the river Seine and visit the Louvre. And he was happy that he was able to help. The telethon raised $116M (CDN).

Moving a little further into British Columbia, the Trans-Canada Highway snakes its way through the  Rocky Mountains. A lot of people think the Rocky Mountains reach all the way to the Pacific. They don’t. The Rocky Mountains are only 120 miles deep from east to west. Then you pass through the Selkirk, Monashee and Coast Mountains before you reach the Pacific Ocean. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

When we had arrived in the beautiful tourist town of Banff, Alberta, I didn’t realize how much I was going to enjoy soaking in the hot springs. In the cold air, there was a heavy mist hovering over the warm water in the hot springs pool. I think most people enjoy the hot springs as a tourist experience. For me it felt more like some kind of medical treatment for tired muscles. Whatever it was, it sure felt good.

I also had to smile when I remembered Jesse’s older brother Tyler, who had been at the Banff Centre for the Arts, telling me what the word Banff stood for.

B-A-N-F-F  Be Aware Nothing For Free!  I did mention it’s a tourist town didn’t I?

Another interesting thing that happened in Banff, was walking past a little independent book store on the main street at the end of my day on the road.  That evening, I looked through the shop window and saw a dog (yes, a dog) “pawtographing” books. I just had to open the shop door and listen the little bell over the door ring as I went inside to find the story here.  It turned out that the owner of the store had written a book about the dog, who was the stores’ mascot. When kids bought the book, they liked having the dog sign his “Pawtograph” in the front of their copy of the book.

I’m sorry my journal notes didn’t capture the name of the dog. I guess I was tired. But, I can tell you the ‘ink’ that was being used was completely harmless, as in “No animals were harmed in the production of this movie/book.”

After undergoing another medical check, my third since Newfoundland, I was given the green light to keep going.

And even though the narrower road made it difficult to stop, people still pulled over to donate.

In the mild but miserably wet weather a man without a coat walked back toward us to make a donation. I could see, even in the light rain that was falling, that he had tears in his eyes as he turned and left. I seldom ever heard the story about why these people stopped.

This section of the Trans-Canada Highway has now narrowed to just two lanes, with a forest of fir trees rising steeply on both sides of the road.

The good news is that the wind is gone. The bad news is that it has been replaced by freezing rain. The ice made walking very difficult and the rain polished the ice, making it extremely slippery.

Transport trucks were crawling past me so slowly that I could read the names of the tire manufacturers as the wheels that were dripping with water turned very slowly about three feet to my left.  Every now and then one of these huge trucks would start to slide sideways on the ice toward me. Sometimes, I was moving faster than the trucks.

You can’t imagine what a relief it is when a huge tanker truck, dripping with water finally inches past you and out of harm’s way – especially when the sign on the back says: Propane – Flammable!

And so it went on Day number 249.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues………

20-years-ago today I was in Calgary, Alberta.  The good news is, we now have fewer than 50 road days left to complete. The bad news is – it’s minus 28 – and the Rocky Mountains are straight ahead.

In the past few days I’ve become aware that I am not as mentally sharp as I want to be. I think there’s a reason for this and it’s more than just the wear and tear of grinding out 33-kilometres a day. Now, it’s the extreme cold. The road crew has really been after me about constantly checking for frostbite. I’m doing my best to listen to what they’re saying.

The other complication is the change of time zone and increased media pressure. We are now in Mountain Central Time and this brings another challenge. Radio stations in Ontario, wanting to do interviews at 7:00 a.m. during their prime morning ‘drive time’ need me at 5:00 a.m. Alberta time. This is only going to become more difficult when we enter the Pacific time zone and those interviews have to be done at 4:00 a.m. I never really fall asleep again after those early morning telephone interviews when its pitch-black outside. And it seems like almost every night we are making an appearance somewhere and it keeps getting later and later when I finally to bed.

Out on the Trans-Canada Highway there’s a swarm of microphones and cameras and newspaper reporters when we officially reach Calgary. The mayor of Calgary welcomed me to the city with a Smithbilt white hat. People often refer to this type of hat as a Stetson.  It’s not. The John B. Stetson Company was established in Philadelphia in 1865. The Stetson cowboy hat was manufactured in Garland, Texas  until the company went bankrupt in 1986.

That hat was made popular by a lot of people, like John Wayne, Clayton Moore (The Lone Ranger), Gene Autry, and Larry Hagman, who played J. R. Ewing on the television series Dallas.

When you receive that cherished white hat in Calgary, it’s a Smithbilt. The company is the original manufacturer of the Calgary White Hat, known as Calgary’s symbol of hospitality. And it’s proudly made in Canada!

Calgary also included a Saturday night stop at the Saddledome and an appearance on Hockey Night in Canada as the Flames hosted Phoenix. The Flames presented me with a hockey jersey that said on the back Jesse’s Journey 98.

While these kinds of tributes were very nice and very much appreciated, the real story was being written out on the Trans-Canada Highway by three men from Ontario, who flew west to join me on the road.

Long-time friends Harry Norris, Blythe Lannin and John Scott were sitting in a coffee shop in Mitchell, Ontario on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1998 when they decided to fly to Alberta to walk with me. Harry arrived with a group of ‘sponsors’ for his walk. On the day that we finished in Strathmore, Alberta, Harry Norris had been on the road with me for the day’s entire 33-kilometres.

The amazing part of this story is that, two years earlier, Harry Norris underwent a double heart bypass!

Those friends from Ontario did Mitchell proud, and I was very proud of the three of them for their dedication and commitment to research. In a nutshell: they got it.

From the edge of the highway we could see a lot of antelope and it was very encouraging that people not only honked a lot, but they continued to stop and make donations.

There was a lady who had looked after Jesse when he was in intensive care in hospital. There was a transport truck driver who was hauling 600 Christmas trees from Wisconsin to Calgary and Edmonton. And silently working to make sure everything run smoothly were the road crew and the volunteers. Some of those volunteers, who joined us at their own expense, had been with us in different parts of Canada. They were the ones who took care of everything that had to be done to keep “Jesse’s Journey” moving along the road.

And on my mind was Jesse, who had inspired so many people. Jesse was in Paris, France along with my wife Sherene and my friend Mario Chioini, who was somewhat shocked when I asked him on the road back in Quebec if he could take my wife and son to France to help with a telethon. Jesse, Sherene and Mario were flying home as we drove through the dark, back to another motel in another town. Struggling to keep my focus, the motels were becoming just a blur.

I was painfully aware that I was starting to run out of gas. Sitting in the back of the motor home, I remember thinking about how we were getting close to province number ten as I shut my eyes on the drive back to our motel.

And up ahead were the Rocky Mountains and the last province.

What mountain are you determined to climb in your life?

And so it went on Day number 242.

Stay tuned. The Journey continues…….

20-years-ago today I was in Brooks, Alberta, a quiet little town of about fifteen-thousand people, in southeast Alberta. Brooks is where I started to feel that the Prairies would soon be coming to an end. Ever since leaving Winnipeg, the Trans-Canada has been a ribbon of highway that runs pretty much straight across Manitoba and Saskatchewan and into Alberta. At Brooks the straight line finally came to an end. We are now heading northwest toward Calgary, which is just under 200 kilometres away. I know that sometime in the next few days I’ll get my first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains well off in the distance.

Not a lot happens in Brooks, Alberta which, long ago, was used as a bison-hunting ground for the Blackfoot and Crow. Shortly after the signing of Treaty 7 in 1877, homesteaders moved into the area and began farming. They’ve been quietly doing that ever since.

Once again I am amazed at how fortunate we have been in that we really haven’t seen much in the way of accumulated snow. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The winters in Brooks, Alberta are dry and cold with very little snowfall compared to the rest of Canada. Chinook winds are not uncommon here. Most of the precipitation comes in late spring and summer, often as thunderstorms. With Christmas less than a month away, we are still managing to pretty much dodge the weather bullet.

A week ago I faced my toughest day on the road and now things have once again settled into our familiar routine.

While it’s very cold, the wild seems to have eased somewhat in the last couple of days. First thing in the morning, all the routine things are in place. Vehicles are fueled, the walkie-talkie batteries are fully charged, water is on board the escort vehicles along with everything from granola bars to dry socks. Ed Coxworthy has seen to it that I‘ve had his Newfoundland porridge for breakfast. He’ll leapfrog ahead of us with the motor home and there will be hot tea and cut up fruit waiting at the morning break. (We learned back in Nova Scotia from a woman who was a great volunteer that men will eat fruit if it’s cut up. I had a good laugh when she said to Ed Coxworthy, “Now remember Ed, men will eat fruit if you cut it up for them. If not – forget it.”) The road crew has given me my instructions about checking my ears, my cheeks, my nose and my lips in regard to frostbite. As soon as the RCMP escort arrives or our own escort vehicles are in place, we’re on our way again.

I always like to get more than half my daily distance of 33 kilometres a day finished before lunch. Mentally, I always find it easier to get back onto the road in the afternoon, knowing I have less distance to cover than I completed in the morning.

People continued to pull their cars, pickup trucks, motor homes and sometimes a transport truck to the side of the road to make donations, take pictures and offer words of encouragement. My journal notes mention a woman who stopped to give me a big hug. Her son has Cerebral Palsy. She knows why I’m here on the highway.

Another lady pulled to the side of the road during the morning tea and fruit break. She brought her young son on board. She told me quietly that he was never supposed to walk or talk. I can see that he can do both very well. Her eyes were wet and glistening when I gave her a big hug.

Along the highway a man stopped and made a donation. All the said was, “That’s in memory of my son.” Then he drove off without another word.

We’ve probably all heard about the six degrees of separation. I was always amazed on the road how often I would meet somebody who knew somebody I knew.

At the end of the day in Brooks, Alberta I was speaking to a group of service club members and after I finished a man came up to me and said, “Did you say you’re from London?” When I said yes he asked about high school and within 60 seconds I discovered that this man played tuba in the high school band with my wife’s brother! It really is a small world. I wonder when we will finally figure out that we are all living on the same small ball and it’s up to us to look after each other and look after the small ball we are living on.

While I was on the road I remember reading a quote from someone whose ancestors may have been among those who hunted bison in Brooks, Alberta a long, long time ago. He said, “Maybe when the last fish has been caught and the last tree has been cut down, we will finally discover that you can’t eat money.”

And so it went on Day number 234.

Stay tuned. The Journey continues…….

This day was bound to come. I didn’t know when.

This is the story of my toughest day on the road.

20-years-ago today I was west of Swift Current, Saskatchewan. It was freezing cold and the Prairie wind was blowing. It wasn’t the wind that was on my mind. It was my son.

As you can see in the video below, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, waiting for my day on the Trans-Canada Highway to end. For me, it was a very long day.

People have often asked me if I ever felt like quitting when I walked across Canada. The short answer is – no.  I had decided long before I dipped the toes of my running shoes in the Atlantic Ocean in St. John’s, Newfoundland, that quitting wasn’t an option.

Yes, there were moments of loneliness, but none like the morning of my 225^th day on the road.

You see, I spoke to my family almost every day, and the night before this day, my wife Sherene had to tell me that Jesse wasn’t well. She may have been trying to sugar-coat that news a bit when she said to me, “Don’t worry honey, he’ll be fine.”  But I could hear the concern in her voice.

Dressed in my road gear and with my running shoes laced up, I was set to go. Like every other morning, everything was ready, except my heart. I was standing at the edge of the Trans-Canada Highway, and I was asking myself if I should go home. This was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make.

As I stood there in the wind and snow, in my uncertainty, I thought about what Jesse would want me to do. Jesse was young and full of kindness, compassion and understanding, well beyond his years, and it was as if I could hear him saying in that gentle voice of his, “Dad, if you quit, that’s all you’ll be remembered for.”

On what promised to be a difficult road day I said to myself, ‘I know that Jesse isn’t a quitter. He’s been fighting all his life, smiling every day, and showing people what real courage is all about.’

I decided that Jesse wouldn’t want his dad to be a quitter either. And so, the decision was made.

I stepped out onto the highway and as I had done for 224 mornings, I said to myself, ‘OK, let’s go. Let’s do one more day.’

The wind blew across the Trans-Canada Highway all day long. I didn’t care about the weather even though the road crew did their job in asking me to keep checking my lips, my ears, my cheeks and my nose for frostbite. I did what they asked even if it was just mechanically. My mind was back in Ontario.

Hour after hour in the blowing snow and intense cold, my favourite picture of Jesse played over and over in my mind.  It’s what I call the signature picture of Jesse and I crossing Ontario in 1995 when Jesse was just 15. He was savouring the moment. He was smiling and happy and as I held his arms up, he was waving his Canadian flag to the crowd. Jesse was doing everything he could to bring a message of hope to so many who sometimes felt they had been abandoned.

They hadn’t been. At least not by Jesse.

On the road, almost no one stopped. The transport truck drivers who seemed to always know just where we were, still gave us a nice wide berth and that familiar blast of the air horn. It was like they were cheering me on. They never knew how much something as simple as the sound of an air horn meant to me on that bitter cold Prairie day.

It was dark when I finished my 33-kilometres for the day. On board the motor home it was eerily quiet as we made our way back to another motel in another little town.

When I received a phone call from home to say Jesse was feeling better, I was more thankful than anyone on the road with me ever knew. With that news, I fell asleep very quickly with that picture of Jesse still in my mind.

Is there a picture in your mind that helps keep you focused?

Three day later, it was still bitter cold when I started my day in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan. By nightfall I was in Medicine Hat, Alberta. We had reached province number nine. I knew I still had the Rocky Mountains to come, but somehow I felt that maybe the worst was behind me.

That’s what happened on the toughest day on the road – Day number 225.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues……

20-years-ago today I was in Chaplin, Saskatchewan, about 150 kilometres west of Regina. Out on the Trans-Canada Highway the wind is now a constant problem. The temperature has dipped to below minus 20 and I am wearing the balaclava that I haven’t worn since Day 1 in Newfoundland. We are a little over 600 kilometres from Calgary. While the fierce wind and bone-chilling cold are a problem, the good news is that so far we have managed to dodge the snow bullet. It’s like someone is watching over us.

For the past few days I’ve noticed that the wind seems to die down at about 5:00 o’clock. The wheat fields alongside the highway have been harvested and everywhere I look, all I can see is the wheat stubble that remains. And in the late afternoon when the sun gets low in the sky, that stubble seems to light up, and for as far as you can see, the whole countryside seems be lit from underneath with a brilliant yellow glow. It’s absolutely amazing.

A few days ago when I was walking the ring road as we were leaving Regina, our motor home driver, Ed Coxworthy, went into the city for the Remembrance Day service. He hadn’t missed a Remembrance Day service in 39 years and he wasn’t about to miss this one.  Ed had served Canada overseas as a peace-keeper in Cyprus and I was glad he was going to the service in Regina.

The night before, I had dropped the puck during the ceremonial face-off at the Regina Pats and Spokane Chiefs, hockey game. The team gave me a Regina Pats hockey sweater and the ceremonial puck. I gave the sweater to Ed for his grandson Scotty and I gave the puck to a little girl who was sitting beside me in the stands. We left after the first period and when we got back to our motel, Ed worked on my legs and I went right to bed. I was really tired.

On the Trans-Canada Highway on Remembrance Day, we stopped the motor home to mark the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month. My friend Ted Eadinger, who had been with us as road manager for a time in New Brunswick and in Quebec, was back again in Saskatchewan and he had a hot cup of tea waiting for me when I came on board just before 11:00 a.m.

While I was taking that break, a young boy about 12-years-old came across the Trans-Canada to make a $20-dollar donation to Jesse’s Journey. I thanked him very much. Later in the day, among the many people who stopped was a man who wanted to shake my hand. My journal notes tell me that he said, “This is a story that fits into Remembrance Day.” I felt very humbled. Here I was, sitting in a motorhome having a hot cup of tea. The Canadians we were honouring at that moment, a lot of them just teenagers, had spent years in those cold, wet and muddy trenches in France during World War 1. A lot of them weren’t much older than that young boy who crossed the highway to do something to help someone else.

Back on the road again I was once more taken with the expanse that lets you look 360 degrees to the horizon. Under that big sky, the freight trains are another thing that stands out on the Prairies. The Canadian Pacific Railway runs parallel to the Trans-Canada Highway through a lot Saskatchewan. Lots of times I could see the triple headlights on the front of the engine of a freight train, and because you can see so far on the Prairies, I could also see further in the distance the triple headlights of the next two trains as well. The trains are very long and almost all of the cars had that familiar yellow shaft of wheat logo on the side as grain from Saskatchewan was being shipped east to Thunder Bay. The trains were hurrying to beat the freeze up on the Great Lakes. From the time I first saw the headlights of a train as a dot on the horizon, it might take 15 minutes for the train to reach us. In that time there was absolute silence until about the last 30 seconds when you could finally hear the rumble and then the roar of the train passing by. The engineers almost always gave us a blast of the horn to acknowledge us.

Most people think of Saskatchewan as flat, dull and boring. Like everything else in life, there’s a lot more there if you just look a little harder.

The picture at the top of this week’s story is the picture that’s on the cover of the book I wrote. (You can find the book here on my website.) My friend Bevin Palmateer took this picture and he like it a lot. When I asked him what he liked about it, he said, “It’s the mysteriousness of the Prairies.” He asked me if the picture was taken in the morning or the evening? Is the person in the picture a man or a woman? Is the person walking toward you or away from you? Is the person going east or going west?

“That” Bevin said “is the mysteriousness of the Prairies. There is almost always more to be see if you just look a little deeper.”

It was dark when our day ended and when I called home I learned that Jesse had become President of Junior Achievement in London. While that news was uplifting, and I felt very proud of Jesse, and his brothers, I was concerned when my wife Sherene told me that Jesse was feeling tired and he was having a bit of difficulty clearing his throat.

I suddenly felt helpless sitting in my cold room in Chaplin, Saskatchewan writing my journal notes under a naked light bulb and huddling close to a space heater, trying to keep warm, while outside, the wind was blowing hard.

My journal notes reflected how I was feeling at that moment. I had written, “I’m a long way from home and I still have a lot of miles to walk before we can all look in the mirror and say, we tried.”

Tomorrow we would try again.

And so it went on Day number 222

Stay tuned. The journey continues……

20-years-ago today I was in Regina, Saskatchewan. We were in province number eight. The Trans-Canada Highway took me through a lot of little places I had never heard of before. I only have recent statistics to go by, so you’ll just have to imagine how small these places were  back in 1998. Fleming, Saskatchewan, population 75 people, is the first place you pass through after crossing the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border. Next up, and the first place of any size is Moosomin, Saskatchewan which today has a thriving population of 2,485 people.

Then comes Red Jacket, Saskatchewan  (which I thought suited me very well) followed by Wapella, Burrows, Whitewood, Percival, Broadview, Grenfell, Wolseley, Sintaluta, Indian Head, Qu Appelle, McLean, Balgonie, White City and finally Regina.

Of all these little places in Saskatchewan, its Grenfell, (Population 1,099) that has some interesting history. Grenfell is where Dr. Robert Ballard, of pet food fame was born. His business life started early with a milk route and a paper route. Soon after that his family started making dog food in the family kitchen and everybody in the family participated. It didn’t take long before Bob opened a canning plant and eventually built his own canning line. He was an innovator, forward thinking and especially interested in automation. His next adventure included acquiring a failed soft drink operation, but with time the first fully automated soft drink canning plant in Canada was successfully up and running. When he wasn’t focusing on business, Bob had a love of horses. He rode on the Canadian Equestrian Team from 1947 to 1958 and he said it was always an honor to ride for his country.

The makeup of Grenfell reflected a lot of Prairie towns.  Chinese rail workers from the building of the railroad in the 1880s settled down and stayed. As late as the 1960’s, Grenfell, Saskatchewan with its 1,099 residents had two Chinese restaurants on Main Street.

Out on the highway it was like I was living on borrowed time. It still hadn’t snowed. The air temperature though was a different story. We were into minus double-digits and I was back to wearing the long johns that I wore in the early days back in Newfoundland.

There was not a lot of traffic along those long lonely stretches of the Trans-Canada, but still people in cars and trucks and transport truck drivers continued to stop and make donations. In the bitter cold and wind a man heading east stopped his car. He crossed the two eastbound lanes and made his way across about sixty-feet of median and then crossed the westbound lanes to shake my hand and make a donation. He heard our story on the radio and said he just had to stop.

Radio played another key part in Jesse’s Journey through Saskatchewan. My good friend Peter Garland was back on the road with us and from our motor home in the middle of Saskatchewan, he conducted an auction for Jesse’s Journey as a part of the morning show on CFPL Radio in London and raised several thousand dollars for research. It sounds easy but when you think about all that went into making that event happen – it was something special. It wasn’t just the time change, it was all the whistles and bells that had to be in place to make that kind of two-way communication work. On that cold morning, huddled inside the motor home and wearing his headphones, Peter really typified what Canadians do when it comes to helping each other. Canadians still help one another, but sadly, that kind of radio power seems to have faded over time.

Saskatchewan is a lesson for artists as everything disappears to a point on the horizon. Terry Fox once said that the way to get across Canada is “one telephone pole at a time.’  Those words were never truer than when you are in Saskatchewan.

It was often dark at the end of our day on the road. We took Ed Coxworthy’s advice and again started using the flashing yellow strobe lights on the back of one of our escort vans. The lights could be seen a mile away and certainly gave motorists who were coming up behind us on the Trans-Canada, plenty of warning that there was something happening up ahead.

From the back, the strobe lights on the roof made the van look like it had Mickey Mouse ears. When we put those lights on the roof back in New Brunswick, that vehicle was quickly nick-named “The Mickey Van.”  By default, the van that did not have the Mickey Mouse look was just as quickly nick-named ‘Non-Mickey.’ Bevin Palmateer often drove Non Mickey when he was a couple of days ahead of us arranging school visits and media interviews.

We took Bevin’s picture when he rejoined us on the road one day in Saskatchewan. We took the picture alongside the Trans-Canada Highway where the tumble weeds would get caught up against farm fences and create what looked like a Hairy Mammoth wall.

Bevin was smiling when we took his picture on that day.  I’m pretty sure it’s because he was very relieved. I always thought that he came back to us every now and then just to check and see if we were still there.

We were.

And so it went on Day number 211.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues……

20-years-ago today I was in Virden, Manitoba, almost 300 kilometres west of Winnipeg.  The daily routine on the Trans-Canada Highway, which starts each morning with a 360-degree look to the horizon, is very repetitious. We have moved our start time on the road back a half hour to 8:00 a.m. to take advantage of the weather as Mother Nature is sending us some nice days with clear blue skies and day time temperatures in the mid-teens. This is a real bonus. I even get to wear my shorts again!

Virden is a little Prairie town of about three-thousand people, with a history similar to a lot of other little towns in western Canada. Virden started out as a railway camp on Gopher Creek when the CPR arrived in the 1880’s.

It’s also the birth place of Dave Rockola who made his mark in the juke box world. Believe it or not, the name Rock-Ola is actually derived from the name of the company’s founder. It also happens to be a real cool name for a jukebox, implying a “rock-n-roll” play on words. Dave Rockola started out as a mechanic in a shop that repaired coin-operated scales. He started making juke boxes in 1935 and after World War II, the jukebox industry was booming. The boys were coming home from the war and it was party time. When Rock-Ola introduced its “Moon Glow” series of juke boxes, business took off through the 1950’s and 60’s.

On the edge of the Trans-Canada Highway, the routine of grinding out 33 kilometres day after day, left the door open to working on ‘Highway trivia.’

People sometimes wonder how we knew exactly where to start each day, particularly when it had been snowing. The answer is pretty simple. At the end of the day, regardless of whether we were driving east or west to where we were staying for the night, we set the trip meter on the motorhome to zero. If, for example, we drove 45 kilometres to get to our motel, then in the morning we reset the trip meter to zero and drove 45 kilometres to get us back to the same spot on the highway. We also spray painted the road and sometimes tied a bit of red ribbon to a fencepost or a stretch of guard rail. (Just for the record, on the Prairies our longest drive back to our start point was 80 kilometres.)

Here’s another little piece of highway trivia for you. Have you ever noticed when you are driving along a highway and you come to a section of guard rail, that there is a little diamond shaped sign at the beginning of the guard rail? The top half of the sign is silver, and the bottom half of the sign is green. At the end of the guard rail you’ll see the same sized sign, but the colours have been reversed with green on the top and silver on the bottom.  Do you know what that sign means? I’ll give you the answer at the end of today’s story. No jumping ahead. That would be cheating!

Here’s another bit of highway trivia for you. We are all familiar with the solid white line painted on the road surface to indicate ‘no passing.’ We also know the dashed white line that indicates you can pass another vehicle if it’s safe to do so. Most of the painted white lines on the Trans-Canada Highway on the Prairies are the dashed  white line. How long do you think those white lines are?  That answer is also at the end of today’s story. And still – no jumping ahead!

Virden, Manitoba, was one of the first towns to give the Prairies its world-wide reputation as Canada’s bread basket. Large-scale agricultural development  arrived about the same time as the railroad in the 1880’s. Virden became a transportation, processing and service centre for hundreds and hundreds of surrounding farms started by settlers from Scotland, England, Ontario and Nova Scotia.

One of our volunteers from Manitoba was a retired farmer and member of the Lions Club from Holland, Manitoba who taught me a lot about wheat, canola, rye and flax. We talked about farming amidst the honking of car horns, and transport truck air horns as we made our way along the Trans-Canada Highway, stopping whenever people pulled over to make a donation and take some pictures.

I learned that farmers in this part of Manitoba were getting about $4 a bushel for wheat [in 1998]. The farmers were part of a system where they received an initial payment of $3.25 and then the government might pay them an additional $.75 per bushel depending on the final price the government was able to negotiate for the sale of the wheat. Farmers were getting about double that price for canola which is used in making margarine. The Flax that is grown in this part of the country is used in making Linseed oil and linoleum products.  I also learned that Manitoba produces a higher yield of wheat per acre than Saskatchewan because Manitoba has a more consistent rainfall.  It was all interesting stuff, but still, it  didn’t make me want to become a farmer. I guess I’m just a city boy.

The people who pulled to the side of the road to make a donation in Manitoba were a welcome sight as Canada was now looking very flat and I knew the contour of the land wasn’t going to change for at least another month.

Some other interesting things happened along the road in Manitoba. We had two school teachers from London join us as volunteers for the week. Marilyn and Carolyn were great volunteers. And I knew they were very well organized because when I got back to my motel room one night after another 33 kilometres of highway, the freshly cleaned laundry was there as usual, except this time – it was nicely folded! It was kind of like having your mom along for a week.

And donations sometimes came from strange places. There was a truck driver approaching me one day and he was flashing his lights and laying on his air horn. I didn’t know what was going on, but when drove by he threw a muffin out the window toward me. It was nicely wrapped in cellophane and there was an elastic band wrapped around the muffin, holding a five-dollar bill neatly in place!

At lunchtime one day, it was wet and windy and when I stepped outside to get back onto the highway for the afternoon, there were two $20 bills pinned under the windshield wiper of one of our mini-vans. We were in the middle of a small town and yet no one had touched them, and they were just merrily flapping in the wind and rain. Sometimes people just quietly donated in their own unique way.

And now – the answers to our highway trivia quiz. The little diamond shape signs are for the snow plow driver. The one at the front end of the guard rail means ‘snow plow up’ and the one at the end of the guard rail means ‘snow plow down.’  In other words, don’t shear off the guardrail posts!

And the painted dashed white lines on the Trans-Canada Highway are just over 10 feet long. A lot of people think they are 3 feet long. If they were, they would go by like a series of dots! Now aren’t you glad you know this?

And so it went on Day number 207

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues……

20-years-ago today I was in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.

I have now been on the road for seven months and we are well into province number seven. There are grey clouds on the horizon. Winter is not that far away.

If you have been following along with these weekly postings, you might recall that I was getting a bit anxious because it had already snowed a couple of times when I was still in Ontario. I had been keeping the thought to myself that if I could make it to Winnipeg, I just might have a chance of making it all the way. Now, here I am west of Winnipeg and for the next six weeks I’ll be on the prairies before starting into the Rocky Mountains.

The big thing that has changed is the wind.

Even before I reached Winnipeg the wind was becoming a factor. And when the wind is coupled with a driving rain and dropping temperatures, things get pretty miserable pretty fast. And sometimes your emotions get caught off guard. That’s what happened a couple of days earlier when I was coming up to Steinbach, Manitoba.

It was like the unrestrained power of the wind seemed to be asking me again just how much I was willing to take. I
was back to wearing the fluorescent orange rain gear as the rain mixed with ice pellets stung my face. High winds sweeping across the open fields sometimes stopped me from moving forward at all. Leaning into the wind that was rocking the motorhome, I had to fight just to get the door open. When I was safely on-board for my first break of the day, the wind slammed the door behind me. My fingers were numb, my eyes were red, and it wasn’t until I was shedding the rain suit that I realized we had visitors.

I slumped into my seat at the kitchen table, rain dripping from my chin, as Ed Coxworthy set a cup of steaming hot chocolate in front of me before fetching a pair of clean, dry socks that had been warming on the motorhome’s heat vent. It was then that I was introduced to a man and his wife who had driven out from Steinbach, Manitoba to make a donation. They knew why I was here.

The couple had three children, two girls and a boy, and their son had died of Duchenne in 1995, when he was just 21. Cold and wet, I listened in silence as another father told me the story of the final hours of his son’s life. It was April when their boy was taken to hospital in Steinbach for the last time. Near the end, he could barely speak. The father said he awoke from a broken sleep when he was at his son’s bedside and heard his son say, “Cool.” He thought his son was cold and wanted a blanket, so he tucked a cover around him. Then he heard the young man whisper, “Neat.”

The man told me he said, “Son, what are you talking about?” His son was very weak and perhaps mistook his father’s voice for that of his mother. “Mom,” he said, “you have to see this. Come with me.” He died shortly after that, in the early morning hours of April 19. 1995, a month before Jesse and I took our first steps in crossing Ontario.

Before they left, the couple made a generous donation to Jesse’s Journey. As they stepped down the stairs of the motorhome, the father smiled at me and said he was sure his son was in a better place. He said his son was the kind of kid who was always happy and never complained. I was close to tears as we shook hands again and said goodbye. As I watched them drive away in the rain, the weather didn’t seem to be such a problem anymore.

After the man and woman left, Ed Coxworthy, who had listened to the story, said to me, “Johnny, if you were to throw all the troubles of the world into a hat, you’d want to pull your own back out.”

I know I met other people along the road that day, but I can’t remember any of them. Looking west at the end of the day when we were about to turn and drive back into Winnipeg, it was getting dark and there was a long thin line of red running across the sky right at the horizon line. I took that ‘red sky at night’ as a hint that maybe we would have better weather tomorrow. I can still see that sky and will always remember that day.

I also took a moment to think about how, I had made it to Winnipeg.  And now, I’m wondering…

And so it went on Day 200.

Stay tuned.  The Journey continues……