How did I get HERE?

Isn’t it amazing how life is always unraveling in ways you never expected? I don’t mean unraveling in that you have your life all nicely knitted together and then the wonderful tapestry starts to unravel and gets into tangles and your whole life becomes a mess. No, I mean that at some point you sit down and think, “In five years I will be doing this or that” and then in five years you find yourself doing something that you could never have predicted at that moment five years earlier. I mean, I live in Asia! Not exactly something I planned out when I was 12.

I have a friend who told me once that she remembers the exact moment she became a person. She believes that you are just a baby or infant and that you aren’t a person until you have your first complex thought, a thought beyond the realm of, “Hmmm, maybe I will cry now because I’m hungry or sleepy or sick.” She still remembers what her first thought was. I can’t remember what my first thought was, but her theory made me think about how we map our lives out and try to predict or plan what we will be doing in ten years or twenty years. Everyone wants to be a firefighter or a policeman (not that I can remember wanting that) but there is a time it becomes more than just imagination and you start to dream how it can become reality.

You see, I should be living in the Canadian wilderness. No, I’m serious. When I was about ten I started to think about my future and start making plans for my life. We went, as a family, down to the Alamo in San Antonio. It must have been 1985 or so. Davey Crockett fought in the Alamo and he wore a raccoon hat or ‘coonskin hat. I bought a coonskin hat at the Alamo in some cheap souvenir shop and wore that hat like it was the latest fashion craze. I wore it everywhere. School, the store, at home, literally everywhere. The tail got ripped off several times at school but my mom would just staple or sew it back on the hat and off I would go.

Later, I lost the hat, but a couple of years later we went back to the Alamo and I bought a second coonskin cap. This trip we went on down into Mexico. While we were there we went to this market where they sold things to tourists. All the time we were in the market, I wore the hat. Merchants in the market would tug on the hat and say “Daniel Boone” (another famous American hero). One store was selling coats made out of deerskin, and the store owner and I convinced my dad to buy me a buckskin jacket with lots of tassels on the arms.

All this started me thinking that what I should become was a trapper in the Canadian wilderness. That was what Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone did, so why couldn’t I be the next famous trapper? Since I was a voracious reader, I started reading books on animals, trapping and trappers. I knew all kinds of facts about what animals lived in the Canadian wilderness, like pine martens or ermine and lynx. I especially loved Jim Kjelgaard. He wrote the best books about dogs and their masters and everyone knows that all good trappers have a dog and a horse.

One day, we were rolling up electric fence on one of our farms. Electric fence is temporary fencing that is just one strand of wire, hung from fence posts that you drive into the ground and then suspend the wire about a meter off the ground. You then hang insulators on the fence and attach a battery to the wire. Cattle will get shocked by the wire when they sniff it and therefore it is a cheap and easy temporary fence solution. When we rolled up the fence, my dad would roll the wire around an old tire rim and us boys, my two brothers and I, would pull the fence posts out of the ground and put them in the pick-up bed. This day I swore that I would live in the Canadian wilderness and be a trapper. The question was, how many years would I live there? I decided to count how many fence posts I collected and then that would be the number of years I would live in the Canadian taiga forests. (I knew they were called taiga forests because of all the books I was reading.) I still remember I collected 37 fence posts that day and vowed to live 37 years in the wilds of northern Canada.

So, here I am, in Malaysia, which may be the exact opposite of the Canadian wilderness. Never saw this coming that day while I was carrying the fence posts back to the pick-up. But, you know, I would be lying if I said there weren’t times I still wonder what life in the Canadian wilderness would be like. But, somewhere in the midst of wondering what trees have the best bark for making snowshoes, I start to dream about the future and what strange twists it will unravel in. No, life, I have found, is anything but predictable but the ride is full of thrills and laughs and tears that make it unforgettable, even if you never make it to the Canadian wilderness. It is a wonderful experience no matter what part of the world you live it and whether or not all your childhood fantasies come true. You know, I once read that the bark of birch trees makes wonderful snow shoes.