once and took it again and I can’t even remember if I
graduated. I think I graduated from a general program,
but I never had the grades to go to university. It was
twelve years of misery, actually. I had no idea I had any
talents, aside from chasing girls. And you can’t make
a living chasing girls.
For a while, I worked at a mill on the Fraser River.
I thought I was a tough kid, but that job almost killed
me. All day I’d feed logs to the men on the bandsaws,
and they’d be yelling at me because I couldn’t get them
the wood fast enough. It was dangerous and it was cold
and wet and I was sick all the time. I’ve never been a
quitter, but I had to quit that job.
And then somehow I ended up in Hawaii, on this boat
trip with kids from all over the world. It was amazing.
Here I was, nineteen years old, from Vancouver, which
back then was in the middle of nowhere, meeting kids
from Europe and America. It opened my eyes and made
me realize there was more to life, and a much bigger
world out there than I’d imagined.
By the time September of 1969 rolled around, I was
restless and hungry for something new. So when a
flashy scientist from a California university came up
to speak in Vancouver, I was ready to buy what he was
selling. And what he was selling was a whole new way
of looking at the world.
He was a seeker, a Christian, and I guess you’d call
him a guru. It was the ’60s, after all, and Vancouver was
a magnet for the counterculture, for all the hippies and
John finishes high school, eventually.
He takes a life-changing trip to
Hawaii, where he joins a boat full
of kids from all over the world and
discovers that the world is both
bigger and more easily within reach
than he’d thought.
Sigurd buys the Jaguar Mark X
that John would later transform
into “The Fluevog.”
1966 1968
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dropouts and draft dodgers that ended up here on the
edge of the continent. Anyway, he was speaking at Simon
Fraser University and my friends suggested I go hear him.
He was mesmerizing. His version of transcendental (and
possibly drugged-up) Christian spirituality was so different
from my parents’ old-fashioned by-the-Bible Christianity,
it seemed like it might be the answer to what I was
looking for, at least for a while. He was cool, for an older
guy, and he was surrounded by even cooler young people,
drawing them to him like Christ and his disciples. I was at
loose ends. So when he invited me down to his compound
in California, of course I said yes.
I hopped into my Citroën ID (even then I had a cool car,
though not really a cool car for a teenager) and headed
down the highway to San Jose. I’m not sure now what
I expected, but it wasn’t what I found: a commune, all
young men, living together in this lovely adobe house
with big glass windows, sleeping together, dropping acid.
When he made a move on me, I realized this wasn’t my
scene. I was a goofy kid, what did I know? I hardly knew
what homosexuality was.
I needed to find a way to get out of the house, so I got
a job washing dishes at a twenty-four-hour restaurant.
I also looked up a girl I’d met in Hawaii, who lived nearby,
and we started seeing each other. One night I was coming
home from her place around one in the morning,
driving along Arastradero Road, which is like the
Kingsway of San Jose. As I crossed an intersection,
something flashed right in front of my face. It looked like
a wire wheel. I turned the car around and realized the
intersection was actually a T-junction, with a parking
lot on one side. I looked closer and there was an E-Type
Jag on the roof of a house. A man and woman were
in it, totally inebriated, not a scratch on them. She’d
been driving through the parking lot and hit a log; she
was going so fast, at least a hundred miles an hour,
that they’d become airborne. That car was so close to
me, if I’d been ten seconds, maybe five, ahead, I would
have been dead. I think of that flash now as divine
intervention.
It also made me realize it was time to go home.
It was the end of 1969. The Summer of Love was long
over, and so was my California adventure. So I got in my
car and drove back to Vancouver, all the way in the rain,
without windshield wipers. I got back just in time for
Christmas, parked the car and the axle broke. It never
moved again.
I was twenty-one years old and it was time to figure
out what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
But what, I wondered, was that going to be? JF
John meets a Christian guru, who
invites him down to his place in
California. John hops in his Citroën
ID and heads to San Jose, where
he finds a house full of young men,
expanding their minds. It turns out
not to be his scene, and after a
terrifying near-miss while driving,
he returns home to Vancouver in
time for Christmas and the next
step on his journey.
1969
1969
29
1968