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I was terrible at them anyway. I took things apart and

customized them. Even when I was little, I’d change the

shape of all my Dinky cars—I’d flatten them, shorten

them, take off the doors, cut off the roofs, anything to

make them different.

Back then, no one really knew about things like

dyslexia. I never even heard about it until I was in my

twenties, and now I think maybe that was a factor when

I was a kid. That, or a kind of hyperactivity that should

have been treated way back when. I still can’t focus on

anything for very long.

But I was Sig’s kid, so I worked hard, even if it wasn’t

in class. All the way through high school I had a job.

For a while I was stocking paper at Smith Davidson &

Lecky, a paper wholesaler in Yaletown, when Yaletown

was still a neighbourhood of warehouses and factories,

and not cool restaurants and condos like it is now. And

then I worked in a factory cutting newsprint on Granville

Island, when it was an industrial area, before the public

market opened.

I finished high school in 1968—barely. I failed Grade

12 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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