Читать книгу That Wasn’t the Plan - Reg Sherren - Страница 21

We had been chasing each other around the country. In truth, I had been chasing her. Pam took a reporter position in Edmonton, and I moved to Calgary. While I was establishing myself there, she moved to Vancouver to do media relations at Expo 86 and then returned to reporting, this time at CKVU in Vancouver. She loved temperate Vancouver and lived in Kitsilano, not far from the beach, and now this fellow she had been hopscotching across the country with for close to five years wanted her to move to Newfoundland. In February.

I asked her to come with me, and to my amazement, she said yes. I went ahead and she would follow. She was supposed to arrive on Valentine’s Day, 1987. But a huge blizzard in St. John’s went on for close to three days and she was stuck in Halifax, no doubt trying to decide whether to just book a one-way ticket back to Vancouver.

When she finally did arrive, we were stuck in a third-rate hotel on Kenmount Road for months. With more snow than St. John’s had seen in fifty years (and that’s saying something), it was almost impossible to get out the door. I was ready to jump back on a plane myself. The parkways had so much of the white stuff piled up it was like driving in a huge luge, with snow walls on both sides. You couldn’t see a thing, including cars approaching the intersection, until you were both practically in the intersection. It was nuts.

Eventually we found a house and moved in. There was a six-metre drift in the backyard, higher than the house itself. Not a great start.

But at the station I received a warm welcome from senior producer Paul Harrington, the fellow who had hired me, and it soon became apparent the good karma had followed me east. At work I met Donna Wicks, who worked in finance, and I soon realized we had met before. Donna had been in the same high school class as me one year when we lived in Prince Edward Island. Not only that, but she had married a St. John’s Crown prosecutor named Brad Wicks—the same Brad Wicks who’d been my best buddy when we were both just five years old growing up in Labrador! They still like to joke that I am the one thing they have in common.

Then another fellow arrived from Montreal. Jonathan Crowe, the new sports anchor, sat right next to me. We shared the same sense of humour, and, as it turned out, we also had a connection. Our fathers knew each other and worked together, again up in Labrador. Quickly we all became a tight circle of friends. It more than compensated for the brutal winter.