From Tabusintac to Tokyo

From Tabusintac to Tokyo
True stories only slightly embellished
By Jeremiah Sutherland
Copyright (c) 2007 Jeremiah Sutherland
Dedication
To H.S. and D.W., who made me who I am today. Well, all the good parts in any case. Any failings are, of course, my responsibility.

Contents
Introduction
Tabusintac Hill
Dirty Snowballs for Breakfast
Catholic and French
A Shad in the Bed
Dining For Disaster 16
How Coffee Led To My Education 21
High Arctic Daze 28
Corporate Malfeasance 35
Mega Mess in Montana 39
In the Belly of the Beast 50
Keep Your Friends Close 53
Wilderness Man I 59
Wilderness Man II 63
You Can't Go Home Again - I (so don't even think about it) 67
You Can't Go Home Again - II 74
A Nice Place to Visit 77
Japanese Diet 81

Introduction
There is a fine line between being a storyteller and a bullshitter. There is an even finer line between being a bullshitter and a liar. I come from a long line of storytellers. However, it is wise to keep in mind that any storyteller may occasionally wander across the line to bullshitting from time to time. Only in the interests of a better story, you understand.
Anyone who writes a story strictly from his perspective, and swears it's the unvarnished truth, is a liar. We all have a version of reality that's coloured by our perceptions and thought processes. The farther back in time one goes in one's memory, the more likely it will be that the intervening years will have shaded the bright colours of what we thought we saw, heard and did. The painting of our lives is not an accurate version of events. And yet we firmly believe our version to be correct.
So the stories in this book are as true as anything viewed through the reverse end of a decades-long telescope.
Right out of the womb, our main goal is to just get by in a world we don't really understand. We have rules to learn at every stage and mistakes are to be expected. The more risks we take, the more mistakes we make and, perhaps, the more we learn. People who don't learn from their mistakes are ripe for a career in politics.
Someone once said that good stories come about when something goes wrong. Not every story in this book was birthed from a mistake, but enough has gone wrong in my life to make me a little leery of walking out the door on any particular day.
I've changed a lot of personal names (sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not) and one or two place names; I don't want people hunting me down, spouting their version of events and threatening lawsuits or broken legs. Let them write their own books.
I want to thank Roy Smyth and Inge Zegel for the last minute formatting rescue mission without which this book would not look nearly as good.

Tabusintac Hill
When she's in the mood to push my buttons, my significant other, the delightful and charming Ms. D, frequently alludes to the questionable timeline concerning my birth date. She derives much mirth from the fact that I was born something less than nine or ten months after my parents wed and hints that this indicates a certain amount of premarital hanky-panky.
Standing on my dignity ('cause it's higher than the coffee table), my reply is that I have it on good authority that I owe my early entry into the world to Tabusintac Hill. Said hill was once considered to be an abomination of the first water. The Tabusintac, like all hills, had an up and a down. In this case, the up and down were distinguished from each other by a sharp curve at the bottom. The main North/South New Brunswick highway slavishly followed the hill's contours.
If you were heading north, the road led you into a ravine and you were faced with a steep uphill incline that, in winter presented a challenge to at least half the vehicles trying to climb it. In true snow country fashion, steep, icy hills were conquered by getting a running start, building up a lot of speed and praying that Mr. Newton's rules concerning inertia would work in your favour. Headed south, the problem became keeping your car under control so that you didn't go shooting into the trees when the road curved to the left.
My parents were taking a trip to the Miramachi in December of '56 and were driving a Pontiac borrowed from one of my father's friends. My mother was pregnant with a bundle of bad attitude and misery that would turn out to be me.
I assume that my father was driving with that mix of panache and insouciance that my mother tended to describe as reckless behaviour. In any case, as he rounded the corner at the top of the hill, the road was apparently free of snow and ice and there was no reason to slowdown. Until the moose stepped out