Fate

Life has a funny way of leading you from strength to strength, or job to job, with each one building on the experience of the previous without which you couldn't get to the next. For instance, I started wiring boats, on the side, for Neil's Electric in New Westminster. I had no qualifications other than I looked handy to the boss and he needed another guy to pull wire. Even that is a wonder because as he was leading me to the boat being built on a side creek of the Fraser River, I rear ended his car at a stop sign. No damage except to pride.

I then went on to do other jobs unrelated to pulling wire - Federal Fisheries, B.C. Research Council, Department of Agriculture, teaching school (notice that school is the only one not capitalized. Strange eh?). After teaching ended and I had worked construction for a few years, and then two years away from home because B.C. was in one of the busts following the boom times of the 1970's, I started installing burglar alarms for Ver-Tel Alarms in Vernon. This was almost twenty years after working for Neil's Electric but based on the hours there, I was able to challenge for the restricted license required for alarms.

The next leap happened when I installed a burglar alarm at Vernon Kiln & Millwork. They were expanding at the time and needed an electrician/millwright. I signed on as the work at the mill was a lot steadier than installing alarms. In those days not everybody was spooked enough by the daily news to want an alarm like they seem to be today. The mill had an annual electrical permit so I was able to do the wiring, occasionally inspected by the Electrical Safety Branch inspector, and over time and based on the restricted license, I was able to write for my Class C, which allowed for wiring up to 240 volts.

Vernon Kiln & Millwork was one of those small mills that once were common in rural B.C. They employed unskilled labourers and skilled millwrights and machine operators. During my time there in the late 1980's the labourers were mostly Vietnamese boat people. Friendly and hard working. There was also a Quebecois, a Golden Gloves boxer, and a heavy drinker who was ten years younger than me but looked ten years older. A binge would have him disappear for a while but then he would be back and carry on working hard. A smattering of young kids from high school would also start their first jobs at the mill. These mills gave work to many who otherwise wouldn't have been able to make such good wages.

In 1988 I was hired by Silver Star Mountain Resorts to lengthen an existing T-bar ski lift. The lift had once been twice as long but had been shortened because they had trouble with keeping the haul rope on the sheaves were it became negatively loaded where the hill got steeper. An engineer had designed a new tower for this spot to hold the cable down and they needed somebody to build it. It was kind of a "let's see what you can do" job offer and I was left to work on it by myself. I just needed to build the concrete base as the tower was being manufactured in a machine shop and the rest of the lift meant installing the towers that had previously been taken down. No problem.

After that lift was complete, the Maintenance Manager, Dennis O'Ferrall, found more work for me and every two weeks or so for about three months would come and say "I've got another two weeks for you but I just can't promise full time". It of course developed into full time and I ended up as Supervisor of Utilities which meant looking after water, sewer, electrical power and telephones. Based on my Class C ticket acquired at the mill and the level of work required on the hill, I was able to upgrade to a Class B which allowed work up to 750 volts. Dennis himself had worked for a long time with the telephone system and he and I then would fix the many breaks in the cables that snaked around the mountain under ground. It seemed for a while that whenever a backhoe put a bucket in the ground a communications cable would be dug up. I eventually mapped all the locations of buried cables.

You see what I meant though, that one led to another. If I hadn't wired boats I wouldn't have installed alarms. If I hadn't installed alarms I wouldn't have gotten the Class C at the mill. And the Class C got me in the door at Silver Star and allowed the upgrade to Class B. And that Class B led me to the job at the City of Vernon which led to retirement, almost forty years after that first boat. Fate. It has to be.