When I was a little boy my mother told me that I had a great grandmother named Unity McFadden, a magic name. Unity had a hard life and faced tragedy many, many times. I wrote this about her.

Unity McFadden, I know your secret.

Illiterate Donegal peasant girl, raised on seaweed and potatoes. You survived the great famine and the coffin ship, but couldn’t escape your fate.

Living in a squalid 1850s coal town, digging Pennsylvania dirt. Did your heart cry out to the wilds of Cloughaneely and the slopes of Mt. Errigal?

Even the famine was not as cruel as this new land of plenty. 8 sons born, 6 buried. 4 killed in railway crashes. 2 young daughters lost. One to disease and the other perished in flames when the house burned down in 1880. Unity and her mother Bridget McFadden leapt from the second floor onto a mattress below and survived. The surviving men quickly built a huge new house with many bedrooms, including the room where my mother Edna was born in 1915. That house still stands and belongs to friendly neighbours.

Unity lost her husband Charles Cooney to asthma in 1892 likely caused by underground coal mining. All those loved ones devoured by America.

Ghost woman of old Ireland I would give anything for one faded picture of you, for one letter that describes you, still stubbornly speaking Irish Gaelic at 78, or was it 85?

I imagine a thin faced old woman, beaten down by the relentless sea, but hard as the cliffs.

They told you one morning in 1913 that your nephew and walking companion had suddenly died and early Sunday morning you learned that your favourite grandson, John Morning of Altoona, had died of peritonitis.

How much suffering can one person endure?

30 minutes later you were walking across the fields to St. Brigid’s Catholic Church in Lilly at 8:30 a.m. when the # 3 express train ran you over at the same spot where you lost one of your sons, Michael, in 1903.

The Johnstown Tribune wrote that your life “was filled to the brim with tragedy and sorrow” and reported you were reading your Bible and “stood bewildered” as the train “bore down upon her.” Some say you never saw the train coming, even though the whistle was blowing.

Unity McFadden, your secret is safe with me.

Unity’s mother and son’s gravestone in Lilly, Pennsylvania. Briget was born in 1797!

One pleasant day John and I walked to the Upper Volta consulate to get visas from that country, now called Burkina Faso. We also got visas to Mali. Things were going well. I handed my passport to the official in charge and when he saw that I was an American citizen he beamed with delight. He told me that the US government had spent a great deal of money on aid and added that visas were free for Americans. That was great. Then John handed over his Canadian passport and learned that he had to pay ten U.S. dollars to get a visa. I thought he was going to faint. He pleaded with the official and got boisterous, but they refused to budge. John cursed under his breath, paid the money, and stormed out of the office.

I didn’t see John for a few days and decided to try and hitchhike on my own from Dakar to Bamako, the capital of Mali. After two long days I arrived in Tambacounda, still only half way there. With very few cars and wretched roads the only alternative was to shell out and take the train the rest of the way to Bamako.

That train had a nasty reputation and I soon discovered why many travelers called it the Hell Train. I bought my ticket and discovered that it was far worse than I could have imagined. The word ‘crowded’ was totally inadequate. Every seat was taken and hundreds of passengers lay on the dirty floor. Worst of all every space in the filthy washrooms was taken. The train stopped and many of us jumped off to have a quick pee. When I climbed back on the train I bumped into Cheap John. It was nice to see someone I knew and we found a few spaces on the dirty floor.

The train arrived in Bamako hours later but there were no obvious places to stay. Unfortunately I no longer had my excellent tent because I let a fellow traveller share it on the beach in Dakar and the fool was reading a book by candlelight, knocked it over, destroying the tent and more than half of my clothes. He reluctantly gave me some money after I demanded some but it was only a fraction of what he really owed.

That night John and I found some huge pipes, climbed in and slept through the night. The next day a very nice local man invited us to stay at his house for a few days, which was very kind of him. We walked around Bamako for a while.

A few days later John and I thumbed our way west towards Upper Volta and got a short ride from two friendly locals. Everything was going well until John pleaded with the driver to give him some money. I was aghast. Here were these very nice guys giving us a ride and John shamefully cadged money from them. Talk about embarrassing. I didn’t have a lot of money but I would never beg for it. Now I fully realized that Cheapskate John had no shame and I was embarrassed to be his friend. As I hitchhiked and mixed with other travelers I realized few had a good word for John. 

The next day we got an early ride that took us to the border of Burkina Faso. We walked up the dirt road and waited for another ride. John loaned me a book of short stories from John Updike and we both read and waited for six hours. Finally we saw a cloud of dust in the distance and realized this was our first and only chance to get a ride. Unfortunately the car shot right past us. We decided to walk and eventually arrived at a village where we were welcomed.

The locals woke us up at 6 a.m. and told us there was a small bus going our way immediately. It was the most crowded ride I have ever experienced. Yes, even worse than the Hell Train. Everybody was sitting on top of everyone else. It was crazy. Everybody was laughing and many of the women were breast feeding their children. I still laugh when I think of that crazy ride.

A little later John and I finally got a ride from two men who turned out to be employees of the United Nations. We all had a good conversation about the UN in Africa. After about an hour I suddenly realized that the vehicle had no windshield. I pointed that out to John and we asked the UN employees what happened to the windshield. They explained that while they were driving through Mali on a dirt road a small boy ran in front of the vehicle, was hit by it, went through the windshield and died. They told us that they left as fast as they could because the villagers would have killed them if they waited. I have heard similar tragic stories. 

They dropped us off an hour later in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second biggest city. John and I found a music store and got the staff to play the latest Beatles albums. The next day we got a ride to Ouagadougou, the capital city. The day after, John and I decided to split up. Somehow he managed to have more money than he did at the start. He wanted to go straight to Ghana and I wanted to spend more days in Ouagadougou. The following day I bought some spicy pastry and nearly turned purple as the locals laughed as I gagged. Someone brought me a glass of water.

I headed on to Accra, the capital of Ghana but never saw Cheap John again. I heard many stories about him along the trail, mostly negative. I assume he went back to Toronto and I have always wondered what became of him. As for me, I passed through Togo and Dahomey on the way east to Nigeria where I fell sick with a mild case of infectious hepatitis and had to fly home. 

I made five more trips to Africa and thanks to my job as a reporter I had enough money to travel well. In 1998 my wife and our three children backpacked through east and central Africa and we all roughed it and loved it. 

The only casualties on the journey were three goats that I helped eat after they were butchered and cooked on a fire by one of my truck drivers, plus a Frenchman who badly broke his leg jumping off the back of the truck he was riding on because the cargo was on fire in the middle of the desert at night thanks to his careless smoking, and all the endless flies I killed while waiting way too long for a truck in Mauritania.

My only desire now was to get to Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, and one of Africa’s leading cultural centres. I wanted to observe and experience life in a major, sub-Saharan African city.

It took me only one ride to cover the 100 kms from the Mauritanian border south to the city of Saint-Louis. From there I spoiled myself by taking a 260-kilometre train ride south to Dakar, beside the beautiful Atlantic Ocean.

The first thing that struck me in Senegal, and especially in Dakar, was the spectacularly colourful and beautiful clothes worn by the Senegalese people. The words for these clothes in Wolof, the main tribe and local language, is ‘boubou,’ for men, and ‘m’boubou’ for women. The male version is a sleeveless robe worn over top of a long-sleeved gown, or trousers. The female outfit is a flowing dress that reaches to just above the ankles, worn over a wrapped skirt. The quality of the material and the dye used to produce the sparkling colours varied as did the price.

These clothes are still worn in Dakar, and with variations across West Africa, especially on big market days, but not as commonly as they were in 1972. Almost everyone was dressed up in those gorgeous traditional clothes back then and they looked particularly sharp on the women. I did see some people wearing western clothes, mostly men in suits, but even a colour- blind person like me was enchanted by the colourful garb. The only other word in Wolof I learned was spelled “Wau,” but pronounced ‘Wow!’, which means ‘Yes!’ in Wolof. On a few occasions I heard locals talking away in Wolof, nodding their heads and repeating ‘Wow, Wow, Wow.’

Dakar had a lot to offer the budget traveller. The medina featured narrow streets, laid out in grids and packed with people. There was plenty of delicious and cheap street food available from local vendors, such as grilled fish, mutton and the national dish, Thieboudienne – fish with rice and vegetables simmered in tomato sauce. Customers could watch cows being killed and butchered in the market, an awful sight I totally avoided. I preferred watching the young boys playing pickup football (soccer) in the streets. There was a great deal of poverty in Dakar, but there was also an unmistakably jubilant spirit and atmosphere. I was very happy to be there.

Dakar was a very safe city and I quickly learned from locals that I could put up my excellent two-man tent on the beach without worrying that someone would steal it, or my sleeping bag and my clothes.

After a few days I met a young American who asked if he could share my tent because he couldn’t afford to stay in a cheap hotel. I didn’t really want to share my tent with him but he was a fellow backpacker in need, so I reluctantly said yes. He moved his things into my tent and we got along well enough.

One night I came back to the beach with my flashlight and couldn’t seem to find the tent. That’s when I heard his voice. He was apologetic. It seems he was reading a book in my tent by candlelight, knocked the candle over, burned down the tent and most of everything I owned except my sleeping bag. I was shocked. I didn’t say so, but you have to be pretty stupid to read by candlelight in a tent. He offered to pay for the damage, but insisted he was running out of money. He finally offered me $60 US dollars, which was pathetic when you consider the tent alone was worth wore than twice that much. I swallowed hard but settled for his offer and used it to buy some new clothes, but not boubou. I still had my traveller’s cheques but replacing everything was just too expensive.

The highlight of my time in Senegal was the state visit of Omar Bongo, who served as the President of Gabon for 42 years. I had heard Bongo was coming the day before, but was astounded to witness the spectacle that followed. Senegalese President Leopold Senghor commandeered all the buses his government could find, sent them out into the bush country and filled them with villagers, who were bused into Dakar to create massive cheering crowds for his long motorcade with Bongo, from the airport to the Presidential palace.

I watched transfixed as thousands of rural peasants came rolling off those buses and began a massive street party in the capital city. They were having a lot of fun. I thought it was fantastic, but the Senegalese soldiers monitoring the streets were not pleased. Men were playing bongo drums while the women danced wildly and joyously in the streets. I was loving the show. The soldiers demanded order, however, and to my disbelief, began snapping bullwhips at the villagers to try to get them off the streets and lined up ‘properly’ on the sidewalks, so the motorcade could pass through smoothly when it arrived.

The villagers kept up the frenzied dancing and there simply wasn’t nearly enough soldiers to control the crowd and stop them. Apart from the bullwhips I thought it was wonderful.

Finally, more soldiers came, a few people were stung by the whips, and those groovy villagers retreated to the sidewalks. A few minutes later the luxurious car carrying Senghor and Bongo passed by at a fairly high speed, under signs welcoming the President of Gabon, and motored on to the palace as the crowds clapped and cheered loudly.

I told that story of the parade, with the soldiers and the bullwhips, many times to my friends, and one day a few years ago I got a big surprise. I was watching the excellent 1973 Senegalese film, Touki Bouki, directed by Djibril Diop Mombety, one of Africa’s best film directors, when I noticed something familiar. Touki Bouki, which can be found in Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Volume 1, and occasionally on TCM (Turner Classic Movies), was clearly influenced by the French New Wave cinema, and featured numerous fantasy sequences depicting Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a female university student, both of whom desired to escape from the poverty of Senegal to the wealth and sophistication of Paris.

The film portrayed a massive parade through the streets of Dakar with shots of Mory and Anta riding in a car, waving to the cheering crowds. Mombety cleverly integrated the shots of his characters into the parade sequence as if they were part of it. Suddenly it dawned on me that this was surely the same crazy parade I watched back in 1972, 38 years ago!

I replayed the film carefully and froze it when I noticed a banner welcoming Bongo to Dakar! I could barely believe it. I went back to the first shot of the parade and advanced it frame by frame, scanning the crowd for shots of myself, but I was apparently not captured in the footage, nor were the soldiers cracking the whips at the dancing peasant women. It was still a thrill to see the parade and an 89-minute film depicting a very familiar Dakar at the precise time I was there for a visit. It brought back many happy memories, apart from the bozo who burned down my tent.

I arrived in kindergarten at the age of 4, the smallest kid in the class, already reading and with a deep love of arithmetic, anticipating that school would be challenging and fun. I was so wrong and so terribly disappointed.

We spent our first two years learning what I already knew, which was excruciatingly boring. I soon tuned out the teachers and the very over-crowded class and quickly became a totally disinterested student who dreaded school and adapted by creating a fantasy world of my own – just staring out the window and daydreaming for hours about being a baseball star or what it must feel like to be happy and well liked in school.

My friends and others who know me well will laugh out loud to hear this, but I was very quiet, withdrawn and painfully shy as a child – the direct opposite of the person I ultimately became. For decades I sensed a loud, opinionated, intellectually curious person locked up inside me, aching to get out.

As I was growing up our Norwegian boarder let me read his National Geographics whenever I liked and I trace my life-long passion for travel, adventure and a fascination with the developing world back to those magazines which I looked through and read almost every day. I also owned a wonderful many-coloured globe that lit up, and I especially loved the deep green mysterious Belgian Congo on the globe, located in the very heart of Africa, where I spent five wild and wonderful weeks many years later. It was my way of imagining a far more exotic and happy life than the deeply troubled one I was living.

About once a week I walked a mile to the public library across the street from the Thomas Edison Museum and scooped up biographies of the American Presidents, read every Hardy Boys mystery and whatever else interested me. It was like I was leading a secret life, home schooling myself.

Apart from my near total lack of interest in school I was not a typical troublemaker. I was exceptionally quiet and never directly misbehaved in any way unless not paying much attention and ignoring classroom work was misbehavior. I would even hide under my desk sometimes when we were all told to bring our completed work assignments up to the teacher which all the other students did. In short, I was alienated and miserable. I stubbornly ignored whatever did not interest me but passionately pursued what did. I am by nature either all in, or barely in at all. I was so lost by Grades 2 and 3 that it would have taken an exceptional mentor to light a fire under me. The teachers understandably assumed I was probably a slow learner. Occasionally I surprised and even shocked them, however.

For example, one day we were given lengthy work sheets on division and multiplication. I finally found something interesting and gave it my total attention. A few minutes later everyone but me was slaving over the work sheets and the teacher raced to my desk and angrily demanded to know why I wasn’t doing the work. I blushed and did not reply, but I handed the sheets to her. She stood like a statue poring over them in disbelief, realizing I had already completed the entire assignment and all my answers were correct, far ahead of all the other students. I will never forget the stunned expression on her face. She mumbled something like “good work” without even looking at me and walked away appearing deeply puzzled.

What she didn’t know was that at home I spent endless hours filling up notebooks with calculations of all kinds, which drove my father crazy. He called them my “damn little numbers.” I still obsessively do similar calculations over sports stats, election numbers, Coronavirus cases and deaths, etc. For example, at Oilers games if Connor McDavid scores multiple points I happily recalculate in my mind the scoring pace he is on and his projected end of season points totals. As the English poet William Wordsworth wrote “The child is father of the man.” Put another way ‘the man he is, grew from the child he was.’

A few years later in 1960 when I was 11 I watched my first foreign film with subtitles on PBS and felt as though I was viewing my own troubling life story. I totally identified with the Antoine Doinel character in French director Francois Truffaut’s brilliant and heart breaking semi- autographical film, The 400 Blows, still my favourite film of the French New Wave.

For Doinel, Truffaut and me, adolescence was a very painful experience, featuring corporal punishment, terrible teachers, a deeply troubled home life and near total alienation. The small boy in the film, Antoine, ran away from his dysfunctional home, was arrested for stealing a typewriter and sent far away to a dreadful juvenile detention center in southern France. The movie is a powerful indictment of French society emphasized by the haunting but enigmatic final freeze frame of the film after Antoine escapes and runs for a long time before stopping cold and staring directly at the camera. Is it a plea for help? An expression of his inner pain or anger? A reflection of his parents rejection of him? I don’t know but I felt like his twin brother. Like Antoine, played beautifully by young Jean-Pierre Leaud, I felt like a human square peg being unsuccessfully hammered into a round hole. Like Antoine I still didn’t or couldn’t fit in.

As with many Catholic schools, Our Lady of Lourdes embraced very strict discipline and the nuns ruthlessly dished out harsh physical punishment with Old Testament fury on supposed ‘bad’ boys. I never saw or heard of a girl being slapped or hit by a nun thank goodness, but I saw many defenceless little boys cruelly thrashed for mostly trivial reasons and I was absolutely terrified of the nuns.

I figured I was safe because I was merely a harmless dreamer, not a significant problem. Then one day the bell tolled for me. In Grade 3 or 4 I wrote a test in my religion class for a nun who then left while we stayed in the room and a lay teacher came in for the next class. About 20 minutes later the nun burst into the classroom, raced to my desk, grabbed a hunk of my hair and used it to yank my head back with brute force as she repeatedly slapped me unbelievably hard across my face, loudly yelling again and again “you will never ever write a religion exam in pencil again,” before stomping out of the classroom, still in a rage. I know the brutality is now gone, but nothing can ever excuse what those nuns did to children. Viciously slapping an innocent child repeatedly for the ‘crime’ of writing a religion exam in pencil is clearly child abuse. For countless minutes I shook helplessly amidst the total silence. I can’t recall how long my face stung with pain and shame as silent tears rolled down my cheeks against my will. I now hated both the school and the nuns and was desperate to escape, somehow, someway.

After my beating there was a period of uncomfortable silence and then the class resumed as if nothing had happened. I was just the latest victim, so no one was too upset or surprised. The brutality was commonplace. I have lived with that barbaric act for more than 60 years and still remember it as vividly as if it happened yesterday. I pleaded with my mother to move me across the street to Eagle Rock Public Elementary School, citing bullies as the problem because I was afraid to tell her about what that nun did to me. That’s how scared I was of them. To my great relief she finally moved me across the street for my Grade 5 year and my sister Joan, who was also struggling, to Grade 6.

The public school was definitely an improvement over Our Lady of Lourdes. At least no kids were slapped around by the teachers. I was quickly identified as a poor student, based on my low grades at Lourdes. Even when I did well I got little or no credit, however. In Grade 5 I was a very surprising finalist in the annual class spelling bee, which clearly puzzled the teacher, Mr. Sorakapud. A bright female classmate and I were the last students still standing out of about 30 pupils. Repeated attempts did not break the deadlock. As an avid reader I was quite a good speller. And now, for once, I was actually having fun at school and really wanted to win something. At that point Mr. Sorakapud told me in front of the class that I should be a gentleman and let the girl have the prize that goes to the winner. I tartly replied that this was a spelling bee not a lesson in etiquette. Why not choose harder words and have a legitimate winner, I suggested. He totally ignored me and just handed her the prize, whatever it was. I spelled every word I was given correctly and STILL lost. Story of my life. Well, of my young life.

Later that year Mr. Sorokapud gave the class a surprise multiple choice current events test after a week of all-day classroom work on that subject, which I thoroughly enjoyed and followed very closely. I got 49 out of 50 multiple choice questions right for a 98, missing only the last question, far ahead of any classmate. Instead of congratulating me Sorakapud pulled me aside after class and suggested I must have cheated somehow. For the first and only time in my entire school life I got really mad and demanded that he tell me how I supposedly cheated. He had no answer. He obviously thought he had me pegged and this piece didn’t fit into his shallow and lazy assessment of me. Sure, I didn’t do very well in class most of the time because I was often totally bored and daydreaming but when I was interested I did very well. What he didn’t know was that I was totally fascinated by current events. I read the Newark Star Ledger closely every day, avidly watched the news on television and was deeply interested in politics, local and world events, even though I had no one to talk to about it.

There were no marauding nuns at Eagle Rock but the teaching standards weren’t much better. My grade 6 teacher, Miss Cowan, was a prime example. We spent at least a third of our classroom time each day learning how to square dance. I am not making this up. Every day we would have to move our desks into the corners of the room so we could square dance for hours. In Grade 6? What kind of school would allow such a thing to go on for years? Why didn’t the parents demand an end to this nonsense? I assume they didn’t because we lived in a generally poor neighborhood with few if any involved and demanding parents.

There was another factor working against my sister Joan and I – our home life. My mother deeply loved her two children and sacrificed greatly so that we could have nice clothes like the other kids. She put our needs far ahead of her own, though I didn’t realize that for a long time. I can’t imagine how we survived our childhood. The problem was my father. He was a very nasty, very bigoted and selfish alcoholic who spent most of his paycheque as a grocery clerk on booze, which didn’t leave much money for the rest of us. He would come home from work every night very drunk and very loud which our unfortunate neighbours had to endure as well.

On a few occasions in her high school days when my sister was on the phone with her Jewish boyfriend my drunk father would yell out anti-Semitic tripe such as “Hitler should have finished the job.” What a disgrace. What an embarrassment. When my mother was at the hospital after giving birth to Joan my father shacked up with a drunken floozy from his favourite bar. He almost totally ignored me but one night he slapped me around very hard when I yelled at him to leave my mother alone.

The only enjoyable thing that happened in Grade 6 was my first IQ test. I loved it. It was the most fun I ever had in elementary school. The test was delightfully challenging and the results came as a total shocker to Miss Cowan and no doubt Mr. Sorakapud. I would give virtually anything to have seen Sorakapud’s reaction to my test result, which I only learned about the next year.

I was still mostly a bored daydreamer who only participated in class if it was something I found interesting or faced a direct question. Miss Cowan was very nice to me, however, after the IQ test and she even told the class one day that I was exceptionally smart. I don’t think they believed her. I’m not even sure I believed her. By that point my self confidence and self esteem were essentially non-existent. All I had was my books, my math, my sports, the news, and my daydreams. I had become a classic underachiever and a lost child suffering from a deep depression. School was my daytime nightmare.

It didn’t get any better. In Grade 7 I went to Thomas Edison Junior High School, a very rough place with numerous bullies and only a few competent teachers. The school had six divisions in Grade 7. The top students were placed in 7-1, the bottom students were placed in 7-6 and the rest were placed in the other four classes which were considered equal. No doubt thanks to my IQ test I was placed in Grade 7-1. Within a month I was rightly moved down to 7-5, however. Nothing really changed.

One day I was called down to the principal’s office. To my surprise he said he had been looking at my grades and my IQ test result and asked if there was anything he could do to help me, adding I was always welcome in his office, which was very nice. Thanks to him a school psychologist was soon brought in to administer a much longer and more extensive, one-on-one IQ test, no doubt to determine if the previous test result was a huge fluke. In fact I recorded the exact same score as the first test, though I didn’t know that yet.

I was always small and thin and had never been in a fight in my life. One day at Edison I was basically forced to fight a much bigger and stronger student. I’ll call him Richie. I was standing facing away from the thug that day when he suddenly hit me incredibly hard on the jaw with a huge, dirty sucker punch from behind. That really hurt but now I was trapped. I couldn’t run away, though I really wanted to. We went to a grassy area near the school and the fight was on with another older student, Billy, acting as the referee to keep it clean. Ritchie knew how to fight and he caught me with a few very hard punches to my cheeks but in an act of desperation I managed to get him in a secure headlock and choked him with all my strength. He could not punch effectively in that position of course and desperately bit me on my side. I kept on choking him even harder in response and he was now gasping for air and moaning like a baby. Billy told him to stop biting me and when he didn’t stop Billy punched him very hard in the kidneys and he gave up, crying pathetically. My jaw and my cheeks were sore for at least a week but I didn’t tell anyone about that. Happily, Richie didn’t ask for a rematch and never bothered me again. This was a rite of passage that almost all boys face, often more than once.

The principal recommended my mother take me to see a psychiatrist to try and find out why I was such a loner, under-achiever, and day dreamer. I came from a poor family and the cost of the psychiatrist was a burden that proved largely useless. It’s quite possible I had some youthful psychological or physical condition such as dyslexia, late puberty, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I suspect my father’s genes were part of the problem but I just don’t know. I did not make friends easily and was mostly just plain bored in social situations. The psychiatrist told my mother about my IQ test results and she shared them with me.

I took yet another standardized IQ test at Edison in Grade 8 with all the other students and got the exact same result for the third time, although I didn’t know that for another two years. Once again it was a lot of fun. I’d be happy writing those tests every day. It was very challenging and I loved that. Unfortunately, my grades were so low I had to go to summer school to avoid repeating a grade.

After another wasted year my mother decided I should go back into the Catholic system, as if that would help. I had to take another standardized (but not IQ) test, submit my dreadful school grades and list my three Catholic High school preferences. Given my grades my mother believed it appropriate to put two of the less prestigious local Catholic high schools first and second and made the third choice Seton Hall Prep School, the top rated academic Catholic high school in New Jersey, just for the hell of it. I must have really aced that standardized test because I got accepted by all three schools and my ever optimistic if not realistic mom chose Seton Hall, an elite all-boys school in nearby South Orange.

I soon discovered how miserable and toxic the atmosphere of a school could be without the civilizing presence of females. I was regularly tormented by a much older and bigger Grade 10 bully who on one occasion knocked me unconscious with a sucker punch to my stomach for no reason but his own sick pleasure. He laughed when I came to and threatened to do far worse if I reported his actions to school officials and I believed him. I knew my life at Seton Hall would become impossible if I complained about him, so I endured as best I could and avoided him as much as possible. There was no place there for “squealers” or “rats” but plenty of room for bullies apparently. It was like a British private school.

I barely survived Grade 9 and totally crashed and burned the following year. I had one teaching mentor, Fr. Higgins, who was kind and took a genuine interest in me. In Grade 10 he looked up my school records and having a degree in psychology asked if he could give me yet another very lengthy face-to-face IQ test, which he confirmed produced my fourth straight identical score – 140 — which he told the class about for some reason. I continued to get horrible grades and got the boot from Seton Hall, which was fine with me. My only happy memory was seeing Seton Hall’s basketball team come back from ten points down in the fourth quarter to win the New Jersey Catholic state championship in overtime at Atlantic City.

Unfortunately, I had to go to summer school yet again to avoid repeating Grade 10. What a way to ruin summer. That landed me back in the public system for Grades 11 and 12 at West Orange High School.

My years at West Orange High were a step in the right direction for once. To my delight there were much better teachers and students. My grades were still a bit below average but they were definitely an improvement, especially in Latin. I also made some new friends and competed well on the varsity cross country and track teams. I also remember a female science teacher who reached out to me and was as happy as I was when I got a top grade in a science work project. If only there were more teachers like her I might have blossomed a lot sooner.

My grades were okay but not high enough to get into a really good college or university. In the United States there is a college for everyone if you have the money and I ended up at Buena Vista College in Storm Lake, Iowa, my one experience of Midwest America. I was exhilarated by my near total freedom and soon stopped going to some of my classes. Sorry mom. I remember once deciding it was time to start attending a course that I had skipped for two weeks only to discover I couldn’t find the classroom anymore.

On the bright side, I made a good friend from Iowa named Glen who was a nice guy and a very good pool player. He didn’t skip classes but he taught me how to play pool and from then on I took advantage of the school Rec Centre, which allowed students to play for free as long as there were open pool tables. Like when everyone else was in class. December came and I entered the college’s large annual pool tournament for a lark. Somehow I got on a roll and knocked off Glen, another good friend and a long series of others, making it all the way to the semifinals before I was defeated by the defending champion. Not bad for only three months of playing. That was my only achievement at Buena Vista as I flunked out by Christmas. At least my student deferment kept me temporarily out of the draft for the Vietnam War.

I spent the next six months in western Pennsylvania working as a blaster’s helper with my three uncles’ Cooney Brothers Coal Company. My beloved Uncle Chuck took me under his wing. I think those long hard shifts of physical labour were good for me, especially setting off all the explosions which I really enjoyed doing. I would have stayed longer but I realized I was likely to get re-classified by the draft board to 1-A, AKA cannon fodder, and be drafted soon if I didn’t act.

On February 23, 1968, I arrived in Toronto by bus and soon obtained landed immigrant status at the Sarnia border. A few months later my mother received a letter for me from the draft board saying I must report for a pre-induction physical and draft status update. I had no intention of showing up but my Toronto roommate, Bill, was excited about visiting New York City so we hitchhiked to Jersey and I went through the six-hour ordeal of the physical, being poked and prodded, waiting in endless lines wearing only underwear and shoes without socks. On the big day my mother passed me envelopes from two psychiatrists I saw in my younger days and both apparently concluded I was not fit for military service.

At the final stage I handed over the letters and the official opened the first one. He didn’t even bother to open the second one and immediately confirmed I would not have to serve in the army and would be classified as 1Y, only available in times of war or national emergency and the United States never officially declared war on Vietnam. He emphasized that they could always bring me back again and have THEIR psychiatrists examine me, but they never did.

A couple years later the US had a draft lottery and my birthdate just missed getting drawn, not that I would have come back to the US if it had been.

I fell in love with Canada instantly 52 years ago and still have no desire to ever live in or even visit the United States again. It was the best and wisest decision of my life. I had no choice about where I was born, but a real choice about where I would spend the rest of my life.

The US invasion of Vietnam was a war of aggression based on President Lyndon Johnson’s bogus Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as revealed in the Pentagon Papers. The thought of dying horribly in a rice paddy fighting an unwinnable and indefensible war made no sense to me. I still see the invasion as a grotesque war crime by the USA.

My best friend, Peter Kovach, fell for the line that enlisting for three years of choice was better than waiting to get drafted for two years of chance. Peter wrote copious letters to me and my mother describing boot camp and Vietnam. I’ll never forget them. One night in Edmonton I called my mother from a pay phone and was shocked when she told me that Peter had been killed in combat. He suffered third degree burns on 80 per cent of his body in a fire fight and only survived for a few days in a Japanese hospital. I walked the streets of Edmonton all night long thinking of Peter and unsuccessfully fighting back tears. It took me about 15 years to accept his death. I repeatedly dreamt happily of meeting him and discovering that he was still alive and that it was all a mistake – only to remember the dream in the morning or a day or so later. Finally, I stopped having the dream but Peter’s death still haunts me and always will.

I soon discovered that I had to have three years of a modern language to obtain senior matriculation and be accepted at a Canadian university. I learned from Bill that Latin would suffice as a foreign language requirement in Alberta. I moved to Edmonton but I only had two years of Latin, so I didn’t qualify. That decision kept me out of the University of Alberta for almost four years, which turned out to be a blessing.

First, I attended Edmonton’s Eastglen Composite High School where I took a number of required courses and did very well in both English and Social Studies, fairly well in Biology and not so well in Chemistry. Not great, but a significant step up for me. To my amazement I was quite popular for the first time ever. Being both a draft dodger and the only guy in the school who could grow a full moustache, it was cool to know me, a totally new experience. I was even befriended by the toughest kid in school. Best of all I became friends with a group that included a few of Eastglen’s top students whose intellectual heft, creativity and striving for excellence inspired me to follow their example. All of these things helped build my confidence and self respect and I began to read a wide range of challenging books of all kinds. Things were changing.

Since I couldn’t go to the University of Alberta I spent most of the next three years hitchhiking around North America, Europe and West Africa, interacting with fascinating people, reading a great deal, going to rock festivals, crossing the Sahara Desert on the back of local trucks, thumbing through Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Uganda, Benin and Nigeria, spending a night in jail in Texas for the crime of hitchhiking, and generally having a great many crazy adventures, working various jobs, including a year-long one in Prince Edward Island as an untrained social worker.

Finally, I was accepted at the U of A as an adult student in 1973. Those four years helped me to mature, grow in confidence and explore the world in preparation for my university courses. I was fresh out of the school of the open road and determined that I could and would succeed this time. I was all in. At last.

First, I got a spring and summer job at Dominion Bottlers, saved as much money as possible and for once I was absolutely ready to do well. I forced myself to develop proper study habits, worked very hard and got good marks (7.9 on the 9 point scale) for the first time in my life. I was nearly broke and landed a job at the new Room At The Top (RATT), the Student Union bar, worked at the university bookstore each summer and lived in subsidized student housing, barely getting by thanks to the meals the female cooks at RATT comped me.

Every year after that I won increasingly greater scholarship money and my grade point average rose to 8.4 in year two and then 8.5 in year three. By then I was already taking some political science graduate student courses from a visiting professor. After a year as a political philosophy graduate student I realized that I was not suited to a life of teaching. I found it extremely difficult to stand before a class to lecture, answer questions, mark papers or control a classroom. It was just too much pressure and responsibility for me. I am not a leader, but I am also not a follower. I am both stubborn and very, very independent minded.

I was quite poor and seriously considered taking the LSAT test and applying for law school, but a friend who was a Journal reporter and the former editor-in-chief of The Gateway when I was the News Editor of the university student paper said The Journal badly needed a copy boy and I got the job the next day. I fit right in immediately. After a few weeks the night editor and later Editor-in-Chief Steve Hume encouraged me to become a reporter and asked if I wanted to write a story. I said yes. Fortunately, the story I was given by assistant city editor Nick Lees gave me a real opportunity to display my journalistic skills. Thanks Nick.

My assignment was to write a feature story about Edmonton’s wheelchair athlete Ron Minor, a star in wheelchair basketball, track and field, and swimming. I interviewed him and immediately focused on his performance in a major international track meet in Europe a month earlier. Just before the race was to begin Minor ran his wheelchair over a board with a nail in it at the edge of the track and it punctured one of his two tires. Unfortunately, there was no time to replace it. Any other athlete would understandably curse his or her bad luck and pull out of the race, but Ron Minor was not a normal competitor. He raced with a flat tire and finished in second place only one tenth of a second short of a gold medal. That heroic race mirrored the way he had responded to adversity throughout his young life. What an inspiration he was.

The next morning when the story appeared the phones in the newsroom started ringing off the hook as an avalanche of Journal readers called to praise the story and salute the inspiring athlete who didn’t know the meaning of quit. I was sitting at the copy chaser’s table and looked up to see The Journal’s legendary publisher, J Patrick O’Callaghan, standing over me and congratulating me on my story. Two days later I heard through the grapevine that I was going to be offered a reporting job and a few days after that I got the job and kept it for 29 happy years.

That Monday I was assigned to sit on the city desk for a week with assistant city editor and future publisher Linda Hughes, to listen and learn. It was January and a late morning story emerged about a plane getting flat tires while landing on the icy cold runway at Edmonton International Airport. Linda told me to chase the story hard and I did, getting some good quotes from an airport spokesman who said flat tires in winter were common. Under intense time pressure I put together a good story even though the airport spokesman tried to take his quotes back. No chance. I finished the story just in time for final edition deadline and it ran at the top of the city page, B1, with my byline. I was still buzzing with adrenaline when my shift ended and I felt that I had found my calling at last. This is what I was meant to do. Forget law school. Forget those vicious nuns. Forget terrible schools and pathetic teachers like Mr. Sorakapud. I was now a very determined and confident journalist with an exciting future in front of him. I was 30 years old, the average age of a classic late bloomer, and nothing was going to hold me down anymore.

A few months later I did my first major investigation. The subject was Edmonton’s Centennial Montessori School. I wrote an expose about some very serious problems in the private school and then learned that eight inspectors from the Ministry of Education had written reports on it. I called all eight on the phone and many of them were sympathetic to my concerns, but all declined to comment or send me his or her own report.

Two days later I showed up for work in the morning and noticed a bulging plain yellow envelope in my mail slot. The only thing inside was a copy of all eight damning reports that I easily turned into a very powerful story which was raised at the Alberta legislature. The lesson I learned was calling all eight inspectors because persistence is always worthwhile and it only takes one to give you the story. It was just like in the movies. And so it began.

I quickly became the go-to guy for out-of-town and out-of-country assignments starting with The Killer Bear of Whiskey Creek, a gigantic and aggressive grizzly who horribly mauled five victims near Banff in 1980.

The following year I convinced the bosses to send me to cover the climax of the IRA hunger strikes in Belfast and the looming death of IRA rebel Bobby Sands. It was the 10 most exciting days of my career. After a few days Sands’ death was announced at 1 a.m. and I quickly found a black taxi driven by an ex-IRA man who took me to a rough Catholic neighbourhood where the locals tossed petrol bombs at the British soldiers who fired rubber bullets and live ammunition back at them. Lots of colour, never a dull moment and a tight deadline to meet. This was what I was made for.

Two days later I walked beside the funeral parade carrying Sands’ coffin in a hearse, guarded by seven IRA men on the way to Belfast’s IRA graveyard. Another seven IRA men stopped the parade and fired a series of volleys over Sands’ coffin, before continuing. I barely beat my deadline by phoning in the story at an all-Catholic taxi station where the drivers shouted advice and criticism of me as I somehow managed to dictate my story with the help of wonderful Journal copy editors. What a great job I had. Editor-in-Chief Steve Hume later told me he attended a conference and used my story as an example of coping with deadline pressure.

In 1984 I was told to hop on a helicopter up to northern Alberta where a small plane had crashed, killing six of the ten people on the aircraft. I learned quickly that NDP leader Grant Notley died in the accident and Housing Minister Larry Shaben was hospitalized with various injuries.

Thanks to lots of luck Byron Christopher of CBC radio and I, with Jackie Northam as our photographer, managed to share an exclusive interview with Shaben in the hospital, scooping everyone else. I just seemed to have a lucky streak going. People told me it was like the news was following me around.

A year later I was sent to Virginia City, Montana, to cover the trial of two unkempt so-called mountain men who looked and sounded as if they just walked off the set of the movie Deliverance. They were on the hunt for a mountain bride to kidnap and share when they encountered and imprisoned world class biathlete Keri Swenson, who was very attractive. A search party rescued Swenson, who was shot accidentally by the young mountain man, but she survived. One volunteer was shot dead by the father who escaped and wasn’t captured for many months.

The next year The Journal made a snap decision to send a reporter to Libya because there were a great many Albertans working in the oil fields there and US President Ronald Reagan was making threatening sounds about bombing Libya. I was their man and a few days later I was sitting a few feet from Muammar Ghaddafi at a press conference and loving the experience and the challenge.

One day I and about a dozen other foreign journalists were flown to the Libyan city of Misrata in the Gulf of Sidra and ended up sailing along the ‘line of death’ with Gaddafi to supposedly challenge the US Sixth Fleet. What a great story. I never had more fun in my life. I also had a few other international bylines along the way.

Shortly before my Libya trip I married a British woman, Philippa, and we had three children, Rachel in 1987, Danny in 1989 and Sam in 1992, changing my life forever.

There were the investigations. In 1987 I wrote two major stories about Montreal mob hit man and convicted murderer Daniel Gingras who controversially got a day pass from Edmonton Institution to West Edmonton Mall, easily overpowered his rather small escort and murdered two more people before he was captured. When a thorough federal investigation was finished I was the first and only reporter in Canada to see and utilize the official report with nothing blacked out. You don’t get that kind of access unless you have earned it by nurturing your contacts and winning their respect.

In 1990 David Staples, Cam Cole and I were finalists in the National Newspaper Awards for stories that established that Edmonton Oilers Hall of Fame goalie Grant Fuhr was a cocaine addict.

Two years later my examination of the use and abuse of psychiatry in the criminal justice system won the Michener Award for public service in journalism – in my opinion the most important of all national journalistic awards. In my spare time while covering the courts over the course of nearly six years I occasionally worked on that package entirely on my own time without consulting any managers, which made some of them VERY upset when I handed in the huge package. I tried to explain that until nearly the end I wasn’t sure if I could make the collection of stories work effectively together, which they ultimately did, obviously.

Managing Editor Michael Cooke, who accompanied me to Montreal for the awards ceremony, told me I should keep the plaque, not The Journal, because I came up with the idea and did all the research and the writing. He also noted that the Journal manager who was supposed to write a covering letter for our entry didn’t bother to do so, shocking some of the Michener judges according to Cooke. I didn’t care at all because I won anyway – totally on my own.

In 1997 I completed the long investigation of a local pedophile priest, Father Patrick O’Neill, ultimately putting him in prison for two years. I couldn’t have done it without the terrific work of a local Catholic, Sheila Williams, who tipped me about O’Neill and provided tremendous help in my investigation. The conversations I had with many of the victims moved me like no other story I ever wrote. There were more investigations of course, such as the inside story of California serial killer Charles Ng, whose extradition hearing was held in Edmonton.

After nearly three decades of deeply loving my job I took a $125,000 buyout and cancelled my Journal subscription because I was very unhappy with what the newspaper had become after it was purchased by Postmedia, an extreme right wing Toronto company, which in turn was owned by an extreme right wing US hedge fund. There were still many good people at The Journal and still are but Postmedia demanded that the newspaper endorse the Conservative Party, federally and provincially, even though Edmonton was a left-wing city which has 19 NDP MLAs and only one right-wing MLA. A great strategy for driving customers away.

Three days after the buyout I started back to my beloved University of Alberta and for a decade took 27 courses for credit, all but two 300 and 400 level classes in English and Film Studies, plus one history course, getting 26 A’s out of 27, including 10 A pluses. My first two classes were Chaucer and Shakespeare and I felt like I was in heaven, loving every bit of it. No two men ever understood human nature better than they did, give or take Plato. I also really enjoyed getting to know some of the best young students.

After that I spent three wonderful months trekking in Bhutan and Nepal in 2008, followed by four months more in Nepal and Northern India in 2014. I couldn’t be happier. My many trips to Africa, South America, Europe and Asia were the fulfillment of my childhood dreams, and I am anxious at 72 to go back and do plenty more if we ever conquer the pandemic.

I hope these stories give hope to parents with children who have struggled in school—children who are bright but underachieving. If they have the drive and the capacity, there is still a good chance they will blossom and find the joy and satisfaction that I have been fortunate enough to experience throughout my many journeys.

I tracked down and cold-called dozens of those boys and awkwardly asked them about their experiences with Father Patrick O’Neill. Sometimes I had to bluntly ask if they had been molested by him. I also asked them if they had friends who had been fondled or worse by the Catholic priest. I felt grossly uncomfortable raising the subject, but was never able to find an approach that wasn’t terribly clumsy.

I dreaded making those phone calls but there was no other way to establish that O’Neill was a pedophile and a continuing threat who was still wearing a clerical collar, even though senior church officials were fully aware of his behaviour over decades. It’s the same old story. He was switched from parish to parish, leaving his victims behind him and finding new ones. O’Neill was sent out by the Edmonton Archdiocese for treatment at least once, which did no good. There is no cure for pedophilia. Sometimes a child molester feels powerfully motivated to stop sexually abusing young boys or girls. They try hard to avoid all contact with them, but the sexual desire will always be there. There is no evidence that O’Neill ever made an effort to avoid vulnerable children and plenty of evidence that he continued to stalk vulnerable young boys. Even after he was forbidden to say mass, he still used his collar to try and gain access to innocent young boys.

Some of the former altar boys I called hung up on me, or yelled at me and then hung up, or simply said that O’Neill never laid a hand on them. Those were the easy conversations. The hard ones were the many grown men who broke into sobs, or expressed their rage and powerlessness and repeatedly described how they’d like to thrash O’Neill because they were not defenceless children anymore. After a long conversation with a victim I would feel totally drained and dreaded making the next call, though I forced myself to do so after a short break. I talked to many of the victims multiple times and sometimes to their wives or parents. No story I ever worked on sucked the energy out of me like that one. Years later I still can’t imagine what these boys suffered and still suffer as adults and often wonder how the ones I talked to and their families are doing.

One of the advantages of successfully completing a series of journalistic investigations is that you sometimes get calls and tips from people who think they have a great story for you to pursue and publish. Some work out. I got a call one day from an Edmonton woman named Sheila Williams, head of the group Parents of Children Sexually Abused by Priests. She told me that Father Patrick O’Neill had been fondling and molesting children for at least 20 years and that she had lots of evidence. Sheila asked if I would come to her house later in the day and listen to what she and some other concerned parents had to say about the priest. Her children were not among the victims but she cared passionately about the young boys who were sexually abused.

Sheila turned out to be a remarkable and fearless woman. I listened carefully as the other parents told of their children and their experiences with O’Neill, whom they had come to despise, understandably. I found their accounts totally credible. Fortunately for me, Sheila had documented O’Neill’s movements from parish to parish, starting at St. Agnes Church in Edmonton from 1967-69, then to churches in Clandonald, Galahad, Drayton Valley, Red Deer, Grand Cache and Holden, leaving many victims in his wake. Sheila had stories to tell and was a phenomenal help to me. We made a very effective team. She also told me about another priest who was hitting on adult women, and Sheila was not intimidated when the church leaders forced her group to stop meeting at St. Agnes, her church, and discussing that priest’s behaviour, not that it stopped her or others in the group from meeting elsewhere. She was not the kind of woman that could be easily bullied, as church officials learned the hard way.

I was deeply saddened to discover during my research for this blog post that Sheila passed away in July, 2013, at the age of 80. In a world of hypocrites she was the real thing. Sheila was very smart, very determined, had no tolerance for sexual misbehaviour by clergymen and would not stand down when pressured by church officials, who did their best to cover up for their sexual offender priests. She was the real Catholic, not them. She fought for those victimized kids, not for the image of the church. I dedicate this blog post to Sheila, in memory of her courage and relentlessness. Without her help I could never have learned enough to expose O’Neill. In fact without her, I would never have known about O’Neill’s behaviour. We did it together and my admiration for her knows no limit.

I talked to the Edmonton Journal’s city editor, Sheila Pratt, the next day and she agreed the story was well worth pursuing, but we both also agreed it would be impossible to publish allegations that a priest was a pedophile without proof, which would be very hard to get. I decided my best bet was to begin by making an appointment to go directly to the head man, Edmonton Archbishop Joseph MacNeil, who knew all about O’Neill. He was the Archbishop from 1973 to 1999, the time period in which O’Neill did almost all of his molesting, as far as I can tell. I was interested to hear what MacNeil would have to say.

When I arrived at his office, the Archbishop was accompanied by the Chancellor, Rev. Mike McCaffrey, the second highest ranking official in the Archdiocese. MacNeil did most of the talking. When I asked him about the allegations of sexual misconduct by O’Neill, the Archbishop replied, “that’s a very difficult question. I don’t think I’m free to talk about Father O’Neill. I don’t think I should talk about somebody in a situation like this unless I’ve had that person’s permission,” noting no charges had been laid against O’Neill. A very convenient position to take. In a letter he later sent to the Journal brass, MacNeil wrote that he felt obliged by confidentiality to all parties not to comment on any case. “Overlying the internal church process is of course the real possibility of criminal or civil legal proceedings against an accused priest. When the civil authorities get involved, the internal review of the church must take a back seat,” he wrote.

The letter sounded to me like the words of a cynical and heartless lawyer, not a man of God. Protecting the church’s image was apparently more important than protecting the kids. Many of the victims I interviewed angrily dismissed MacNeil’s comments as self-serving. “It’s the church I can’t really forgive in this,” said Scott (not his real name). “They have a responsibility to their parishes and to the kids. They put a lot of people in jeopardy.’’ O’Neill was exposed as a pervert and moved from parish to parish when MacNeil was in charge. Where were the church and its leaders? Why didn’t they place the safety of children ahead of the threat to the church’s reputation? Of course we now know that this kind of immoral and criminal behaviour by Catholic clergymen had been happening for countless centuries in virtually every country in the Roman Catholic world and the sexual abusers and their stories were all virtually the same. Local parents looked up to Catholic priests and didn’t hesitate to trust them with their children.

I distinctly remember MacNeil’s smirk as he closed out our discussion, clearly counting on me to be unable to find enough evidence to print the allegations against O’Neill. I took his unspoken words to mean “prove it if you can,” and that I could expect no help or candour from him. I was steaming as I left the building and waited for my taxi back to the office. I couldn’t help thinking that MacNeil was confident the story would never see the light of day and I vowed to myself that if this story was gettable I would get it, whatever it took. I was angry, and that anger gave me the determination to track down a great many of those former altar boys and hopefully find enough evidence to help put O’Neill behind bars, where he richly deserved to be. I didn’t want to let those boys and their families down.

Whenever I felt spiritually drained after another long, emotional phone conversation with a heartbroken victim I would harken back to that meeting with MacNeil and make another call. I was determined to get enough evidence to get the story into print. People deserved to know the truth, not just about the molesting, but about the way the Roman Catholic Church handled the matter. I also didn’t want to let Sheila Williams down. If she had the courage to challenge church leaders then together I believed we could get to the grisly truth.

To my total surprise I got a call a few days later from an Edmonton man who told me he had been fondled by O’Neill many times when he was young and that the priest tried to sodomize him on one occasion. I asked him how he knew about my investigation and he said Father Mike McCaffrey, whom he knew well, told him about it, and said he might want to talk to me about it. I was glad to learn there was at least one church higher up who was willing to do the right thing.

The man, whom I called Scott in the story I finally wrote, was only six years old when O’Neill began fondling him. Scott, who was from Edmonton, had his worst experience in the Grand Cache rectory where he was visiting at the same time that three young Northern Ireland boys were staying there. I later learned that O’Neill, whose parents were born in Ulster, had been bringing over defenceless young Irish boys for decades.

Scott, who was 13 years old, desperately wanted to call his parents to come get him but was afraid to tell them why. For seven years he had endured the priest’s groping and fondling. The unwelcome hands on his genitals, the body thrust up against him in bed. Now O’Neill wanted Scott to join him in bed and the young boy came with tears running down his cheeks. “What’s the matter?” Scott remembered the priest asking. “You said you wanted to rape me,” the boy stammered. “I shouldn’t tease you like that,” O’Neill replied. “This is our little secret.” Scott knew it was wrong, but who could he tell? Who would believe him?

Two decades later Scott decided to share the secret he had long been hiding. He decided to tell a family friend, Father McCaffrey. He was shocked when McCaffrey told him O’Neill was a well-known pedophile, mostly a persistent fondler of young boys. I repeatedly attempted to contact O’Neill and ask him to tell his side of the story, but he never came to the phone or returned my calls. He finally sent a message back via McCaffrey that he didn’t want to talk.

An investigation is much more credible if some of the crucial sources are willing to talk on the record. The many victims I interviewed understandably declined to have their names used in the story, however, as they were all still struggling with what O’Neill had done to them, so I couldn’t forgive myself if I had tried to talk any of them into agreeing to use their real name. I felt they had suffered enough. I met with Scott numerous times and was totally surprised one day when he told me wanted me to use his name. I hesitated for a few seconds before saying truthfully that it would make the story much stronger if I identified him, but added that he might regret that decision. I asked him to think it over very carefully for a day and talk to his wife about it before reaching a final decision. That is the only time in my thirty-year career that I asked someone to reconsider whether they were willing to be identified in a story.

Scott called me the next day and said he had talked to his wife, thought things through as I asked, and decided he didn’t want his real name used after all. I had no regrets about his decision. Or mine. If he felt strong enough to identify himself in the story, that would have been ideal, but I’m sure now that he did the right thing.

During my investigation I interviewed men who said they were molested by the priest as far back as 1971 in Galahad. O’Neill recruited his victims in two ways. In each parish he worked the priest gathered around him a group of young boys, mostly altar boys. He would take the youths out to movies, Oiler hockey games or for pizza or expensive dinners. They would go on camping trips and other unsupervised outings. The parents of these children assumed that they were safe with a priest. Like other pedophiles the priest was good at detecting the vulnerable young boys who would be unlikely to tell their parents, and groom them for his pleasure.

I talked to many parents who were still outraged by the way O’Neill befriended them and then molested their sons. A man I will call Allan burned with anger when he learned that O’Neill had been molesting his three sons in the rectories in Galahad and Grand Cache for a decade. One of the boys, who was very young when the priest began fondling him, said he knows the fondling and manipulation damaged him. “It affects the way I deal with my boy,” he said, his voice breaking. “I’m not very affectionate. I do give him hugs sometimes, but some part of me holds back. I know it’s the reason.” Allan’s son, whom I call Jack, told a senior church official about the sexual abuse he and his brothers endured for years and was told O’Neill had already been treated for his problem with boys, was back in a parish, and everything was OK now. It wasn’t of course. Jack’s father confronted O’Neill. “I said ‘Why didn’t you come and apologize to me? You abused my children and you didn’t have the guts to come to me.’ ” O’Neill said church officials told him not to say anything because he might have to go to court, Allan told me.

A former altar boy from Galahad told how the pedophile priest twice sat him on his lap and plunged his hand down the boy’s pants and fondled him. Another altar boy told his parents about the molestation. “It was sick,” his father told me. “I complained about it to the church and he was removed.” A priest was sent to talk to the families, which left him disgusted. “All he talked about was protecting the image of the church” the father said bitterly. O’Neill was moved to Grand Cache, where he continued his sexual abuse of young boys. He was then moved to Drayton Valley. It happened again and again as church leaders continued to ignore the reality that more innocent children were sure to be molested as long as O’Neill was allowed to wear his clerical collar.

On at least one occasion the church sent O’Neill to the Southdown Convalescent Foundation in Aurora, Ontario, a treatment centre largely for alcoholic and pedophile priests. A fellow patient at Southdown I talked to was not impressed by O’Neill’s behaviour. While others bared their souls, O’Neill basically refused to talk, I was told. “He was very much on his guard. He wouldn’t share anything with anybody. He would simply say everything was fine. At the end of the month I knew everyone else very well because of what we had shared. I didn’t know him at all.’’ So much for his ‘treatment.’ How did I find this person? Sheila Williams arranged the conversation. Bless her.

My story was published by the Edmonton Journal on September 21, 1997, and I received an avalanche of phone calls from victims I didn’t know of before. A few of them also told their stories to the RCMP, who charged O’Neill for molesting three boys and attempting to sodomize one more than 20 years ago. Painfully eloquent victim impact statements revealed how the three were driven from the church and have fought for years to live with the memories, to re-gain their self-respect and restore their faith in humanity. The priest was sentenced to two years in prison and three years’ probation, a disgracefully low sentence, as anyone who actually talked to the victims had to know.

One of the victims contacted me shortly after my story was published. The former altar boy told me he was in a hospital bed after surgery when his mother walked into the room and handed him a copy of my stories about O’Neill. “That’s what happened to you, isn’t it,” she said. After reading it he told her, yes, he was one of the priest’s victims. He told me that he cut his connections to the church after what O’Neill did to him and began drinking heavily to cope with his psychic pain. The emergence of the truth helped heal his relationship with his family and he decided to contact the RCMP and press charges against the pedophile priest. We exchanged phone calls for nearly a year and he told me how pressing charges finally gave him a sense of empowerment. I ended up connecting him with another devastated victim and they developed a long distance friendship.

I thought the whole affair was over, but two years later someone put copies of my stories about O’Neill and the Edmonton Archdiocese into envelopes and mailed them to a few families in Northern Ireland, where the parents of some of the young boys who sent their sons to holiday with the Edmonton priest learned he was a sexual predator. In fact one of the boys had already told his parents what O’Neill did to him but they didn’t believe him. They trusted the church. Big mistake.

In 1994 a Northern Ireland boy I call Sean woke in the middle of the night and found O’Neill towering over him. The 59-year-old man had shoved his hand down the boy’s shorts and was pawing his private parts. “He kept telling me I was beautiful” the 13-year-old told Edmonton sex crime detectives. “I was confused and scared and didn’t know what to do.” Sean pleaded with the portly, balding priest to stop, but O’Neill was stumbling drunk and bent on his own satisfaction. He ordered the sobbing boy to strip and join him in the living room. On the next mattress his best friend, whom I call Michael, had watched the sordid show in disbelief. He also feigned sleep, wanting to help his pal, but afraid he would be the next victim. “I was terrified of him and I cried myself to sleep every night,” Michael said. One night he forced the kids out of his car near midnight, leaving them to find their own way home across a strange city.

Another time he kicked Michael, elbowed him in the face “and threatened to punch my lights out. After that I started standing up to him,” Michael said. When he returned home, his faith shattered, his life in shambles, he told his mother what happened. She didn’t believe him. Later he drifted into despair and attempted suicide. O’Neill pled guilty to fondling the Irish boys and was given another two-year sentence to be served concurrently with the other sentence, meaning he would do no more additional time in jail. And they call it justice.

I recently discovered on the internet a very long list of Catholic priests from New Jersey who were credibly accused of molesting young boys. That’s where I grew up so I read the list released by the church very carefully. To my amazement it included the name of a priest, now deceased, that I knew well at Seton Hall Catholic Preparatory School in South Orange, New Jersey, where I was a student in Grades 9 and 10. Most of the priests on the list were conveniently dead. This particular one gave me a few rides to Seton Hall Prep’s away basketball games and seemed like an intelligent and friendly person, who was especially nice to me, but never touched me or spoke to me inappropriately. Nevertheless it gives me a chill to think he may have been grooming me as his next victim. I fit the profile. I was a struggling youth from a very troubled home with an alcoholic and occasionally abusive father who showed no interest in my existence. Happily, I flunked out of that private Catholic school a few months later and never saw him again.

I guess I was one of the lucky ones.

Feature Photo: Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton/Lincoln Ho, Grandin Media file photo (from this article).

We took a two-hour ferry ride on February 7 from the then capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, to the island and settled into the Old Stone Town section of Zanzibar city, a World Heritage site that we immediately fell in love with. After a little searching and shopping we found the perfect hotel, the Old Stone Inn, with big comfortable beds, a powerful ceiling fan that actually worked and mosquito nets without holes. It was hot, averaging 32C (90F), so the fan was badly needed. This was our biggest splurge in our 12-week African backpack, but it was worth every penny.

We never tired of walking the narrow, winding streets of the Old Stone Town, a maze of very narrow alleys lined with houses, shops, bazaars and mosques like an historic relic from the days when the Sultan of Oman ruled the island. It was built for people on foot, long before the invention of the automobile. It seemed like there was a surprise around every corner, including a man on a bicycle almost running us over. Even with a map we were constantly lost and couldn’t care less. We did not want to be rescued.

There was always another fascinating shop, an overhanging balcony, an elegantly carved Arab or Indian door or a gaggle of school children chanting the Koran inside a school building. There were Arabic coffee houses, shops with colourful fabrics, and many old structures made of coral stone giving the buildings a warm, reddish hue like the Palace Museum, formerly the home of Zanzibar’s sultans. Toss in the lovely, near deserted beaches, the spice tours, boat rides to charming nearby islands and it’s not surprising that no one, including us, wanted to leave when the time came.

The relentless heat drove us to one decadent act in Zanzibar. We hailed a cab to the International Supermarket, relatively equivalent to an Edmonton corner grocery store, scooped up two litres of ice cream, cabbed it back to our hotel, and sat with the fan going full blast, stuffing down the ice cream. It was frozen solid but we couldn’t wait. We just muscled it out with a big spoon and gobbled it down like starving refugees.

For dinner nothing compared to the freshly cooked food on the sea front in Zanzibar. Each night as darkness settled, the food stalls opened and hundreds of people gathered around the charcoal fires. There were crafts to buy, and tangy king prawns, luscious kebabs and a host of vegetarian delights to sample. The mingled smells of the food and the sea, the sounds of chattering people and the friendly atmosphere kept us coming back night after night.

Renting a vehicle in Africa is an expensive option that didn’t work to well the one time we tried it. We spent a crazy day driving around the island in a dilapidated wreck we had to push to get started. Tip – if the car you have just rented has to be pushed out of the lot to get it going, stop right there and demand your money back. Some of the roads were so wretched people were actually passing us on foot!

Later the van started making terrible grinding noises and breaking down repeatedly. The children loved push-starting it, but we were afraid the owner would try to charge us for the damage this must be doing to the van. Finally, the police stopped us on the highway to ask what was causing the racket. They said they were afraid that we would cause an accident. Incredibly, the owner wasn’t upset. In fact, he apologized for the problems and offered us a new car to rent the next day. No thanks.

The kids spent part of nearly every day splashing about in the Indian Ocean with us. They loved building sand castles in between short trips back into the water. On our third day in Zanzibar we rode a small boat to nearby Prison Island (aka Chawguu Island), which was once the place where slaves were incarcerated until they were sold. It is estimated that 3.3 million of these East African slaves were auctioned off.

The kids enjoyed the water and built sand castles but especially loved the giant tortoises that were protected animals on the island. Danny and Rachel were allowed to climb on one of the tortoises, which made their day. The only day the kids didn’t get to the beach was the day we went on a spice tour, taking a taxi to a plantation where a guide walked us through fields of lemongrass and other spices. There were cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper and much more. A delightful experience.

Philippa and I decided that we should go to the northern tip of the island and spend a week at the fishing village of Nungwi, which had great beaches and some bungalows. We got up early to take a minibus taxi there over some really rough roads. The kids adored the beach, but we didn’t have a fan the first night and it was so hot only Sam was able to sleep. We moved bungalows, but found the fans in the new place didn’t work either. Nevertheless we loved Nungwi.

I remember lying on the prefect beach there one evening as Arab dhows and small fishing boats sailed past, watching the local village women wading into the water at sunset, laughing and gossiping and wearing metal pots on their head. The women split into two groups. Half of them held out a huge fishing net, while the rest pounded the water with their pots and shouted, driving many fish into the net. Afterwards, they headed back to their village in the fading light, carrying their bounty and chattering happily. This simple but delightful ritual was repeated every evening, but very few travellers paid much attention. I watched it every night as I felt I was looking at a fascinating traditional practice.

Sadly, we had one ugly experience in Nungwi. One night each of the kids bought inexpensive necklaces for themselves and put them on. We went for a walk on the beach but couldn’t see well because there was a power outage. Suddenly Sam said that he had lost his necklace and we began searching for it. A local man suddenly appeared and asked what we were looking for. He said if he found the necklace we should give him one thousand Tanzanian shillings. We ignored him but he suddenly announced he’d found it. I asked him to give it back, but he wouldn’t. I called him a thief just as we walked into the village where many locals were standing around. One told him to give the kid his necklace back but the thief ignored him. I wanted to get the necklace but was not prepared to start a fist fight with a local man in his village. Just then two muscular Australians and a woman walked up and asked what was going on. Philippa told them about the necklace. “Beat the shit out of him,” the Australian woman said. One of the men then put the thief in an arm lock and I pushed him up against a wall and said “Hand it over.” The second Australian then put his hand around the man’s neck and squeezed hard until he returned the necklace. I’m glad we got Sam’s necklace back but the entire experience left a bad taste in my mouth and was the absolute low point of our time in Zanzibar.

As the trip went by the kids learned a lot about Africa’s geography and even learned to speak some basic Swahili, including the names of the most famous wild animals and counting up to ten. Sometimes our narrow knowledge of East Africa’s primary language came up a little short however. One day in Nungwi we found ourselves surrounded by curious women and children. The women, wearing colourful wraparound skirts and clutching babies in their arms, were jabbering excitedly and pointing at our kids. In our best Swahili we listed their names and ages, but there was something else the women wanted to know, something about Rachel that we simply couldn’t fathom. Suddenly the boldest of them stepped forward, brushed back Rachel’s hair, inspected her ears, and then grabbed her crotch. Rachel jumped back in astonishment, but they got their answer. Yes, she is a girl. I guess they don’t see too many local girls wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

At the end of our 12-week journey, Philippa asked all of us to give our picks on 19 different categories about the trip. One category was named “Favourite Place” and all five of us picked Zanzibar. There is something magical about that wonderful island.

Read the previous posts about our family trip to Africa:

Adventures on the Malawi Trail

A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall

Backpacking in Africa with Kids

One of my most memorable series of rides took place one night while heading east on the New York Thruway on the way from Edmonton to my parents’ New Jersey home. The thruway was a great place to catch a ride because you could hitch in the service centres, which were about 20 miles apart, by standing near the entrance back on to the thruway with your thumb out. It was usually very easy for people to stop if they wanted to because they were going slow and there was usually no one behind them. Every experienced hitchhiker knows that picking an easy and safe place for drivers to pull over and stop greatly improved their chances of getting a ride. Sometimes I just got tired of waiting and would approach people as they emerged from the restaurant and asked for lifts. I hated doing it, but the success rate was very high.

I was a pretty good reader of who would say yes (or no) and on this night I spotted an odd pairing of women who looked like a great bet and asked for a lift. They agreed immediately and I happily hopped in their car. They were two of the nicest people I ever got a ride with and I think one of the reasons we hit it off so well was that we were all outsiders. Especially them. One of the women was a very attractive, if gaudily dressed, professional stripper and the other was her gay lover, who was dressed more like a man and had a very short haircut. They made quite a couple. I was a ragged looking hippie with hair down to my shoulders and not too much cash. We drove off and were all having a great time swapping stories when a problem developed with their car and we exited onto a slip road off the thruway.

We got out of the car and tried to figure out what the problem was, but none of us really had any idea – especially me. I didn’t know and still don’t know anything about cars, even though I have been driving them for decades. The couple were wondering what to do next when another car turned down the slip road and pulled up behind us. Two very big and burly men wearing Hells Angels colours got out and approached us. This was turning into an Outsiders convention. We all walked on the fringe of society for one reason or another – and I was the closest thing to a conventional person.

The Angels were also friendly but took a quick look at the women and sussed things out. One approached me and asked if I had any dope. I said ‘no,’ which was true. “Hey man, those women are dykes,” he told me. “I saw one of them had a gun in her purse too. What are you doing with them?” I explained that I was a hitchhiker and told him the women were good people who had been kind to me. I assumed the gun was for protection.

It was dark and we suddenly saw some headlights as another vehicle turned down the slip road. As it drew closer we realized it was a New York State Highway Patrol car. The cops took one look at the five of us and their eyes bugged out. None of us were breaking the law as far as they could tell, so after giving us and the car the once over they told the women they would have to call for a tow truck, which they did. Then one of the Angels came over to me to say they were going and asked if I wanted a lift. They seemed friendly enough and, besides, I didn’t have much choice. So I thanked the ladies and wished them luck.

The two big bikers looked pretty scary but they treated me like gold. They drove down the thruway for quite a long while as we engaged in friendly conversation before we reached a rest stop and they insisted on buying me a meal. Halfway through it I was thinking that maybe the Hells Angels weren’t as bad as everyone thought. I knew they were into drugs and that bumping into one of their bikes was a good way to get your head kicked in, but they couldn’t have treated me better. Once again I think we hit it off because we were all on the margins of society. Then completely out of the blue, one of them turned to a woman at the next table and made the vilest sexual suggestion you can imagine of what he’d like to do to her. I will spare you his exact words, but his remark would have made Donald Trump blush. I think it made me blush to. My food caught in my throat, but the women simply stood up and moved tables. And the Hells Angels let it go at that, thank goodness. I was speechless.

We left and a little farther down the road they dropped me at my turnoff and both got out of their car and gave me a warm handshake and wished me well. I got a couple of good rides and made it to my parents’ home that night.

I have thought of that night many times. It’s been about 50 years but I still remember well the two women who stopped for me. They were clearly living in a rough environment on the edge of society, but they treated me with kindness and hospitality that has stayed with me. I hope that they were able to get by in life and find some happiness together. I still can’t figure out exactly what to make of the bikers, who were also very nice to me. Should I have spoken up when one said that horrible thing to the woman at the next table? Frankly I was too shocked to say anything. I suppose I should have, but it’s a lot easier said than done. Here I was, eating the food they bought for me and enjoying a long ride from them. I know that’s a weak excuse, but I was flat out scared of those guys from the moment it happened. I realized how dangerous they could be.

Maybe if the women hadn’t gotten up and moved immediately and the abuse continued I would have spoken out. I hope so, but I’ll never know.

Photo of Hells Angels from Life Magazine 1965

In late 2007 I was ready to retire early from my job as an Edmonton Journal reporter and was looking for the best, most exotic and hardest long walk I could find to celebrate. The first time I read about the Snowman Trek I knew instantly I had to do it. Sure, it was intimidating but that is part of its charm. It sounded exactly like the kind of travelling challenge I have often taken on and the idea of a month in Bhutan with endless days of magnificent mountain views, Buddhist shrines and interactions with some of the world’s friendliest people was irresistible to me.

In 1972 the King of Bhutan declared “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product,” which became a part of the Bhutanese constitution two months before I arrived. The King got it right.

How tough is the Snowman Trek? Bart Jordans, author of the excellent Cicerone Guide to the Treks of Bhutan, notes, “more people have reached the summit of Everest than have successfully completed the Lunana Trek.” The success rate of reaching the Lunana Valley is approximately 50 per cent but the best organized companies, who wisely head out on the Snowman in the last 10 days of September, usually get all their clients into and through Lunana, even though it is situated in the remote northwest corner of one of the most remote countries on earth. Sometimes very heavy snowfalls make it impossible for the yaks, who carry huge loads, to make it over the 16,465 foot (4,940 metre) Karakucha La (‘La’ means mountain pass) into Lunana, forcing groups to visit more accessible areas of the country.

There are very few roads in Bhutan and the closest one is almost a week’s walk away from Lunana. It is definitely not the place to experience a medical emergency because it usually takes two or three days to get a rescue helicopter there from India.

The scariest thing about the Snowman is the cost. It is mostly set by the Bhutanese government, which charges $250 a day. My trek with Canadian Himalayan Expeditions cost about $8,000 in 2008 and today the price is around $10,000. I loved Bhutan, but I won’t be going back.

After many months of long runs of eight-to-ten miles every other day and other rigorous exercise I boarded the Bhutanese Druk Air plane on September 21, 2008 from Bangkok to Paro, the country’s only airport. I met our US trek leader Kevin Grange in Bangkok and the eight other trekkers, all male. It’s always better to have the civilizing effect of women on this kind of journey. We settled in well, however, and the following day hiked up to the stunning Tiger’s Nest monastery.

The next day we got a ride to the trailhead and started walking at last. That first day was quite long if relatively easy but the second was a very, very tough, up-and-down 22 kms through constant rain over a trail which was like a sea of mud. We struggled through piles of huge, uneven and slippery rocks covering the entire path. I fell four times, hyper-extending both knees at least once, but was not seriously hurt, only frustrated.

On one rickety wooden bridge my right foot went right through the rotten wood up to mid-calf with a raging river (the Paro Chhu) just below. I was momentarily terrified I would lose my irreplaceable boot, but it was on very tight and with a little help I was able to carefully pull and twist my leg out with my boot still on. I had worn those boots every day for six months so my feet would adjust to them before the trek and within a few days I was the only trekker without a blister. I was wet and exhausted when we reached camp after nine difficult hours of plodding along and reminded myself that this was the challenge I asked for. If this was only the second day I wondered what the Hell was ahead.

The next day was wonderful. It was mostly dry and I happily walked ahead of everyone else until I reached a military checkpoint, run by Bhutanese Captain Dorge, whose job was mainly to watch out for smugglers crossing the nearby border with Tibet. I was stunned to see his little house had a satellite dish with a TV inside. Captain Dorge invited me to share some butter tea with him and he explained that he was able to get the BBC, ESPN, CNN etc. on his television, but mostly loved watching English Premier League football, especially his beloved Liverpool FC. As a huge fan myself we had a delightful conversation about our favourite club as we sipped cups of tea. It appears that there are LiverpooI football supporters everywhere.

I then headed off with a few members of our trekking group and later our cooking staff made lunch in the home of a friendly family of four who owned 25 yaks and made lots of delicious yak cheese, which we happily sampled. Later we reached our spectacular campsite, Jangothang, at 13,260 feet (4,044 metres), a 5,500 foot elevation gain in three days since we left Paro. The camp was dwarfed by the nearby mountain, Jhomolhari, at 23,995 feet (7,315 metres), and perched on the border of Tibet and Bhutan. This is why I came on this journey. To walk away from the crowds, experience wild and beautiful country, encounter friendly locals and gain some insight into a unique and exotic culture and maybe into myself.

Following the ‘walk high, sleep low’ maxim we took an acclimatization hike the next day and climbed a thousand feet to a meadow where we saw a large herd of yaks, some bharal (Himalayan blue sheep) and three marmots in what was clearly snow leopard country. Later we descended to camp and watched the horsemen from our trek play Dego for hours against the horsemen from an Australian company. Dego is a popular local game similar to horseshoes but played with stones. The players toss stones underhand at a stick stuck in the ground. The closest stone wins.

Karma, our head horseman, was the embodiment of everything I loved about the Bhutanese people. He was strong, very experienced, kind and seemed uniquely at peace with himself and his rugged life. He treated his mules and horses gently. I watched fascinated one morning as he carefully prepared his animals for a day on trek. Karma was constantly singing a song, whistling a tune, talking to the horses and smiling. Our guide Tenzing said he was singing a Buddhist song praising the mountains and rivers.

After the horses had spent the night chewing what grass they could find Karma put blankets and ropes on them and strapped a food bag on each as they prepared to carry our tents and duffel bags over yet another 16,000 foot pass to the next campsite.

Karma is the ultimate Bhutanese horse whisperer, and the other, younger horsemen watched carefully, listening and learning from him. We would head off first but always see them pass by when we stopped for lunch, skipping theirs so the camp was all set-up when we arrived at the end of the day’s walk. We could hear Karma singing away happily as he passed by.

The life of a Bhutanese horseman, and their horses, is hard. One day we were walking to our campsite as they led their horses and mules on a trail far above us. Suddenly we heard a shout and looked up to see a horse cartwheeling down the very steep hill, head over heels, and breaking his neck. Everyone raced to the horse’s body and one of our trekkers, Jon Hinds, tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the dying animal, but it couldn’t be saved. The horsemen earn little money so we all chipped in generously to lessen his loss.

The Bhutanese government has a rule that trekking groups and campers may not start a bonfire at night, but one evening the crew told us they were collecting deadwood for a massive camp fire. Later we brought our little chairs up to the edge of the roaring fire, drank our chai and had a wonderful dinner. Soon the horsemen, led by Karma, began to sing Bhutanese folk songs and it was pure magic. For the first night on the trek the sky was absolutely clear and a great blanket of stars twinkled above us. I thought about how far we had all come in the first week. Not so long before we were leading our ordinary lives, completely incapable of imagining the experience of a night like this.

One of the horsemen wrapped his arms around Karma from behind as he led his friends through one song after another. As he sang beautifully they made a chorus, singing with their butts turned to us, as they warmed their upper bodies on the fire. They challenged us to sing that night and we did our humble best. I finally stood up and purposely wandered away from the campfire, far enough so that I could get an even better view of the magnificence of the sky above us, but close enough so that I could still hear the wonderful singing. Not for the first time, I wondered if I could ever possibly re-create for my friends a sense of what this exotic experience was like and why I go on these trips. My motto is “Do not sleepwalk through life.” Do the most interesting and challenging things you can think of and afford. You won’t regret it.

Later Karma sat down next to me with our Bhutanese trek leader, Khandu, beside him, and they harmonized perfectly on a series of local folk songs. I believe I could have listened to them all night long, but morning comes quickly and we had another high pass, the Jare La, to cross the next day. Everyone left the campfire with a smile on their face.

The next morning we had our best ever encounter with a local family who welcomed us into their home. The 85-year-old Bhutanese woman’s eyes shone with delight and amazement as she held the strange foreign object, a digital camera, in her wizened hands. Sitting in the home’s only chair, in the place of honour beside the small stove, she twirled her Buddhist prayer wheel and watched bemused as the group of western trekkers ate lunch prepared by our cook, Yeshe. To her delight our trekkers then played with her three beautiful young, great-grandsons. She glanced in awe at the magical image on the camera. It displayed the young boys, herself, and Jon Hinds, the hulking American personal trainer. They were all smiling broadly.

The trekkers were there because we asked the team leaders to arrange such experiences as often as possible, so we could be welcomed into the homes of ordinary villagers and interact with them, and although this was not the first time that it occurred, it was definitely the best. My fellow trekkers were great, playing with the three delightful young boys, and it was clear that everyone thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Jon, in particular, was magic with the kids and his pal, Pete, who is also phenomenally fit and strong, thrilled them by walking around the room on his hands. Later, after I left, the boys entertained their guests by singing six songs to enthusiastic applause. Finally, everyone enjoyed a dessert prepared by our cooks. Obviously, I should have stayed longer, a mistake I would not make again. At our campsite I watched the local men practicing Bhutan’s national sport, archery.

Not that much has apparently changed in roadless rural Bhutan since 1923, when the old woman was born in the tiny village of Chebisa in the remote north of the rarely visited Himalayan country of just over 800,000 people, about 10 per cent larger than Switzerland. This very pleasant cultural and multi-generational encounter was one of many opportunities we had to mingle with the ordinary people of Bhutan.

One big positive about Bhutan is that most people, especially the younger ones, speak English well because it is the language of instruction in many schools. In addition, government documents and road signs are written in both English and Dzonkha, a language with roots in Tibet. Even the national newspaper, Kuenkel, is published in both languages, plus Nepali. This enabled us to visit a school and talk to young students. Earlier that day in Lingshi, we talked to two young girl students who asked in English where we were heading to and I showed them on the map in my trekking guide. This was the same school the three young boys we met in their home attended, and lived at during the week. They made the three-hour walk on Mondays and back on Saturdays.

We soon reached Laya, the biggest village on our journey, where we said goodbye to Karma and the other horsemen who were replaced by men with yaks, which are needed to make it over the high passes that lead to the Lunana Valley. A few days later we trudged over a very high pass and then down nearly 5,000 feet to the valley floor. We began our descent in a blizzard and ended it in the pouring rain. But we had reached Lunana, so everyone was happy.

We awoke to a lovely sunny day with piercing blue skies and views of a beautiful nearby mountain. Top that off with a cracking breakfast of granola, toast and Lunana pancakes and we were all in high spirits. We were also surrounded by lovely waterfalls as we trudged on muddy trails through a forest before a very steep climb up to the village of Woche, our first in Lunana. The villagers were very friendly and we joked and laughed a lot together for about an hour before heading up to our campsite for the best meal of the entire trek, which led to a standing ovation for our cook. The next day we walked to Lhedi where we visited the only school in Lunana and did our best to answer good questions from the young students who spoke English well.

We got a real surprise in Thanza, the last village in Lunana, when we learned that the yak men had gone on strike! There were six days left in the trek including the highest pass of the entire walk and we couldn’t do it without yaks. I am always suspicious of labour disputes when you only hear from one side, but we were told the yak men claimed their animals were tired and demanded triple pay for the last six days, then refused it when it was offered. Who knows the truth? Finally a deal was made because Yeshe knew some local men with yaks. The strikers agreed to take us for one more day if the company paid for five extra horsemen. Then Yeshe’s friends would transport our gear for the last five days, which they did.

A few days later I was experiencing some stomach problems and general exhaustion as we crossed the Rinchen Zoe La at 17,470 feet but marched on until we arrived at a real road the next day and celebrated a totally successful trip. We spent a few days visiting Buddhist shrines, and the capital, Thimpu, which features the only stop light in Bhutan. It was time to leave and the other trekkers, who were headed home, were shocked to discover I wasn’t finished walking yet.

I said goodbye, hopped on a plane to Kathmandu and a few days later headed out on my 60th birthday with my Nepali guide/porter, Gelu Sherpa, for three fabulous weeks of walking the famous Annapurna Circuit and the Annapurna Sanctuary, two of the best treks in the world, before heading home with a smile on my face.

Read about my adventures in Annapurna here.

There were less than 1,000 people living in Bir Moghrein when I arrived and there was nothing to do except endure the excruciating boredom until I could hop on the back of a truck headed in the general direction of Senegal on the other end of the western Sahara Desert. In the 47 years since I travelled through Mauritania I have never met anyone who has ever been there and very, very few people who have ever even heard of the country.

After saying goodbye to the driver who took me to Bir Moghrein I decided to go truck shopping and explore the virtual ghost town, but quickly learned the only truck was the one I rode in on. There was absolutely nothing to do there but wait. And wait. And wait. Any truck headed this way and continuing southbound would likely be coming from Algeria. There might also be some locals with trucks bringing supplies to southern Mauritania. There was a massive iron ore mining operation about 600 km to the south near a small city called Zouerat. A little further south was the smaller city of Atar. Those communities would definitely need supplies and the only other option would be a truck coming north from Nouakchott, Mauritania’s capital, more than 1,000 km away.

I was hungry and went searching for food. I could not find a single restaurant and there was only one very poorly supplied general store. I didn’t have any cooking equipment and I could find only one thing on the dusty shelves that I could consume – large cans of cold peas. It did not look very appetizing, but I figured it would do until the next day, so I pulled out my trusty Swiss Army Knife and used the little can opener to pry open the top, bent it back and gobbled down the near tasteless peas using the tiny spoon on the knife. It was pretty wretched but it would keep me going until the cavalry arrived. I set up my tent, crawled inside and went to bed hoping things would be better the next day.

No luck. Another slow day followed. There wasn’t much to do in Bir Moghrein, apart from walking around the place and as the day got hotter the swarms of flies became more and more intrusive and annoying. I tried walking down the rough dirt road to the south out of curiosity, but the flies just got worse and worse, driving me back to my tent to escape them. I concluded that the fly must be Mauritania’s national bird.

The next day there were still no signs of any trucks heading south. It was unbelievably depressing. I didn’t have a book to read and there was no chance of buying one in English. There was nothing else to do but wait, and then have a few more cans of cold peas. Ugh. This was definitely the downside of budget travel, but for me it was worth the trouble, despite everything. It was the price you had to pay for a real adventure. A couple of American backpackers showed up that day, but the truck that dropped them off was heading back to Layounne, where I started. They were also headed south, so at least I was no longer the only foreign traveller in town. The following day was exactly the same. No trucks, nothing to do, more cans of cold peas. Get me out of here.

Just when I was beginning to contemplate spending the rest of my life in that godforsaken town, a truck arrived the next day, not just heading south, but going all the way to Nouakchott, 1,120 km away and just 200 km north of the Senegal River, the gateway to black Africa. I was ecstatic. The two Americans and I asked the driver how much it would cost to ride on top of the cargo in the open back of the truck. Riding up front was not possible because the driver had a partner sitting there. He asked for the equivalent of $8 US (2,000 West African francs) and I quickly said yes. It was going to be a long two-day ride and it was a fair price. He could have asked for more and I would have accepted. I didn’t want to see another can of cold peas ever again. To my bewilderment the Americans began bargaining with him, offering $6, but the driver would not budge. It was a genuine Mauritanian standoff. Finally, the Americans walked away and never did get on the truck. I hoped they enjoyed the local cuisine and recreational opportunities in Bir Moghrein for a few more days.

I hopped aboard the back of the truck and found a place, riding on top of what felt like steel bars. It was a very uncomfortable journey, bouncing up and down on the hard metal as we bumped our way down the rough dirt track for hour after hour. I could tell I would have a bruised butt by the time this ride was over, but six months of hard travel had toughened me up and trimmed me down. I am 5’10” and-a-half and my usual weight back then was about 150 to 155 pounds. At the end of my African journey I weighed in at a rail-thin, but hard as nails, 129 pounds. I couldn’t get down to that weight again now without the assistance of a concentration camp.

As the ride continued it grew insufferably hot and I could see that even the many Africans riding in the back were beginning to suffer. The ride was so rough and the temperature was so high that a couple of them threw up over the side of the truck. It scared me to think that I was able to handle these conditions better than some of the locals. Maybe I had been travelling rough for a little too long. We rode on until night fell, at least making the temperature easier to handle.

Suddenly the truck slowed down and came to a stop in what appeared to be an empty space. I wondered what was going on. I heard the vague murmuring of voices in the distance and they slowly became clearer as they neared the truck. One of the voices sounded horrifyingly familiar. It couldn’t be. Not again. Please no. Dominique climbed on board and spotted me. “Ha, ha, we meet again my friend!” he announced. And then for dramatic emphasis. “I’m still on my way!”

The prospect of sitting in the back of a truck with Dominique for the next 24 hours or so was very unappealing, but I had no choice. I didn’t even ask him how on earth he ended up in the middle of the desert with literally nothing of any kind in the vicinity. Or how come I didn’t see him in Bir Moghrein. Was there another track that skipped Bir Moghrein? Did he get dumped on the side of the road because he was too annoying to transport any further? He was on his own now because he certainly wasn’t with me. I had to admire his spirit, but I wasn’t sure if he was good luck or bad ‘juju’ as the Africans called it. When I considered his behavior and the actions of the two Americans, who were surely still swatting flies and munching cold peas back in Bir Moghrein, I wondered if you had to be at least a little bit crazy to make this journey.

After many hours we stopped in Zouerate, the iron ore mining centre, and grabbed a bite to eat. I don’t remember what we ate, but it was delicious after days of cold peas. Later we drove on to an outpost near Atar and the passengers slept on top of the cargo, as best we could. I stuffed my wallet and passport in my unpickably tight, front-pants pocket and had a good snooze. We headed on in the morning, with a few less passengers, and bounced along all day under the searing rays of the sun. The Atar area was the only place in the Sahara that I saw some genuinely beautiful sand dunes. As evening approached we reached the outskirts of the capital city, Nouakchott. There was an impressive, well-paved road at a turnoff leading into the city, but I asked to be let off, so I could hitchhike on the road south to Rosso, the border crossing beside the Senegal River. I did not say goodbye to Dominique and never saw him again, but heard through the backpacker’s grapevine that he made it to the Senegalese capital, Dakar. He was an unforgettable rascal and character, like the notorious Cheap John, whom I was soon to meet.

I stuck out my thumb and just as it was getting dark a local young man on a motorbike stopped to offer me a lift. It was massively uncomfortable riding on the back of the bike with my backpack on and my fingers desperately gripping the back of the bike seat but I was hungry to reach Senegal at last. He dropped me off about 150 km from the border. Finally, I got a ride to Rosso, found some space, put up my tent and slept blissfully.

In the morning I got up and walked through town to the shores of the Senegal River. It was now nearly three weeks since I left Marrekech, hoping I could cross the desert. I got my exit stamp from a Mauritanian official, boarded an exotic looking pirogue canoe rowed by two locals using paddles in the shape of lion claws. I felt as though I was riding through the pages of the National Geographic. Everything looked totally different from Morocco, Mauritania and the Spanish Sahara. It was lush and wild and intoxicating. The Africa of my dreams.

I stepped off the pirogue, walked into the immigration shack and was promptly informed that I wasn’t going to be admitted to Senegal, despite my visa, without a major haircut. The French speaking official repeated in broken English “not proper,” and “not correct,” pointing at my unruly mop of hair.

I had no choice but to cross the river back to Rosso in Mauritania. I did, and then went searching for a barber shop of any kind. I found one and the barber said for $1 he would lend me a pair of scissors and the use of his big mirror. I don’t think he wanted any part of cutting my hair. Minutes later, a vast amount of that hair was lying on the barber shop floor and I was back in a pirogue headed across the river again. Judging from what I saw in the mirror I am pretty sure I wouldn’t make a great barber. This time I was greeted happily by the same border official. “Very, very good,” he said with a broad smile “Welcome to Senegal.”

Read Part I of this journey: The Call of the Wild

Read Part II of this journey: Adventures in the Sahara