Page 243 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

The net result of this tuition system was that by April 1971 I had completed
two years’ worth of university and had been accepted at the UBC, where I knew
standards to be high. (I had long since absorbed ‘Anarchism’ by George Woodcock,
a professor there). In choosing my courses there I selected those that I thought
I could ace and was also accepted in the third-year Honours Class, part of that
scheme being so that I could get into the Faculty of Law, the second-most difficult
Faculty (after medicine) by which to be accepted. But summer employment was
a problem, the part-time jobs that Judith had found for me being poorly paid. I
therefore enquired from a friend of hers if he, in the Employment business, could
locate anything for me. He did; work as a timekeeper for Canadian National
Railway. The job was located in the middle of the forested wilderness, but one
earned money that one simply could not spend!

While the location of the job was far from ‘civilisation’, there were reasons
for the remoteness. I was transported by train to a siding near the hamlet of Blue
River, a town that I never actually saw. The job entailed ensuring that a rail gang
was properly paid, I having to liaise with the foreman, who each year collected
together 15 Portuguese labourers, who lived in rail cars on a siding, and each
day departed for a section of rail that needed some maintenance. As there was
nothing else to do, they would work long days, I would be left in the rail ‘camp’
with the cook, and I would keep a record of their time spent on the job, plenty of
it, of course, being overtime. Naturally I was completely separate from the gang,
did not speak the same language, and myself had absolutely nothing to do other
than read books. The idea, I suppose, was that I was effectively incorruptible;
necessary perhaps, but the foreman was a good man, and the gang earned, in
effect, good money because they worked such long hours. In addition, the cook,
indeterminate as male or female, produced excellent food in lavish quantities, my
problem, if I had one, being that after my steak I generally liked a clean plate for
my fruit pie; the guys seemed to think that a bit too prissy. For me, a very boring
and inactive job … but I was ready for that. But it didn’t last long.

One day (May 20th, to be precise) I received a phone call from Judith. Her
secretary, plainly a diligent type, had seen an advertisement in a paper for a
merchant marine officer with a foreign-going ticket. “Get on the next train,”
she said. “Come to Vancouver, and we’ll catch the next ferry to Victoria.” I did
as requested and two days later found myself in an interview with Mr Case, a
director of West Line, a division of West Tours, an old tourism company operating
from Seattle. The interview was short and sweet, one view of my Discharge Book
demonstrating that I had a ticket that he really needed.

“Okay,” he said, “I need a chief officer for West Star, cruising to Alaska. We
have been taken over by Holland America and need a foreign-going ticket.
Are you interested?”

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