WE MOVED AROUND a few times when I was growing up. My father, known by most as Pastor Mark, was called to lead the flocks of churches in every corner of New Brunswick. I was born in Sussex, where he was attending Bethany Bible College, and then moved to his hometown of Saint John where he led the “bus ministry” at a church that brought children from all over the city for Sunday School each week by school bus. We then moved to a tiny farming community called Head of Millstream before moving once again, this time to North Head, on Grand Manan Island. I don’t remember much from before the move to the Island, because that happened when I was three years old.

I remember a lot from those days on Grand Manan though. From my childhood viewpoint, we had an expansive home in the biggest yard on the Island. (Realistically, it was an older four-bedroom home on a corner lot with a small field.) But to me, it was full of wonder, and of danger! While I enjoyed exploring, there were some places I simply could not wander. The tall open grass between us and the neighbour was surely home to massive snakes, while the green hillside leading downward behind the well was a haven for the local lions. As for the space behind the raspberry patch in which the trees sheltered an area where the ground sunk down, that was the closest thing the Island had to a swamp; and we all know what terror lives in swamps—alligators!

But I didn’t let those geographical restrictions prevent me from exploring other areas. For some reason, the darkest part of the yard, where the forest began with dense evergreen cover, was where I discovered a path that led to a tiny clearing which I called “the sunroom”. I parked a couple of junior-sized lawn chairs there and that became a favourite place to play, either alone or with my sister Cheralyn, who is a couple years older than I am.

On my fifth birthday, I got a wagon. It was one of those classic wagons with a wooden frame and red fence-like rails on the front, back and sides. I hauled that wagon around everywhere I went, so much so that its presence became an essential component of my day-to-day routine.

It was the late 80s and we lived on a rural island, so by the time I turned six years old, my exploration was no longer limited to within the boundaries of my own yard.

On my sixth birthday, I got a bike. Suddenly I had options, and I had decisions to make. The basket at the front of my little blue bike didn’t have the same carrying capacity as the bed of my wagon. But the bike allowed me to travel farther, faster. Although not forgotten entirely, the wagon took a back seat.

I could ride my little blue bike not just in my yard, but through nearby streets. When one of the training wheels fell off, I simply learned to bike with a lean to one side.

As a six-year-old, I could also walk with my wagon or ride my bike to the playground just up the Whistle Road, but that trip wasn’t without its challenges.

The first challenge on the 400-metre walk was the monstrous dog that lived near the start of the road. I would step ever so lightly as I walked through that first short length of the journey, praying that the beast would not emerge. And yet every time, it did. The dog towered over me but it wasn’t just tall. It was big by every dimension. It may have actually been a grizzly bear. If it had sat on skinny little Danny, as I was called back then, I would have simply disappeared. If the story of Little Red Riding hood had featured a dog and not a wolf, this dog would have been it. Such big eyes. Such big nose. Such big teeth!

Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever saw its teeth. And I don’t recall ever hearing it bark. (Although I could have just blocked that horror from my mind forever.) I’m quite certain all I remember the dog doing was lumbering slowly up to me and sniffing me. But it was a ferocious sniffing, I’m certain of that!

The first danger out of the way, I would continue to the next obstacle: Lee the Bully.

Lee wasn’t just a bully, he was the neighbourhood bully. He was a year or two older than me, and he had made it his life’s mission to torment and terrify other children. If Lee spotted me coming as I walked to pass his house on the way to the playground, he would bolt out the front door and chase me down the road yelling obscenities and threatening each time to harm me in some creative new way. Worst of all was the one time he came chasing me with a snake–a snake no doubt found in that tall grass next to my neighbour’s home.

But getting past the mammoth dog and Lee the Bully was worth it once I would arrive at the playground. The playground was an oasis. A sanctuary. It featured a scalding hot, shiny metal slide, free of encumbrances like safety rails. It had swings with chains so long you could work your way up to heights allowing you to fly through the air like Superman as you catapult off the end of the floppy rubber seat. (Rumour has it a third grader once swung so high he wrapped all the way around the top bar and then just kept on swinging.) The rusty jungle gym allowed us to hone our climbing skills, and should we discover we’d gashed our hands on a jagged edge, we would just make out way across the street to see Deedee.

Deedee was an older lady who took care of all the children who came to the playground. She had a caring soul, but I suspect she knew how to put the fear of God into any bully name Lee who might try to expand his territory to include her piece of the Whistle Road.

A visit to Deedee’s home would always include checking in with her pet goat, who saved the elderly woman from having to mow her lawn. She would invite us inside where she would offer us a drink of water, always served in a mug, and a snack of graham crackers topped with chocolate frosting. The first half of the Whistle Road may have been hell, but Deedee’s home has heaven. 

It was in these happy days of my childhood that my imagination was allowed to flourish. I remember my dad taking me for a walk once along the top edge of a beach where the sand and rocks met a patch of trees. I asked him what we were doing and he told me we were exploring. I was hooked. I was an explorer.

I explored every nook and cranny of my little world. Either alone or with my best friend Devin, I would sneak about inquisitively to find out what was around every corner and behind every door. We would go to the tennis courts near my home and instead of playing some game on the court, we would duck into the woods nearby just to see what others couldn’t. We tried in vain to discover or create a trail through the woods behind my house that would lead to Devin’s house, because he lived next door to the playground. If we could have made our own path, we could have avoided the horrors that lurked on Whistle Road. 

In 1989 I started Grade 1, attending Grand Manan Elementary School. I made another friend, Ritchie. At recess, Devin, Ritchie and I would go just beyond the boundaries of the school field, to explore in the bushes.

And as we explored, we imagined. Clearings became rooms. Pathways became hallways. A scraggly tree with branches sticking out of it at strange angles became a large machine requiring operation by pulling and pushing the branch levers.

If was fun to play with my friends, but when they weren’t around, I wasn’t alone. Just as I had my friends, and a best friend, I also had imaginary friends, and even an imaginary best friend. His name was Jake. He drove a tow truck. (No, not a big one, just a small kid-size one, of course.)

After I finish Grade 1, we moved to Dalhouse, an economically struggling town in Northern New Brunswick. Our home was in a place just outside the town limits, called Point La Nim, along the bank of the Restigouche River. It was here I discovered my passion for computers. Max the Computer was a slab of mud on the side of a hill along a path that led down to the beach behind a friend’s house. Stuck into the mud were old sticks, light switches and doorknobs, and at the top of it was a broken TV plugged directly into a tree trunk. I’m not sure what the processing power of Max was, (after all, it was the early 90s), but I know I learned a lot from that mudborne computer. Or at least, I imagine I did.

Our home in Point La Nim served as the base for my first entrepreneurial endeavour. I took my penchant for exploration and discovery and mixed in a healthy dollop of imagination to launch the D.W. Detective Agency. I set up my desk in the basement and put a sign on the door of the front porch. “No case too small,” was my slogan, stolen from a serious of books I’d read about Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective. In my first year in business, I made one dollar. 

My family stayed in the area for three years, until low attendance and financial pressures caused the church to close its doors. (The small protestant church, with my father, as anglophone as they come, didn’t stand much of a chance in a Catholic town with strong Acadien roots.) So, in the summer prior to the start of the fifth grade, we packed up the U-Haul once again, this time moving to a place called Royalton.

The name Royalton may sound grand, but in reality it’s a quaint potato farming community along the border to Maine in Carleton County, New Brunswick. It had no post office and no stores, but it had a little country church. It was the first time I’d lived in a place where you referred to where you lived by the county. My little red-fenced wagon made the journey to Royalton, and by that point I’d upgraded to a yellow, five-speed bike. (The lingering training wheel was long gone.)

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This blog post is one of a series of posts on the topic of multipotentiality, drawn from an unfinished book I started on the topic nearly a decade ago. On the surface, this one might just seem like random tales from my childhood, but it will all make sense in time. Come back weekly for the next few weeks if you’re curious about curiosity.