Before the Portal: Tales of a Relentless Adventurer
By age 19 I had left England and was living in the Canadian bush prospecting for gold, a year later for buried treasure on Oak Island, Nova Scotia, then on to uninhabited Cocos Island in the Pacific. From there to seek gold and diamonds in the steamy jungle of British Guiana (now Guyana), the Green Hell as it was known.
My life has been a turbulent carousel of adventure, interspersed with periods of writing which earned me enough money to fund a great variety of exciting and uncommon ventures. Some are better remembered than others, such as my days as a Robinson Crusoe on remote Cocos Island, working on deep sea fishing trawlers and a spell in the Canadian Coastguard.
Then there was the castle I was going to build in the Scottish Highlands on an 800 acre estate I had, the distillery and lighthouse I was building (before coming here), and the old gold mine and ghost town at the top of a mountain in British Columbia, the nearest 'neighbor' 40 miles away (64 km) with $100 million in gold/silver ore all of which I gave to the grizzly bears to prevent further exploitation.
(Today's value in excess of $300 million)
For a few years I ran off-road adventure tours in the backwoods of British Columbia and spent many long summers at the remote cabin I built in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York.
For a while I had an uninhabited island, an abandoned gold mine in northern Ontario, and an old salmon cannery on the northern coast of British Columbia.
Many people, especially 'modern' people of today, will no doubt consider me a little strange, or at least different! (I grew up in the 60s, the age of flower power.)
One day I was waiting at the top of a mountain for two heavy lifting helicopters to arrive, that never did because I had chosen the only day in history that Canadian air space had been closed – it was 9/11 and with no communications I had no idea of the planes hitting the twin towers. And more recently was a 30,000 acre conservation project in Nicaragua that went up (literally) in flames ... and so on, and on.
Now a lifetime (almost!) of pitching and striking camp. I have done many things in my life but none for very long, or very well. In all of this I have never really succeeded at anything, so to some my life will be seen as a story of failure – but a failure that succeeded in so many ways that if life could be entirely filled with such I would never ask for any victory.
I am a relic of the past, and I am glad. Nobody today except old-timers – and of course I have now joined their ranks – can relate to the life I led (and one that could be led) from the early 1960s (the golden age). The world has changed so much since I was a boy that today I can no longer recognize it. From the many thousands of letters I have received over the years (due to my adventure and lifestyle books) I know that so many people, so many, would love to return to the days of wild abandon as I knew them. Carefree, happy-go-lucky days, when nothing mattered other than the free life you were living.
No matter where you go today, and no matter what you do, it can never be repeated or reconstructed in any way – the way it was. Freedom is now a bygone word, lost to the annals of history.
In any event I must be prepared for my demise and no matter how it may come my death will likely be in a singular way – the second time around so I know what to expect.
... in my adversity they rejoiced, attackers gathered against me. Let their way be dark and slippery ... (it will).