a family of adventurers
I was 35 when I packed up and moved to Japan. Right about midway between the age of my father (17) and Opa (51) when they emigrated to a new land.
Like me, my father and my Opa didn't speak the language of their new country. Like me, they were leaving behind everything and every one they'd known.
They were Germans but moved to Canada together by boat in 1956. They were part of a huge migration of Germans who left Germany's post-war reconstruction for Canada's um, construction. My Opa had wanted to come to Canada from the time he was young, and for him this was something of a life's dream come true, if overdue. I don't know what my dad's opinion of the move was, but coming at the age he did he was much more able to 'go native' as it were.
My Opa, dragging his family to a new country when already grey, was doing what he'd always done. Go see what was out there. He left home at fifteen. He told me once that in climbing the 'mountain' outside his village as a teen, he became the first person in living memory to do so. Prevented by a heart murmur from leaving for Canada as a young man, he took to other forms of self-expression, such as crashing motorcycles.
My father, too, is a wanderer and adventurer. He's been to every continent except Antarctica, and he's flown planes on at least three of those continents. He's walked away from car crashes with deer and kiwis (the human variety), he's stood atop 200m towers, and he's piloted locomotives. He's also a record-holding pilot of motorless gliders, and as such has landed the lightweight planes in rough places when he's run out of sky. An avid photographer, he's amassed a huge portfolio ranging across fifty years and countless countries.
Then there's my mother's side. My grandfather managed to get to all seven continents. He not only flew but built a plane. And he built a boat. And a cottage. And a dark room and a jewelry-making studio. He sailed ships and was an avid early scuba diver (and correspondent of Jacques Cousteau). He visited Caribbean wrecks before treasure diving was an industry. He was in Israel and before that Cuba when war broke out. He served in World War II.
Then there was my uncle Bill, a self-confessed crook. Among his few legitimate successes was discovering Uranium lodes in the Canadian wilderness. There is a story of a man who once had an off-road vehicle to sell, but that vehicle had no reverse gear. Taking a prospective buyer into the sticks, he demonstrated the thing's off-road ability by charging into the ditch, careening across the road in a big arc, heading into the opposite ditch, and then racing back into town. Impressed, the buyer took the vehicle. When the buyer later came to complain, my uncle Bill had moved on.
This is where I get taste for a non-linear life, I suspect.
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