To know where one is going, one must know from where you came...

Today we start again.  This is my 4th official attempt at blogging, and given my new adventure I felt it necessary to make my journals public for the benefit of all those who would like to follow my adventures.  Y'see, two weeks ago I moved to Las Vegas-Nevada from Moncton-New Brunswick.  3273 miles (5267kms), which would take 53 hours of driving if one ever wanted to travel by car from there to here, or here to there.  I hope to do that ride someday.  I have lived away from home before, in Ottawa-ON for a number of years, 12hrs drive from home.  But this is something wholly other, pretty much the other side of the continent.  A long gawd-damn'd ways from home.

I am not much of a traveller, really.  If not for my wife Tanya, this country boy would have long ago settled into some other life, contented at shirking off change and lamenting the inevitability of change.  Staying the same.  But alas, Tanya is a do'er, not a dreamer like I, and her drive to fulfill her every life's desire keeps our family in a state of ever-evolving change.  I've learned not to fight it, that change is a good thing and it almost always results in good things happening.  She is the spark in my life that keeps life interesting, always placing me into situations I am not necessarily at home with.  Tanya makes smart, calculted decisions, and I've learned to trust her instincts.  Still, I am a rooted man, and I have to make damned sure her calculations are a worthy endeavor.  They usually are, and one way or another, Tanya usually gets what she wants for the betterment of us both.  I know I am a very lucky guy to have her, because she is an angel upon this world and my own personal saving grace.  If you know her, you know what I am saying.

The tail end of 2011 found us in a funk.  We were starting to spin our wheels in Moncton, looking ahead to the impending winter and dreading what was to come.  After 8yrs of grueling it out, we were stuck.  It seemed we had reached the end of the road and we desperately needed some kind of change to shake up our lives.  Looking back at it now, it was uncanny the way the stars aligned for us.  A fortune teller might have been able to connect the dots for us, because for months leading up to the drop everything around us had been pointing to Vegas.  We started making little changes in our lives to try to affect the outcome, to get out of the rut and then, late one night in November I was suddenly stricken awake from a very deep sleep to an absolute mental clarity, which was very odd.  It was 4am and my skin was crawling with giddiness at the premonition I'd had, that the universe had suddenly shifted in our favor and something big was about to happen.  I shook Tanya awake to tell her... "yeah?..." she cackled, and sighed back to sleep.  Two weeks later, she got a job offer from a boss in Gratz-Austria, to come to work for her in Vegas.  It took no time at all for us to decide that we would take the opportunity and make the huge, continental, cross-border jump to begin this new life in the desert.  And that was that.

So here we are.  I named this blog 'Las Vegas: A Mountain Man's Experiences in the Desert' because, as you may or may not know, I am a mountain man.  My home community in northern New Brunswick is called 'Mann's Mountain', named after my Great-Great Grandfather Richard Mann, whose name I carry as my middle name.  No one knows where this place is unless you live out that way, in 'the Sticks' as the old taunt used to go.  As a kid I didn't really like it out there, so far away from everything.  We were usually outsiders at school, until we started kicking ass at all kinds of sports because that's what we hicks did every night, every weekend, all the time.  We played sports.  And it wasn't til much later in life, after high school, when I brought friends home from university and got to see my own stompin' grounds through their eyes how wonderful a place it actually was.  The mountains, the river, the rock beaches against all that lush greenery.  It was beautiful.  Only then did I realize it, and then began to miss it and the people who were so dear to me. 

Mann's Mountain is on the banks of the Restigouche River, directly across from Matapedia-Quebec where the train crosses the bridge on its way to Montreal.  Growing up in the 70's and 80's, we never had TV, or video games, or any toys that required batteries.  We had our bikes and our imaginations and the wilderness that was our infinite playground.  We weren't allowed to fish due to the wealthy American interests in the area, but we spitefully did so anyway and skirted the law to get away with whatever we could whenever we could.  Dad worked at the Department of Transportation his whole life on the roads to make ends meet, and mom took care of us.  We were poor, but we never knew it because we had an amazingly rich family support system of Great Aunts and Great Uncles who loved us and helped our family immensely.  This upbringing of family values made me a very wealthy man, without a penny to ever call my own.  I want for nothing in this life, I have enough to see me through to its end no matter what may come.  Money is the way the world works and I have to play the game to survive, but it rates very low on my scale of things that are important to me.  I could survive without money, without government.  These are the meager beginnings of my life in Mann's Mountain, and this is the lens through which I relate to the world, for better or worse. 

I never would have imagined in my life that I would be living in Las Vegas.  I have always held a fascination with the desert.  I don't know how that was incubated in Mann's Mountain, maybe dad's old records, the Beach Boys, The Ventures, the Beatles, Dick Dale, and that whole 60's scene that seemed to revolve around living in California and that beach lifestyle.  So damned far out of reach, a world away from where I was.  I don't know where I picked it up, but I've always been fascinated by that era, and that far-out mindset.  I've written stories and songs about the desert and I've researched it plenty, the mystical wonderland of emptiness, the vast void.  But I never thought I would get here, much less LIVE here.  So this is a pretty wild life-excursion for me!  I'm going to make the most of it and try to keep blogging about my adventures to share with whoever wants to take the time to read. 

So away we go!  Enjoy!