This guy - I can't even remember his name now - took seven hours to change my life.
I wish I could remember his name, I feel so bad that I can't. I checked my journal, all I wrote was 'the Dad with his two boys in the combi'. Technically it was a Kombi. Anyhoo... I didn't even take a photo of him.
I was trying to get out of a little rainy town called Ucluelet, on the western side of Vancouver Island, in BC, Canada. I wanted to go down to Victoria, some six or seven hours by road, but couldn't afford the bus ticket, so I thought I'd hitch-hike.
I stood by the roadside, freezing my butt off, massive pack at my feet, waiting, waiting for a car to pick me up. I'd been told it was easy on Vancouver Island, everyone was super friendly and looked after backpackers. I started wondering whether those words had been delivered sarcastically an hour later, when car after car after van after car had driven past, without a driver so much as making eye contact. I'd all but given up, prepared to head across the road, grab a coffee and warm up. I'd literally picked up my bag and was about to cross the road when a bright green Kombi came around the corner.
'What the hell,' I thought. One more thumbs up wouldn't hurt.
I nearly tripped over myself in my haste to get in the Kombi when it pulled over, afraid he'd pull away before I could get there, some cruel joke. I stuck my head in, he kicked his son down to the back of the van, grabbed my pack and off we went. Of all the rides I could've landed, a dad, two kids and a Kombi seemed to be pretty sweet.
With nothing else to do, we talked. He was American, two boys (in the back), they'd been camping on a father-son trip, just boys and the ferocious Canadian camping grounds. They'd caught the ferry from Seattle and driven up.
We talked about American politics - the healthcare debate was still raging, we talked about Obama, about the structure of the Australian parliament and we compared political systems. He had a Master of Economics and he all but lectured me in global economics - I disagreed with plenty of what he said, but was completely out of my depth in my ability to argue. He was a Republican, I'm anything but. It set the scene for a rather uncomfortable few hours on the road.
Yet, as we kept talking, we began to share our life stories. He was a smart guy, he knew a lot about a lot of things. In his early 40s, I thought he'd made the most of the world. Yet when describing my life - quitting my job, taking a year off and flatly refusing to work, he looked at me with a kind of envy I'd never expected.
It wasn't that I wasn't used to envy - I'd seen it plenty of times before. Broke backpackers forced to go home to work, friends stuck at home, dreaming of my life on the road, I'd seen envy. But not from a guy like this. A guy who'd done it all. A guy who had a family. A guy who, in his 40s, was still living the dream.
In his early 20s, he'd been ambitious, and he'd worked his butt off to get what he wanted. He'd succeeded, was rich, had a beautiful wife, big house, and was on track to be a star in his company. He negotiated major corporate real estate sales - from what I could gather, he settled deals for logging companies, that sort of thing. And his company took a slice of each deal it negotiated. He was loaded.
And yet, when he'd scaled the peaks of life, when he'd got the money, the wife, the job, he hated it all. It all fell apart. He split from his wife, he hated his job, even his house he could no longer stand - it reeked of money, wasted money, luxuries so unnecessary that he felt guilty owning them. Of everything he'd worked his arse off for, for all his ambition, he said there were only two things he was proud of from the last two decades of his life: his two sons.
So he rolled the dice. He quit his job - with that losing his contacts and his future, his bosses reacted angrily to losing their star prospect, his high-flying friends distanced themselves. His family had already fallen apart - while still friends, he and his wife divorced. He sold the house, the palace of excess, and even got rid of his luxury car. He packed it all in.
He wanted purpose in life, something to be proud of. He got out. He went to the Caribbean - I can't remember which country, though Haiti sounds right - volunteered for two years with an aid organisation setting up permanent tents for refugees and the homeless. He worked his butt off and excelled at that too.
In those two years, working hard, labouring manually as he had never done, he found a peace, a contentment, that he'd never known as a high-flyer. The money wasn't coming in any more but he didn't care, he'd found a happiness - as cliched as it is - that money couldn't buy.
He went back to the US, bought a Kombi, and vowed to spend as much time with his two sons as he could.
That was where we met.
His advice to me, the advice that I remember every time I look to make a decision, was: 'don't miss out on life because you're too busy chasing something else. Make the most of it while you can.'
He, the big shot, lecturing me in global economics, talking politics at a level I can't imagine, driving a Kombi with his kids through Vancouver Island in the middle of a Canadian summer, was jealous of me.
That's hard to forget.
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