Beyond the Mirror
Copyright© 2012/2014
Prologue
Thomas Franklin Dunn, known to his friends as Tom, was the fourth and last child born to Jack and Kelly Dunn, the owners of Dunn-Redding Petroleum Exploration. Tom inherited his mother’s red hair and freckled complexion, but his father’s height and muscular build. He also inherited his mother’s even temperament and intuitive common sense, but surprisingly, as he grew older, he developed his father’s stubborn demeanor and ingrained intelligence. By the time he reached high school, that overall combination resulted in a young man who aced any subject he took, yet was liked and admired by almost every student in the school. According to his friends, he had to beat off the girls with a stick, but actually, Tom had never had a meaningful relationship with any of the young women he had dated. In his opinion, he just wasn’t ready to get serious, having decided that he was too young to be heavily involved with anyone right then. Besides, he had plans that didn’t involve a girlfriend. So, although he was friendly and was often out on dates and attended cordial parties, he kept his relationships casual.
Tom’s home life was somewhat rockier though. The Dunn-Redding company had made his family rich, but Jack Dunn was adamant that it remain a family-based enterprise. Only Tom and his father never could see eye to eye on almost any subject. Jack wanted all four of his children to be involved in the company business; in fact, he was insistent that he knew what was best for each of them. Instead, by the time Tom graduated from school, he and his father were more often at odds with each other than they were in agreement about anything.
Tom and Jack’s conflict came to a head on the morning of Tom’s last day in high school. Jack waited until his wife had gone out to the car, then he laid down the law by placing an envelope on the table by Tom’s plate.
“I’m sorry, Tom, but I’ve made up my mind, and I’m drawing a line in the sand. Don’t bother arguing with me on this one. I’ve heard all the arguments I want to hear about what you plan to do to improve the world, but I think you’re being foolish. There’s a ticket in the envelope for a flight to Edmonton tomorrow morning and an introductory letter to the boss of one of our seismic crews who will be working up north for the summer. I think a job in the bush, working on a seismic crew, will teach you about real life, but you can also earn enough money over the summer to buy a decent car before you leave to attend university. It’s your choice, of course. I won’t force you, but a degree in petroleum geology would guarantee you an excellent income for the rest of your life. So think it over carefully before you decide to toss your life away over a silly dream,” and with that, Jack walked out the door of his house and headed for the office.
With his mom and dad gone off to work, Tom was left alone in the house, and he sighed heavily, then shook his head. He loved the life of a prospector, but he had learned to dislike the oil business and he absolutely hated the development of the tar sands. He was positive that any process that would be developed would take too much energy investment for the amount of return. As well as that, he worried about the pollution which could easily happen if the process wasn’t constantly monitored at every step along the way. Besides, any job with the Dunn-Redding Company was eventually going to put him in the office or the lab, and working inside for any length of time would drive him around the bend.
Instead, he wanted to work in the field, out in the bush, so he pulled a pen out of his pocket and turned the envelope over, then wrote a message on the back.
Mom and Dad,
Sorry, but I’m just not cut out to work in the oil business, and Dad, since you gave me a choice of either your way or the highway, I’m heading out. I want to be out in the open, working in the field every day, and I can’t see a petroleum engineer doing much of that. I do plan to study geology, but I’m aiming toward an education that will make me a better prospector. I want to hunt for minerals; gold, silver, copper, nickel, maybe even diamonds, but not oil and gas. Who knows, maybe I’ll eventually go to university and study mineralogy? I’ll drop you a line when I have a job and a forwarding address.
Your son, Tom.
Once he’d written the note, he went to his room, packed his outdoor clothing, his sleeping bag, his camping kit, and his tent, loaded them into his old Volkswagen bug, and drove to school. After saying goodbye to his favourite teachers and several friends, he cleaned out his locker and disposed of the majority of what he had stored there. After he was finished cleaning up, he hopped into his old car and headed out of town in search of work.
Over the next two years, Tom Dunn became a full-fledged prospector, but he taught himself to be much more than that. He had an advantage because he’d been born and raised in the wilds of the Canadian bush when his whole family had travelled with his father. Through that experience early in life, he had learned that you needed to be resourceful and self-reliant to survive in the wilderness. In the areas Tom haunted as a prospector, you needed to be self-reliant. You either packed in what you needed, made do with what you had at hand, or you did without, because there was no nearby corner store to run to for supplies. Over that two-year period, he often had to make do with what he had at hand and what he could cobble together. In time, he could turn his hand at almost any survival-oriented task, from killing and butchering a deer to felling a tree, then using the wood to build furniture for a cabin. As well as calling him a loner, a prospector, a woodsman, and a miner, others might have called him a handyman or a Jack-of-all-trades. Tom didn’t believe in any of those labels; instead, he felt he was simply someone who liked doing things his way.
There was one label that he did acknowledge though. He became known as ‘Lucky’ Dunn because he was lucky at finding precious minerals, and being lucky meant he made money for the mineral exploration firm who employed him. He was doubly lucky in the fact that the company he worked for paid a bonus to those prospectors who made decent finds of any minerals the company was seeking. As a result, over two early springs and three summers, Tom earned enough money to pay his board, room, and tuition for his final three years of university. His winters were a lot less profitable, but he did manage to earn enough to live on by taking odd jobs. In fact, except for his tuition, Tom didn’t have to dip into his savings during the first two winters when he took his first-year courses at the university as an evening student.
Over and above the tuition money he’d managed to save over those two years, he had gained something else by his hard work: a reputation as a dependable worker. He had realized at the end of his third summer that if he was careful, he would probably be able to get through university without going into debt, even if he took regular term courses. He negotiated a deal with the firm to work from May through August and take mineralogy courses at the university in the fall and winter. As a result, the firm he’d worked for offered to rehire him during his summer break from class after completing his second year and continued that practice following his third year.
He did invest some of his tightly hoarded funds outside of normal university expenses when he joined a local Flying Club and took flying lessons at one of Vancouver’s outlying airports. His employers encouraged that though, even paying for a third of the flight time necessary for that license. After all, they hired planes and pilots every year, so having Tom earn a pilot’s license was an advantage for them.
Over Christmas break during his third year at the university, he caught a ride to Calgary with one of the owners of the business he worked for, sitting as second seat in a Lear Jet. He arrived on Christmas Eve and rented a car, then drove to his grandparents’ house so he was there to greet his family when they came to Christmas dinner. He’d warned his grandparents and his mom that he’d be there, but it was a surprise for the rest of the family. He brought presents for all of his family though, polished and mounted samples of some of his mineral finds - earrings or necklaces for the women and tie clips and cufflinks for the men. That break was a wonderful holiday from his studies, so he returned to class quite refreshed and for once he hadn’t had an argument with his dad, but then - it was the Christmas season.
The following summer, Tom spent much of his time flying from one remote area to another, often spending only short periods of time in each area. His job had changed from simple prospecting to evaluating claims for their viability, working out estimated production costs, and yield evaluations of the various claims. His skill as a pilot was not only an asset but a necessity for that job because he would often travel a thousand miles or more between one claim and the next. Not only did he get to fly, but he was paid extra for the time he spent flying, and he loved flying, as well as the work he was doing.
It took him a total of five years, but Tom graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in exploratory mineralogy, a private pilot’s license, and five summers’ experience working as a prospector. He’d needed that work, not just to earn enough to pay his way through university, but also for experience he had gained while working for a known prospecting firm. He had made enough of an impression on the people working for that firm that he’d had a standing invitation to go to work for them at any time, but they made it clear that he would be spending much of his time in an office or a lab. Tom wasn’t interested in a job of that sort, though; after all, his father could have steered him into a similar job at a moment’s notice, probably with better pay. However, Tom had always followed the beat of a different drummer than most people around him, and he had no plans to alter his lifestyle to suit anyone else.
For instance, during his first year in attendance at UBC, at six feet, four inches tall and weighing slightly over a hundred and seventy pounds, most people would have expected that he might play basketball if he played any sport. Instead, Tom played soccer on the university’s intramural league and was regarded as a very effective forward - he was even scouted by the local semi-pro team. Besides soccer, he either spent his time at the local airport or the university hiking club and usually spent his free weekends either hiking, flying, or walking the beach. Then too, while Tom looked like the sort who might be involved in drinking and partying after class, instead, he spent two or three evenings a week in the local gym, but most of his evenings were spent studying. He made friends easily and he dated on occasion, but he stayed away from heavy drinking, drugs, wild parties, or serious relationships.
Like many young men, Tom had a dream, but his dream wasn’t the standard dream of a wife and family, or of living in a house in the suburbs. Once more, Tom was planning to go his own way. He had no ambitions to work for the large oil and mining companies who wooed him fervently as he neared graduation, many of them trying to encourage him to follow in his father’s footsteps. Tom had other ideas; instead of being a petroleum geologist, he’d always dreamt of being an old-style prospector, hiking through the mountains and searching for gold.
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