Tom Findley left his work in the field of fat chemistry to paddle across North America by canoe. He is 89 years old and lives as simply as he can, chopping his own wood and hauling his own water to his cabin in the woods.

HIS HOME OUTSIDE OF BORRUP’S CORNERS . . . 10:00 a.m.

Tea and Bagels

THE CONVERSATION

My directions to Tom’s house involve turning off the Trans Canada highway onto a narrow dirt road and a caution to turn around when I reach the bridge. The fact is that most people drive right past Tom’s driveway and miss his home altogether. So the trip to the river is a prerequisite.

Once I arrive, Tom turns off CBC radio to give me a tour of his home. It is covered with books and he shows me his single light bulb with pride. While he admits that he has a generator, he does not see the need to use it. He can meet his needs with a battery and enjoys the solar powered light and wind up radio he has been given by his grandchildren.

Tom travels by bus. With the distance and the scheduling, to visit either Thunder Bay or Winnipeg is a twenty four hour round trip. He says, “Now it’s tough. If I want to go to town to do some shopping it’s an overnight trip so I usually go with the neighbours.” Those neighbours are six miles away and collect his mail for him.

Tom moved the day Chernobyl blew up, April 26, 1984, but he says his story began before that: “Our family had problems in the twenties, before the depression. My grandfather was a harness maker. He didn’t go bankrupt because he paid off all of is debts. My parents were divorced. I didn’t ever get the full reason why, but I suspect it was because she realized he was a child abuser.”

Tom was raised by his mother who worked as a nurse. He completed junior high and some of high school in Princeton. Einstein was a boyhood idol who walked by on his way to and from work. Tom says, “I knew of him. He knew me as a kid with a bicycle. He always spoke. He didn’t know it was my mom who almost hit him with her car once. When the sidewalk ended, he chose to walk in the middle of the road because it was easier to find and he could go on thinking.”

One of the two books Tom is currently reading is about Einstein. The book jacket describes the “fundamental contradictions faced by the committed humanist that to respond to the problems facing his fellow human beings, to be involved, an individual must often stand alone and apart.” It is no wonder that Tom is interested.

Tom himself is a well trained academic. The camp he had attended every summer as a result of his mother’s work as the camp nurse opened a high school and Tom graduated from there with a scholarship to university. He trained as a chemist and worked on synthetic rubber for the Ministry of Agriculture. The project was a priority because of the war. He says, “Things have changed so much. We didn’t even apply for jobs. We were told where to go.”

When he was drafted, he was assigned to the infantry.  Most of those he was working with were sent to the Battle of the Bulge, but he was assigned to the US army hospital and didn’t leave the US. He explains, “That gave me the GI bill that sent me back to grad school. By that time, I was married with a child and one more on the way. It allowed me to buy a house. It actually took me four calendar years to get my PhD and by that time we had a third child.”

Tom’s PhD was in fat chemistry and he considers his job at the Mayo clinic his first real job. He says, “I probably could have made something of it, but I didn’t.” The fats and oils he had made at the Ministry of Agriculture were now available commercially and Tom says, “I knew I could do better.” He moved to Swift and Company to do just that.

His work required that he move, but he wanted to stay near his wife who had opportunities of her own with a Masters degree in mathematics and a Master degree in education. When Tom talks about his work history he says, “The one that really changed my life was at a small, experimental Quaker College in New York. The president’s ideas about how the world was and the way it should be influenced me. It was clear that we couldn’t continue and our economic growth in the US couldn’t continue.”

Tom and his wife had become Quakers and he had worked on Friends Committee for National Legislation. He says,“My failure to be able to persuade them led me to think the only way I could see to do it was with my own life.” Their children were grown and his wife had taken a job in Washington. He decided not to follow saying, “I was looking to simplify my life, not complicate it.” He and a group of his students made canoes and set off from Long Island to see how far they could get.

He laughs that he took a leave of absence from the college even though he knew he would not be back. They wanted to be able to keep him on the faculty list because he had a PhD, but after about five years even they realized he was gone. Tom says, “From that point on, I never took a job that didn’t have a termination date. When you’re living in the bush and you don’t have a car to run, you don’t need much.”

Most of the next fifteen years was spent paddling and Tom eventually made it to the Bearing Strait. He had literally paddled across North America. He says, “That time between when I left Friends’ World College and turned sixty five, I consider the most valuable time because I learned how little I need to be healthy and happy.”

When the fishing camp he was working for put in floodlights, Tom knew he couldn’t stay because he couldn’t see the stars. His children suggested he look at property.  He says, “The property cost on the lakes was really expensive, but no one gives a river a thought as a source of water.” His children put up the money and he prides himself on the fact that when he paid back one of his children, the money went to pay for a semester of his youngest grandson’s education at Harvard.

Tom is amazed that he is actually accumulating money despite the fact that he is living on pensions. He owns the land he lives on and his primary expenses appear to be food and books. He and a friend have season’s tickets to the Opera in Winnipeg. He travels to Quaker meetings and family events.

He says, “What I taught is that this wasteful society, using resources the way we are cannot continue. I don’t know what’s going to change it, but I took what I could to my own life and did simplify it. I have heard from some of the students who went on those canoe trips with me and they’re doing some good things. So I guess it was a worthwhile time I spent getting people to think about retaining this environment.”

Tom is also concerned about people. He grew up with a respect for the Quakers because his mother had admired their work helping slaves escape through the underground railroad to Canada. He had attended a Quaker meeting as an undergraduate and felt “it was just another place for professors to have a captive audience.”

He explored other faiths and remembers, “A pastor came in to give a weekly talk about the history of the Christian religion. He talked about all the horrible things it had done. It was that course that left me feeling I did not need any Church. I could relate to God if there is one without relying on and organization that has a history like that.  I knew I wasn’t interested in having another intersperse between God and I.”

When he had children, he though it would be “good for [his] kids to have a background in Christianity even if [he] didn’t’ believe it.” He adds, “I taught Sunday School. If I wanted my kids to go to Church there, I better contribute to the program.” He raised his children in the Presbyterian Church until one of them was teased and refused to go back. The family began to attend the Quaker meetings and eventually became members.

Tom remembers leading the men’s Bible class. He explains, “I thought this was great because it was a group of older men. I could bring up anything I was thinking about and get some wise council.” When his home was used to host the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Quaker lobbying group, he says, “I gradually began to listen. I ended up standing up to ask a question. I was told we’ll put you on the committee and you can find out for yourself.”

The work they were doing was on civil rights legislation. It was when he was in Washington lobbying for this bill that he received a call that his daughter was in jail in Montgomery as a result of her work on civil rights. He says, “I can remember ferrying about twenty back and fourth between the jail and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Of course in the middle of the night they let them go. None of them had to go out in the dark. I was there to meet them.”

Tom continues to calculate his risks, albeit in a very different venue. His commitment to social change has him living a life that few can imagine. As idealistic as he may seem, he is guided by the practical realities of his life alone in the bush. He no longer thinks it is a good idea for him to get into a canoe by himself, but says, “I still climb the ladder to the roof to clean the snow off the solar panels. If I were to fall off the ladder into a foot of snow it’s not going to hurt that much.”

Tom has a cell phone so that people can reach him, but is just as interested in the habits of the birds he feeds every morning.  Asked about his approaching eighty ninth birthday he says, “I have to get exercise and you always have to have two books to read. Moving is a last resort.”

STILL DIGESTING

We assume that idealism and practicality are diametrically opposed, but to live your ideals you must be very practical indeed. Tom uses a wheelbarrow to haul water from the river in two five gallon water jugs. That water will last a few weeks. He is trying to build up the amount of split wood he has in the house in case he gets sick for a few days.

He credits his longevity to his physical activity, but it is clear that his mind is always active. CBC radio is a regular companion and for a man of so few possessions, he has many books. He shows me a number of the publications he receives and finds the puzzles they suggest to keep his mind active quite straightforward. He does them anyways.

While people might puzzle over his lifestyle, he should give us pause to puzzle over ours. He is so concerned about environmental degradation that he has changed his entire way of life. His intelligence and life experience have taught him that it does not serve to separate your ideals from your actions.

I asked him about independence and the question did not seem to resonate. He talks fondly of his family and values the friendships he has. He does not seem like someone who is trying to live apart, but like someone who cannot separate what he understands from what he does.

Tom does not claim to know how the changes the world so desperately needs will occur, but he knows the changes he has made to be consistent with his ideals. He certainly has lots of space to think about them.  And enough work to live them.