My conversation continues with Thomas Seekins, a lone traveler, while we are on an archaeological dig in 2011.
“So when I got to Calgary, the only job I could find was driving a taxi on the midnight-to-dawn shift. My boss gave me a map of the city, and I studied it by walking the streets when I wasn’t driving. Fortunately, riders were mostly inebriated and didn’t put up too much of a fight when I lost the way. The first time it happened, I told the guy not to give me a tip, and he congratulated me for being honest. That stuck with me, and I made that lesson work in lots of ways since then.
“After I’d been driving for a year and a half, I got word that my dad had passed. He left me nothing—he’d been sick and had used up what little money he had. I was alone in the world. Being my best was now more important than ever.”
As he spoke, I drifted into my own thoughts about how so many people suffer with loneliness and despair. I could sense that Thomas felt that desolation, yet he knew his life would progress elsewhere. He went on talking about how he quit being a cabbie, packed up a backpack, and hitchhiked his way to Edmonton, where the trucker he was riding with brought him to the train station in midmorning. Likely around the same time we were talking, I thought, and I tuned back in to what Thomas was saying.
“I thanked the driver and bought us cups of coffee and doughnuts. As we were having breakfast, the trucker introduced me to a guy named Sam who was sweeping the floor, because the trucker thought maybe I could get a job at the station or with a railroad company.”
“What luck, right?
“Not really. The job didn’t happen, but this was the first time I realized that there is a reason that you meet everyone you meet. Sam was a full-blooded Native American who had come to Canada in search of work. Like me, he had roots in the Southwest, but unlike me, he had studied them well—just on his own, out of personal interest. When we discovered we had something in common, he took me in for a few days. Let me live in his little place. When he got off of his shift, he told me stories about my ancestors and what they had gone through as a race, how they suffered from white man’s diseases, displacement and murder—how they’d become a group of prisoners on their own land.”
Thomas explained to me that it was Sam’s kindness and knowledge that allowed a new attitude to settle into his mind. I could see qualities of a humble warrior awaken behind his dark eyes. “Sam showed me how to envision myself as a seeker of knowledge through a willingness to work hard and pay attention. He said he’d heard that there was a need for workers at a resort in an area to the west. After a week with Sam, I said good-bye and boarded a train to Jasper on the promise of finding work. It was the last I ever saw or heard from Sam.”
The afternoon sun now cast a shadow in the pit where we’d been digging, but Thomas had been talking with the same enthusiasm as he had after his morning coffee. In my mind, I was on the journey with him—moving in that train from Edmonton to an immigration office in Jasper. He said that the view from a window seat in the train car, the vast reach of nature and the few small towns that flashed by, housing people in anonymous peace, inspired him.
Read the complete success story in the book, The Quiet Rich: Ordinary People Reawakening an American Dream.
Kevin J. Palmer, Author
