I was the only openly confessing Christian when I worked at Mule Creek Camp in the Yukon—that remote stretch of road connected Haines, Alaska, with the Alaska Highway. Americans could drive onto a ferry in Seattle and relax for four days, bypassing most of Canada for a subsidized rate. Then, they passed over our highway and up to mainland Alaska. We plowed snow down a long, spectacular descent to the Alaska border, drank coffee, swapped yarns with the border guards, and then plowed our way home again. In the other direction from our camp, I drove 65 miles North on Sundays to meet with other believers. This was my first regular church experience as an adult believer because in Eagle Plains, where I lived for the previous three years, it was 400 km to Inuvik, and the route included crossing two large rivers with either ice bridges or ferries, depending on the season. During my Eagle Plains years, I occasionally worked all day Saturday, then drove all night in my pickup, arriving in Inuvik at 3 or 4 a.m. I would sleep in the restaurant parking lot until they opened, have breakfast, go to church, and drive home in time for work Monday morning.

In the Fall of 1986, I bought a Tandy 88 computer from Radio Shack, complete with a green monitor and a noisy dot matrix printer. It all cost around $3,000, which was a lot back then. I proudly set it up in my bunkhouse room. I had some computer magazines that explained how computers worked—on my first day off, I started typing in a multi-page code that would result in a primitive video ping-pong game. After a short time, I got up for supper. To my surprise, it was 10 p.m. It was like a time warp, so fun! I ordered my first copy of Microsoft Word from that magazine. It came on thirty-five floppies. I picked it up at the post office in Alaska on my day off. I went from failing typing at a private school in Grade 9, the only school course I ever failed, to having the ability to correct mistakes before I printed my final copy. I could hardly believe the awesomeness of it all.