MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
1
Chapter One - The Early Years
How I Died
Around 1933-34, my mother Anne Moen was a 14-year-old Swedish drifter
trying to find work for room and board. During the depression, money was scarce
and room and board was about all a drifter could hope for. A Scottish lady, Marion
McC took her in. Marion lived in the little town of Wapella, Saskatchewan. Anne did
housework for Marion in exchange for a roof over her head and some food. Shortly
after Anne moved in, Marion married an Irishman by the name of John C. At the
time, they were both in their late 50s.
When she was 15, John soon took a sexual interest in Anne and raped her. She
gave birth to twins, Albert and Agnes. Shortly after the twins were born, my mother
threw them in the garbage and they died. She murdered them and got away with it. I
often wondered how my life might have been different if my brother and sister had
lived. In those days, there was virtually no law and people could easily get away with
murder. John raped her at least one time when she was 16 and I was born. This time
she was taken to the city of Regina, about 150 miles west where she gave birth to me
in a hospital. I was born on April 7, 1936. She named me Vincent Moen. After
returning to Wapella, she threw me away too and I died as well.
Wapella was a very tightly-knit community and everyone knew what everyone
else did. What happened to my siblings and me was common knowledge as I later
found out. My mother had actually taken me out in the bush and threw me naked into
a slough. My body was in the water but my head rested on a rock. Marion who
became my foster mother was part of a Scottish witch coven. She was the white
witch of the family and she apparently had special powers as well as her family. She
located me in her mind and sent a search party to find me.
A cowboy found me, wrapped me in a horse blanket and took me to the town
doctor. Marion was waiting for me at the doctor's office. When the doctor examined
me, I had no heart beat and was not breathing. He pronounced me dead and told
Marion that he would bury me in an unmarked grave (a pauper’s grave). Marion said
"No, I'm taking him home" and so she did. She cooked up some strange broth and
force-fed me. She revived me. She brought me back to life. Marion then kicked my
mother out and I never got to know her.
I believe this incident had a profound and drastic affect on my life. I know that
babies can feel emotional pain and anger even though they may not be able to
express it or be consciously aware of it. When a mother kills her child, that is the
ultimate rejection - the one thing that everyone fears more than anything else. But I
survived death, and rejection has been the common thread through my entire life.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
2
My Foster Family
Marion had a half-sister Christy McP, and a half-brother Malcolm McC they
and a group of others came to Canada when they were young on what they claimed
to be a sister ship to the Mayflower. They came from Uist in the Outer Hebrides of
northern Scotland. Christy was the high priestess of a black witch coven along with
her brother Malcolm, another sister and several cohorts. While practicing their
witchcraft, they would draw a huge circle on the ground containing a pentangle and a
devil’s head. I was told that they sacrificed animals there and there were rumors that
they sometimes sacrificed human babies. Malcolm was a warlock. On several
occasions I witnessed first hand the supernatural powers of Christy and Malcolm.
I was now the foster child of John and Marion C. The town at that time was
predominantly people of Scottish descent. The town was originally settled by Jewish
people and the famous Bronfman family came from here. Highland Gaelic was now
the common language spoken even though they could speak perfect English. I never
understood a word they were saying, but I remember part of a song Marion used to
sing. It went something like "sherm shua sherm shea har apout the rury acum. A
smoongiasic meesavatin har apout the rury." There were lots of pipers in Wapella. I
loved the bagpipes because they sounded so weird.
My earliest memories go back to when I was about seven months old. This is
when I learned to talk. At first I had trouble pronouncing words. It was late fall and
getting cold outside. I would notice smoke rising from chimneys. I remember a
sentence I was trying to say, "There's moke coming out of the domy tote". I meant,
there's smoke coming out of the German church.
Wapella was a primitive pioneer farming community in the 30s and 40s. The
town was proud of its four grain elevators, but it remained far behind the times until
at least the 50s. We lived in an uninsulated wooden shack with two bedrooms, a
living room and a kitchen which was like an add on. There were two hatches in the
kitchen floor. One was to the root cellar with a ladder to the dirt floor. Actually, it
was a big hole dug in the dirt below the floor to store food for the winter. John, or
‘Jack’ as I came to call him, had a huge garden behind the house. He grew enough
food to barter for things we didn't have. The other hatch was for the cistern - a hole
about two feet wide with water in the bottom. Perishables like milk, cream, butter,
cheese, eggs etc. were lowered in a wicker basket to just above the water line. It kept
everything fresh during the hot summers.
Jack and Marion, or "Gramma" as I used to call her, always slept in separate
bedrooms. I always slept with Gramma. In the 12 years I was with them, I never at
any time saw any affection between them. I never even saw any evidence that they
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
3
ever had sex. In all that time I never at any time got any affection from either of
them, not even a hug.
The mattresses were huge bags of straw that were refilled every spring. In
winter, we slept under a thick down comforter. Gramma would heat up glad irons at
night and put them at the foot of the beds before turning in. We had an old coal and
wood stove for heating and cooking. On cold winter mornings, Jack would get up an
hour early, start a fire in the stove and jump back into bed. Within an hour the house
would be warm enough to get up. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing. For
lighting, we used coal-oil lamps. It became one of my jobs to clean the glass
chimneys. There was an outhouse some distance from the house which was awkward
in the cold snowy winters. Sometimes we had to shovel a path to it. Later when I was
around five, Jack got an indoor potty to use in the winter. There was no toilet paper,
paper towels or tissues. The only paper in the town was the small weekly newspaper.
It was precious and used sparingly, mostly for cleaning lamp chimneys. In the fall,
we would get a Simpson's Sears catalogue. That became our toilet paper in winter. In
summer, it was a handful of grass.
Our drinking water came from one of the two town wells. It later became my
job to get the water. I would be given two tin buckets and fill each one half full. I
wasn't strong enough to carry a full bucket. When I got home I would empty one
bucket into the other and we had a pail of drinking water. There was a tin dipper in
the bucket and everyone drank from it including visitors. Saturday was bath day in a
square wash tub. In summer, we used water from the rain barrel which had lots of
bugs and leaves in it. In winter, we melted snow in the tub and warmed up the water.
It sat in the middle of the living room floor and I was the first to bathe with lye soap,
then Gramma, and then Jack.
Some people in town had wells under the kitchen and had a pump beside a sink.
Malcolm McC, the warlock, was the town diviner. Anyone wanting a well came to
him. He used a forked stick and if there was water, the stick would point down. I was
told he never failed.
My earliest memories of Gramma washing clothes was on a glass washboard in
the square wash tub. Some years later we got a washing machine. A long wooden
handle came up from the side of it that was attached to an agitator. It had to be
moved back and forth. Then there was a ringer with two rubber rollers attached to a
crank. Gramma also had a spinning wheel to make strings of wool. I also remember
the little wooden butter churn. The three of us lived on Jack’s $36-a-month pension.
Pensions weren't available to women then but we still lived pretty good. Gramma
was good at making preserves and she did a lot of baking. The best memories of her
was when a hot loaf of bread came out of the oven. She would cut off a crust and I
would smear it with butter and peanut butter. It tasted so good. Peanut butter became
my lifetime favorite food.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
4
As a toddler of about eighteen months old I was already very inquisitive and
getting into everything. Once I found a $5 bill and was trying to clean the stove with
it. I didn't know what it was, but Jack saw me with it and grabbed it away from me.
$5 was a lot of money in those days.
I remember enjoying listening to the radio. It was the only source of
entertainment. Jack had a shortwave radio that was powered by a wet cell battery and
a dry cell. The wet cell had to be periodically charged at the garage and it became
one of my jobs to take it there. I remember the gas pumps. The top half was like a
glass cylinder and the gas was pumped by hand. The three most common radio
stations we listened to were in Minot, North Dakota, Wheeling, West Virginia and
the BBC in London, England.
Year Two
I have a lot of memories from when I was two years old. I had an insatiable
curiosity. I would study flowers and wonder why they were different colors. Why did
they attract insects? Why did they disappear in the fall and come back in the spring? I
examined tree leaves. I noticed that the veins of the leaf resembled the branches of
the tree. I was fascinated by nature and wanted to know everything about it. At night,
I would lie on the grass and stare at the stars, wondering what they were and why
they were so bright. I used to imagine other beings out there and about them maybe
sometimes contacting us.
Jack had a wind-up alarm clock and I wanted to find out why it ticked. I found a
small screwdriver and took it all apart. I found out what made it tick but I couldn't
quite get it all back together. Jack gave me a painful whipping for that with a
caragana branch that he kept beside his favorite chair.
Jack was an alcoholic. He was a binge drinker. Usually about once a month he
would be drunk every day for four or five days straight. I vividly remember on one of
his binges he took a double-barreled shotgun and threatened to blow Gramma’s head
off. He imagined she was interested in another man. Gramma was on her knees
pleading for her life. Another time while staggering and flailing his arms he knocked
out a section of the stovepipe and set the house on fire. His buddies got buckets of
water from the rain barrel and put the fire out.
I remember lightning hitting the house and setting it on fire. The lightning rods
on the roof didn't help. Later a huge tree beside the house was split in half by a
lightning bolt and our house caught fire again. I remember the colorful Gypsy
caravans that came through town each spring and Jack would always find something
to buy from them. Because of prejudice, they were soon forbidden to enter the town.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
5
Jack had some good qualities about him. He was my first real tutor. He was
wise in the ways of the world. He always had sayings that he would repeat to me
such as: Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Every dark cloud has a silver
lining. Always improve the quality of your life. The sun is always shining
somewhere. Moss always grows on the North side of the tree. Always start at the
bottom unless you are digging a well. Jack was an old time fiddler and won several
championships. One time we had two canaries, a crow and a magpie. He taught them
all how to sing. They learned to mimic the notes from the fiddle.
Year Three
The age of three was the first major turning point in my life. The first thing I
realized was that I was a little girl. But there was something wrong. People were
referring to me as a little boy, and I couldn't figure out why. By now I had noticed
that there was a difference between boys and girls and that girls were wearing
dresses. I wondered why I didn't have any dresses. I was confused because my body
looked more like Jack's body than Gramma's. I thought there had to be a mistake. I
loved to play with dolls and when Jack got me toy guns and trucks I wouldn't touch
them. I loved to put on Gramma's clothes even though they were way too big for me.
I would ask Jack to buy me dresses but he was outraged at this. He tried to convince
me that I was a boy and not a girl. I refused to accept that. He ordered me to stop
wearing his wife's clothes, but I wore them when he was out. Once he came home
and caught me. I got a severe whipping with the caragana branch and I was bleeding
from the barbs on it. Altogether I got caught three times and each whipping was
worse than the one before. I was forced to live as a boy even though I knew I wasn't.
I became aware of other strange things about myself. I was exceptionally
talented in so many ways. I was gifted with so many abilities. I started my first comic
strip at the age of three. People were referring to me as precocious and a child
prodigy. At age five, I was doing serious art work. I also started school that year in
Grade One. I was told that I had an understanding well beyond my years. I sailed
effortlessly through elementary school always getting straight As. I skipped Grades
Three and Five. They wanted me to skip Grade Seven but though my classmates
would be too old for me.
There were some tough boys in school, but I was never teased or bullied even
though I was somewhat on the feminine side. I was too smart for that. First of all I
was the class clown, always making the right kind of jokes. And I could laugh at
myself. As a cartoonist, I was in the habit of drawing caricatures of the kids and of
the teachers. They enjoyed that. Secondly, I had all the answers. If any other kids
needed an answer to anything, I had it for them. I soon had nicknames like Einstein,
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
6
the Brain, the genius, the prodigy, and so on. I soon came to realize that boys (and
men) had the power in society while girls did not. I selfishly took advantage of this
and played the role of a boy but it was mainly a survival technique.
There were two kids I hung out with, Arnold T and Grant McD. They seemed to
be fascinated with me. Grant and I would go out in the bushes and I managed to get
him to pull his pants down. I liked to play with his penis. He had no objection and
this became a frequent pastime. I remember having my first orgasm while climbing a
tree. I didn't really understand it but it felt good and for a while I climbed a lot of
trees.
Wapella’s Characters
Wapella was a strange town while I lived there. It was like something from the
Twilight Zone. There was a strange assortment of characters in the town. First there
was Christy McP, a black witch, who conducting her witchcraft ceremonies while
chanting in highland Gaelic.
Then there was a hermit who dug out the side of a hill and lived comfortably in
a large hole. He had furniture, a stove, and all the comforts of home. The walls, floor
and ceiling were all dirt. I heard that these dwellings were common in the past as
were sod houses. They were gone now.
There was a man in his late 20s who had been struck in the head by lightning
when he was four. He was an idiot-savant. He lived as a four-year-old child, played
with toys and had a speech impediment. But he was a mechanical and electrical
genius. The town mechanics would always call him if they had a problem. He knew
how to fix it instantly.
There was a true hermaphrodite with both sexes fully functioning. He-she
preferred to live as a woman but worked as a man. She went by the name of Millie O
and drove the town's dray team. She would haul lumber, wood, coal, seed grain, and
anything that came off the freight cars. I once saw her get hit by a speeding train. It
sliced the wagon right behind her seat and her load of lumber went flying
everywhere. She was not hurt.
Then there was Frank S, the giant strong man. He made money by lifting
seemingly impossible weights. He would lift horses on his back and carry them a
short distance. He would lift horses with riders and I saw him lift a Clydesdale. I also
saw him pull a Greyhound bus full of people down the full length of Main Street. He
was a hermit and lived in a homemade shack in the woods. He was the town
gravedigger.
There was also a native Blackfoot chief named Kickackaway, who weighed
between 400 and 500 pounds and had eight wives. In the summer, all he wore was a
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
7
loincloth and a headdress made of turkey feathers. He was an alcoholic and drunk
most of the time. When he was drunk, he would sit in the center of Main Street. The
policeman would have to get four or five men to help get him on his feet and take
him to the town jail. Usually three or four of his wives were there to help him resist
arrest. Sometimes they would just move him to the side of the road. The unique thing
about him was that he was the most incredible marksman with a bow and arrow
(when he wasn't drinking). He made money by betting on seemingly impossible
targets, then he would take his winnings and go to the beer parlor and get drunk. He
always won. I once saw him put an empty soup can on the wooden ledge of a store
window with the bottom of the can facing outward. There were stores on only one
side of Main Street so he walked across the tracks and must have been 150 feet from
the store. He aimed his arrow at about a 70-degree angle and let it fly. It made a huge
arc through the air, hit the center of the bottom of the can, and pinned it to the
window ledge. He made a lot of beer money with that stunt.
Year Seven
The age of seven was the second major turning point in my life. I was grappling
with my gender identity but realized I had to continue playing a boy just to survive.
Being a transgendered person was totally unacceptable in those days (and it still is as
I write this is 2002). The war was on and Jack used to listen to BBC radio to get
reports on the war. The announcer's voice came in waves, and I asked Jack why? He
said it was because the broadcast was coming over the ocean. There was a theater in
town and a movie would play every Saturday night. Jack would often take me. It cost
a quarter and they were mostly westerns. Before the movie there was Movietone
News reporting on the war. Then there was a cartoon followed by a 15-minute
episode of Gangbusters, a serial or continuing series that always left you in suspense
so you would come back next Saturday. After dark, Grant McD and I would dip dry
bulrushes in coil oil, set them on fire, and run around with these flaming torches.
The first major event was when some school kids and I got some rifles and
ammunition and went to Frank S's shack in the woods. The kids started firing shots at
his shack and he started firing back. We were involved in a real-life gun battle. It was
just like in the cowboy movies. Bullets were whizzing by my head as I hid behind a
tree. Kids would say "cover me" as they dashed between trees to get closer to the
shack. I fired two shots, but not at Frank's shack. One guy managed to climb on his
roof and plugged the chimney with a gunnysack. The shack caught fire and burned to
the ground. We all ran. It was very senseless because someone could have been
killed including me.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
8
The second major event was being brutally tortured for six hours by a sadistic
dentist. There was nothing wrong with my teeth but Jack took me there for a
"checkup". My arms, legs and waist were secured with leather straps to a wooden
chair. He took his time torturing me. He would drill into a perfectly good tooth
without using any anesthetic of any kind. When he drilled into a nerve, I would start
yelling and screaming and crying. This would make his eyes light up and he would
have a sinister grin on his face. He would keep drilling until the nerve was dead. That
could take up to half an hour, but it was an eternity of hell for me. Then he would go
to the washroom and I could hear him moaning and groaning. At age seven, I didn't
understand what he was doing, but years later I realized he was masturbating.
Altogether he drilled six teeth like that and never put any fillings in any of them.
Sometimes after killing a tooth (and I thought he was going to kill me) he would sit
in an over stuffed chair for a while. Altogether, during the six hours he went to the
washroom three times. He seemed to get his jollies from hearing kids scream. Twice,
I passed out during this ordeal. He ended up by yanking out two of the teeth he had
drilled. This was very painful, but at least it didn't last as long.
Since that terror, I developed an intense phobia of dentists. For many years I
could not walk by a dentist’s office. I would cross the street and then back again past
the dentist. For most of my life I never brushed my teeth. I never in any way looked
after them. I would get cavities and I would endure excruciating pain for two or three
weeks until the nerve rotted away. On three occasions, the pain was so severe that I
went to a dentist thinking he couldn't put me in more pain than I was already in. I
was wrong. When they stuck a needle in my gum, it felt like a shard of broken
window glass going through my face. I ended up punching one of the dentists in the
face. He kicked me out. I had seen a few other dentists over the years and they were
all monsters. Oddly enough, three dentists died shortly after seeing me.
Grant McD had become the one I hung out with mostly. I liked him. I think I
had a crush on him. By now he became embarrassed with me playing with his penis
and wouldn't let me play with him any more. I felt rejected, but that became the norm
in my life. I was forced to hide my true self because I knew that would bring on a lot
of rejection. I learned that people can't accept anyone who is different and I knew
that I was certainly different even though I couldn't figure out why.
The third major event at age seven was getting hit by lightning. I always loved
thunderstorms. They fascinated me and I always wanted a front row seat to see the
light show. I had been very close to lightning strikes before but this was different.
This day I saw massive black clouds approaching from the east. The kitchen door
faced east so I pulled up a wooden chair to the middle of the open door. I sat there
watching a spectacular light show. Suddenly, there was a deafening bolt of lightning.
It passed under my chair and between my legs, and went out the open window behind
me. I was thrown tumbling through the air landing in a heap on the floor with the
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
9
burnt chair on top of me. There was big holes burned through my pants and my legs
had first degree burns. The bottom of the seat of the chair was charred black. I was a
little scared for a moment because I could have been killed. But I was mostly thrilled
because I went through an exciting experience and survived.
The fourth major event at age seven was Christie McP, the black witch, putting
a curse on me. This was by far the most devastating experience in my life and a few
times it almost cost me my life. At the time I wasn't aware of the curse. The only
thing I remember then was Christie taking a pair of scissors and snipping some hair
off the back of my head. She also stole a pair of pants and a shirt from me. I had
heard rumors about me being cursed, but I didn't find out the details of it until I was
31 when I made a trip back to Wapella in 1977. I talked to the old timers who knew
my foster parents and Christie. They filled in a lot of the details about my life as a
child that I was unaware of. I talked to one of the witches who participated in the
curse. She gave me all those details.
Christie had initiated the ceremony as usual by drawing a huge circle with the
pentagram and devils head. They sacrificed a dog and chopped it into a lot of pieces.
Christy then wrapped the chunks of dog in pieces of my clothes. She sprinkled some
of my hair on each bundle of dog parts and buried them inside the circle. She
pronounced a three-fold curse on me as she buried the bundles. The first part of the
curse was that I would never have any successful relationships. Well, I guess that
part held true all my life. I certainly never had any normal relationships. The second
part, and the most devastating, was that none of my talents, gifts or abilities would
ever be recognized. This has been absolutely true my entire life. It seems to be the
source of the bulk of my rejection and sometimes in what seems to be supernatural
ways. The third part of the curse was that if I had any children, the first two parts
would be passed on to them.
Well, I ended up fathering three children. All were very talented. None of them
have ever had a successful relationship. And none of them have ever had any of their
talents recognized or accepted. As a scientist, I've always found it hard to believe in
curses. But I personally witnessed supernatural powers displayed by both Christie
and Malcolm. Besides, I have witnessed the effect of curses on other people. In any
case, a pattern of rejection has prevailed throughout my entire life. Sometimes, I
blame it on my mother because when a mother kills her child that is the ultimate
rejection.
I remember when the telephone line came to Wapella. The whole town was on
one party line. The phone was mounted on the wall. There was a mouthpiece to
speak into and a thing on a wire that you held up to your ear. It sat on a cradle which
was the on-off switch. There was a crank on the side of the phone to ring the code of
the household you wanted to call. For example, two long rings and one short, or three
short and one long. If anybody called anybody else, every phone in town would ring.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
10
The idea was that if it was your code you would answer it, but half the people who
had phones would pick it up and everyone would talk to one another. Most of the
conversations were in Gaelic and would go on forever it seemed.
In the winter of ‘43-‘44, we had the worst snowstorm in history. The town of
Wapella was buried in snow in one massive dump over three days. I remember the
morning when Jack opened the door to wall of snow. He shoveled snow in the house
to make steps to climb out. I followed him to the top of the snow. All I could see was
the tops of the grain elevators. We lost a mule that night that had been tied to a tall
pole. There was a black hole in the snow above our chimney. Nothing in the town
could move and no fuel could be delivered. Before the snow melted enough, we
burned all the furniture and half the wooden floor for fuel.
The Lost Years
The last major event of my seventh year, and the most baffling, is that I have
lost all memory of my life for three years. Ages eight, nine, and ten are completely
missing from my memory or anyone else’s, as far as I have been able to determine.
The exception is that I have one and only one memory from age ten. I somehow got
hold of a model-T Ford car and was racing it down a hill onto a frozen slough. This
was late in my tenth year because it was winter and there were three or four other
kids doing the same thing. When we hit the ice, we would slam on the brakes and
spin wildly on the ice. The most baffling part is that I missed two years of school. I
know that Jack and Gramma would never let me miss school. Where the hell was I?
What happened to me? Did Christy have anything to do with it? Maybe something
more traumatic than the other four events happened so that I completely blocked it
out of my mind. But where was I when I missed school?
Year Eleven
I have lots of memories of age eleven. That spring of 1947, I befriended the
strong man, Frank S. I worked with him for a while as a gravedigger. Even though he
was not well accepted by the townsfolk, I found him very interesting. He was highly
educated, mostly self-taught. He had a vast library in his new and improved shack.
Walls were lined with books and journals. We got into a lot of heavy conversations.
Sometimes I would challenge his theories.
In the summer of that year I spent a few months on a nearby Blackfoot reserve. I
lived with a family that included two boys and three teenage girls. The father had a
sawmill but he worked only whenever he felt like it. Most of the work I did there was
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
11
picking stones from the field. His wife was always teasing me about her daughters.
She thought I was having sex with them and was even encouraging it. I had
absolutely no interest in her daughters, maybe her sons but I didn't act on it. She
would cook me big breakfasts with lots of eggs saying that I needed to build up my
strength to satisfy her daughters. Living on the reserve was a great learning
experience for me. Their culture, attitude and mindset was so different from ours.
They were much closer to nature and understood it. I developed a great respect for
them and they taught me a lot.
Jack C had a daughter living in Regina. She felt I was becoming a burden on her
dad and took me away to Regina. This was my first time in a city and I knew nothing
of city life. She had a fancy dial telephone. I didn't know what it was. There was
indoor plumbing and electric lights, none of which I'd ever seen before. I was
fascinated with the light switches on the wall. I kept flicking them on and off until
her and her husband got mad at me. Strangely, water came out of a tap over a sink in
the kitchen. The shower was very odd. You turned a tap and it would rain on you.
The first day, I had to have a bowel movement. I saw a small room and assumed it
must be a toilet because it remotely resembled the outhouse I was used to. I did my
business and found a roll of paper on the wall. I used it and left the room. Jacks'
daughter angrily asked me why I didn't flush the toilet. I had no idea what she was
talking about.
I wanted to explore the city and would wander around with great curiosity. I had
no idea what the lights were for at the intersections. I crossed no matter what color
the light was. I walked through red lights and wondered why the cars were beeping at
me. Jack's daughter didn't want me around so she called the Children's Aid Society.
They placed me in an orphanage called the Embury House. It was run by nuns and I
hated it. They forced me to eat things that made me sick and sent me to bed with no
desert. After enduring that for about three weeks, they sent me to a foster home in
Bethune, Sask. I lasted about six months and asked for a transfer. There was no
challenge for me here.
Year Twelve
At age 12, they sent me to a huge cattle ranch and mixed farm about eight miles
from Southey, Sask. This was definitely a challenge for me. They were an older,
staunch, and rigid German family. They were quite self-sufficient, producing almost
all the food we ate. A windmill produced electricity which was used only for lighting
the house and the big barn. Casey B was the owner and dictator of his little empire. I
was accustomed to sitting with my legs crossed like any woman, but he couldn't
stand that. He would yell at me to put my feet on the floor. He had a son and a
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
12
daughter that were slightly yonger than me. He had seven hired cowboys and several
female cooks.
The huge garden provided more than all the vegetables we could use. The dairy
cows gave us all our milk, butter and cheese. The beef cattle gave us all our cuts of
beef. The pigs gave us all our bacon, pork and ham. The chickens gave us all our
eggs and white meat. Sheep gave us wool which the women worked into knitting
yarn with a spinning wheel.
I never worked as hard in my entire life as I did here. It was usually fifteen
hours a day of mostly hard labour from 5am until 9pm. I was never paid a cent for
my work and this was purely child slave labour. When I arrived I was given a gentle
horse, a jet black mare that I named ‘Midnight’. School was my work break. I drove
the yonger kids to the town school in a horse and buggy in the summer and a horse
and cutter in the winter. I always used Midnight. The first winter, I drove through a
blinding snow storm and the cutter upset on the side of a snowbank. The cutter was
too heavy for me to get upright, so I unhooked the horse and had her lay on her side
in the snow. I lay the two kids against the horse's belly and wrapped them in horse
blankets. We were there for hours. The kids fared pretty well, but I almost froze. I
thought I was going to freeze to death.
Finally the owner showed up on horseback. He must have suspected something
happened and fortunately for us he did. He managed to upright the cutter, hooked up
Midnight to it and I drove it back to the ranch with the two kids. He rode ahead so I
wouldn't get lost. I was allowed to rest the rest of the day because I had severe
frostbite, but I never got any medical attention.
When I got up at 5am, a massive breakfast was waiting. They sure loved to eat.
The women were up at 4am to cook. The seven hired cowboys of course got paid
even though I worked harder than any of them. One of the cowboys showed a sexual
interest in me but nothing ever happened. I never at any time received the slightest
hint of affection there, not even a kind word, and never a compliment. I always
seemed to be competing with the cowboys even at breakfast. I was really competing
with myself because I felt I had to prove I was better than them. I once broke a record
by eating a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon and a loaf of toast. At the time I weighed
130 pounds, and although I never ate as much in my life as I did there, I never gained
an ounce.
My first chore was to milk as many of the 26 milking cows by hand as I could.
Then at 7am, we had our second breakfast. It was often a huge steak with all the
trimmings. Then it was off to school. School was always my work break. On
returning from school, my first job was to clean out the big barn. I had to load all the
manure onto a stoneboat. I hitched a Clydesdale to it and hauled it to an evergrowing pile of manure beside the barn. Then I shoveled it onto the pile. It usually
took three trips. They used it as compost for the huge garden. On weekends and
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
13
holidays, I had to feed all the animals after the second breakfast. There were a lot of
animals. Then I had to gather the eggs.
One of the hardest jobs I had to do was run the cream separator by hand. I had
to pour the raw milk into a hopper. There was a long crank on the side of the
machine. It caused the milk to spin and the cream was separated by centrifugal force.
It would come out of a spout into an attached pail. The difficulty was getting the
crank started. I had to put the handle in the highest position and then hang from it
until the weight of my relatively frail body would slowly pull it down. Then I would
have to every possible bit of strength I had to push it up for the first revolution. It
took between five and ten minutes of all the strength I could muster to keep it going
until it became easier to turn. Then I would have to start all over with another batch
of milk. I did this three or four times before they let me rest. The cream was then
usually churned into butter with an old wooden butter churn.
I drove everything on the ranch. I drove horse teams including Percherons,
Clydesdales, other work horses, riding horses, cars, trucks, covered wagons, covered
sleighs, chuck wagons, lots of tractors (John Deeres, Allis Chalmers, Fords, Massey
Harrises) combines, a road grader, and two Rumley steam tractors. They looked
more like the old locomotive engines with the boiler and coal hopper, except they
had massive rear iron wheels with huge iron treads. Their top speed was four miles
an hour. They had a huge flywheel on the side and they were mostly used at harvest
time to run the thrashing machines. A huge leather belt connected the flywheel to the
thrasher.
Year Thirteen
I was thirteen in Grade Nine; I should have only been eleven, but I missed two
years of school. In spite of the lapse, I got straight As for the first part of the school
year. About half way through Grade Nine, I started challenging my teachers. By
now, I was a lot smarter than they were. It was perfectly obvious to me that some of
the stuff they were telling me was wrong. I argued with them but they wouldn't
listen. My grades began to drop because I refused to give them the answers they
wanted when I knew they were wrong. This is when I became a rebel.
Casey B was a big-time rancher with about 7,000 cattle and 10,000 horses. They
were pastured loose in the Quapelle valley. The dairy cattle were pastured on the
ranch. The fall was roundup time. The seven cowboys and I rode out to the valley
with a bedroll, a rifle and a lariat. It was a three-day ride. We were followed by an
overstocked chuck wagon driven by a cook. We even wore chaps and I had a rifle
holster attached to Midnight’s saddle. At night, we would camp out under the stars.
Someone would start a campfire and the cook would serve up a big meal. After
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
14
eating, we would all gather around the fire and the cowboys would swap stories and
wild tales. Then someone would take out a guitar and start playing western songs.
Someone had a harmonica and people would be singing and dancing.
The horses were all wild and we had to round up a percentage of them along
with beef cows and calves. It was primarily a cattle drive back to the ranch taking at
least three days. By now I was an expert with a lariat and I could rope anything. I
was always a very fast learner. This came in handy on the cattle drive, and I taught
Midnight to become the best cutting horse. All the cattle and horses had the 7-UP
brand with the seven and the ‘p’ as part of the ‘u’. Some of the animals had no brand
and had to be branded the first evening we stopped. They wanted me to take part in
the branding bur I flatly refused. I could see the pain in the animals as the red-hot
branding iron burned through their flesh. I felt sorry for them because I've always
loved animals. One cowboy threatened to pull down my pants and brand me if I
didn't participate. Another cowboy stopped him or I'm sure he would have done it. I
was called a sissy.
When we got back to the ranch, there were wild horses to be broken in. I
became the best broncobuster on the ranch. This was because I had the ability to
communicate with animals. Some did not want to be ridden and I got thrown a few
times. But I could usually convince them that it was going to happen anyway and
better me than someone else. They knew I would never hurt them. I rode them
bareback with no harness. Some of the cowboys couldn't figure out how I did it.
Within a year, I became a full-fledged "cowboy". I was as good if not better
than the hired cow hands. I rode wild Brahma bulls. I mastered the bullwhip. I could
crack it to sound like gunfire. I became a marksman with a rifle. I practiced with tin
cans and beer bottles on top of fence posts while the cowboys were shooting at birds
and gophers. I never shot at any living thing. I also mastered skeet shooting. The
"skeets" were dried cow dung and I never missed. I had the fastest time in roping a
steer, throwing it to the ground and tying its legs. They wanted me to compete at the
Calgary stampede but I refused. I didn't believe in such a thing.
The most sickening thing I had to go through was when they butchered animals.
They tried to get me to kill animals but I absolutely refused. They still forced me to
watch. They would hit cows over the head with a sledgehammer and then slit their
throat. They would shoot pigs in the head with a 22 long rifle bullet and slit their
throats. Chickens had their heads chopped off and would run aimlessly squirting
blood from their necks. I felt so sad that I always cried myself to sleep when they did
that. Casey's wife Mary would attach a hose to the tail pipe of the truck and put the
other end down gopher holes. That really made me feel sad because I loved gophers.
I thought they were so cute.
The worst job I ever had in my life was stooking sheaves all day out in the hot
sun. The combine would cut the wheat and tie it up in bundles then toss it on the
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
15
ground behind the machine. The sheaves had to be lifted up and stacked against one
another otherwise the kernels would rot. Five or six sheaves would be leaned
together and this was called a stook. In those days, they didn't use chemicals on the
crops and the sheaves were full of thistles. I would start out with a pair of leather
gloves, but after an hour or so, they were ripped to shreds by the thistles. Long before
I finished for the day, my hands were all torn apart and bleeding. Nobody seemed to
care.
While I was in Grade 10, I was getting fed up with everything. I was tired of
being a captive slave on the ranch. I wanted to run away. I was often tempted to take
a horse and ride it into Southey and hitchhike to Regina. I was fed up with the school
and the whole system of education. I had an insatiable appetite for learning but I
knew I couldn't get it in the school system. I knew I could only get the education I
wanted from life itself, including nature, people and the pure sciences. I knew I was
exceptionally gifted and talented. I had several abnormal abilities including being
capable of communicating with animals. I have never told a single person in my life
about some of my abilities and I never will. This is partly because no one would
appreciate them and some would fear them. It is a law of human nature that you will
be rejected in direct proportion to the extent of your differences.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
16
Chapter Two - The Fifties
I never did finish Grade Ten. On the day I turned fourteen, my owners decided
to take me to Regina to attend a fair. They gave me about two dollars and fifty cents
and told me to have fun at the fair. I never saw the fair. I felt I was free from
bondage. I ran away and never looked back. I entered the school of "Life". I walked
to the eastern edge of the city and hitchhiked to Wapella. I wanted to talk to Gramma
to find out where my mother was. I wanted to confront her. When I got to Wapella I
found out that Christy McP had murdered John C (Jack) who I had earlier found out
was my biological father. She killed him with strychnine poison. He died a horrible
and agonizing death. He had never been sick a day in his life. There were rumors that
he had left something valuable for me. I got nothing. After that, she talked Gramma
out of her house. She put her in a nursing home even though she was in perfect
health, and she stole all her belongings. Then she sold the house.
Chase, BC and Mother
I visited Gramma (Marion) and she told me my mother was living in Chase, BC.
Shortly after that Gramma died. I wonder how? I wonder why? I then hitchhiked to
Chase, panhandling those who picked me up so I could eat. Reluctantly, the post
office told me where to find her. On the way to her house, a green pickup truck very
nearly ran me over. I had to jump out of the way. When I got to my mother's house,
the same green truck was parked in her yard. Even though she didn't know me, she
almost killed me the second time. I knocked. When she opened the door and I told
her who I was, she was shocked. She politely told me she didn't want to have
anything to do with me. Rejected again. I could smell something really nice cooking
on the stove. I mentioned it to her and she said that she would feed me but then I'd
have to leave right away after. While eating, I tried to pump her for information but
she said nothing. I also found I had two half sisters that were sleeping in the wood
shed. The dinner she served turned out to be bear meat. She had shot the bear in her
back yard, butchered it and cooked it up.
My Life With the Circus
From Chase, I hitchhiked to Vancouver and joined the Ringling Brothers and
Barnum and Bailey circus. Clyde Beatty was the lion tamer but he was a nasty man.
He was mean and cruel to the animals. It was a three-ring circus and they used
elephants to do the heavy work like setting up and taking down the tent. They gave
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
17
me my own elephant and I rode on its head. In the center ring, there was a famous
trapeze family. I watched them and soon figured out exactly how they did it. They
practiced with a net and I asked them if I could try out with them. They let me. I
found it quite easy to leap from one swing to another. I caught other flyers and was
caught by someone. I could exchange swings with others in mid air.
I got to know most of the clowns. Most of them were refuges from the Georgian
chain gangs. They were really a sad lot. Most were heroine addicts. I felt sorry for
them. While the show was on, I had nothing to do so I teamed up with a
photographer and drew caricatures of people for two dollars a shot. There was
usually a midway and I got to know the barkers and hustlers. It didn't take me long to
figure out how all the games were rigged.
From Vancouver we traveled with the circus train toward the prairies. In the
mountains, the engine and the first five cars went off the tracks. The derailed cars
were all animal cars housing elephants, horses, lions, tigers, etc. Some animals were
milling about while others were still trapped in boxcars. I helped in rescuing the
animals. I carried a tiger to a makeshift enclosure. I had no fear of any animals. A
few tigers ran off and were never retrieved. We soon got a new engine and a crane to
put the train together again. We set up in towns across the prairies till we got to the
border of North Dakota. I wanted to go with them to their winter headquarters in
Winter Haven, Florida, but they wouldn't let me cross the border.
Enter Don P
I was hitchhiking back to Regina when I met Don P. He ended up having a
profound effect on my life. By social standards he would be considered an ugly
pervert. He was in his mid thirties and liked to have sex with young boys like me (I
was 14). He was a hobo, an alcoholic and a heroin addict. He had no teeth, a scraggly
beard, unkempt hair and dirty clothes. He wanted me to travel with him. I found him
fascinating and, oddly enough, attracted to him. I knew he would never hurt me
because I had the ability to communicate with people the same way I did with
animals. This was not a verbal thing nor could I read minds. This was a deeper
communication and the less said about it the better.
We hitchhiked to Regina. Being underage and without resources for
independence, I checked in with the Children's Aid Society. They offered me a foster
home with the Mitchell's in the city. I said I didn't want any more foster home
placements. Then they offered to send me to a local college to become a commercial
artist. I said no to that because that wasn't creative and it was too mechanical. I had a
need to create art from my own mind. Instead, I found a job washing cars, but that
only lasted about two weeks. However, I made enough money to rent a cheap,
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
18
dumpy room and Don and I moved in. I became a typical housewife to him and it felt
good.
We left Regina and hitchhiked to Vancouver, panhandling for food along the
way. At night we would sleep in the ditch beside the road. I got a job at the BC Sugar
refinery. It was a good job and I made $100 a week. For some reason I only worked
one week. When I got my money, I rented a room in a cheap rooming house. Now I
could look after Don better. We would bum money separately on the streets. He
would spend his on beer and I would spend mine on food for our meals. One day I
met a hooker about my age. She was really nice and talked me into going with her.
Her price was five dollars. I took her to my room and had sex with her. I thought of it
as an adventure, besides, I've always found it difficult to say "no" to people.
We didn't spend much time in Vancouver. We headed back to Regina. One
night on the way back, we slept in the ditch a certain distance apart. I woke up in the
morning to find a grizzly bear straddling me and sniffing my nose. I knew I was in no
danger and just lay there. I noticed Don waking up and seeing the bear on top of me,
he ran as fast as he could. The bear wandered away and I caught up to Don later. We
arrived in Regina in the fall of 1950. We begged for money on the streets and slept in
alleyways. We often ate out of garbage cans. In the early winter of that year, I got a
job with a printing company sweeping floors. It turned out to be the coldest winter on
record. The temperature went down to -64 degrees F.
In mid December, Don decided to go to Edmonton. He taught me how to catch
and ride freight trains. He was my second mentor. He taught me street smarts that
probably saved my life many times. It is very dangerous living on the streets. You
have to live by whatever means possible. We arrived in Edmonton about the third
week of December. I soon met an Inuit girl from Hay River, NWT. She was living
with her uncle who was a fur trapper and was about to embark on a three-month
journey across the territories to retrieve furs from his trap lines. She wanted me to
join them in the expedition. I told Don and he told me to go ahead. He said that he
would wait for me in Edmonton.
The Arctic
The girl and I thumbed our way to Hay River and got there the same day. The
uncle welcomed me. He cooked up a caribou supper and soon it was bedtime. He
told me to sleep with the girl. Reluctantly, I did. They always slept in the nude. They
used to have a tradition that if someone was visiting a family, the visitor was
expected to sleep with the guy's wife. The girl wanted to have sex with me but I was
able to refuse. She was a beautiful sixteen-year-old but I just had no interest in girls.
The next morning we set out with two fully loaded dog sleds. We had plenty of food
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
19
for ourselves and the dogs. We headed northeast across the arctic. I drove one of the
dog sleds and he drove the other. Most of the time it was dark but the sky was
usually bright enough from the stars.
It was probably about 9pm at night when he said we were going to camp here
for the night. I wondered what he was going to do. We were in the middle of
nowhere. He patted the snow with his hand to feel its consistency then he pulled out
a machete and started cutting out big blocks of snow. They were generally
rectangular but each side was cut at a particular angle. Within twenty minutes he had
built a perfect igloo. I slept in an igloo every night and drove a dog sled every day for
three months. It was definitely an adventure, The three of us would sleep nude on a
polar bear rug with me in the middle and a couple of black bear rugs over us. The
uncle kept encouraging me to have sex with his niece, but I kept avoiding it. I
pretended to be shy. I would have rather had sex with him, but I felt I couldn't reveal
myself. One night, the girl wasn't going to take no for an answer. She started playing
with my penis and, of course, I got an erection. She got on top of me and slid it right
into her. I can't say it didn't feel good because it did. It just wasn't my preference. I
ended up having sex with her several times during that three months with her uncle
watching. I really was never shy.
We were usually up about 7am each morning. He would feed the dogs first and
then cook our breakfast on an oil stove. The dog food was usually the trapped
animals after he skinned them for their pelts. We spent each day visiting trap lines
and retrieving the pelts. Around noon we would have lunch. Every night he would
build a new igloo and I was surprised how warm it was inside even when it was
thirty or forty below outside. When we left Hay River, I was given a warm parka and
fur mitts. When we stopped at an Inuit village, they were wearing exactly the same
type of parka that we were wearing. I was surprised it was so warm. The Inuits
cooked up a tasty dinner. I have no idea what it was but it tasted good. Some Inuit
women started throat singing. I had never heard anything like that before. I learned
so much from these people and they were very different from the native bands on the
prairies. I was in the school of life and learning a lot.
Back to Don
When we got back to Hay River, they gave me the parka and mitts to keep. I
wore them back to Edmonton but now it was near the end of March 1951 and I didn't
need them. Don sold them for a good price and then we rode freight trains to
Vancouver. We still had money so we rented a room with a kitchen. Don came up
with a stupid idea. Supermarkets were fairly new in those days. He took me into a
supermarket and got me to push a cart. He loaded it up with food including lots of
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
20
steaks. He told me to bypass the checkout counter and just push it out the door. We
had the kind of foolish relationship where I probably would have done anything for
him. As I pushed the cart out the door, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was a security
guard. He called the police and I was arrested and hauled off to jail. I never got a trial
but I was sentenced to two years less a day in Okalla prison farm. Don took off and I
took the rap.
Okalla was a modern, newly built prison when I went there. I was treated fairly
well there. I had a roof over my head every night and I always had food to eat. In a
way it was better than living on the streets. There was a time to shower and everyone
showered together. This bothered me because I was surrounded by naked men and
was getting really turned on. I knew I had to be smart and pretend I was just one of
the guys. I wrote my first full color comic book in jail. Once a week, we would get a
sheet of paper to write a letter. I had no one to write to so I saved the paper. One of
the guards gave me some crayons. I came up with two characters called Jerry and
Joe. I wrote the book and for some reason I still have it. Once a week we were given
a small package of tobacco and some rolling papers. Tobacco was gold in prison.
You could trade it for chocolate bars or even drugs. By now I was addicted to
nicotine and never traded. I got out in nine months for good behavior. It was
December 1951. I found Don who had been waiting for me. He apologized to me.
We spent the winter in Vancouver on the streets. Fortunately it doesn't get that cold
there in the winter.
In the spring of 1952, we traveled to the Yukon and into Alaska. We went to
Anchorage where there had just been a devastating earthquake. Some of the streets
were pushed up about 20 feet above where they used to be. Buildings were in
shambles and some were leaning at precarious angles. Somehow Don managed to get
us a ride in a bush plane up to Inuvick and Aklavic in the North West Territories. We
managed to reach the Arctic Ocean and dipped our fingers in the icy cold water.
When we got back to Vancouver, Don made a proposition to me. He said that
we weren't making enough money so he gave me three choices. I had to steal, deal in
drugs or become a prostitute. They were all dangerous but I chose the latter. He
became my pimp. He said I should act more feminine. That in itself was dangerous
but I couldn't resist the temptation. I spent part of the summer turning tricks in Van
but I soon learned I could get my own Johns although Don was helpful. And I didn't
have to give him all the money I made which wasn't much anyway. I was considered
a male prostitute and I hung out where the gay guys hung out. Surprisingly, or maybe
not, most of my tricks were married men. They loved getting oral sex and came
looking for people like me, because their wives couldn't or wouldn't do it. People
thought I was gay because I liked men. I never in my life thought of myself as gay. I
always felt that I was a woman trapped in a man's body.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
21
Riding the Rails
We rode a lot of freight trains up until about 1954. I managed to catch the tail
end of the hobo era. These were all steam locomotives. For us there was no USCanada border. The freight trains were never checked at border crossings. A hobo
was a lifestyle in itself. Most of them knew one another and had been "riding the
rails" for years. About every 200 miles along a main track there was rail junction.
Trains traveled at a slow speed there and so they were easier to jump aboard. The
Canadian Pacific Railway police often hated hobos. They carried a long billy club
and would beat hobos if they caught them. We always had to be on the lookout for
them. Near almost every junction, there was a hobo camp and there always seemed to
be someone there. There was a pot of beans most of the time over a small bonfire.
Anyone was always welcome to help themselves. You just grabbed a stick from a
branch, poked it in the beans and ate. There always seemed to be tea. You grabbed a
rusty tin can and drank from it.
A lot of the hobos were very colorful characters. Many were known by
nicknames like Panama Pete, Yakama Red, Boxcar Bob, Freightrain Freddy, and so
on. The hobo era started in the "dirty thirties" and ended in the 50s when diesel
engines replaced the steam engines. A hobo was defined as a migratory worker, and a
lot of them were. A tramp was a migratory non-worker, and a bum was a nonmigratory non-worker. I guess Don and I would be considered tramps. Whatever
cities we went to, we always hung out in the skid row district. We frequented
Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, Chicago (Don's favorite city), New York City, Boston,
Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the maritime states, and so on.
We had many harrowing experiences riding freight trains. One winter we were
in Fort William, Ontario (now Thunder Bay). We had gotten a ride in but couldn't get
a ride out. A hitchhiker had recently murdered someone near there and nobody was
picking anybody up. The freight trains didn't stop in Fort William or Port Arthur so
we had to catch one on the fly, traveling at 25 miles per hour. Don told me to lick my
hands and get them good and wet. Then I had to grab the iron side ladder of a boxcar
and lock my fingers tight. They would be temporarily frozen to the ladder. He said
that if I didn't lock my fingers it would tear all the skin off my hands and I would
probably fall under the wheels of the train. I grabbed the ladder successfully and so
did he. Eventually, the heat from our hands thawed our skin and we could move our
hands.
Sometimes, we would travel separately to a prearranged destination. One
winter, we decided to casually go from Montreal to Toronto meeting along the way. I
caught an express freight by mistake. There were no open boxcars so I lay on the
catwalk of a tank car with my arm locked around a railing. I was not dressed for the
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
22
winter and the train was not stopping anywhere. To make it worse the train was
traveling at high speed which made it colder. I was freezing. When the train finally
stopped, I couldn't move. I was no longer conscious. My feet, hands, nose and ears
were severely frozen. Three hobos from a nearby camp saw my predicament and
pulled me off the train. They took all my clothes off and massaged my body with
snow, until I thawed out. One of the hobos took out a snuffbox that had some kind of
greasy stuff in it and rubbed it on me where I was frozen the most. He said he got it
from an old Indian. They put my clothes back on me, fed me hot beans and tea, and
gave me a small horse blanket. I never fully recovered from nearly freezing to death
but I started believing in guardian angels.
Once while riding in the States somewhere, our boxcar got shunted onto a side
rail in the middle of nowhere. The door had previously slammed shut because Don
was drunk and forgot to put a brake shoe in the door trough to prevent getting locked
in. It was a hot summer day and it was stifling in the boxcar. We kept banging on the
side of the car in hopes someone would hear us, but there was no one there. We were
trapped there for two days with no food or water. Don had passed out and I didn't
know if he was alive or dead. I had kept banging and finally someone heard me. He
opened the door and as I jumped out, he pulled Don out, who then woke up. He took
us to a gas station - restaurant and bought us a meal. We were very thankful.
Once we were riding on top of a boxcar in the mountains. I was facing forward
and Don faced backward. As we turned a corner, I noticed a tunnel coming up very
quickly. There was only about a foot clearance above the top of the boxcar. I grabbed
Don and pulled him flat to the roof of the car with only seconds to spare. Otherwise
he would have been killed instantly. Another time we were on the side of an empty
cattle car. The train was an express freight and we were on there so long we couldn't
hold out much longer. We had to figure a way to stop the train. Don grabbed a
handful of grease from the wheel box, got some straw from the floor of the car (it had
slatted sides so we could reach in), and he set the boxcar on fire. We hoped this
would get the attention of the guy in the caboose and it did. He radioed to the
engineer and he stopped the train. We ran off into the bushes. In a similar situation,
one other time, we disconnected the couplings, separating the train and waited until
our section finally stopped.
Once when we were riding through the mountains, the boxcar door was wide
open. We were sitting in the doorway with our feet dangling outside to enjoy the
fresh air and the spectacular views. Don was really plastered this time. At one point
when we were going around a curved railway bridge I noticed that the river canyon
below us was about a 600-foot drop. Don lost his balance and was thrown out the
door toward a certain death below. Somehow I managed to grab his foot while his
body dangled above the canyon. I have no idea how I did it, but somehow I managed
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
23
to pull him back inside the boxcar. Suddenly he was pure sober. I think he was
terrified at the thought of what almost happened.
These are some examples of what it was like riding freight trains. I had known
people who had been killed by freight trains. I got to know one guy in Vancouver ho
had both legs cut off above his knees from going under the wheels of a train. He had
a small platform with castors on it and would push himself around with his hands.
Hitchhiking Adventures
Sometimes hitchhiking was just as adventurous. Hitch-hiking could also be
dangerous. We often hiked separately to make it easier to get a ride. I often got
picked up by drunk drivers and on several occasions we came close to a serious
accident or being killed. I guess my guardian angel looked out for me. I just had
some very close calls. Once two drunks picked me up and said they would give me a
ride as long as I don't mind riding with a corpse. There was another guy in the back
seat and I thought he was drunk too. When we took off, the guy fell over on me. I
pushed him up but noticed his skin was cold. I tried to find a pulse but there was
none. The guy was definitely dead.
While thumbing through the foothills, three drunken natives picked me up in a
pickup truck. They said I'd have to ride in the back. It was summer and I was dressed
very lightly. In those days there was a tunnel that went through the Kokanee Glacier.
It was seven miles of ice and they drove very slowly. I thought I was going to freeze
to death. I survived.
Once while trying to hitch a ride along a mountain road, a brown bear
followed me about ten feet behind. When I stopped, the bear would stop. When I
walked, the bear would follow. He never attacked; he just companioned me along the
road until I got picked up.
One of the strangest things I saw while walking along a mountain road was a
huge ball of light heading straight toward me. It was about six feet in diameter and
stopped about five feet away from me. There was no heat coming from it and I
thought it might be ball lightning or swamp gas. As I walked, it followed me. When I
stopped, it stopped. It kept this up for about twenty minutes, then it vanished.
Prostitution Challenges
Being a prostitute was pretty dangerous too. I often got beaten up, raped, and
robbed. I have had guns pointed at me and I have been threatened with knives. I
usually was able to talk my way out of these situations without getting harmed.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
24
Sometimes I hustled men in the regular hooker districts. Some of them accepted me
being there but others did not. Some of the female hookers would threaten me
because they felt I was invading their territory and being competition for their johns.
In Chicago, I frequented the loop area around south State St. (where the "EL"
train turned around). This was the skid row area of the city. I picked up a guy who
was pretending to be a trick. He took me down a seedy alley and said we have to go
up the fire escape. I had an uneasy feeling about this. We were on the second
landing. Then he pulled a knife and said, "I hate you kind of people and I'm going to
kill you". The stairs were blocked but I noticed an empty wine bottle on the landing. I
grabbed the neck of the bottle and smashed the bottle on the iron railing. I asserted
myself to the full extent and threatened to slash his throat with the jagged edges of
the bottle. He backed down and I got away.
One day in an upscale area of Chicago, I met this really handsome young
Italian guy. I asked him to buy me dinner first. He agreed. Then he made a call on his
radiophone. A black chauffeur driven stretch limousine pulled up and we got in. He
took me to a high class Italian steak house and bought me the finest steak dinner.
Then, the limousine took us to his luxurious home in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. He
wanted me to move in with him and be his "wife". He said he would buy me $400
black pin striped suits to look the part and a fancy car. He admitted to belonging to
one of the top Mafia families in Chicago. I was quite leery of this but I stayed one
week living in luxury. I overheard him on the phone getting a call that one of his
family had been gunned down by a rival family, and there would be retaliation. I
thought it best to leave. It was too dangerous and I left.
The Maritimes
In the early summer of 1953, Don wanted to go to Newfoundland. We thumbed
a ride to Cape Breton Island in northern Nova Scotia. This was where we could catch
a ship. Don had previously been in the merchant marines and he talked the captain of
a small freighter ship to take us to Port Au Basque, Newfoundland. The ship was
loaded with steel pipes and sides of beef. Shortly after leaving, we ran into a severe
ocean storm. Huge waves began swamping the deck and the ship was starting to sink.
The captain had only one crewmember and us on board. He ordered us to throw all
the cargo overboard. We got most of it off. Our disabled ship could not complete the
trip and we ended up in a small port on the French islands of St. Pierre and
Miquelon. The gendarmes spoke no English and were hostile to us. They locked us
up in primitive and dirty jail cell for the night. The next day, the captain fixed the
ship and we made it to Port Au Basque. Don and I hitchhiked to St. Johns and spent
most of the summer there. Somehow we got back to the mainland.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
25
We spent the winter of `53-`54 in Halifax. Don, as my pimp, got me lots of
clients. I made enough money to rent a room with cooking facilities. We lived well
that winter because we lived off the ships in the harbor. Don was familiar with the
ships and we would go aboard and he would beg for food. He would often have to
speak sign language because the crews were usually African or Asian. Sometimes
they would feed us in the mess galley and often would then give us a bag of food to
take with us. Every morning we went down to the ships and always came back with
food, cartons of cigarettes, and bottles of rum (which Don loved). All the food and
cigarettes were from European countries, including England and Scotland.
I found Montreal the best city for panhandling. I could make eight dollars a day.
We used to eat at a place called Nick the Greek's on St. Laurence south of Main
Street. A full course meal was twenty-five cents and it was a big meal. Nick was a
bootlegger and made his money selling cheap wine. Across the street was a
flophouse with dirty cots for fifty cents a night.
Hello Toronto, Goodbye Don
In the spring of 1954 we went to Toronto. Even here at this time we found
ourselves eating out of garbage cans sometimes. We would go to the back doors of
butcher shops and ask them if they were throwing out any meat. We often got chunks
of bologna that was starting to go bad but we ate it anyway. We would do the same
with bakeries and get moldy bread, which we ate with the meat. After a few months,
Don wanted to back to Vancouver. I told him I'm fed up with hitchhiking and riding
freight trains. I told him to go ahead, but I was going to get a job so I could go there
in style – by Greyhound bus. Don left and that was the last I ever saw him. We had
been together about five years.
I got a job at the Flyte restaurant as a dishwasher for $36 a week. That was the
price for a bus ticket to Vancouver. When I got paid I bought the bus ticket but
thought if I worked another week, I could have some money for food. As a
dishwasher, I got all the dirty trays. Some would still have food on them. I would eat
the food, until a waitress caught me and asked me what the hell I was doing. I told
her I was hungry. She said, "For crise sake, don't eat that shit. If you're hungry just
tell me and I'll have the cook make you something". I ended up working there for six
months. Then one night, the restaurant burned to the ground. While I was there two
sexy young waitresses really wanted me and kept coming on to me, but I managed to
never have anything to do with them.
In the meantime, I had progressed from a dishwasher to a cook. This way I
never went hungry. I got a job in another restaurant and now I could always have a
room to rent. I was still turning tricks but now I was hanging out in the gay cruising
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
26
areas like Queen’s Park, Professor's Walk by the University of Toronto, and
Sherbourne Street, south of Bloor. By then I didn't care if I got paid or not because I
had become obsessed with having sex with men. I never at any time considered
myself gay even though everyone I knew thought I was. I have always thought of
myself as a woman trapped in a man's body, although I never told anyone that.
Trying to pick up guys in the cruising areas was unsuccessful most of the time, so I
found an easier way. I started going to the steam baths. Sex was guaranteed there but
the police often raided the baths. If you were caught you went to jail. Fortunately, I
was never caught. I satisfied as many as seven men in one night.
By now I had established a clientele, mostly married men that I knew from the
past. I became a call girl. At least two or three nights a week, I had a prescheduled
client coming to see me. I usually got ten dollars a shot.
A Deep Sadness
By early 1957, I was starting to feel sad for the first time. I realized I had no
friends and never did have any. Even Don was not really a friend. He was a business
partner and a survival partner. I never got any affection from him or anyone else in
my life. I felt rejected. To me, having sex was the ultimate form of acceptance even if
it was only for a few minutes. I became addicted to sex and have been all my life. I
never cared what the person looked like or how clean or dirty they were. Throughout
my life I've been with hundreds of men and maybe with a dozen or more women.
The one benefit from women was that I got sexually satisfied. That was something I
never could get from men. This was very frustrating for me because I knew I was a
woman but could never have a normal relationship with men because I didn't have
the right equipment. I thought, how could God be so cruel as to allow me to be born
this way.
An overwhelming feeling of rejection overcame me and I developed “the
disease to please”. I became a people pleaser, or maybe I always was one. This was
for the sake of feeling accepted in some way or another. I became very good at this. I
always went out of my way to do things for other people in hopes that they might
like me. About ninety percent of all the physical work I did in my life, I never got
paid for.
Music in my Life
I was twenty in 1957 and I had been used to hanging out in Toronto's skid row
along Queen Street from Church to Jarvis. There were always lots of rubbies passed
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
27
out on the street. Some I would talk to (for company) but I never got into drinking. I
got away from hanging out on the skids and when not in the cruising areas, I was
uptown along Bloor and Yonge Street. Right on that corner, there was a drugstore
with a coffee shop inside. I hung out there. There was an older blond waitress there
that got used to me being there. She became friendly with me. She talked a lot about
her husband who was a musician and her lost ambitions to be a glamorous movie
star. They had a house on Harbord Street near Spadina. She offered to rent me a
room. I accepted because I never had a room where I knew anyone.
Her husband, Ron B was a former drummer with a big band. He still played the
drums and also the clarinet. We became friendly and he got in the habit of taking me
to the Colonial Tavern where big band stars would still play. He knew them all
personally. He introduced me to many of them including Cab Calloway, Jack
Teagarden, Gene Krupa, and so on. We would often sit at their tables after a show.
He was a close friend of Gene Krupa and we would always sit at his table. He was
always shooting up with heroin and speed. That was how he could play his famous
number "Topsy" with its twenty minutes of high-intensity drumming. Maybe this is
why he was then known as the world's greatest drummer.
Godfreed and Vicky and the Movies
Later that year, I met a redheaded Afro-American who was starting a motion
picture company. I joined up and became the director. It was a natural for me because
I was a natural actress. He had a full-length script called Death Of A Record
Salesman. Godfreed L was the cameraman with a 35mm camera. The idea was to
bring people in off the street and train them for one particular part in the movie. I was
the one who trained them. One of the "actresses" was a French Canadian girl from
Hawksbury, Ontario who barely spoke a word of English. Her name was Loretta D,
but I changed her name to Vicky. Shortly after I joined, the redhead was arrested and
put in jail because of huge bills his wife ran up and then took off.
I took over the production and improved it. We had rented a huge space over a
garage and body shop. I renamed it the Cyclopean Film Club. I started a Saturday
night rock and roll dance club. I got a really good rock and roll band. They could
play and sing all the top hits of the 50s. We charged one dollar admission and paid
the band out of the gate. We always had a good crowd. Godfreed would film the
dancers and we told them to come back next Saturday night to see themselves on
film. It was a good ploy. But then, after the dance band had only been going about a
month, a couple of guys came in and ordered the band out. They said the band was
not unionized and it was illegal for them to play there. We lost our dance club.
MITCHEL: Desperate Journey
28
Shortly after that a con man talked me into renting a studio next to the CBC on
Jarvis Street. I had moved in and set everything up in less than a week. Then the
owner of the building came in and asked what the hell we were doing there? I was
scammed by the guy who rented it to me. We got booted out immediately. That was
the end of my career as a movie director. I still hung out with Godfreed and Vicky.
Godfreed was asexual. He would never have sex with anyone, male or female. I'd
never met anyone like him before. I then found out he liked to wear women's clothes
when he was home alone. Then he told me that he liked to drive out into the country
and go in drag. Once, the police caught him and beat him up. Years later, he was at
the Clark Institute on a program to eventually have a sex change. He was on female
hormones and had grown good size breasts. Still, he had a very masculine body.
On the Road to Legitimacy
I was still hanging out with Vicky. We were just buddies and she was starting to
speak fairly good English. In 1959, she bought a 1950 Chevy torpedo-back car. She
couldn't drive so she gave the car to me. I drove that car for a year with no driver's
license or insurance. I wasn't even registered. Finally I got all the legal papers for it.
In the summer of 1959, I put a sign on the roof saying “Jeff Blackburn, Traveling
Caricaturist”. I drove around Ontario, but it was a complete failure. I had been using
the name Jeff Mitchel since I was offered, but refused, my last foster home with a
Mitchell family; I liked the sound of the name. For a while I used Blackburn as an
alias for my artwork. I never had any official identification; certainly no birth
certificate. Before I could get my driver's license, I got Godfreed and Vicky to write
me a letter and mail it to me. With that delivered envelope confirming my address in
Toronto, I went to the Toronto Public Library and got a library card. With that proof
of residency I got my driver’s license.