Evan Morris:
CLASS OF 1966
St. John's High SchoolClass of 1966
St. jean sur richelieu, QC
Evan's Story
Where I went after Grade 11.
I spent 4 years at McGill, and I lived in Montreal for 9 years. Apart from my studies I travelled a lot. Mike MacNeil who graduated in 1967, went to Queen's university. His parents had moved to Port Hope in Ontario, and he invited me down there. I decided to go by train and I took my bicycle along. I didn’t go all the way to Port Hope, and I determined to cycle the rest of the way. I got off at Cobourg pretty late in the day, and decided to camp somewhere for the night. I found a somewhat rural area, and pitched my tent next to a high embankment. It got dark and I lay in my sleeping bag.
Then this loud rumbling began. It came from outside my tent. First it was a distant sound, but then it became louder and louder. Finally it became so loud I was really scared. I didn’t know what it was. Eventually it was right next to me, and then a train whistle blowed. I had camped at the bottom of a rail line, and the train was 8 feet above me. That was scary. I thought about moving my tent, and then it started to rain. It quickly turned into a thunderstorm. Fortunately I had passed by a motel on my way to my campsite, and I hurried back to it. I spent the night in comfort, and my clothes got to dry. I followed Highway 2 to Port Hope, and get there without any trouble.
I met a friend, Ron, who introduced me to weed at the residence I was staying at. He later quit university and I visited him in Toronto. He lived at Rochdale College. It opened in 1968. It was built like a modern condominium. This really was an interesting place. Most of the people had stopped paying rent there. The interior walls of the building were painted by the residents, and they were quite varied. Everybody there was in their teens or twenties.
Ron took me into the building, and there a thugish looking individual near the door. He waved to the guy and said I was ok to enter. Ron said he was going to buy some weed, and did I want to come along. I said yes. I dressed in an informal manner so I wouldn't spook the dealer he was visiting. When we got there we met the dealer. He was about 25-30 years old, and he had a woman partner. He was really unhappy with my presence. I had to stay in the living room while Ron bought his weed in the back of the house.
On the way back, I learned that Ron had purchased not just weed but some other more potent drugs. When we got back to Rochdale prettry soon about 10 people came into the room and wanted to smoke pot. I joined in. An old school chum of mine called Bill was there. We really got along well telling each other stories about our activities.
I was told that a couple of weeks before the Toronto police had raided an apartment on a high floor. They arrested aguy and took him back to their police car. When they got out of the building they found their cop car was wrecked. People who had gardens on their balconies had dropped potted plants down on the cop car. The cops were really mad, but they couldn't do anything about it. There were dozens of little gardens where people grew plants. It was a really interesting time.
In 1968 I decided to visit my relatives in Wales and in Germany. I also did some interesting things in Denmark, Sweden and Czechosloviakia. I hitchhiked towards Denmark form Hannover. On the way I met a guy who was training in the US Army to be an officer. This was when the war in Vietnam was heating up. The guy wasn't sure about the war, but he thought there was a way out for him. People in the top of his class could put bids in to where they wanted to be posted. He was striving to get a high score in his training, and then he would be able to choose an alternate to Vietnam.
We hitched together through Denmark and got to Copenhagen. We stayed at a youth hostel, where we were surprised that we could but alcholic bevarges. The next day we decided to go to Malmo, in Sweden. We took a ferry over, and and decided to stay at a cheap hotel. In the 1960s downtown Malmo was a pretty seedy place. There was a shop selling porn around the corner. It showed what it sold in the windows.. The pictures were quite graphic. I tried to figure out how local women would feel about this. When we went to bed there was a lot of noise from the other rooms. We had booked into a hotel that people had chose for satisfying their carnal needs.
Later on I went to Prague. I had a pen pal who I traded stamps with. I could stay with him in his room at the university while he took classes. He was free in the evenings and on the weekends, so I had lots of time to look around Prague during the day.
When I went to the National Museum of Prague I wasn't sure which building it was located in. I saw a woman my age. I asked her if she spoke any English, and she answered “Yes, but poorly.” She turned out to be German, and so I spoke German to her. I asked her which building was the museum, and she pointed to the proper one. I asked her if she would like to view the museum, and she answered yes. Her name was Maria, and she was staying with friends for 10 days. I don’t remember anything I saw in the museum, but I do remember Maria quite well. I went out with her several times. The relationship ended when she returned to Berlin.
On the weekend my Czech friend offered to take me to his family and have supper there. We took a train out of town, a met his mother, father and younger sister. I remember a story the sister told me. They had been outside having a spitting contest in the street. The objective was to see who could spit the furthest. Just then a column of Soviet tanks and troops came on the road. An older man chastised them. “How can you spit on them? They were our liberators during the war.”
During July and August of 1968 the Soviet Union and the other communist states had been carrying out practice manoeuvres to repel a NATO invasion. In August the Russian troops were still in country, but slow to leave.
I was back in Canada when the invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred. It was on August 20 1968. The border guards of Czechoslovakia let out tens of thousands of refugees. It took a certain amount of time for the new government to impose their rule. I had listened a lot to a record my dad had at home by the composer Dimitri Shostakovich. He was Russian, and I wrote him a letter complaining how is government was doing bad things in Czechoslovakia, and I asked him to do something about it. I was quite naive back then.
During this period my friend got out of the country and was accepted in Norway. He later asked me if I could get a fake Canadian passport for him. I said I couldn’t. Martin Luther King had been assassinated by James Earl Ray in 1968. Ray had a fake Canadian passport. As a result the Canadian government instituted a more severe process of checking that the applications were valid. This scared me off. I should have done it even if the risks were slightly higher.
My trip to Central America in July of 1969
I decided to go travelling to Central America in the beginning of June 1969. I told my parents about this, and my mother suggested I take a Berlitz class in Spanish. This I did, and for the next 3 weeks I went in to Montreal for an hour a day and studied Spanish. At the beginning of July I was set to depart. I was 19 years old at the time.
The Bahamas
I first contacted my cousin Harald, who was a chef in a big hotel in the Bahamas, and he said he could put me up for as long as I wanted. I arrived on the island, and took a cab to his hotel. He was staying in a room for 3 employees; however one bed was free since they hadn’t hired anyone. My accommodation was real cheap! Harald also brought me food from the kitchen. The other guy who shared the room with him worked outside at the pool, so I could have anything I wanted, such as snorkels, etc., free of charge. It was a great place to be.
San Salvador
After a few days I left for Central America. I took a plane to Miami, and then I asked them at the airport desk when the next plane left for Central America. They were rather surprised at this, but said that the next plane out was to El Salvador. I said sure, I would take it.
When I got out of the airport in San Salvador, I had planned to take a cab to a hotel in the centre of the city. However a huckster (whom I didn’t recognize at the time) offered to take me in to town to a cheap but better hotel. I said okay, and off we went. As we got into town I was getting a bit depressed at the living conditions in San Salvador. Finally we made it to the hotel, which was run by a woman. The cabbie then talked to the owner and it was at this point I realized what was going on. He took his commission and disappeared. I said I would stay for four nights, and take some meals at the hotel. I never saw many people there.
I walked around the centre of town a couple of times. It was kind of scary. All the young guys stared at me, often in an unfriendly fashion. I stuck to the main city streets, and that probably kept me alive. I went into a magazine store that advertised a couple of US papers. I browsed through some of the Spanish periodicals, and bought a US paper to keep up with the news. It was a day or two out of date, but that was all there was.
On July 14 of 1969 I went for a walk, and I heart trumpets ahead of me, and people heading that way. I followed, and saw that the occasion was a big parade at the El Salvador parliament. There were troops in formation, and dignitaries on a platform addressing the crowd. The dignitaries included generals and civilian politicians, and a couple of priests. I looked at the troops who were lined up below them. What astounded me was that a lot of them looked younger than I did. Quite a few were probably 16 or 17 years old. Also there were several old guys in the ranks. They looked about 40. I didn’t understand what the speeches were about, and I left for my hotel.
That day, El Salvador invaded Honduras. I didn’t have a clue what it was about. I ju...Expand for more
st realized that I was in the middle of a war. The combat troops were obviously in the front line, and the troops who had been at the parade were not fit for combat.
I left two days later on a bus going to Guatemala City. I saw no evidence of the war in San Salvador. When I got to the bus station there were people handing out leaflets. One said, in translation, “Death to the Communist Traitors”. It said that various university students and others at University of El Salvador were supporting the Hondurans in the war. The leaflet was translated for me by Americans who were members of the Peace Corp and were finishing a stint in South America and were on their way home. I was appalled that people could think this way. This was the first time I had witnessed such hatred and potential violence.
Guatemala
Finally our bus arrived in Guatemala City, and I said goodbye to the Peace Corp members. I spent a couple of days in Guatemala City, and it didn’t strike me as unsafe as San Salvador was. However, I kept to major streets and tourist centres.
I took a bus to Antigua, a city in Guatemala to the west of Guatemala City. It was small and fairly safe. I found a tour map that said that Chichicastenango had a wonderful market, a famous church and some interesting rock formations. I found out when I got there that most of the people were Mayan, and spoke K`iche`.
I was the only person on the bus who was not Mayan, apart from the bus driver. People were taking chickens and other animals to market.
When we got to Chichicastenango, I asked the driver where the market was. The driver was white, and about 40-50 years old. He told me it was on the next day. As we were speaking I discovered that he was of German ancestry. His father was a German émigré and he had married at Spanish woman. I told him that I also had German ancestry, and that my mother was a German woman. We ended up speaking in German to our great delight. My Spanish was pretty rustic, and his English was a very poor. He then asked me if there was anything else I wanted to see while I was in Chichicastenango, and I replied that there were certain rock formations that were advertised as being pretty neat.
He then drove me up to rocks in his bus. I was quite delighted with this. After 10 minutes on the rocks I had seen enough. He asked me if I had a place to stay in town. I said no He offered to put me up for a few days. I accepted, and was his guest. When he drove me to his home I discovered that he was more than a bus driver. He was the owner of a latifundia, or big farm. The valley in which Chichicastenango lay was mostly farmland. It was owned by three families, and the bus driver was one of these families. His house was large for the area, and I had my own room. The conditions were not as robust as what I had lived in back in Canada.
The next day was the market, and it was exactly as good as had been promised in the brochure I had read. I saw some neat weaving. They were really colourful rectangular pieces about 1 ft by 6 ft. People seemed to wear them as shawls. I bought three of them to take back to Canada with me. I promised myself that I would give one to my sister. I met the bus driver in the market, and he asked me what I paid for them. I had bargained my way down to half the price originally asked. When I told him what I paid for them, he just smiled. He didn’t say anything, but I got the impression that I could have gotten a better price.
He introduced me to another German who lived in the town. He was a young guy (compared to the driver) who looked about 24 or 25. We chatted for a while, and then asked if I would like to go to cantina for a drink after supper. He would bring his girlfriend and one of her friends. I readily agreed.
The two women were also interesting. We would talk in my rudimentary Spanish, and when I need a word or sentence explained, the boyfriend would translate into German. It worked fairly well, but it took a long time. Sometimes the two women talked together, but both I and the boyfriend could understand some of what was said. For example, they were both arguing that they were pure blood. That meant their ancestry on both sides was Spanish. I asked them what people of dual extraction (Spanish and Mayan) were. They replied that they were Mestizo, but they both emphasized that they had no Mayan blood.
I asked about education in Guatemala. They said that elementary school was paid for by the state, but they had gone to private elementary and high schools. I was surprised at this, and asked them more questions. They asked what out education was like in Canada, and I answered that it was a provincial jurisdiction, and in Quebec we had 11 years of school, and other provinces, like Ontario, had 13.
The girl who was a friend of the girlfriend then asked me what living in Canada was like. I told her about some of our life. Then I told her about health care in Canada. The federal government had just (in 1966) incorporated public health care in Canada, based on the Saskatchewan model. I explained how this came about, and used a phrase something like “socialist health care system”. She immediately looked frightened, and asked me to lower my voice. I asked why. She told me that someone could be listening. This was the first instance I encountered of secret police and informers being present. She was very worried that someone had heard us. I immediately changed the conversation over to other things.
When I left Guatemala the next day, and took a bus to Mexico, I waited until I was in Mexico to talk to people. I discovered that there was and had been a civil war between the Mayans and the government rulers. The area I had visited was one of the hotbeds of this war, with many Mayans fighting on one side, and the Guatemalan army on the other. In addition, Guatemala had an extensive system of informers, secret police and death squads working for them. Over 100,000 Mayans had moved as refugees into Mexico.
Mexico
The bus trip to Mexico City was pretty direct. We had to stop to change busses at Oaxaca, and then we were off again. When I got to the capital, I felt quite at ease in the city. There were a lot of things I could safely do in the city, such as going to parks, visiting famous museums and art galleries, and seeing some of the important buildings in the city. I travelled by walking, taking the bus, and taking joint rides with other people in cabs during rush hours. When I walked I chose well travelled streets.
I learned by reading travel brochures what the good and bad parts of the city were, and I avoided all of the latter. I only had one incident where I was bothered. I was walking through a large square with a statue if the middle, and there were not many people present. Four people, about my age, came towards me. They asked if I wanted to buy any watches off them, but they said it in a threatening manner. They were really playing me. I took them for university students.
In response I spoke to them in French, and told them I was from the province of Quebec. They didn’t understand, so I repeated the statement in Spanish. I said I was a member of an independence movement trying to liberate Quebec from the grip of English Canada and the United States. I talked a bit about the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), and the bombings they had carried out. I had figured the four students who had accosted me as having anti-American feelings, and here I was not an American and a revolutionary at that. They mumbled something and went on their way.
It was time to go home as I was running low on money. I figured a train trip to Austin, Texas and then a plane to Montreal. I booked a train trip to Austin, and had to change at Laredo. There were lots of Americans on the train. When we got to the border, we had to take a cab to the states. I negotiated a cab fare in Spanish, and I got a reasonable rate in Mexican pesos. The people who shared my cab were Americans who paid the same amount as me, but in US dollars.
Houston
I met a woman in the cab we started talking. She looked to be about 50 years old. I explained I was going home to Montreal, and I would fly out of Austin. She thought that it would be better to fly out of Houston as it happened to have a much bigger airport. She had a car waiting in Laredo, and was going home to Houston, and was willing to drive me there. I agreed, and the highway was really great. I’d never seen a road like that. It was single lane, but it was REALLY wide, and it had parking lanes that were just as wide.
We got talking on the way, and I explained about my experiences in Central America, and she told me about hers. She was a widow, and her children were living on their own. She had a house in the suburbs and she had a young guy living in it who painted houses for a living. By the time we got to Houston she invited me to stay for three or four days in a spare room she had. I agreed. She worked during the day, but she gave me a key to use to the house. I also met the other boarder she had. I quickly realized that she was not acting in a completely selfless manner. She was interested in sex.
Back to Canada
After four days I decided to go back to Canada. I booked a ticket at Houston airport that would take me back to Montreal via New York. When I got into Dorval airport, I phoned my parents and told them where I was. I took the bus and subway home, and was welcomed.
My parents had become quite worried about me after they hear about the war in El Salvador. My mother was threatening to go down and look for me if she didn’t hear anything from me in a couple of weeks. I told them all about my trip (with the exception of some of the details of my stay in Houston). I gave them presents I had collected while in Central America. We were all overjoyed that I was back. I had $15 left in my pocket.
The main thing I learned about this was that I felt really safe when travelling in Canada, Britain and Germany.
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