My original plan was to move to Hawaii. That was the plan. My whole life I loved other cultures. I had just lived in Japan for nearly two years – and most of it on a Hawaii-clone island of Okinawa. I knew that the school I wanted to go to would have a lot of Japanese people, as well as people from all over the world. So that was the plan.

This is the story about how I was sure I would be dead. No, it isn’t the story of my first experience with an anxiety attack, and it has nothing to do with being the passenger in Johnny’s Silver Surfer.

If you are familiar with Canadian winter, you will know that a stormy winter night can be preferable to a not stormy winter night. A calm and clear winter evening in Canada can be a ridiculously beautiful thing – thousands of bright stars, mesmerizing northern lights, and silence so absolute it takes your breath away. But what really takes your breath away is how cold those kinds of nights are.

This is how one of those testing sessions went.

The guys and I were too cool for that. We asked Mr. Hogan if we could do our own thing as long as we stayed in the park. He grunted something about “free country” and “failure at life” but we took that as an answer in the affirmative.