Tomson Highway is a playwright and novelist perhaps best known for his plays that depict life on native reserves—most notably “The Rez Sisters” and “Dry Lips Outta Move to Kapuskasing”.

You just savour the moment—even the bad ones.

I believe that savoring the struggles in one's life is one of the hidden secrets to deep happiness. And it was my father who showed me by example how to embrace this truth as my own.

My father was magnificent. He worked three times as hard as all the rest — as hunter, as trapper, as fisherman, as athlete . And as a result we lived three times as well. To us, his children, he was the King of the North. To us he was Royalty.

They had twelve children, he and my mother — with whom, by the way, he had a 60-year marriage they can only dream about in Hollywood — and of those twelve children, seven of us survived to adulthood. As we seven survivors were growing up, every bone in our bodies screamed, “I want to be like Joe Highway.”

One winter, back in the 1940’s, he and his burgeoning family were spending the winter in a log cabin on Nueltin Lake, a large sub-Artic lake that straddles the border between Manitoba and what is now called Nunavut. And the reason my father had chosen that location was because there was a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post on the other side of that same lake. At least once a week, he would drive his dogsled more than twenty miles to trade in his furs and to re-stock supplies. On one of those trading expeditions, as he was packing his sled for the return trip, he saw a blizzard approaching in the distance. Now blizzards in those parts can move with a speed literally breath-taking. They can arrive, that is to say, in a flash. And you don’t mess with them. They blind. They kill. So no one — no one –ever went anywhere without a big thick goose down sleeping robe stashed away in their dogsled . Without one, you died, it was that simple.

At any rate, my father looked at this storm that was, for the moment, some ten, fifteen miles in the distance. Young, athletic man that he was — and loving a dare — he decided to race it with his packed sled, and eight huskies pulling it. He was no more than a quarter of the way into the crossing of that lake, when that storm hit him. And, suddenly, he found himself in a white-out; in a white-out, you are blind, you cannot see six inches past your nose. Did my father panic? Did he freak out? No. He was Joe Highway. Quite to the contrary, he decided that what he would do was have the most beautiful nap he had ever had in his life.

He stopped his huskies, climbed into the sled, and, before he disappeared into the sleeping robe, he snapped his whip once at his lead dog. And off went the sled, through the blinding, blowing, screaming snow. And my father? He went to sleep in the sled, slept like an angel, the fury of the storm muted by the layers upon layers of goose down. Some hours later, he woke up. He poked his head out of the sleeping robe. All was calm. And lo and behold, there he was, right at the door to his and my mother’s cabin. That’s how smart those dogs were, the lead dog in particular, that’s how well trained they were, by my father in particular.. And no one knew that better than World Championship Dogsled Racer, Joe Highway. And that was a fundamental life lesson he taught us: when things go wrong, when everything in life is looking down and hopeless, you don’t panic, you don’t freak out, you don’t feel sorry for yourself, you just lie down and have the most beautiful nap you have ever had in your life. You just savour the moment—even the bad ones.

And this lesson, among many others, is the lesson my father, Joe Highway, King of the North, taught me. And you know what? It work, It works wonders.

For This I Believe I’m Tomson Highway in Sudbury.