ASTRONAUT CHRIS HADFIELD’S WORST SUMMER JOB.
Many years before he was Canada’s most famous and beloved astronaut, Chris Hadfield was a farm kid hoping for a break at his family’s cottage on Stag Island, near Sarnia, Ont. But no such luck. Here’s how the astronaut-turned-author — his first work of fiction, The Apollo Murders, will hit bookstore shelves in October — spent a summer begging his neighbours to learn to waterski. As told to Rosemary Counter.
I was raised on a farm, so I was long used to hard labour — I once cleaned 50 years worth of manure out of a horse barn. But the year I was 13, when we were staying at the cottage and I would have much preferred to just play guitar and meet girls, my dad made me get a real job.
Kind of. I’d say I was a volunteer, but really I was volunteered. It was somewhere between Dad asked me to do it and told me I had to do it. It was all part of the Growing-up-hadfield learning experience.
So there was this Ontario travelling water-ski school at the time, and if there was enough local appetite for lessons, they’d come to your lake in a fancy boat with a trailer. Stag Island has only about a hundred cottages, but we really wanted them to come to us anyway, so my job was to drum up enough business to make it worth their while.
I first invested in advertising, by which I mean I’d make signs that said, “Learn to water-ski! Professional water-skiers coming to Stag Island!” I’d post flyers on the ferry and in our teeny-tiny convenience store. Mostly, I just walked and walked — there were no cars on the island and I was too young to drive anyhow — like a doorto-door water-ski lesson salesman. I had a little clipboard and a money bag with a zipper. I’d make lists of names and reschedule the no-shows and get the money and try to keep it all organized.
I’d talk up the teachers — Herald and Sheldon, Olympic-level skiers as far as I was concerned — to convince people that they really should better their water-ski skills. I had no real sales technique and no idea what I was doing, but it wasn’t a hard sell, really. There was never much going on the island, so people were usually pretty excited that something was happening. The harder part was collecting the money. They didn’t get to ski until they paid.
I don’t even remember what the lessons cost, to be honest. I’m a bad accountant. You know what I learned that summer? I don’t like accounting and I don’t want to be an accountant. So I didn’t try too hard. I worked just hard enough to get the names I needed and no more. It wasn’t physically arduous, like the farm was, which I appreciated, and it didn’t take up the whole day. It was hours as required, just do the work and you’re done. I also learned that summer that I wanted an hours-as-required job when I grew up. Nine-to-five was never going to be my thing.
My cut-off jean pockets were full of $20 bills, but I did not get rich that summer. I did get to ski for free on a nice new boat though, which I thought was a pretty good deal.
And then the next summer, Herald and Sheldon operated a whole water-ski school that I got to go to. There were world champions practising, and there I was, reasonable at best, skiing with them. I even stayed with Herald at his house. A few years ago, I used my pension to buy my own cottage here on Stag Island. And unless it’s raining, I still go skiing every single morning. I went this morning with my dad. He’s 87 now and he still drives the boat.