Tim is tall, thin, and perpetually scruffy. Some people nicknamed him Clampett, after the character Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies.
I used to drive Tim to the local Native reserve to pick up cheap cigarettes every couple of months. We had lots of great discussions about everything from our lives and politics to life in prison. When he was younger, Tim had seen a lot of the world and frequently vacationed in Jamaica. He had a great system for doing it very economically. He would get a cheap flight there and then just wander from resort to resort, enjoying whatever free stuff he could get. He was very good at making excuses when confronted. “I’ll go get my wristband from my room and be right back!” he would tell them. Eventually, they would catch on, and he would move on to the next all-inclusive resort.
Tim had been a long-haul trucker most of his life, and he had lots of great stories about his adventures driving around North America. He certainly got around, and in some ways, his life really was a great adventure.
My favourite Tim story happened when he was staying at “The Farm,” a minimum-security prison in Brantford, Ontario. Tim had been working in the field all day and was getting tired, so he snuck up onto the roof of one of the buildings to have a cigarette. It was a common place for inmates to sneak off for a little privacy. After his cigarette, Tim was relaxing and drifted off into a nap. A while later, he was rudely interrupted by the prison alarm bells going off. Tim climbed down and complained to one of the guards about the racket. They told him to get to his cell because the prison was on emergency lockdown after someone had escaped. It turned out Tim had missed roll call, and they thought he had escaped.
To this day, Tim says it was the guards’ fault for doing such a crappy job of keeping track of the prisoners.
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