by Brandon Webb
My grandfather may have thrown his son out, but he didn’t succeed in changing his mind. To this day my dad still sports a full beard, though its black is now flecked with gray.
Now on his own, Jack made his way from Toronto to Malibu, where he picked up landscaping jobs and soon had his own company. Driving home from a job one day, he picked up three young hippie girls hitchhiking. One of them, a free spirit named Lynn, became his wife.
After they married, my parents moved up to British Columbia to the little ski town of Kimberley, just north of Vancouver, where he took a job as a guide at a hunting lodge, despite the fact that he knew absolutely nothing about hunting. The guy who hired him said, “Look, don’t worry about it. Stay on the trail, and you’ll be fine.” He was. His first time out, he took a small group into the Canadian Rockies, pointing out all sorts of wildlife along the way. When they got back, the group told my dad’s boss he’d hired the greatest guide in the world. They didn’t know he was flat-out winging it.
Soon Jack was working construction, and on the job he taught himself everything there was to know about building houses. In those days, if you were a builder you did it all—pouring the foundation, framing, wiring, drywall, plumbing, roofing, everything from A to Z. Jack had never graduated high school, but he was a resourceful man with a big appetite for learning, and he soon became an accomplished builder with his own company, High Country Construction.
It was about this time that I came into the picture, followed a few years later by my sister, Rhiannon, and once I arrived on the scene my mother’s life became considerably more complicated.
Free spirit though she may be, my mother has always been fiercely loyal to me and my sister, and to my dad, too, as far as that was possible. I always felt completely loved and supported by her, even through the difficulties to come.
My mother has also always been very entrepreneurial. She opened up a restaurant with my dad’s sister, and later, when we lived in Washington for a while, she had her own boat maintenance business, sanding and varnishing the boats and keeping the woodwork in good condition. She wrote and published her own cookbook for boaters, The Galley Companion. Later still, when I worked on a California dive boat in my teens, she held a job there as head cook.
One more thing about my mom: She has always had a great sense of humor.
She would have had to, to cope with me.
* * *
I was born on June 12, 1974, screaming at the top of my tiny lungs, and I screamed for weeks. For the next ten months I stayed awake every night from ten till seven the next morning, yelling my head off, at which point I would sleep blissfully through the day while my mom recovered from the night’s battle fatigue. My parents did everything they could to keep me awake during the day so they would have a shot at getting me to sleep at night. Didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to happen.
According to my mom, I was as wild as the Canadian landscape. I started crawling at six months and crawled everywhere. My mom talks about a study she heard about, where they put babies on a glass counter to see how far they would crawl. Nearly all the babies would stop when they got close to the edge—but the last 1 percent went crawling off into thin air every time.
“That 1 percent?” she says. “That was Brandon.”
I started walking at nine months, and there was not a gate or door that could hold me. My mom bought every childproof lock she could find, but evidently “childproof” did not mean “Brandon-proof.” She had doorknobs that even she couldn’t open, but I always managed to get through them. She would lock me into my high chair, but if she stepped into the bathroom for even a moment, I’d be gone when she returned.
By eighteen months I discovered the joys of climbing and found I could climb up, over, and into pretty much anything. This ability, combined with my easy friendship with locks and predilection for drinking anything I could get my hands on, added up to quite a few visits to the emergency room to have my little toddler-sized stomach pumped. Among the beverages I sampled during those early years were kerosene, bleach, and Avon honeysuckle after-bath splash. I’m not saying this is a method I would endorse or recommend, but I am convinced that this is why I have always been able to hold my liquor and have never had a problem with addiction. By the time I was three, the hospital emergency room staff and my mom knew each other on a first-name basis.
When my mom was pregnant with my sister, my dad built an enclosure with a swing and what he thought was a Brandon-proof gate. (There’s that term again: “Brandon-proof.” Hadn’t they learned?) My mom still doesn’t know how I got out, since she was sitting right there reading a book—but she looked up and I was gone: I had crawled under a barbed-wire fence, scooted down a steep hill, and was out of sight.
My mother was wild with fear. Seven months pregnant, she knew there was no way she could get under that barbed-wire fence, and she didn’t have any wire cutters. The night before, she and my father had seen a pack of coyotes ranging around, and now all she could think of was how her tiny son would make a tasty little coyote meal. The only reason she spotted me was that I was wearing a red sweatshirt. Somehow she managed to coax me back up the hill and under the fence so she could grab me, crying hysterically and at the same time wanting to beat me.
From my earliest years, I always had a penchant for danger and physical extremes, and it made my poor mother’s life a living hell. She likes to say that when I was little, she was the victim of parent abuse. She once called Social Services on herself when I had driven her to the edge with my behavior. She explained to the poor lady on the phone that her two-year-old son was driving her so crazy, she was about to hurt him. The social worker spent a week at our house observing, but I behaved like an angel for those seven days, and she left thinking my mom must be crazy.
It didn’t take long for my parents to figure out that while they couldn’t control my wild energy, they could channel it. Once they saw how madly in love I was with skiing, they knew they’d stumbled on the parenting strategy that would serve us all well for years to come: If they could get me involved in every sports activity possible, maybe it would keep me out of trouble. It did, too—at least for a while.
By age five I was on a ski team, and by age seven I had piled wrestling, football, baseball, swim, and track teams onto my athletic schedule. Later, as an adult, I found I have a love of extreme sports. The steeper the ski slope, the larger the wave, the higher the cliff, the more difficult the jump from the plane or helicopter—the more danger and adrenaline involved, the more I want to try to conquer it. In my thirties, I would channel that same impulse into a drive to conquer huge goals in the entrepreneurial world. At the age of five, my Mount Everest was a 2,500-foot hill called North Star Mountain.
My earliest memories are of the crisp cold in my face and the sibilant schusss of the snow under my skis as I flew down the face of North Star. Every day, during the long months of ski season, my mom would pick me up from kindergarten and drive us straight out to the slopes. We had a season pass, and we used up every penny of it.
Less than half the height of its more famous neighbors, Whistler and Blackcomb, North Star is not really much of a mountain, but I didn’t know that. To me, it seemed vast and inexhaustible. When I think back on my early childhood, what I remember most are the countless afternoons on my bright yellow Mickey Mouse K2 skis, exploring every trail and out-of-the-way patch of what seemed to me an endless world of snow and adventure.
My best friend at the time was a kid named Justin, who was as devoted to skiing as I was. We would spend every afternoon we could exploring North Star together. Justin and I got into ski racing and joined a team. By the time we were in first grade, our team was competing in tournaments at Whistler, and I was winning those races. My mom still has some first-place ribbons I took at Whistler at the age of six.
I don’t think my mom was joking when she called Social Services, but the truth is, she would never have hurt me, no matter how bad I got. With my father, it was a different
story.
I was not exactly scared of my dad, but I knew he was in charge and not afraid to whip out his belt and get after me when he thought I needed it. Over the years, my backside and my dad’s leather belt really got to know each other. Today, now that I’m a parent myself, I believe in discipline just as much as my dad did—although instead of a spanking, my kids’ punishment is push-ups. My ten-year-old son can knock out more push-ups than most adults I know.
Although my dad was very strict, he was also not afraid to hug me and tell me he loved me. He was a good father, and I have a lot of happy memories of him from those early years.
When my dad went out on construction job site visits, he often took me with him, and I loved it. It always felt like an adventure, just me and my dad going on trips to these serious grown-up work sites—and they were great places to pick up colorful new ways of using the English language. I also went along when he played gigs with his country rock band, Jack the Bear, of which he was the drummer and principal sponsor. Jack the Bear played to a pretty rough-and-tumble crowd in the rural backcountry taverns of the Canadian Rockies. By the age of five I had the mouth of a sailor. Typically I would stay in the bar for the first set, and then Dad would tuck me in for the night in our VW Westphalia van outside with the family dog, Shy, where I would lie awake listening to the music and voices until finally fading off into sleep.
Best of all, there was hockey.
My dad has always been an outstanding hockey player. During those early years he was captain of his hockey team, and I would go with him when they would play their games, which were typically pretty late at night. It was a working league and the players all had their full-time jobs, so that was the only time they could play.
I was only five, but no matter how late it was, I never got tired at my dad’s hockey practice. I would go through the place looking for lost pucks or fish for quarters and play the big, brand-new Atari Asteroids video game console they had there. Crawling around, exploring every inch of the place, it felt a lot like being up on the mountain, only in a way this was even better, because I was there with my dad. After practice we would go hang out in the locker room, surrounded by sweaty hockey players who were cursing and laughing and cracking beers. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It was just us, just the guys.
I could tell my dad really enjoyed having me there. I looked up to him, and in many ways, he was my hero.
Then, about the time I turned six, our lives changed.
* * *
My father had always been into sailing. My parents had a dream of sailing around the world, and business was now doing so well they decided it was time to take a few years off and hit the water, just the four of us, to make that dream into a reality. We owned a beautiful 60-foot Sparkman & Stephens ketch, which he kept moored on the California coast; why not let that become our new home as we circled the globe?
Just as we were getting ready to leave, my dad decided to do one more big project. My mother objected, but my dad prevailed: One last gig, he said, and that would really set us up. A group of investors was going to put up the money, so he took out a large construction loan and built the place. Then the recession of 1980 hit—and the project collapsed. My dad was left with the bill and no investors. He tried to negotiate with the bank. He kept trying for two years. They came and took our house. My dad declared bankruptcy and we lost everything.
Being so young at the time, I didn’t quite grasp what was happening, and nobody ever sat me down and said, “Brandon, we’re ruined, wiped out.” Even so, there was an ominous undercurrent that I couldn’t have missed.
I remember going into the bank one day with my dad to close our accounts—the same bank he’d been wrestling with for the past year—because we were about to move away from Kimberley. One of these was a savings account he had opened for me some two years earlier.
This had been quite a big deal for both of us when we opened it. “Look, Brandon,” I remember him telling me, “this is your first savings account. We’re opening it in your name—this is going to be your money.” He showed me the passbook and the first line, where he had entered the initial deposit. “Now you get to watch it grow.” I was so excited about it, and I could tell he was, too.
Now, when we asked where it stood, my dad was informed it had a zero balance.
“What?” he practically shouted at the teller. He was livid. “How is that possible?”
I don’t remember how much he had put in there in the first place, but it wasn’t much, and whatever it was had been wiped out by monthly fees, without my dad realizing it. He had wanted to teach me a life lesson about how you can invest and save—but the only lesson I learned that day was about how you can get wiped out without even realizing it.
When I was seven we left Canada for good, moving to a little town called Blaine, jammed right up into the northwest corner of Washington state, where we began the painful process of starting over.
As huge a change as this financial collapse was for my parents, it crept up on Rhiannon and me only gradually. It was only now, when we picked up and moved to Washington, that I began to realize that something pretty serious was going on here. No more Jack the Bear gigs or late-night hockey practices, and no more skiing the North Star face with my friend Justin. All of a sudden I was yanked out of the life I loved and we were living in a strange place in a smaller house. Now, when my mom took me shopping for new school clothes, we were hitting the thrift shops instead of going to the big department stores. It wasn’t just that we were living in a different place. Our lives were different. I never saw Justin again.
My dad was different, too. He became moodier and angrier, and tougher on me. The whole thing had devastated him. Today, thirty years later, he is still getting over it, and I can’t say I blame him. As a seven-year-old, though, I didn’t understand any of that. All I knew was that before, I would go with him everywhere—and now I didn’t see him all that much. I always loved my dad, but I think it was during these years that a wedge started quietly building between us, one that would have life-changing consequences in later years.
It was in Blaine that I started getting into trouble, getting into fights with other kids and raising hell. Fortunately, my parents already had a formula for dealing with that, and they got me as involved in athletics as they could. Soon I was doing sports again year-round.
What I remember most about Blaine is baseball and wrestling. I was crazy about wrestling, and it was also one of the few places where I would still regularly connect with my dad. My mom was at all the baseball games, but at the wrestling matches it was always my dad cheering our team on. I could tell he was proud of me. I especially loved going on trips with our wrestling team to compete in matches. In fourth grade I placed second in the regionals and made it to the state championships.
Another thing that made life in Blaine better was that making new friends, even in tough circumstances, has always come pretty easy to me. I had three especially good buddies there, Chris Bysh, Gaytor Rasmussen, and Scott Dodd; we all stay in touch to this day. Chris became my best friend, and as with Justin back in Vancouver, we got into lots of athletics together—especially baseball.
On our Little League team, Chris played catcher and I was the pitcher. We did pretty well and made All-Stars. We even got invited to attend a special baseball camp being hosted by the Orioles. I was so excited about going. This was going to be a blast!
It never happened. Instead my parents shipped Rhiannon and me off to Toronto to stay with relatives for that whole summer. I was absolutely furious at my dad. What was wrong with him? I could not believe he was going to take away this incredible opportunity and ruin my summer, and for no good reason whatsoever!
He actually had a very good reason; it was just one he couldn’t tell us. At the time, my parents’ marriage was on rocky ground. I don’t know the details of what happened, but I’m sure that whatever it was, the financial stress didn’t help. They were making a serious effort to reconcile
and put things back on an even keel and thought they would have a better shot at it if they didn’t have to tiptoe around Rhiannon and me for a few months.
But of course, I didn’t know any of this until many years later, and it wasn’t easy to find anyplace in me that could forgive him for taking this prize away from me.
While we were living in Blaine, my father started picking up the pieces of his career. He found a job as foreman for a large construction company and was soon building houses again. He and my mom had never given up on their dream of sailing around the world, and by the time I entered fifth grade we were able to purchase a 50-foot ketch.
Soon we were leaving Blaine behind and moving 100 miles or so south to Seattle, where we began living on our new boat, which we christened Agio, Italian for “ease.” There were times when life on the Agio lived up to its name—and there would be times when it most definitely did not.
My parents were excited about the move and hopeful about the future. Me, I was pissed. This was the sixth time we had moved since I was a baby, and I was starting to seriously resent it. It seemed like as soon as I would make some new friends and start to settle into a social group, we’d be up and moving yet one more time, and I’d have to go through the whole process all over again. Even though I was pretty good at easing my way into new situations and making new friends, this was getting old. I was tired of being uprooted, tired of being picked on as the new kid. It probably served to build character and develop in both Rhiannon and me the ability to adapt to new circumstances, but at the time, it just felt hard. I was jealous of the kids who got to stay in one town and have friends they’d known since preschool. We never had that.
No matter how much we moved around and how difficult things sometimes got, one thing Rhiannon and I always did have was each other. Like any typical brother and sister, we’d fight sometimes and get on each other’s nerves, but we were close all through these years. Sometimes we’d talk together about how we felt about it all. Typically, I would be angry, and she would cry.
