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Diaries of a Lodge Owner
In 2009, sheet metal mechanic, Steve Niedzwiecki, turned his passions into reality using steadfast belief in himself and his vision by investing everything in a once-obscure run-down Canadian fishing lodge.
After ten years, the now-former lodge owner and co-host of The Fish'n Canada Show is here to share stories of inspiration, relationships and the many struggles that turned his monumental gamble into one of the most legendary lodges in the country.
From anglers to entrepreneurs, athletes to conservationists; you never know who is going to stop by the lodge.
Diaries of a Lodge Owner
Episode 92: Ancestral Healing - One Man's Journey from Illness to Self-Sufficiency
Gary Tibo's life story reads like an adventure through Canada's cultural identity. Raised in the Sudbury Basin with Aboriginal roots—his father a Beothuk native from Newfoundland—Gary grew up hunting with a loaded gun at age ten, bringing fish home after school, and learning to live completely off the land. His father's determination that Gary wouldn't follow him into the dangerous mining industry led to an apprenticeship that shaped his future.
With hands that could feel differences in engine parts others couldn't see, Gary became a renowned automotive machinist whose expertise made him legendary in performance engine building. His innate curiosity drove him to understand root causes rather than just symptoms, whether in engines or later, in human health. This mindset of looking beyond the obvious would eventually save his life.
At age 38, Gary faced a devastating diagnosis of Crohn's disease and colitis. After two frustrating years of conventional treatments that only made him worse, he walked away from modern medicine and turned to his ancestral knowledge. Drawing from childhood lessons learned from his grandmother and indigenous elders, Gary began a radical transformation—growing his own food, eliminating processed foods, and discovering powerful plant medicines that healed his intestinal inflammation when pharmaceuticals couldn't.
The results were extraordinary. Not only did Gary heal himself, but he maintained a family food bill of just $30 weekly for three decades through self-sufficiency practices. His journey from master machinist to nutritionist demonstrates how indigenous wisdom can offer solutions to modern health crises and food insecurity. Gary's story challenges us to question conventional systems and reconnect with traditional knowledge that sustained humanity for generations before supermarkets and pharmaceuticals.
Ready to discover more about living self-sufficiently and healing naturally? Gary's experiences offer practical wisdom for anyone seeking greater independence from systems that often fail to address root causes of our most pressing health and social challenges.
I started growing food and then, you know, my wife and I educated ourselves and she got some old recipes from my mother and stuff like that and we started learning how to preserve food. And then I started experimenting with drying stuff, Like I saw some older people in my grandmother's side of the family, some of the cousins, that were drying stuff and stuff like that. So I had all this little background information and I just started expanding it to the point where I advertised on the internet that my food bill when my two daughters were home eating and there was no lack of anything my food bill was $30 a week or less, and I'm talking that was like that for 30 years.
Speaker 2:This week on the Outdoor Journal Radio podcast Networks, diaries of a Lodge Owner Stories of the North, we sit down with one outstanding fella whose aboriginal roots began in the Sudbury Basin, which started him on a journey through life with several winding roads, from the early days living in the bush to building some of the highest quality engines on the planet and nutrition and healing. There is no shortage of topics to unpack in this one, and it is my pleasure to introduce to the Diaries family Gary Tebow. On this show we tell stories of the North and how Gary's life was shaped around the foundational knowledge he learned as a child. This knowledge helped him to become an outstanding automotive machinist but, more importantly, that foundational thirst for knowledge may very well have saved his life. So if you love learning about things that aren't quite mainstream and hearing great stories, this one's for you. Here's my conversation with Gary Tebow.
Speaker 2:Welcome, folks, to another episode of Diaries of a Lodge Owner Stories of the North. And today is another special day. I have live in studio a good friend of mine, gary Tebow, and Gary is a nutritionalist. But we're going to dig in a little bit into his past so we all get to know who Gary is. He's a wonderful, extremely interesting person and it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show today. And you're no stranger to the show. Actually, you did a I'll call it a interlude a couple of years ago at the Sportsman Show and that was very good. So welcome back to the show, gary. Thank you very much for having me. It's all it's my pleasure. So, like I said off the top, gary, why don't we get to know you a little bit and can you take me back to your childhood Because I think that's a very important part of everybody's introduction and just give us a bit of a bio of who you are?
Speaker 1:Well, I grew up in Northern Ontario in the Sudbury Basin and my father was a Beothuk native Indian of Newfoundland, which they said. The government says they didn't exist. But you know, when my father was drinking a little bit he had a few foul words to let people know that they didn't get him and I'm being very polite about that deal. And so on my mother's side of the family, in the early 1800s 1820 to 1840, 1860, they were forced off the land out of the Ottawa Valley to northern Ontario. So you know, if you look at the Canadian census the first one that was really done in 1860, my mother's great-great-grandfather was Peter Terrien and he had 23 children. So in the Nipissing Basin he was half of the census because there were only 50 people recorded this is a fact I can show you all this documentation how many children he had 23, him and his wife, wow, in Tomiskaming, ontario.
Speaker 1:So at one time when I was a kid growing up, we knew that the town of Hager was basically at one time owned by the Savary family and the town of St Charles was owned by the Russell family, or Roussie what they called it in French. And so the Russell name came originally in the very early 1800s from England. He was a captain and basically when Sitting Bull came across the border he treated Sitting Bull with respect and Sitting Bull married his niece to this Captain Russell and basically on my grandmother's side of the family that's part of our bloodline. And so on my father's side of the family, natives from Newfoundland and most people don't know that the Algonquin language is not a people that was the language by Ojibwe people spoken from Newfoundland to Alberta. So you know I've hunted on lots of different reserves all over the place with different people on reserves and they look at me and say here's this white boy. Well, you know, I turned out the lightest one in my family, but if you look at my two sisters it looked like they just came off a reserve with dark brown hair and dark brown skin, and so you know, even I look at my mother's family, her mother had blonde hair and blue eyes, yet everybody else in the family had jet, black hair and brown eyes. Yeah, except my mother had more in the middle and blue eyes. So you know, there was this mixing of our bloodlines, I guess, with a little bit of European in there.
Speaker 1:But we always considered ourselves Aboriginal, even though we had. We weren't born in reserves or had any rights. And when I grew up as a kid I mean I was carrying a loaded gun at 10 years old in the bush hunting my brother was eight I had to give him a turn to shoot and you know, my father would say, well, after school today, you know, go down to the creek and catch fish. Say, well, after school today, you know, go down to the creek and catch fish and clean them and put them in the freezer. And so you know, summertime we were already splitting wood or hoeing potatoes or picking bugs off the potato plants. We were doing. There was no sitting around, doing nothing.
Speaker 1:We didn't really grow up like going to town and buying and shopping. My father got paid every couple of weeks from International Nickel and basically the only thing they ever bought was maybe a little bit of flour and coffee and tea, but the rest of it we did it ourselves and lived off the land. Yeah, we lived totally off the land. So when I first came to Toronto as an apprentice because my father didn't want me to work in the mining industry, you know, and it was really good paying money compared, minimum wage was a dollar 95 an hour and starting an international nickel at 18, you were making over 20 bucks an hour. Yeah, it was pretty hard to turn that kind of deal down. But my father said, if you go and take this job, uh, you don't live in this house. And my brother and I we had respect for our parents and so basically I got a trade.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow. And that's a pretty, that's a pretty strong endorsement to you're not working up here. And what was the reason?
Speaker 1:For not working in the mines. My father didn't want us to be like rats underground, you know, just digging away the way he did, and he wanted us to have a trade, and so you know. He heard about a machine shop in northern Ontario that was hiring and everybody told him if your son can work there for three months, he can work anywhere Everybody will hire him.
Speaker 1:Because he was a German guy out of the Second World War and his philosophy was he wasn't a Nazi, he was just doing his job. Well, I'm telling you, he ran his shop Like he was Hitler, literally. You know you would go in in the morning and, um, you know, by the end of the day, your coveralls that gained six inches of weight and dirt and water from washing and cleaning parts. But it was an environment that for me was kind of easy, because I like learning and I wanted to be as good as I could be at anything.
Speaker 1:And I worked there for a little over three years and then I moved to another place on the other side of Ottawa and I worked there for a little over three years and then I moved to another place on the other side of Ottawa and I worked there for a few years and then, basically at 22, I came back to visit my brother who had got him a job at a shop in Toronto because the owner didn't want me to leave. So I got my younger brother in as an apprentice mechanic and I basically came back and a machine shop heard about me and hired me and I basically started my business part-time working at this machine shop and it didn't take me very long before I had more clientele than the owner of the shop and there was a little bit of discussion and argument when they sold it and the new owners. You know the son was a little bit of an asshole so I quit and I went out on my own and started G&R Automotive and I never looked back and then I worked really hard on that.
Speaker 2:So the machining that you were doing it was automotive machining.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you know when tool and die people would talk about oh you know, they're so precision I would say well, you know, you talk about working in thousandths of an inch. In the automotive industry we work in ten thousandths of an inch because you can't put a crankshaft in an engine unless it's ground to within five, ten thousandths of an inch, it won't turn. And so you know.
Speaker 2:I. It might turn, but not for very long. No, yeah, it's going to be seized up, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:So you know I was always around cars. I mean I built my first cars in my parents' driveway with plastic and birch trees that I tied together and let the snow make an igloo and I would sit inside. I literally sit in a snowmobile suit on the ground holding on to a 100-watt light bulb to keep your hands so you could make brake lines and, you know, scrape off rust and when it got warm you painted it. And you know I'm not kidding.
Speaker 1:And this was in an igloo that you had built, yeah, in the front driveway, in the driveway, in the driveway, and you were working on vehicles inside it, inside my I went with my father, I was 17 years old, to a scrapyard in Northern Ontario, in Sturgeon Falls, and the owner said I got a good little car here for $150. And it was a 63 Mercury Meteor with all the fins and nice chrome and everything. And I looked at the car and I said boy sold, and so my father paid for it and I had to pay him back and that car came into the driveway and basically I made an actual igloo over the top of the car I did when September came. I mean, I actually built the framing work and tied all the branches together, put the plastic over the top and when it snowed I had a little entranceway and I took an extension cord from the garage and we put it inside and I was working away on the car.
Speaker 2:That is, that is awesome.
Speaker 1:And that's what I did the whole winter, and I mean some days it was minus 40, but you know you're inside there and your body heat you know it warms up a little bit and you know a 100-watt light bulb you can see, good, it'll throw some heat and you warm up your hands.
Speaker 1:As long as your hands can function a little bit, you get used to the cold. That's great. And with limited tools, you know like you're scraping off rust with a scraper and a wire brush and you know when it warms up in May. Well, now you're going to paint it.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:But you had all the mechanical work done. I took the engine out, I took the transmission out, took differential off, I had it stand up on cement blocks. That's awesome. And you know I was an apprentice and basically you know I was always fascinated by people going fast with their cars, like quarter mile stuff, fascinated by people going fast with their cars, like quarter mile stuff.
Speaker 1:And the funky thing was, there was this guy. He was the world record holder for the first guy to ever break 10 seconds in a quarter mile drag car. His name was Drago Bridgak, he was a Sudbury boy and basically when he went to the international finals in Vegas I even have a picture at my shop of his car and the write-up from a newspaper that said you know, when he fired up that car at 3 o'clock in the morning, the entire hotel shook. I'm not kidding, I can show you that, I can actually show you. The guy gave me this thing out of a newspaper and he actually worked for me.
Speaker 1:I admired this guy, like he was like my hero when I was a teenager, because nobody, nobody had ever went that fast in a car. And, um, he was the first guy to take a 426 Hemi and make it 2000 horsepower, naturally aspirated with carburetors, wow. And so he was sponsored by, you know, ngk spark plugs, all kinds of stuff like that, which were a good spark plug when he came into the country. So you see, that was one of the reasons. When I worked at this company and I, with these German people and Yugoslavian people like that from the old country, they were really, really good tradespeople and they knew their skills and they were really fussy about how things were done, and so I spent three years there and it was a learning experience that, no matter where I went, you know, I excelled because I had the foundation.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's amazing. So that, I guess, is the love for speed, was one of the driving forces that led you to machining, in particular, engines and starting your business.
Speaker 1:Well, I started my business doing, you know, oil changes and brakes and tune-ups, because I was licensed in both fields.
Speaker 1:Doing, you know, oil changes and brakes and tune-ups, because I was licensed in both fields and you know I loved making things. So as a kid, growing up in school, I mean I went to a one-room schoolhouse which don't exist anymore, and the teacher had 56 students in eight grades. Her name was Mrs Cunningham and you know this little one room schoolhouse and when they built a bigger school and they started making this, um, every classroom was an individual thing. I had already went to the sixth grade and then, basically, when they transitioned us, I did the sixth grade over again and, and even though I'd already been in the sixth grade, so the teacher that was our homeroom teacher and the principal of that school, mr Cameron, for some reason he paid attention to me and in grade seven he wanted me to enter in a science competition and you know the library in the school was a cart you pushed around from classroom to classroom, had maybe a hundred books on it.
Speaker 1:People in today's society don't understand how we grew up in the North, okay, and how limited certain things was. So I took a few books home and then, basically the next day, I showed Mr Cameron what I was going to build and he was a very tall, big guy and he said, gary, you're going to build that. I said, sir, why not? And so I built this gristmill, a waterwheel gristmill system to grind flour, which I'd seen in a book. And I remember, you know, when I would want a little piece of wood to make a spoke or something for the wheels, I'd be looking in a tree and sometimes, you know, you're blind to a branch that's right beside you, so you'd climb the damn tree to cut something in the top. You know, I mean I was just invigorated to make all the pieces and I had the tables and chairs all made and I made all kinds. I even made the saw cutting things and all that kind of stuff for it. I made all kinds. I even made the, the saw cutting things and all that kind of stuff for it. And uh, basically in the school, you know, I won, and then the teacher entered me in competition for Ontario, for all the public schools and I went there.
Speaker 1:Then I was entered in high school.
Speaker 1:I won there and then basically I beat everybody at university level in the entire country because the competition was at Laurentian university in Sudbury and there was a couple of people that and the judges that had been over to Europe and they saw these antique grist mills running on air or water like windmills and they were so impressed by what I had done. They kept voting for me all the time and basically that's how I won. And you know I competed with university students that had done some amazing projects. And you know I competed with university students that had done some amazing projects. And you know they took us to Toronto and went through the Science Centre and you know the ROM and stuff like that and looking at dinosaurs and all that kind of thing. So it was a good experience. But then you know that experience in some cases kind of backfires on you because now when you get into high school the teachers think, well, there's some kind of a prodigy student that's going to bend to their will, right, and I was not a conformist.
Speaker 2:And still aren't.
Speaker 1:No, I'm not. And so I remember really upsetting the biology teacher when I told her not to eat any pork because it gave her worms. And so I proved it using a pressure cooker and I didn't have any pork. So she brought the pork chops in and in 36 days, when the worms were crawling inside the jar, she threw up on her desk. But she never talked to me for four years.
Speaker 1:So I made an impression, I guess. But you know, I always wanted trade stuff and I remember in high school the shop teacher for electrics and and overall all of the positions, actually knew my father underground. He was electrician in the mines and he decided to transition and become a teacher in electric and stuff like that and um, I really I'll never forget Mr Yuppie. He passed away a long time ago but when I told him I wasn't going to be an electrician, I was going to be a machinist, he actually cried and had tears going down his face because I was the first guy I know of anywhere in Canada that put a in high school, put a color TV together. They didn't even exist.
Speaker 3:We had done it in high school.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I knew all the resistor codes like I could look at any resistor and still look at the stripes and knew what the resistance was instantly. And so he was really upset that I wanted to be a machinist but I just liked making stuff and I think one of the reasons I never wanted to be an electrician. When I was a little kid, around 12 years old, in my mother's kitchen there was a bad cord wire on the stove kettle you know the electric kettle and the water from the spoons went on to the I was drying spoons and I got this shock so bad I hit the floor, and so after that I had a respect for invisibility I can't see it coming. I can't see it coming. Yeah, so you know I was always hunting and fishing in the bush. You know always, and you know, even years ago, when I went to different reserves and you know different people would bring me and say, well, this guy's a really good mechanic, so I'd fix their ATVs or stuff like that.
Speaker 1:I'd be there to help them out and you know we'd go hunting and after a day or two in the bush I'd say, what are we walking through the bush? Are we sightseeing here? And they'd all get all insulted. I said, well, we're looking for moose, right, they're right beside us. And they'd say and say, walk in the bush there, why is the crap still steaming? Oh, let's follow those tracks.
Speaker 1:I said, well, we could have done that three days ago. How do you know the animals are there? I said, well, I pay attention to what I see in the work of the trees, certain branches bent, certain things being damaged, and I know what certain animals do, that it's not just anything. And so my father trained me and then I, you know, when we were kids growing up, during the day in the summertime, different indigenous families that you know lived in the area. I always took a liking to old people. I mean, I was hanging around in the corner of the porch listening to the grandparents talk about things when my parents would say, go outside and play, and you know the rest of the kids went outside, but I would sit on the porch and listen to the stories. Yeah, and to me that was just like the best thing.
Speaker 2:Well, speaking of stories, I'm intrigued with your dad and working underground so many years ago. Do you remember any stories that he told you about working underground and maybe why it wasn't a good idea?
Speaker 1:Well, you know they worked in conditions that were basically, you know, like a rat in a coal mine. It was terrible and there was some major strikes in Northern Ontario, you know where International Nickel, you know, got shut down and Coppercliffe and all these big companies got shut down because the conditions were so bad. And you know, I mean now there's maybe a few thousand men working on ground and they're working in conditions that you know the people that started working there would have dreamed to have.
Speaker 2:It was really bad and you know Back in the days where they still used canaries.
Speaker 1:Well, pretty well, you know. But in the mining of nickel and you know copper and stuff like that, in international nickel and gold and whatever other minerals they took out, but mostly it was nickel you know they had some pretty good ventilation. But still, you know, when you got scoop trams, diesel motors, scooping material and driving it to a chute and it goes down and then brings up by elevator after it's ground underground and bring it up through elevating system, you know there's a lot of dust and you're breathing all that stuff. Yeah, you know, and you're walking around in the dark with a light on your hat. You know, basically that's your visibility.
Speaker 1:And then you know my father became a long hole blaster. I mean, he was such an expert with Amix and blasting caps and he showed me some stuff and we got in trouble a couple of times from my dad with my brother and I. You know, in those days you could go down to the local store Firecracker Day and you'd get a whole bag of firecrackers for a dollar and they had one of these blaster big yellow-black ones inside. Remember all these little red ones in there? So what we did? Well, it was my idea and my brother and I we got the belt for that because we could have blown up the house.
Speaker 1:I took a 40, I wanted to see how strong I could make the thing too right.
Speaker 1:So I took a 45 gallon barrel and I put the barrel on the sand.
Speaker 1:But before I put the barrel down, what I did was I dug a little trench and I took all the little fuses and I tied them all together and I took all the powder out of the red firecrackers and I put them in a Kleenex and I packed it really good and then I put that big monster firecracker in there and I tied all the fuses to it and I had about three feet long long and then we filled the barrel with right to the top with sand 45 gallon barrel.
Speaker 1:And it was about two feet away from the house my parents at that time. That house still exists but it had a breezeway and so my brother and I I lit it on fire. We ran through the other side of the breezeway and it sounded like about three 12 gauges going on and the barrel went up in the air Like. It looked like a pop can, all the sand dumped on the roof and stones on the house and the barrel landed about a quarter mile away in the neighbor's yard, missing his car. Okay, and my mother came out of the house pissed right off.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, wondering what's going on.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and she said get that branch and we got it beaten. And then my father gave us the belt when we got home and he said I told you not to do that kind of stuff. So we did some experiments that were a little, you know, outrageous as kids would get.
Speaker 2:you know, that's okay though that's how you learn. Oh, I'm telling you, you live to tell the tale.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm going to tell you something. It's lucky we didn't live, because if we would have had the barrel angle the other way, we would have took half the house down.
Speaker 1:I'm telling you that's funny and you know. So I was always experimenting and trying stuff and doing things. And you know, I remember in the high school competition, the science competition, when this guy had told me, you know, he had made his son electric car. It was basically a starter motor instead of and he took the gears off to start your car and he put a pulley on and basically had it up to a battery with a switch that was onto the gas pedal and and you know he had brakes and you know the kid was a teenager He'd sit in the car and press on the gas pedal and basically the starter drove the car around. And so I was watching this and I said to the man and he was a physicist I said, you know, why don't you put some kind of a pulley system on so that when the starter drives the motor from the battery, the pulleys would turn an alternator and it would generate the battery and you know you basically be able to drive anywhere. And the guy said, well, that would be infinite power. Like you can't do that, that's not possible. And I kept thinking in my brain how is that not possible? Because I mean, if you put the pulley ratio three times as fast, it's going to make enough power to keep charging the battery, and that's been all proven. True, now, but I could see that as a kid. Yeah, I mean my, you know, because I don't look at any kind of problem as being a problem. There's always a way of figuring it out.
Speaker 1:And so when I started in my automotive business, porting and polishing stuff, you know I started without any. You know air equipment or you know systems that most of the people in big shops were using. I just thought you know in my brain one day, why don't I take a plastic cylinder, put a cap on it? I'll clamp it to the bottom of a cylinder head, put a garden hose on it and I'll put some air in on the side with the air, and I could put the air and water in together whatever rate I want, and even if I just use water, I can take and open the valves in and out and clamp them with a vice grip and watch where the water goes out backwards, and then I would know where the restriction is. So that's how I started improving performance and porting and polishing.
Speaker 2:And then, when Toyota first having Toyotas in Canada, so explain to all of our Diaries family what actually is port and polish.
Speaker 1:Okay. So if you look at the runner on an engine or you look at anything that has velocity for air, so if you put a car in a wind tunnel and you put smoke in the wind tunnel with the car, you can see where the air from the fans is blowing the smoke over the car. So then you can change the aerodynamics. So it's the same thing. As you know, you watch a bird fly. That's how they figured out how to make wings for airplanes and they started making things. So you look at the shape of a wing of an airplane and when you put air over the top of it and if you put smoke in the air or some kind of film, you can see where it's going to touch the plane wing. So you know where the resistance is, and then you can change that structure and then try again till you get the least amount of resistance and the most amount of elevation. So it's the same thing. When a car runs, so inside the runner, you know you're going to have restrictions.
Speaker 2:And runner, you mean.
Speaker 1:Inside the runner of the engine, so like where the air goes into the chambers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so through, so inside the cylinder.
Speaker 1:No, so through the carburetor or fuel injection unit Yep Then through the intake manifold Yep.
Speaker 1:And then directly through the carburetor or fuel injection unit, then through the intake manifold and then directly through the runner, going in before it hits the valve Okay, and when the valve opens the air is coming in. So when Toyota, for example, first introduced their product into Canada and in the United States and the first cylinder heads, when I was working in the machine shop and I took them apart, I started noticing that Toyota had put an extra cut line on the intake valves on the inside top edge. So if somebody doesn't understand that, if a valve was standing on a table you would have a 45 degree angle, but closer to the stem you'd have another 30 degree angle or 15 degree angle. So I started looking at that and saying, hmm, that's a good idea. So when I would take a set of 350 Chevy heads or Ford heads or Chrysler heads, I would take and put the valves in, grind the 45, and then I would take and grind these extra angles on those valves. That was traditionally not in North American cars and right away I had better performance. I would just do little things like that and then I basically understood, because I was using water instead of air and watching how the water flowed through the cylinder backwards because I had to wash parts. So when I was 18 years old, washing parts in Nordic engines outside of Sudbury, and you would put the power wash wand on a cylinder head and the water went through the runners and you didn't get wet. But yet the next 10 set of heads which were the same part numbers, basically you were drowned with water like backflow. So I, I under, I wanted to. Why is this one working so differently than that one? So when I'd be cleaning these heads I would put my close my eyes and put my hand inside the holes and feel what the difference was. It's just, I want to know.
Speaker 1:From the time I was a little kid, I always had the why in my brain. Why does that work like that? How does that work? Why are we doing this way? What for? I just have that curiosity that never stops. You know I'm always asking why. I want to know why. How does it work? You know I'm always asking why I want to know why. How does it work? So you know, if a piece broke on a car, I would spend half the day breaking it apart in little pieces to figure out what was wrong inside, then I want to know what caused that. Instead of most people would just put a part on and drive away. I wanted to know why. Because if this thing had this problem, somebody else has the same problem. Absolutely Right. And so that was just my mindset all the time.
Speaker 1:And so you know, growing up in that kind of stuff, making things, working for this company, and they had basically hardly any business to pay me, but they were looking for a machinist I made them print business cards with my name on it, even though I wasn't the owner of the business, that's right. And then I borrowed their company truck and I went to all their customers and said I'm the new machinist in this machine shop and you know, when you want something you've got a problem with an engine or anything like that you know you can have a mechanic. Give me a call when I get the cylinder head I'll diagnose it backwards. I want the head gasket. And sometimes people would say why do you want the head gasket? I said well, you know, I'll ask you a question.
Speaker 1:When we were taking the cylinder head off, was there some bolts very, very hard to take out? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said okay, but the rest were loose. Oh yeah, we think that's why the head gasket blew. I said no, the bolts that were tight is the reason the head gasket blew, because those bolts bought them to the bottom of the hole. They didn't turn tight and they didn't tighten the head gasket down enough. So when you sent me the head gasket back, I took a micrometer out and I measured the head gasket and where the gasket had burned was the thickest part of the head gasket, and where it was crushed properly it was thinner. So that right away tells me that that bolt stretched or touched the bottom. Or when the guy took the head off, there was dirt in the bottom or oil or water went in and he didn't clean out the hole. Good, put the new head gasket on, torque the head down, but it didn't get torqued properly because the bolt touched the bottom.
Speaker 1:So you see, I want to know why all the time. And so I got a reputation of when I fix something I'm going to fix it or I'm not doing it. And you know I was innovative when I first started doing car shows. I went with no parts to International Center Speedorama. I brought cylinder heads that I'd machined and ported. I brought a block, the way I board it differently, and I brought, you know, a camshaft and a set of maybe pistons. And then I explained to everybody coming down there look, this motor makes 350 horsepower. It's a high-performance Corvette motor. So you can make that same motor, make 475, by doing these little tweaks, and everybody would think it was impossible.
Speaker 1:And then some old guy in the back listening to me talk say this guy's telling the truth. Because you see, what I would explain to them is we're not going to build the motor to what you want the horsepower to do. We're going to build the motor to what gear ratio you have in the rear end, because if you have a highway gear ratio you can't take off easily off the line unless you have a certain amount of torque and power. And if you want the cruisability and not the motor screaming all the time, you need to know what the differential gear ratio is and your tire size. Then we'll put the right scenario for transmission right Torque, inverter, stall, speed, all that. And now we'll pick the camshaft according to those two so that will open the valves at the right powertrain and angulation all the time, so that way you're not taking off and seeing the car with clouds of black smoke and you're burning all kinds of fuel and everything else.
Speaker 1:And then I also explain where people are buying aftermarket heads with these super big runners. So explaining that is you know, if you put water through a half-inch garden hose and it's got to go 500 feet and you only have 40 PSI of pressure pushing it, at the end of that 500 feet your water may flow out at, because it's a half-inch hose, 50 feet away because it's got enough pressure. Yeah, take a two-inch hose all right in diameter and only have 40 PSI. The water at 500 feet is just going to dribble out Because you've got such a big volume it can't travel fast enough. So guys would put these large cylinder heads on with big runners and wonder why their car didn't go fast.
Speaker 1:So when I would take the head off and look at it, the gasoline because it's cold coming in, cools down the air. You could see the bottom of the port nice and clean, and the top is dirty. So that means the fuel is dropping out of suspension. And so on the exhaust side again, when people look at a runner, they have the head turned upside down. They always cut on the short side because thinking the exhaust gases have to go out through the shortest route possible. Meantime heat does not go to the bottom, it rises. You're sitting in a room, the ceiling is warmer than your floor. I don't care where you are, that's for sure. That's a fact, because your heat is always going to rise. So when you're grinding material and you're grinding on the bottom and it's on the exhaust side, you're actually defeating the purpose. You're going to slow that runner down because the heat wants to run along the long side at the top, because the head's not on upside down, it's on right side up.
Speaker 1:That's right. So you understanding automotive and you're working on your own stuff, right, you understand that. So I would explain this. At car shows, and when I first did a car show, you know I boiled down the mathematics. What I did was this guy offered me, you know, a booth space and he said okay, you know, we got 50 to 80,000 people coming in and walking by your display or whatever, and you know you're going to make business. So I boil the math in my brain. There's no way I can talk to 50,000 people. I might be able to talk to 5,000 people in three days. Hi bye, here's a flyer. Whatever. Out of 5,000 people, I will talk to 500 having a good conversation over three days. Out of 500, if I get 50 people to come to my shop and they spend $2,000, that is a hundred grand and I'm only making 40. So if, even if I get half of that, I jumbled my business and so I actually proved that reality out, so that when I would do a car show on a Monday morning, I'd have four or $5,000 worth of deposits and I'd have six months of work booked in advance. So basically and I did the math in my brain and so when I would go to outdoor shows.
Speaker 1:I would tell guys. I would say, listen, you know you don't realize the power you have because you're not doing the marketing the right way. Don't try to sell people on what you do. Sell them on what the result is going to be in the experience they're going to have. Yes, right, because they want their car to go fast. So you explain them how you're going and you know, don't ask for them to give you business.
Speaker 1:I explained to them. Here's what you need to do. You don't have to come and see me. Just do these three things. Your car is going to gain 50 more horsepower, right, automatically. And then if you do this other thing, which you bring me to Hads and Ports, I can guarantee you another 50 more horsepower. So I showed them how they could accomplish it on their not trying to get any business at all. I just that was my mindset. I'm not doing this to make any money. I'm trying to educate you and through the fact that I would educate them so well, I had people come and see me 10 years after I'd done a car show saying I know the prices have changed. Here's your price list and whatever you're going to charge me. I want you to build the engine. I'm ready now.
Speaker 2:That and that is the key to any successful business. That is translatable directly over to the lodge business. Because I was selling the experience. I was selling you know and and I wasn't saying come here, but you know what the north is such a beautiful place. You sell the experience. You can go and find this experience anywhere and when you do a great job at educating people, they want to come and they. I think it's that thirst for your love of what you do and the fact that that is the key to being the best at something that you can be and people are attracted to that. Like attracts, like Positive attracts positive.
Speaker 1:Well, it's the same thing I've applied. Okay, so because I grew up in a household you know where my mother was, you know very much about, there's a God and I was raised that way and I for some reason it stuck in my brain, not the fact that my parents or my mother or my grandmother, anybody talked about God, it's their actions that showed me and at the same time I it was like in my brain, in my DNA, to realize when I was outside that there had to be a greater force than my mind could even comprehend, because everything is organized, chaos, but it works perfectly. So when you look at nature and you look at things, there's a reason for everything you know. You might think, when you grow food, well, why do the weeds outgrow your food? So, studying nutrition and I didn't study nutrition until I started formally in a school at 50,. But I got involved with nutrition because at 38, was basically told you know you're dying. And I tell the doctors look, I know I'm dying, tell me something new, because what you're telling me doesn't make any sense. But and they kept telling me Crohn's and colitis was basically there was no cure and I was bleeding some days a cup of blood and they wanted to cut me open and look inside and after two years of testing they couldn't tell me what they were looking for. So I basically told, I gave them middle finger and I walked out of the office with six doctors sitting there wondering what they were going to do with me. But I never came back. I never went back and I started thinking at 38 years of age.
Speaker 1:By the time I was 40 and I was really in bad shape. My wife was walking on me and rubbing the skin off her knuckles for me to just function every day. And at 40 years of age I was walking around like I was 85 with a limp and my feet and toes and I was just hurting pain, lower back pain. It was some days I thought my eye teeth would fly out of my face and you know, I kept wondering how did I go from where I was that I could outrun a deer?
Speaker 1:At 16 years of age we could run a deer down in the bush with a stick, bang on trees, and deer run in a circle. They always do. They never run back and forth, whatever, they run in a circle right, around, around, around around and you could chase them for hours and it just keep running. And because they know their area, that's what's comfortable about them. Once they know their area, they know what's there, and so you know we would run them the exhaustion. And I kept thinking you know, I was working 18, 20 hours a day and I, you know, I got sick. And then I started realizing what was going on, thinking about what I was doing food, wise stuff like that I started changing everything.
Speaker 2:And what were you doing at that time? Food-wise.
Speaker 1:When I got sick, a coffee truck comes in. I couldn't touch McDonald's for years. Sorry, McDonald's, but if I eat your food I'm in the hospital. It's plain and simple.
Speaker 2:I think if everybody eats that food too much, they're in the hospital.
Speaker 1:And you know I lived, you know, running your automotive business. I'm working an 18-hour day. You know I was eating junk. Coffee truck comes in. You know pizza, pizza, whatever.
Speaker 2:You know all kinds of just fast food, and this is a very, very interesting topic. And just before we leave the automotive side of things, what is one of the most memorable builds that you ever did, whether it's the most powerful engine you put together or just a single memorable moment from that chapter of your life?
Speaker 1:Well, it's still part of my life. I mean, I'm still building at my own will. Whenever somebody approaches me for a custom engine build you know for mostly for show cars and stuff like that, you know, or some performance thing, I will build them on my own timeline, not like I used to like. I was under a gun for a certain timeline. Some of the best bills that I've done were old Camaros and I had a guy live in my shop basically for two years while he was building his car. I got all the pictures to prove it and it was $20,000. We're talking 35 years ago on a table, $20,000 worth of parts and that car won every trophy and thing that it ever went into. What was it? A Zed, yeah, zed 28 Camaro 1969.
Speaker 1:And then I built another 69 for a guy by the name of Dale Oldham. He used to work for Ducruppi and Sons as their heavy duty mechanic and I was. He met me at a car show and I told him he was looking for a DZ302 original motor block and I had it and the one condition that I sold him the block and the crankshaft was I was going to build the engine, otherwise I wasn't going to sell that motor and those parts and he said it had to be factory original and I guaranteed him that this motor was going to be a hundred percent like. It came off the line and when he entered he beat everything in Ontario and in Canada pretty well. And then he entered his car in the United States where it's strictly 1,000 Camaros and they're all the same year and everything and he was judged. The first time a Canadian car ever beat anybody in the United States and the judges told him is the detailing on the engine that one? That one made the car the difference because not everybody had the exact nuts and bolts with the washers and everything.
Speaker 1:And because I grew up knowing, you know, at 17, when I was working for Nordic engines and people got me to build stuff at the end of the day. Or you know, when I was 22, starting my own business and I was still working at um, um Queensbury automotive in Toronto and people would bring me. I had a little shop on the Toronto and people would bring me. I had a little shop on the side and people would bring me, you know, four or five engines in boxes and bolts and they wanted one engine to come out of it and you know, they'd bring so-called mechanics with them and I'd be organizing the bolts and and some guy would be making some smile Well, that belongs to this and that, and I would put it in a different pile. And then by the time an hour went by, the customer would say, it's okay, I don't need you anymore, this guy knows what he's doing. And the guy would be like a 50-year-old guy.
Speaker 1:But I knew I could. You could blindfold me. I could put my hands on the bolt and say, well, that's a Chevy bolt, that's a Ford bolt, that's a Chrysler bolt, that's something else. And bolt, that's a Chrysler bolt, that's something else. And you know, people used to be amazed. I would walk into a room with 150 crankshafts and say, okay, I gotta go and get that one down that aisle right over there and walk through the thing and pick that up. How do you know what it is? They all look the same to me. No, no, no, they don't. You know because you're. You know I look at cylinder heads. When I look at the end of a cylinder head, even even now and I'm not doing it every day I just know what year and model that came off over what production run. Pretty well just from the GM or the Ford or the Chrysler or the Oldsmobile or Pontiac started at 22 on my own and I had from 17 to 22 working for other people basically running cylinder head departments where I was building 300 cylinder heads a week.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, that's so much experience.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, when I'm building 300 cylinder heads a week, I was running 10 pieces of equipment, sometimes at the same time. You know people would look at me walking around machining rotors and flywheels and this thing and their head resurfer's going. I got the hot tank going, I'm cleaning parts, I'm grinding valves. You know you're like a robot almost, but you know because when you understand what you're doing and how much time it takes to certain things, it's just automatic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's amazing and that story with that car, that 69 Zetter.
Speaker 1:And I have the pictures, the shoe. I can show you the pictures too the pictures.
Speaker 2:That right, there is an amazing achievement and folks, on that note, we're going to take a short break and on the other side, I am intrigued with what you talked about as far as your health, and I'd like to just rewind back a touch at that point and talk about somebody very important, I believe, from knowing you a little bit, that helped you realize the true nature of your health and how to fix it, and that's your grandmother.
Speaker 1:Yes, she basically started me as a kid.
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Speaker 2:Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. Welcome back folks to Diaries of a Lodge Owner, and I'm sitting here with good friend Gary Thiebaud and we've been having an unbelievable conversation, learning about your machining life and your childhood and your father working in the mines, and it was excellent. Thank you very much for that. You're very welcome. My pleasure and you know I can tell right now this isn't going to be our last podcast because there's so much stuff to unpack. But one of the things that you alluded to before the break was the fact that you had gotten very sick in your early 30s and with a mind that you have where it's cause and effect and you constantly look for not the symptoms but the root cause of things, and this kind of led you down a path that, um, that that that you currently do today. But, um, let's talk about how you you ended up sick and what you did to pull yourself out and start from your roots. We talked about your grandmother.
Speaker 1:Well, my grandmother on my mother's side was the only real grandparent I saw, because her husband was murdered and the police reports say accidental drowning, but the guy swam the Sturgeon Falls River Power Dam and that's recorded actually.
Speaker 2:So hold on, we went through some real history, I'll tell you. So let's okay, let's unpack that a little bit.
Speaker 1:Okay. So because we are Native, my mother would never even admit she was a Native woman till she was like a year or so before she passed away. She said you know, I challenged her more than once, even as a kid. I would say Mom, how did you get the name? The King's Indians? Because if you understand French and the definition of words, the name Savary in French, even if you look on government websites, it says basically savages of the king. Yeah, because Savary means Savarois. So how are you king? How are you chief? That's the definition of the name.
Speaker 1:So I was, you know, always asking questions like that and I was always being denied. You know the existence. But I always heard my father, you know, basically saying you know, when he was drinking a lot and if you know a good Newfoundlander, I mean he should have been the worm in the tequila bottle. If you know a good Newfoundlander, I mean he should have been the worm in the tequila bottle. Okay, I'm not kidding, I've seen him drink 24 bottles of Labatt's, 50 in an hour, 24 bottles, and then he'd go outside and work like he was a machine, I mean moving truckloads of sand with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. He had physical strength that most people can't even imagine. He had physical strength that most people can't even imagine. When I tell people a 150-pound man could hold, with his hands straight out, forearms like this, straight out, he could hold five bags of Portland cement. That's 400 pounds and walk with it anywhere.
Speaker 1:Like it was really crazy. And so, you know, I inherited quite a bit of physical strength from my father and my genealogy wise, because when I met my wife at 26 and she was 22, basically she said I didn't know my own strength and I used to pick up a 350 short block, complete, which was 550 pounds, and put it up on a bench, and I didn't use no engine crane or anything, I just picked it up off the floor and lifted it. And so, you know, I came from working hard. You know we physically worked hard all the time.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, when I saw my grandmother, she was always, you know, either gathering something or picking something up, and she'd roll it up and stick it in her apron. And you know, when she came to our house and we went into the forest picking blueberries, she'd tell me to go pick up something and I'd bring it to her and she started. You know I'd say, well, you know why, or whatever. She said, well, this is poison. And so, as a little kid, you know, you throw it on the ground. You think you're going to poison yourself. But she'd explained that if you use this with a little bit of fat and you put it on somebody's skin, uh, you know it would stop their nerve problem and I questioned those kinds of things and you know I had limited time around her and um, but it's stuck in my brain and so go back to the murder.
Speaker 2:Well, what happened?
Speaker 1:He drowned in a car. But the strange thing was that one of the people in the car there was four other people in that car that escaped out of the car and a farmer that was in that car hung himself a year later. And they all said that my grandfather was murdered and everybody accused him of being a native man. But he always said he was French. But if I show you my grandparents' pictures he looks like an Indian and a white man's haircut. To my brain there's just no way if this guy wasn't native.
Speaker 1:I I'm, I'm from the green land on the moon, okay, and you could see it. And even if I show you pictures of my father, you know, my father used to tell me, you know, that he had blonde hair, like I did, when I was a kid, when he was a kid, but you know, when you're, when you're a little kid six, seven, eight years old and you have really light, light hair, and your father has jet black, straight, poker hair, like I mean, it's jet black. Yeah, you know you, you can't, you can't fathom how could you have blonde hair and he has jet? How could he have blonde hair when he was a kid? Would you have blonde hair? And he has? How could he have blonde hair when he was a kid?
Speaker 1:And so, for example, if I go ahead a little bit, I had my DNA tested and you know, we know Newfoundland was invaded by the Vikings, and then the Dutch and then the Spanish, and then the French and then the English. So we got traces of that DNA all the way from the beginning. So someone had sex with the women and left the kids behind. There's just no other way around. You can deny it all you want. But my father said he was a Beothuk native Indian and he didn't show up in the census records until he was 19, after he entered the military, and the only reason he didn't get sent overseas is because they stopped taking men two weeks before the war ended. Otherwise I guess I wouldn't exist. Because Newfoundland, out of all the provinces in Canada, in the Second World War lost the most people, 8,800 men. 90% of my father's friends that he grew up with never came home. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1:And the First World War, because Newfoundland was still under England. You know, there was a group of. They were natives and French mixed. They were called the Blue Petit and they were called that because the government would not even give them material in green color. So they got this blue material and made all their own uniforms right and they stood out like a sore thumb. So when they were dropped overseas, I mean the foreign armies could see them like a mile away and that's a bright blue uniform they were. No one of them ever came home. Yet our governments don't even recognize that. It kind of pisses me off. You know what I mean, and so so why would?
Speaker 2:why would somebody want to murder your grandfather?
Speaker 1:He was a native guy buying up land and really he was so talented, according to what I learned from my mother, that people that were sick would come and he would pray on them in a different language and he would give them remedies. He would go in the forest and pick it up. My grandmother did the same thing, okay, and he people would bring them horses that they were basically going to shoot because the horse had a broken leg or the horse was something was wrong with it, and my grandfather was repairing these animals like they'd never been injured. And so when the Trans-Canada Highway was being built Highway 17, from March Day along the Vev River all the way to Hager and beyond, nobody knew how to negotiate through there, and so, even though they had equipment, they couldn't move the stones and the rocks without using a team of horses, and my grandfather had the best team of horses and the best buckboards. He was a builder, and so he basically built that whole foundation of that road for about 40 miles with a team of horses and unloading the stones.
Speaker 1:And other people were jealous because he invested the money in buying land and at one time he had four or 500 acres, and when my grandmother died, or when he died, my grandmother, she was so distraught she basically gave away a lot of land just to survive. And some of those pieces of land, guys put platinum mines in them and took out platinum. I'm not kidding, I can actually show you they made fortunes right. It was a lot of jealousy and things going on. You'm not kidding you, I can actually show you they made fortunes right. It was a lot of jealousy and things going on, you know. Back then, and so my mother, you know, I said well, you know, why didn't you ever admit? We were too badly persecuted. We were persecuted and picked on all the time because we're native, you know. So they just hid themselves. Yeah, we're French right, just hid themselves. Yeah, we're French right.
Speaker 2:And they spoke French right, so I grew up with that in my brain. So let's talk a little bit about you getting sick now. And we know that your grandparents had a wealth of knowledge with the outdoors and natural remedies.
Speaker 1:And my mother and father too, like my mother, you know, was a really good gardener. My father was even better, and my father when he came. I don't know where they disappeared to, but they were in the house and they something. You know. My mother used to throw out stuff all the time. I know she'd have no use for it and throw it away, but my father had the hand shears for shearing sheep.
Speaker 2:You know the old-fashioned ones, the metal ones, Yep, no exactly.
Speaker 1:And I want to tell you something my father I seen him shear sheep a few times when I was a little kid and, oh my God, I bet you, if there was these guys who shear sheep in Australia that are really good, I think if they would have come up to Northern Ontario and see my father's sheer sheep they would have shut up and walked back home, because he was like a machine, grabbed, the sheep tied the legs and the wool came off like it was in a minute by hand, you know, with that little flippin' thing, and you had to have really strong hands to use those things.
Speaker 1:And so in Newfoundland he raised sheep with his aunt and uncle. His grandfather basically died when he first came to Ontario and he never got to go back to the funeral. But he was out on the ocean fishing at 11 years old catching codfish on a steel line. And you know they would, that's the way that's. You know he was out of school at 11. He only went to grade three and it was his aunt that taught him how to read and write, because in school they didn't teach him anything, they were mostly beaten on him, and so she took him out of school and taught him how to read and write.
Speaker 1:And you know I got some old pictures from when, you know he was young, at my house and you know you think about it. My father held the world's record for cutting four foot pulp, which was 78 bushcord cut and piled in 22 days, and he was written about in the local newspaper in Cawdoroy not in Cawdoroy Valley but Cornerbrook. That local man sets world's record and nobody even today with a chainsaw has cut more than 75 bushcord of firewood or of any kind of wood and have it piled with a road for a team of horses to pick it up, even with a truck. Nobody's done that. My father did that when, you know, after the Second World War, like probably around 1950. Yeah, right, and so you know they came. They were cutting firewood, as kids with a buck saw. Every day you had to cut wood, Right? And you know, I looked at all kinds of old records and books and you know it shows that you know anthropologists that came in the 1600s. They said you know, the indigenous, the Biotic natives of Newfoundland, have an unbelievable ability to build clapboard houses. So I think we'll keep them around for a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know this ignorance, like you know, like it just pisses me off when I read some of this stuff that they wrote, you know, and it really does get under my skin badly, like crazy, does get under my skin badly, like crazy. That you know, I estimate from what my own brain thinking is. I estimate that in Canada alone we have at least 5 million people should be recognized as being indigenous or Métis. And we're not, and we are a dominant force. We built this country. It didn't fall into somebody's lap, we were innovators. You know, without us nobody else would have survived, they wouldn't have at all and I know this and you know so. I know that the way I was raised in a forest at the edge of a little community, you know we were very self-sufficient and that's one of the things I teach today is self-sufficiency, and I try to talk about that.
Speaker 1:And when I got sick at 38 years of age and I went to the medical system for two years back and forth I mean, my arms looked like heroin junkie. I was afraid to wear a short sleeve shirt in the summertime. Police pull you over, you go to jail. You wear a short sleeve shirt in the summertime. Police pull you over, you go to jail. You know I'm not kidding From all of the needles that they were putting into you and you know they couldn't tell me what was going on with me, but I knew something was wrong. So I blew up on the doctors and I basically gave up on them.
Speaker 1:And because I started going to chapter bookstores from where my business was the last position in around the city of Toronto at Western Road and Finch, I used to go up to Highway 7 and Finch I mean on Western Road and go to the chapters. And I spent two years every night from Monday night to Friday night, from 7 o'clock to 10 o'clock at night, reading, because I didn't have money. You know, I was a poor businessman. Nobody's rich when they start a business, believe me. Anyway, I was studying to help myself and you know, the girls at the front at the cash would announce me our name on the PA.
Speaker 1:Gary, we're closing in five minutes time Cause they knew I was in the store even if they didn't see me come in, I was there every day and I educated myself and so I started doing things and changing things. And then what my grandmother and my parents basically taught me about basic stuff, I started really implementing it and researching it and practicing it and putting it into the food supply. And I told my wife one day in our Etobicoke backyard which we still have, that house in Etobicoke I said you know, I'm growing all my own food and she said, well, that's going to be a lot of work. Because she came from the Orangeville area here. You know her father was the care. Her grandfather was a caretaker in Grand Valley for the school for 50 years. He went to the same restaurant, same same stool for 50 years.
Speaker 1:Seriously, the people who owned the restaurant came to his funeral because they lost their best customer. Yeah, right, anyway. So they came, you know. So you know my wife signed the family, for example. You know they were farmers, right um, the german side came in the 1600s and then the irish came in the 1800s and married into the indigenous native people and then basically they had farms and they grew up on the land. And so you know, I had a similar background and so even harder. You know, like I mean, I was hunting for the food, we weren't just going to buy it. You know you had to kill it, drag it home and clean it up and put it in the freezer you know, or preserve it somehow, right.
Speaker 1:So I decided I was going to go back to that. I stopped everything from the stores and if my kids wanted something, well, we bought it for them, whatever. But I basically started digging up the backyard and you know, a hundred by 60 lot, the 60 by I don't know, 55 or something like that backyard had a few trees in it, lots of shade from the neighbors. I took the spots that were sunny and I basically 10 by 10 garden plots. I started growing food and I grew so much food and I never spent tons of hours doing it. I mean I would walk out in the backyard drinking a cup of tea and basically picked out the weed plants that I would cook at lunchtime and letting my food grow.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, my wife and I educated ourselves and I talked and she got some old recipes from my mother and stuff like that and I started buying mason jars at yard sales and we started learning how to preserve food and the way we did. And then I started experimenting with drying stuff. Like I saw some older people in my mother's grandmother's side of the family, some of the cousins that were drying stuff and stuff like that. So I had all this little background information and I just started expanding it to the point where I advertised on the internet through GoDaddy, years ago that my food bill when my two daughters were home eating and there was no lack of anything my food bill was $30 a week or less, and I'm talking that was like that for 30 years.
Speaker 1:Now I got trouble to spend 15 bucks. There's only two of us at home. I don't know what do I need to buy. I buy some bread once in a while. That's about it, and I specific bread. I don't buy just anything. And so you know that's. What pushed me to becoming independent and self-sufficient was my health, and so I studied on my own, you know, researching and everything for 10 years, from the time I was 40 till I was 50. And I decided because I was going to health food shows and you know people were getting me to speak.
Speaker 2:And how long did it take you to fix yourself, like, what was the issue? Did you actually find out what the issue was, or did you just kind of go to the root of the problem?
Speaker 1:They couldn't decide between Crohn's colitis or bowel cancer. And I knew I had Crohn's and colitis because I saw my x-rays and I saw that my intestinal tract some places were the size of my small finger and other places it was as wide as the palm of my hand. And so I know that's inflammation in your gut lining. And I knew that because all of the research I had done and I was experiencing all these cramping and pains and bleeding and and you know it was just horrible and lower back pain. And so you know I went to chiropractors and there was a temporary relief and all this kind of stuff and no matter what the doctors gave me, it made it worse. So I realized taking their crap wasn't working and so I started, you know, doing things and what were the key things that made a difference?
Speaker 2:or were there? Was it just the combination of everything?
Speaker 1:It's a combination, but there's also some key ingredients. So first of all, I eliminated all the store-bought foods. I really I just stopped doing everything. All of the processed stuff, Everything else processed, Yep, Okay, I just eliminated it all. At one time I was even making my own bread. The recipe that's in the Bible is equal of chapter four, verse nine. I was using that recipe to make bread and when I went to nutrition school at 50 years of age for the two years of plus I was there part-time. If I showed up on a Tuesday or Thursday night without bread, there was 35 young women who wanted to dissect me and kill me because I didn't bring bread, I'm not kidding. So because I made bread that was so tasty and so good and I don't do so much of it anymore because I'm kind of a little bit busy, but in the wintertime I do a little once in a while, Anyway. So when I decided to look around for a school, I went around and I so you eliminated all of the processed foods.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Then what are the other?
Speaker 1:I started growing all my own stuff and doing it as naturally as possible, and what I started doing was investigating plants, even plants that I didn't know anything about it. I would pick it up and taste it. I didn't go to books, I didn't go to the internet. I didn't know anything about it. I would pick it up and taste it. I didn't go to books, I didn't go to the internet. I don't anything. I just I have a nose, I can smell things and taste things like I don't know, like radar, and I can't explain that. It's just in my brain.
Speaker 1:So when I first met my wife and I, we went, went. I took her hunting and, uh, you know, we'd only gone out for about three months and I took her up North and we went hunting and I saw this fern, a wood branch fern on the ground, and I always, as a kid, loved the smell of this fern. Like I told my wife, I said you know, if this thing, if I could put a skirt on this and it could cook, I'd get married to it. I mean, I just I could lay down in a patch of these ferns and just stay there. I just love the smell. I don't know. So I don't know if you, whether you don't believe in God or don't believe in God, but I think God put that in my brain to recognize that this was medicine for me. And so I remember hunting one fall and I carried a little cooler around with me into my friend's camps and stuff like that, and I only ate my own food. And when I had bought my property after 2001 in Sudbury I built a little really ruckus hardcore camp. I mean made out of the local pine trees and leftover plywood I mean it's as rustic as you can get and I put a polycarbon fiber roof on it and some of the screws weren't tight and the wind would blow and the rain would come in and I'd sleep in there and I would make my own stuff.
Speaker 1:And so I showed up in my friend's camp one night and I wanted some hot water and they said, oh, it's on the stove. So I went outside and I grabbed a handful of these ferns and I put them in the cup and I poured hot water in and my friends knew I wasn't feeling that good and they said, ah, you listen to your doc, you're going to kill yourself. I said, well, if I drop dead after I drink this tea. You know the bears roaming outside your camp. Just throw me outside, you know he'll take the head and my wife will find the body. She'll collect the insurance. I don't care, you know. But I'm not going to. I'm I'm, I'm trying something. You don't like it too bad.
Speaker 1:And so I started drinking this tea and I noticed after the next morning my gut felt better. So I drank this tea every day while I was in the bush for two weeks. I had a little metal cup and I put some leaves inside and I boiled the water over the stove over the fire and I put the leaves in and I made tea and I drank it. And I started noticing by the end of the two weeks almost I wasn't passing any blood armies at all. My gut felt so good and so I picked the jumbos black garbage bag times two full of this stuff that it was so much of it that I couldn't see out of the passenger side front window of a Ford F-150. And I came home and my wife said what have you lost your flipping mind? Where are we going to put all this stuff? I had it hanging on the chandeliers on the back of the Chesterfield. I had it in the laundry room, every place I could hook something up and I tried it and I started experimenting with it because I wanted to know how much to use or whatever, and I figured out that about two tablespoons in a cup of water and I could use it for three days in a row and my gut started healing, and healing really good. And so when I ran into people who had problems, I started teaching them how to use it. And then I started expanding my knowledge on other plants and looking at and thinking about what my grandmother had taught me about certain things. And then I started, you know, reading books and looking at old things and going to yard sales and seeing some old book from the 40s or 50s and buying it for 25 cents and, you know, reading through the entire book to find some information and I started making a repertoire in my brain.
Speaker 1:And then I was privileged to, you know, end up working with different people on different reserves elderly people because you know, the school organized groups to go to different reserves and help them grow food or do stuff, and most people, you know, would come at 12 o'clock not knowing some very much stuff and they were just there to, you know, give a little bit of labor and glean whatever they could for free, not really having any respect for anybody, and four o'clock they all disappeared. Well, at 4 pm I stuck around. I'd sit down with this elderly person and I'd say what else do you need done? Community garden, we've got it under control. I'd bring a little rototiller and shovels and everything.
Speaker 1:And I remember one time I showed up at this one place and I dug so many holes to plant the corn. The guy said thank God you showed up because we would have never done this today. Like, I dug about two acres of holes every two feet. I plant, you know, and they were planting six corn inside and I was explaining to them what to do and this elderly woman started realizing wow, this guy's got skill. So I would go down a lot of times on a Saturday afternoon just visit her. And, um, she was pissed off at the community she was in. She said I'm going to start putting on a skirt because nobody wants. She said they all come and eat, but then nobody wants to grow anything. And so she'd see me picking certain things to do and use and she'd say what do you do with that? I said, well, I do it like. Well, I do it like this. And so we exchanged all kinds of information and I'd done that all over the place in Manitoba, all over Ontario, parts of Quebec.
Speaker 1:I've run into all you know like sometimes I'd be driving down the road in the city of Toronto and I'd be in a hurry going to pick up some parts and I'd see some foreign person on the side of the road picking up stuff from tree branches or whatever. See some foreign person on the side of the road picking up stuff from tree branches or whatever, and I would stop and say what are you doing? Uh, how are you using this? And sometimes you kind of speak English. But they would, they would understand, I wanted to know, and they would explain to me in their broken English oh, I'm using this for this, and so you know like one time I saw a woman on the side of the road on an underpass. She was picking up.
Speaker 1:It grows at my farm like crazy. It has a lot of silica in it and it grows where it's wet always, and I'm trying to think of the right name now. But I saw this woman and she could barely speak any English and she was picking up like bags of this stuff, and so I finally got it out of her that she was bringing it home and put it in the bathtub to soak with it to help heal her bones from the arthritis. Really, yeah, that's what she was using it for. And so I said wow.
Speaker 1:And so since I've known that part, I've run into different people who actually use this to help fertilize their potatoes and they actually make tea for it to spray on their potatoes to get rid of the bugs. And so you know, I've never stopped looking at stuff. So, for example, you know, last fall we'll say August, right Beginning to start to cool down a little bit, cooler nights, I'd say you know, we're going to have a lot of, we're going to have a real heavy winter this winter. We're going to have a lot of snow and it's going to be pretty damn cold. We're going to have a hard winter and we're going to have a cold late spring. It's going to be up and down and people are looking at me like I'm sideways you know, I said well, watch, it's going to happen.
Speaker 1:And you see, I look at certain things and I can see from certain plants, I can see from certain trees how much fruit and berries are on certain things that you can't eat until they freeze and thaw out. And I know that the songbirds coming back, that's their food source before the ground's fully thawed out and there's worms for them to eat. They're eating that to keep them alive for maybe a month or two and then they start transitioning and at the same time those berries clean them out. So, for example, I've had women come to me as a nutritionist who want to get pregnant. I've had, out of 11 women, I've had one that doesn't want to listen. That's why she didn't. She doesn't have any children. Okay, I'm not kidding you. She wants to bang her head in the wall, listen to the medical system? Fine, go ahead.
Speaker 1:The other 10 have all brought in their children and show me. And one woman, she was only given a 2% chance of ever having a second child. She had so many miscarriages. They said there's just no way you're going to have children. And she was sent to me by an osteopath. I explained to her what to do. I gave her some jar with some berries in it that I'd cooked down with a little bit of raw honey to get rid of the bad taste.
Speaker 2:And what kind?
Speaker 1:of berries, european bird cherry, and I would have to explain to somebody who was listening to this how to use it and why to use it. And it's almost now that you can't pick anymore. It's almost the end of the season and I'm probably going to pick some and make some extra so that in case I run into somebody that needs that help. So I've learned to educate my mind and not believe anything. So my mother had a saying when I was growing up don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see and you know. I will never forget that because I think that's one of the best pieces of advice you could ever be given. Absolutely Right.
Speaker 1:You know, people get brainwashed by other people's stupidity. If you look at the history of all of the great inventors, they went against the grain, they went out of their way. Some of these guys bankrupt their companies three and four times. They worked 20-hour days for trying everything that you could imagine, like the light bulb. The guy tried 1,001 things till he hit tungsten and made the light bulb right. But he never gave up and he bankrupted his businesses three times, lost everything he owned.
Speaker 1:You know, look at the history. If you look at, you know people talk about rights. Look at the Constitution of the United States, the ten founding people. Three of them were murdered, seven of them, their properties were burned into destruction on purpose, so that they would sign the papers, so that the Europeans would control us. They never quit. Not one of them put their signatures on.
Speaker 1:It's the only reason United States and Canada are free places. People don't really investigate stuff and understand. You know, I keep telling people and we're going to get a little bit political in my brain here right now, and I'm very strong about this we have bad government in Canada and we are catering to the Chinese Communist Party because when people say made in Canada, the box is made in China with the label Nothing in here is made in Canada. We have no manufacturing anymore to talk about. And our American cousins down there, because we're the same population, are saying wait a minute. You know we're tired of this. Well, we got to change ways. And people are talking about tariffs. Well, most people don't realize the United States in 1913, until then, nobody paid any tax property or income tax. And in Canada there was minor property tax but income tax was not into law until 1948, right, it was the five-year deal to pay for the war measure Four Measures Act and they kept it on. It's against the law to charge a human being tax. That is a fact. The only reason they get away with it is you have a social insurance number, so you become a corporation. That's why they charge you tax. But it's not law.
Speaker 1:I had an employee some 35 years ago from New Brunswick. It came into my business and asked me when he would get paid and I said well, we hold one day back. You get paid tonight, thursday night, and you know, friday's on next week's thing. He said that's fine. He said don't take any taxes from me. Nothing, I said, but I have to. He said no, you don't, just give me my straight check. And the government audited me. Okay, they never questioned how come I never took any tax from that guy, because they know it's the truth. They know, they know it factually.
Speaker 1:And that guy told me a story where he worked for a guy in New Brunswick who had 55 employees and the government took him to court every year or two and every time he quoted something out of the Constitution. Boom, gabel went down, have a nice day, sir. And he walked out and never paid a dime for his employees or himself ever, and so we tolerate shit. You understand, yeah? And something I hope this podcast goes to a lot of native reserves. Unless you start voting to change for your benefit, you're always going to be stuck in the quagmire of no progress when you have the greatest wealth sitting in your hands and you haven't even realized it your independence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1:And you know people like me. When I go on the reserves, they look at me like I'm the pale face. Okay, well, you know, I know survival skills that none of your children are being taught anymore. They're being brainwashed into. You know the laptop and the computer and the cell phone. And guess what? If I shut the electricity off, which I predicted will happen guess what it's going to suck to be you when you don't know what to eat.
Speaker 2:And that's something that everybody should know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you need to start waking up and become more reliant on you, that you're not stuck depending on somebody else. And I mean the famous words of John F Kennedy. He said stop relying on the government and saying what can my government do for me and what can you do for your? Government should be turned around. And so you know people, you know we are the government, we are the people. If we allow what's going on, we won't be the people, we'll be the serfs and the slaves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and on that note, my friend, I think we touched on about four more podcasts there.
Speaker 2:Oh, don't get me started, oh yeah, Well, hey, listen, we've basically come to the end of our time and I really, really appreciate you being here. And again, like I say, I think we touched on about three or four more podcasts in there. We haven't even talked about a ton of different things that you do as far as blood analysis and everything else, how we met, but that will be for another day. And, gary, thank you so much for joining me here today. On Diaries of a Lodge Owner.
Speaker 1:It was my pleasure to show up here and I hope, to all your listeners. I will be back and I might be very controversial with some of the things I say, but you know what the facts are. The facts and the truth will always be the truth, Well, and the truth shall set you free.
Speaker 2:At first it'll piss you off. The truth shall set you free, and first it'll piss you off. Yeah, not the truth, yes, and folks, thank you all for getting to this point and listening to us. And you know, every week I say it, it's head on over to the fishingcanadacom website. Get in on all those free giveaways, folks. And thank you to all of the supporters we have out there. Andrew at Lakeside Marine, we love you. And thanks again to everybody and Nixon, night night buddy. We will talk to all of you soon. And thus brings us to the conclusion of another episode of Diaries of a Lodge Owner Stories of the North. I've been railing in the hog since the day I was born.
Speaker 3:Bending my rock stretching my line.
Speaker 1:Someday I might own a lodge, and that'd be fine.
Speaker 4:I'll be making my way the only way I know how, working hard and sharing the North With all of my pals Boy, I'm a good old boy. I bought a lodge and lived my dream.
Speaker 2:And now I'm here talking about how life can be as good as it seems yeah, Back in 2016,.
Speaker 6:Frank and I had a vision to amass the single largest database of muskie angling education material anywhere in the world.
Speaker 5:Our dream was to harness the knowledge of this amazing community and share it with passionate anglers just like you.
Speaker 6:Thus, the Ugly Pike podcast was born and quickly grew to become one of the top fishing podcasts in North.
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Speaker 6:The Ugly Pike Podcast isn't just about fishing. It's about creating a tight knit community of passionate anglers who share the same love for the sport. Through laughter, through camaraderie and an unwavering spirit of adventure, this podcast will bring people together.
Speaker 5:Subscribe now and never miss a moment of our angling adventures. Tight lines everyone.
Speaker 6:Find Ugly Pike now on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4:Hi everybody. I'm Angelo Viola and I'm Pete Bowman. Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's Favorite Fishing Show, but now we're hosting a podcast. That's right. Every Thursday, ang and I will be right here in your ears bringing you a brand new episode of Outdoor Journal Radio. Hmm, now, what are we going to talk about for two hours every week? Well, you know there's going to be a lot of fishing.
Speaker 6:I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and how to catch them, and they were easy to catch.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but it's not just a fishing show. We're going to be talking to people from all facets of the outdoors, from athletes, All the other guys would go golfing Me and Garth and Turk and all the Russians would go fishing To scientists.
Speaker 6:But now that we're reforesting and letting things breathe, it's the perfect transmission environment for life.
Speaker 5:To chefs If any game isn't cooked properly, marinated, you will taste it.
Speaker 4:And whoever else will pick up the phone Wherever you are. Outdoor Journal Radio seeks to answer the questions and tell the stories of all those who enjoy being outside. Find us on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.