Field Note: The Man Beside Me
You never really know who’s sitting in the seat beside you.
On my second flight today, I found myself beside a reserved man on his way to Labrador for a two-week shift as a mining supervisor. By the time we landed, we’d travelled through batteries and pipelines, artificial intelligence, books, grandchildren, environmental stewardship, and the future of Canada.
Some of the best conversations happen at 30,000 feet.
Before long, we discovered that we had something in common. We both grew up in a world before the internet. We remembered dial telephones, party lines, libraries, paper maps, and learning through curiosity because there was no search engine waiting to answer every question. Now, here we were talking about artificial intelligence—how it’s already changing the mining industry, how it’s beginning to reshape education, and how both of us are trying to understand a future that would have seemed almost unimaginable when we were children.
It reminded me that while technology changes rapidly, curiosity remains one of the most enduring human skills.
He spoke thoughtfully about his work, overseeing diamond drilling in search of nickel, the importance of safety, and the realities of spending two weeks at a time in a remote mining camp. He described working long thirteen-hour shifts and laughed that, once you’re underground, one unexpected advantage is that there are far fewer bugs than above ground. We talked about the environmental impact of mining and the difficult balance between extracting the minerals needed for new technologies and protecting the landscapes where they’re found.
He also spoke about his grandson. Being away for weeks at a time isn’t always easy, and you could hear how much his family mattered to him.
What surprised me most, though, was learning that while he’s at camp he reads—constantly. Two books a week, he estimated. Michael Crichton is one of his favourite authors. Somehow it seemed fitting. Here was a man whose work depends on understanding the ground beneath our feet, yet who spends his evenings exploring entirely different worlds through books.
As our conversation drifted toward politics, I was reminded once again that most people don’t fit neatly into the boxes we imagine for them. He wasn’t interested in slogans or certainty. Like so many people I meet, he was weighing difficult questions: industry and environment, innovation and responsibility, domestic priorities and international commitments. He wasn’t trying to win an argument. He was simply thinking out loud about the kind of country he hopes we’ll continue to build.
By the time we landed, I realized I hadn’t simply met a mining supervisor.
I’d met a reader.
A grandfather.
A lifelong learner.
Someone who, like me, has spent a lifetime adapting to a rapidly changing world without ever losing his curiosity.
These are the conversations I hope never to stop having.
They remind me that every seat beside us holds an entire life. Sometimes all it takes is a little curiosity to discover it.
