PART ONE Chapter One

THE LITTLEST HOBO

"Aren't the pigeons funny?" That was the first thing the disheveled old man said to me. "Aren't the pigeons funny?" and with that I was launched on one of the most fantastic adventures that even a novelist in his wildest moments couldn't have formulated. It has totally changed my life, as well as the lives of my wife Sharon and our two sons, Steven and Sean.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning when I was asked that peculiar question about the pigeons. I had taken a few moments to stop for a junk food lunch at a drive-in hamburger joint on Kings way, in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver, B.C. (Canada).

I had missed the coffee break crowd, and it was too early for the lunch rush. As a result, I was alone in the place. While I stood, sort of daydreaming, waiting for my food, I was startled when he spoke.

"Aren't the pigeons funny?"

My first thought was to turn and look out onto the parking lot, usually busy with pigeons after the food scraps. But the peculiar thing was, THERE WEREN'T ANY THERE!

The man who asked the question was standing right behind me, so I had to turn around to see him. He was somewhere in his fifties, I'd say, bearded, somewhat disheveled. He was wearing a faded denim jacket and looked a bit like a farmer.

"I have this place in the country," he says to me. "These birds will be gathered. They're on this loft," and he's motioning with his arms. "They're on this loft, and there's this other bird over here. And a light comes shining through this bird and hits these other birds." He said, "I feed all the birds." And he told me quantities, in bushels. You know, he told me figures.

"Well, I thought he was a guy who just wanted someone to talk to, right? You know, sometimes some older folks just like to come up to you and talk. Well, I'm not doing anything anyway, so I stood there and listened politely. But all the time he was talking, he didn't once look me in the eye. He was looking off into space telling me that something was going to happen to the world, but that there were enclosures to protect certain people. He assured me that me and my family would be protected. We'd be safe.

"Well, here's my order," I said, and prepared to leave. But before I could, he looked me straight in the eye for the first time since he started talking, and he said, "I'll see you later." Then he touched me on the shoulder and an electric like shock went through me. If he hadn't done that, I probably would have dismissed the whole thing as some poor old lonely soul wanting a bit of an audience. But that shock like sensation simply underlined the whole thing.

I took my lunch and left, but as I was leaving, I looked back at this character once more. I was really puzzled about the encounter and seriously wondering just what the heck it was all about. He just stood there for a moment where I'd left him, then he turned a circle. He turned right around in a circle and walked out the door and along the side of the restaurant. He disappeared! He just sort of vanished into thin air.

"Well. That's pretty weird," I thought to myself. He never ordered. The waitress never asked him if he wanted anything, just as if he wasn't there. I shook my head as if I were dreaming the whole thing. Day dreaming, you know, but he touched me. And there was that electrical jolt. I couldn't deny that.

"Then I thought, "He's probably gone to the washroom." And I wanted to go into the washroom just to confirm that indeed he'd gone in there. But I got a countering thought. It said, "No, you don't want to go in there, because if you go in there and discover that he's not in there, how are you going to handle what's just happened?" What was going on was I was being told to leave things as they were. I mean, you could always rationalize that he's in the bathroom, and that he was just some farmer that wanted to talk, right? So that's where I left it, unresolved.

"About two years later, I'd just about forgotten the restaurant incident, when it happened again. This time there were two of them, looking like skid road bums. I was cleaning windows in downtown Vancouver at the time.

One of them stood back about thirty feet and watched while the other came up to me and said, "Careful for the height".

What did he mean? Was he referring to my work as a window cleaner? My work on scaffolds, ladders, or hanging off of buildings? I turned to him and he repeated the phrase, "Careful for the height." Then he said it a third time, and went on, "Me and my friend," and he pointed to the other fellow standing off a bit, "Me and my friend have been here a long time. We've seen people come and go. We've seen people born and die." Then he said, "Everything's going to be okay. We're close by all the time." Then he touched me on the shoulder and said, "Just take care." And when he did that, a warm electric sensation went through me, just like the time in the restaurant. He turned and walked to his companion and the two of them just sort of faded off the street right in front of me. Like they weren't there. That was in 1973.

In 1974, a wino came up to me on the sidewalk by one of those little parks in downtown New Westminster (British Columbia) right near the skid road area. He walked right up beside me, looking for all the world like a wino, or a hobo. Even more strange, he had a wad of gum wrappers in his hand. Juicy fruit and Spearmint wrappers. And he had them separated into two piles, one yellow and one green. He was just picking them up off of the street, and I couldn't help thinking that he must be pretty weird to be doing that.

As if to reply to my thought he said, "I collect these you know. You should know about that." And he looked right into my face and pointed at the wrappers. "These are the Protestants and these are the catholics," he said, indicating the two colors, "You know, you can't get just any. They can't be torn or dirty." He said, "These are special wrappers.'

Well, he kept on beside me as I was walking, and he was jabbering about something or other, and all the time I was thinking, "This guy is cracked."

"You know," he said, "there's this wagon, and it's pulled by some horses, this wagon load of wheat. And it comes to this elevator and goes up a ramp, and the horses are skittish, `cause they don't like going up the ramp."

Bang! My mind is blown away! He was going right into my head, into my memories of when I was a boy of about four. I was riding on this wagon load of wheat in Saskatchewan, going into the elevator with my dad. And, as the wino had said, the horses didn't like going up the ramp into the elevator. When they get inside a hoist comes up and tips the wagon off of its front wheels and dumps the grain.

I was astounded because this guy is describing what occurred one particular day. He described the whole thing. I could remember going to the elevator and what happened there. But I don't remember coming home.

"You got frightened of the machinery in the elevator," he said.

Well, you know, there were three things I had been frightened about, and right there he told me all about the three of them, talking about the equipment and all. I was amazed. Now I'm really wondering who this guy is. What he isn't I thought, is a skid road bum. This guy is no wino. He has to be coming from some other dimension, some other level. But why? What for?

Questions aside, I was so astounded, and so excited about it, that I wanted to phone Sharon right then and there and tell her about it. I saw a phone booth and turned to it to make the call. But I discovered the phone cord was broken. When I turned back to the wino, he'd vanished.

In the fall of 1974, one particular day, I was washing windows down near the skid road area of Vancouver when all of a sudden, out of the clear blue, this thing got beamed into my mind. It was just as if someone was beside me whispering in my ear. And I started to get a poem coming into my mind. It was so compelling I had to stop work, and write it down. Now, I'd diddled around a bit writing some poetry before, but never anything like this. That day, I wrote down the "Prince of Hope". I didn't compose it; I just wrote it down like it was being dictated to me. It started;

One day, while I was walking by the sea, I met a man who's most different from others that I've seen. On his cloak he wore a star-like symbol that had more points than one we're prone to draw.

You know, we're prone to draw the five pointed star and this was referring to the six pointed Star of David. And it went on;

And I saw this light shine from around him, and I asked if I could wear his coat.......

And it came out complete. It had a rather peculiar rhythm and rhyme, but there it was. And it goes on to describe how after taking the coat, the light didn't come as well; that the light came from him, not his cloak.

Then I asked him where he was from and why he had come, `I am from shores so far away that ships of space which you possess will never touch. But yet so close that your heart can nearly see.'

I was just overwhelmed. It was just coming out of space, so to speak, complete, and all I had to do was write it down. Remember, I wasn't psyching myself up to write poetry. I was cleaning windows when all of a sudden, ZING! In came the piece. I got the complete first part right away, then the last part of it, then the middle parts just flowed in over the following couple of days.

In one instance, a waitress came up to me in the restaurant, and out of the blue says, "Why don't you write something on patience." Right out of the blue. But as soon as she said it... bang!... there it was, complete.

After I let it sit for awhile, I published it myself with the help of a few friends. We hand bound the copies and all. Over the years since, it has been requested by and sent to most English departments in universities across Canada. It's in the B.C. (British Columbia) Archives and so on. But of the 700 (copies) we've put out, I haven't sold a single copy. I just had to give them away. After all, it was given to me.

In 1975, I had three visions. I saw what was going to happen in the future. I also saw that these visions were tied in with these strange encounters I'd been having and the strange thoughts and inspirations that had been coming to me. It was as if someone had been trying to get through to me from another dimension.

In the first vision, I was standing in the mountains on a grassy slope. Nearby was a powerful being, sitting just off to my left. He was beaming a ray at me which tranquillized me so I wouldn't be frightened at what I was seeing. And what I was seeing was incredible.

I saw a mountain coming unglued. It was crumbling and the big rocks were just coming down like a waterfall. And as they fell, they turned into houses, buses, and other types of vehicles, all containing people. They were being crushed as they came down. I saw the people in anguish before they were crushed and killed.

The spirit guide who was off to my left interrupted my thoughts then with a command. "No! Don't look at that, look over here!". And out of this holocaust were tumbling some people. They were landing on the grassy slopes of the mountains unhurt. They were being thrown clear. I couldn't identify any of them, they were just people. Then the spirit said, "That's what you have to see. You will see that and you will see those people living."

Here I was, surrounded by mountains, all of them intact except for the one directly in front of me which was breaking up. And I was being shown that people would land on these green grassy slopes and be alright.

Right after that I had a second vision which showed another aspect of this whole thing where there were groupings of people. Some of them were already in place, and others were moving to B.C. from all over the globe. They were being drawn consciously and unconsciously to safe areas or pockets of protection in British Columbia. That was in 1975.

At the beginning of 1976, my next encounter with a guide occurred. The older chap, the one who'd appeared to me first in the restaurant, appeared to me one night in a dream. He had me by the shoulders, he shook me, and asked me three questions.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Well, I'm Menno Pauls, window cleaner," I replied. He didn't like that answer. He shook me again and asked, "Where are you going?" And I told him I was cleaning windows. He didn't like that answer either. He shook me again and said, "You should know by now who you are and what you're doing; or what you're supposed to be doing." Then he asked, "Where are you going?" And he answered that one. All of a sudden I was in a valley on an old farm, an old homestead. There was a barn on one part of it, and behind me, an old farm house. We were standing in a field of green crops of some sort. Maybe alfalfa, I don't know, but it was really green.

That was the last thing I saw and then `poof'. Everything disappeared. Then it dawned on me. "With everything that's been happening here," I thought "from 1971 to 1976, you should start to get the drift of what your role is, and what you're doing."

After that I started getting directions almost in the form of commands. They'd say, "Go and talk to so and so".

The first contact I made was with a couple who lived on a farm near Handy, up in the Fraser Valley. We had known them for maybe five or six years; they were very unique people. Only now did I realize why we were acquainted. When I went to see them, I knew exactly what to tell them.

"You know," I said, "one day you're going to come to in a green kind of a setting, a valley and mountain area. When that happens," I told them, "something awful will have happened in the world, but no harm will come to you. You'll be alright. It'll be very strange. I'm telling you now so you'll have a chance to think about it, let it soak in, so you can cope with what's going to happen and help others who will be there, but without the benefit of knowing why."

Message delivered and accepted. I was on my way. Now the real work had begun.