And I know that the record which I make is true; and I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge.

—1 Nephi 1:3

Every word of this is true.

I have to make that clear up front, because some of you are going to recall that I'm a professional science fiction writer and assume that I created the memoir that follows from whole cloth.

Not so. It really did happen to me, and I can trot out the newspaper clippings and conviction records if you want proof. I've changed the names of most of the participants, but the events themselves happened the way I describe them.

Back in the late eighties, I told this story frequently—often to folks from Utah who said, "Oh, yeah, I remember hearing something about that on the news." A good oral telling took at least two hours, and even then it didn't do the story justice.

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It may not surprise you to learn that I was once a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—dark suit, tie, name tag, short hair, the whole bit. Two entire years spent knocking on doors, from the tender age of nineteen to the oh-so-lofty legality of twenty-one. I was called to the Canada Calgary Mission, which covered all of Alberta, parts of British Columbia, and the entirety of the Northwest Territories. I labored there from September of '86 until March of '87, at which point I was transferred to the Washington Spokane Mission and served out my next eighteen months before returning home as the most infamous son of the sleepy burg of Kaysville, Utah.

This is the story of that transfer, and how it came about.

I left a girlfriend behind when I went on my mission, a young woman by the name of Katrina McCormick. In high school she had been a member of the drill team and part of the popular crowd. But regardless of her social position, she was awfully smart. She read SF—Frank Herbert being her favorite—which was part of our initial attraction. We didn't start dating until two years after high school, just three weeks before I was due to leave for the North Countries. In that short time we fell in love, and Katrina resolved to wait for me so we could get married when I returned from my mission. Yeah, so we were a couple of naïve, mixed-up kids. I guess everyone was at some point.

Of course, I missed Katrina horribly once I reached Canada, and in the first few months the two of us talked on the phone several times. Now, you must understand, not only are missionaries not allowed to date or to fraternize with members of the opposite sex in a social way, they are also not allowed to talk on the phone with anyone from back home. It's too easy for them to get too trunky too quickly when they're supposed to be working "with an eye single to the glory of God," having put the cares of a "normal" life behind them. (Of course, letters are very important to missionaries. Pity the missionary whose companion receives a lot of mail while getting none himself.)

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The bus rolled into Calgary at around six-thirty in the morning. I waited for the transfer bus anxiously in the huge downtown Greyhound station, fearing that someone from the mission would spot me and the game would be up.

Now, the way I'm telling the story, you may get the impression that a mission is something of a police state. If so, you wouldn't be wrong. It has all the same trappings—totalitarian leadership, constant indoctrination, "protection" from non-approved media, and even informers. According to the party line, no missionary is compelled to do anything he doesn't want to do. If he doesn't want to stay, he doesn't have to. In reality, however, the pressure to stay is applied mercilessly. Our hypothetical runaway is counseled very strongly to try to stick things out, if even just for another month. And if that works, then he's counseled to try staying for another month after that, and so on. I'm sure you catch the drift.

Admittedly, there is a somewhat defensible rationale for this—assuming the missionary intends to stick with the Church and not apostatize completely. For those who actually believe, leaving one's mission can lead to a sense of failure or incompleteness in life that is difficult to shake. My father is a good case in point—he came home from his mission in Germany after only six months and still can't shake that sense of failure—but that's another story.

In any event, in order to have a chance to bring this sort of pressure to bear, a mission president will wish to have a rather serious chat with any elder who wants to leave—laying out the facts of life, so to speak.

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So there I am, unable to reenter Canada, closed up in a stuffy office with this pretty young Immigration officer who's staring at me like I'm something from the bottom of the Marianas Trench as I try to explain what's been going on in my life for the past couple of days.

There are two things to keep in mind at this point. First, I was not returning to Calgary with the intention of returning to my mission. My intention was to go back and get a proper release, then to catch a nice Western Airlines flight back to Salt Lake City. The second is that I had surrendered my work visa to the Americans the previous day, having stated that I had no intention of returning to Canada.

The officer grilled me interminably, wanting clarification of what a missionary was and what that entailed, asking why I was returning to Calgary if I was only doing so to facilitate going back to Salt Lake, wondering what strange sort of cult this was I belonged to, never quite seeming to grasp anything I was trying to explain.

After an eternity of my sweating this out (though it was probably only fifteen minutes or so), the officer finally cracked a smile and said, "Missions are hard, aren't they, Elder? Mine sure was, harder than I expected."

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As I said last time, Snow and I had numerous adventures in our two and a half short months together, most of which once made for great telling at mission reunions. There was the Mattress on Top of the Car, the Evening of Two Hearty Dinners, the Week We Lost Our Wheels, the Great Chinese Fire Drill Prank, and even the Unexpected Fart During Prayers (which I have sworn a solemn oath never to relate). These are all entertaining stories in their own rights, but none hold a candle to our current narrative, as you'll see if you stay with me.

Snow and I had so much fun together (though I can't pretend that I wasn't still suffering from a trunkiness that was only tenuously held at bay) that it seems impossible in retrospect for it all to have happened in just two and a half months. Overall, though, the first six months of my mission seemed to take years to drag by, so maybe it's not so strange that my time with Snow seems to have lasted so long. (Conversely, the last six months fairly flew by. I think it's a function of the ratio of time passed to time remaining.)

Snow was the district leader in our little corner of southeast Calgary, and there were four other missionaries in our district besides the two of us. Elder Van Wagoner (an off-putting name until you realize that it's German for bear foot) and his companion Elder Bishop had the area just south of ours. Sisters Roper and Steed worked in the neighborhood east of us. Snow and I ended up spending the bulk of our spare time with Roper and Steed.

Monica Roper was about twenty-two and quite attractive, and if her manner hadn't intimidated me so much I would probably have had a big crush on her. She came from Amarillo, Texas, and she had a way of acting as if she were the captain of whatever enterprise was at hand. She was very outspoken, and she was forever questioning me about why I had come on a mission. I was usually uncomfortable around her, because her questioning seemed to indicate that she knew I had tried to run away (a fact that President Tuttle had labored to keep under wraps as much as possible, so that I wouldn't have to endure a lot of humiliating innuendo from other missionaries). It turned out later that Roper's questions were the result of nothing more than simple curiosity—that's the way she was—and my paranoia the result of, well, simple paranoia.

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