 .His relations include grandfather Dr. Emile Therrien, a pioneering doctor, and Dr. Norman Bethune, his grandmother's cousin, a noted anti-fascist and Communist famous for battlefield medicine in the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War.He worked on a ranch as a cowboy in the Cariboo restored a wooden sailboat and sailed across the Pacific for 18 months, accompanied by his wife, Amy, whom he had met in Colorado.