In a well-worn suit, with a tired Montana drawl, the man at the front of the gym tells a story he has told over and over again for the past 10 years.
It’s a story about his travels down a path of destruction, how he saw the light, mended his ways and battled freedom of speech with Oprah Winfrey.
This is Howard Lyman’s story. And this week, like most weeks of his life, he’s telling it to high school students.
The 300 teenagers are about as attentive as any group could be in the close air of the gym. It’s their first week back at Sisler High School, the largest in the province, and probably the most urban.
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It’s not every day a well-known person comes to Sisler, said vice-principal Mike Kachmar.
“When you’re on the Oprah Winfrey show, you’re just not some guy walking down the street,” he said.
Lyman is the ex-rancher whose dire warnings about mad cow disease inspired Oprah to utter the famous words about hamburger that launched a Texas libel lawsuit.
True to form, Lyman brings a little bit of hellfire and damnation to this high school gym. He talks of violent floods and droughts, holes in the ozone layer, and the evils of El Nino.
He tells them about bacteria in United States rivers powerful enough to attack water skiers, erase human memory and make the fish walk up on land to escape.
He recounts scary tales of spongiform diseases, followed by a description of how roadkill is scraped off highways, ground up and fed to cows.
He implores the students not to be “brain-dead” like 80 percent of people on the planet who are “Joe Six-packs,” passively sitting on sofas and watching TV.
He disparages a society fixated on money, newspapers that print stories only about things like “Bill Clinton’s girlfriend.”
“I was like that, one time,” he solemnly intoned.
He told them he was an “agribusinessman” who turned a small organic farm into 12,000 acres and 7,000 head of cattle, a man who could write a cheque for $1 million without it bouncing.
But when a tumor on his spinal cord left him paralyzed from the waist down in 1979, he vowed before a last-ditch operation to stop “killing the birds, trees and soil” with chemicals if he was made well.
He kept his word. He said he travels 160,000 kilometres a year, telling people his story. High schools are his favorite stop.
“I love it, because they are the future,” he explained.
Lyman doesn’t preach to students to turn their backs on their carnivore ways, although he does mention that vegetarians and vegans (people who also shun dairy and poultry products) live longer.
“This is not about turning them into flaming vegans,” he said. “This is about getting them to ask the questions” about how their food is produced.
He encouraged students to dig out the facts at the school’s library, where he has donated three copies of his own book to the shelves.
A beefy looking blond student with a wide grin chuckled as he walked out of the gym.
“I’m not going to stop eating meat,” he scoffed.
Others were less cavalier.
Gareth McVicar, 17, said he was impressed by Lyman’s life story.
While he’s not a vegetarian – the lure of McDonald’s is often hard to resist – he said he’s “not overly enthused” about eating meat, especially after hearing about the ground-up roadkill.
“It certainly makes you think about whether it’s safe to eat meat,” said McVicar.
