Okay, Whose Been Swiping And Storing Our Apples?

     The other day while walking through the yard, I noticed and apple sitting on our picket fence.  It left me very puzzled as to how it got there.   The apple wasn’t eaten, and my first thought was maybe a deer had picked it off of the ground, then for some reason, left it on the fence, but that didn’t make sense, because a deer would have eaten it right away, not leave it for later.  Then I thought, maybe somebody had been in our yard, and left the apple there as a joke, but that likewise seemed very unlikely, because no one has been around our rather isolated house.  

    I gave up wondering about the apple and forgot about it.  Then this morning when I was headed over to the pond, to get some exercise walking and jogging around it, I passed an old birdhouse on a post  and noticed something inside it--four apples.  (photos below)  This really confused me.

    To me, the most likely suspect would be a squirrel, but the squirrels we have around here a small, compared to other varieties of squirrels.  While squirrels do collect and save food for the winter, I couldn’t imagine a squirrel carrying one of those apples in its tiny mouth.   I couldn’t really identify any obvious teeth marks on the apples.

    The whole thing remains a puzzling mystery to me.

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1973: Our First Canadian Winter

          The yellow leaves of the Trembling Aspen were soon on the ground, and the organic damp smell of the decomposing cottonwood leaves soon filled our nostrils, as the chill of autumn filled the ever shortened days.  The “snowfall/mud” cycle was soon replaced with the “snowfall/more snowfall” cycle and the temperatures began to drop lower and lower.  On Halloween of 1973 the temperature dipped below freezing and didn’t climb back to above freezing until spring.

         Soon we were experiencing our first Canadian winter wearing Indiana winter clothes--it was not a good combination.  We were able to keep our upper bodies warm by wearing sweaters beneath our winter coats, but our extremities were always cold, due to our lack of long underwear, warm gloves, and especially adequate winter footwear.  

    On our feet, all we had to wear in the snow were the uninsulated rubber boots (in Canada called "Wellingtons" or "gum boots") that we had brought with us from Indiana.  Throughout my life I had always suffered with cold feet during the winter, but in that first Canadian winter, I really learned what cold feet felt like.

         Even though we were ill-prepared for that first winter, we were pleased to discover that there was a huge difference between -12°C (10°F in Indiana) and that same temperature in the BC Interior.  Indiana had a moist, damp cold, which quickly went right through to your bones, whereas, in BC we were experiencing a "dry" cold, which didn't really go through you like the high moisture cold of Indiana.  It took a lot longer to feel the cold with the dry air.  Another benefit was that when the temperatures got down to say,  -30°C (-22°F), it was calm and still outside; there was no wind, which also lessened the cold that one felt. 

         I must confess it was fun to write home, telling of all the snow, and the ever increasingly cold temperatures that we were daily facing.  Our bed was right up against the bedroom wall of our little trailer, and one morning I woke up to discover that my breath had condensed and froze on the wall.  The cold temperature in our bedroom had also caused my breathe to condense and freeze the blanket to the wall.   Seeing all of the icicles in the photo below, shows just how uninsulated the travel trailer that we lived in, was.  

        We enjoyed writing about our first Canadian winter, living in the remote little community that was our  home.   The life we were living, amazed our family and friends back in the States.

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1973: Exploring The Environment Around the Silvacan Camp

           We were, of course, very curious about the new natural environment that we found ourselves in, and during the weekends, when I wasn't preparing for school, my wife and I loved to hike down the muddy/dusty logging roads exploring and acquainting ourselves with the environment of north central British Columbia.  One of the most rewarding discoveries that we made was that there was a “little” lake (compared to the size of Takla Lake Which we began to refer to as the “Big Lake”).  The Little Lake was was located a mile from Camp.

         This pristine jewel was surrounded by untouched forests, and low rolling hills.  Hiking to "Little Lake," as we called it, (officially named, "Cheztainya Lake, we later discovered) quickly became the activity we did every time we had free time.  We visited it almost every day.

         The yellow leaves of the trembling aspen were soon on the ground, and the organic damp smell of the decomposing cottonwood leaves soon filled our nostrils as the chill of autumn filled the ever shortened days.  The “snowfall/mud” cycle was soon replaced with the “snowfall/more snowfall” cycle and the temperatures began to drop lower and lower.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1973: Silvacan Camp Rec Hall / Elementary School

 The photo shows the Rec Hall / one-room school.

    Having our school in the camp’s recreation building was not the best facility for education.  Every two or three evenings a week, the camp would show older, full-length movies to the workers.  My wife and I often attended the films, since this was the only form of outside entertainment available to us.  There was no television reception in camp, and no radio, except sometimes on a rare night.  So we looked forward to going to the movies, no matter how bad they were.

    On "Movie Night," as the mill workers filtered into the Rec hall, the room would quickly fill with cigarette smoke, the pop machine would continually roll out its cans, the level of blur of conversation would rise, and the pool game would continue until the lights were darkened and movie projector begin to click.

              We saw lots of movies, mostly action films, the favorite choice of the workers.  Everyone in the camp was so starved for entertainment, that the parent's didn't seem to put any restrictions upon what movies their children were allowed to watch.  I was often  embarrassed to see my young students there, glued to the screen during the bloodfests and steamy sex scenes that were the mainstay of most of the films.  The movie rating system did not accompany the reels of film shown on movie night, and as a result, my students received a far broader education in that Rec. Hall on movie night, than I could provide in that same Rec Hall hall during school the day.

    The next morning, when the Rec. Hall became a school again, I would enter the building to find that it was filled with stale cigarette smoke, scattered empty pop cans, which had been discarded on the floor or used as ash trays, and all the chairs and tables, we used in class, left in chaotic  disarray.  As winter approached, I was often forced to open the windows to the frigid winter air, in order to vent the Rec Hall, as I rearranged the furniture back into the way we used it for our classes.

take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

1973 Silvacan Elementary: Teaching in a One-Room School

 I continue my memories in establishing and teaching in the isolated one-room school in a mill camp on Takla Lake:

    Because we were so isolated from the Stikine School District headquarters in Fort Nelson, and it was impossible for me to even communicate with them, (the only “phone” in the mill site was a radio phone in the mill office) which really wasn’t there for me to use.  Besides it was unavailable to me, except for an emergency, and the fact that it was a radio phone, meant that there were privacy concerns, as the radio conversations were not secure.  They could be listened to, by the camp office manager and others with radio scanners.

    Unlike in “regular” schools, I had no fellow teachers to talk to, or to share ideas with and with whom I could borrow prepared work.  

    While I enjoyed being around kids and working with them in school, we soon discovered that there was never any respite from them.  In the camp there was no radio, or TV reception.  There was no playground, and the parents of the children worked longer than the normal 8 hours a day, so it was not surprising for my students to always come to our little trailer to visit during the evenings and after-school hours.

    If they spotted my wife or me outside doing something, the kids were always quick to join us so that we often felt burdened with providing entertainment for them.

    While I was struggling trying to stay on top of my workload, my wife had her own challenges.  She had agreed to run a kindergarten class, which was held each the morning in the mudroom of our tiny travel trailer teacherage.  It was something she had never in her life considered, since she had spent her university days getting her degree in Art History.  Our quickly established school had not yet received any kindergarten supplies for her young and often mentally under-developed students, so she also had to do a lot of improvising.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

1973 Silvacan Elementary School: So Much Work For The Teacher

 The photo was taken a couple of years later, when the school actually had our own school building , and the teacher (me) actually had a desk.  It does show me busy at night preparing work for the next day.

Despite the small number of students I had, I quickly discovered it was almost an overwhelming job to teach in a one-room school.  Since I could only spend time with one grade at a time, I had to create work for all the other grades; something that they could work on independently, and could finish without a lot of help from me, and I had to supply enough work for all the different grades to do to keep them occupied for 5 hours every day.

I didn’t have any workbooks, or even a mimeograph machine (an old technology that allowed one to crank out (literally) duplicate copies of worksheets from a typed-up or drawn stencil).  Before photocopiers, mimeograph machines were the workhorse for most teachers at the time.

Most teachers also had access to already prepared worksheets that they could use, unfortunately, but because of the remoteness and isolation of the school, no such timesavers were available to me, I had to create my own from scratch.  I had no teacher's guides to help me digest topics, give me directions on what points to stress, or to provide me with additional problems for the students to solve. 

  In all of the schools I had ever been in, all of the answers to the problems would have been there in a Teacher’s Manual, but unfortunately, since I hadn’t been supplied with any Teachers Manuals, when it came time for me to check the work that the class had done, I had to first, calculate all of the answers myself,  before I could spend the time checking their papers.

Everything was left up to me.  I had to read all of the material, and think up all of the work exercises for the various grade levels, because I had no teachers guide to help me.   Once I figured out what I would do, I had to make the worksheet by typing it out, if I needed more than one copy, I had to type layers of carbon paper (another old technology)and correct all the layers manually, if I made a mistake.   I typed all the worksheets sheets out on the portable typewriter I had fortunately brought with me from Indiana.

     I found myself busily preparing late into the night, striving to come up with enough appropriate activities for all the different age groups.  I quickly discovered that if I wasn’t really well prepared and supplied with a lot of work, things quickly turned to chaos in our school, because the students got done and then started messing around.  

While quick learning is generally considered a positive thing in the classroom, I was always dismayed to discover just how quickly my students were able to complete the worksheets and assignments that had taken me so many long hours to create the night before.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1973: The First Week Of Silvacan Elementary School

 The photo shows some of my students headed for the Camp Recreation Hall, which doubled as Silvacan Elementary School.

    Since there were no real school supplies available, because the school district had not been able to find a teacher, and hadn't totally committed to supplying anything in the remote community until they were sure of one, for the rest of the week, our school activities depended almost entirely consisted upon what could be done on blank sheets of paper, and the things that my wife and I had brought with us, ie, some magazines, and my guitar.

    The following week, various sized boxes started appearing from the Stikine School District office.  I excitedly open them to discover some text books, art supplies, and a chalk board on stands.  Getting a chalkboard was not only a real boon to my job, and made the camp recreation hall which was filled with a pool table and a Coke vending machine, seem a bit more like a classroom.  It allowed me to write and demonstrate things to my group of students, instead of having to show them things individually on a piece of paper.

           The arrival of some text books, while another big step in creating a school, also caused me some problems.  I was flying blind, none of the school books had any of grade designation, and I didn’t have any kind of information to tell me what subjects were supposed to be taught in the various grades.  I didn’t know what books were meant for what ages, but at least I had some things to work from.  I found it also frustrating that none of the books had any kind of teacher’s manual to help me, but I plowed through, the best I could.

    After a few weeks had passed, a few of the mill workers moved their  families to live at the camp, and our school enrollment increased.  Silvacan’s Elementary’s student population reached a staggering 12 students.  It was a K-7 school, but I didn’t have kids in every grade. Enrollment was something like 5 students in 1st grade, 3 in third grade, 2 in fourth grade, 1 in fifth, and 1 in 6th.  The school population was in continual flux, as families moved into the camp and others returned back to civilization, but through it all, the First Nation's Jack family made up the bulk of the students in our school.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca