1973: Teaching In A One-Room School, Always Stuck In Camp

 (Just a follow-up from yesterday’s blog--I caught three more mice last night.)

    Because of the isolation of the Silvscan Mill camp and the schedule of the those few transportation links to the outside world, we were never able to leave the camp on our weekends.  The“Sched" (a regular scheduled float plane) flight to Fort St. James only operated on weekdays, when we had to be in school.  

        The Silvacan mill did have an old DC-3 which they used to make twice weekly trips from Williams Lake to the camp ferrying work crews and supplies back and forth, but that again, only happened during weekdays, so it ended up always being stuck in camp.  It ended up that we were only able to leave the camp three times a year, just during the school breaks--Christmas, Spring Break, and summer vacation.

           The fact that the mill worked on a 10/4 schedule (working 10 days straight, then getting 4 days off) which allowed the mill workers, most of who lived in bunkhouses, a chance to work long hours while they were in camp, then have extra-long weekends when they were flown out to Williams Lake.  

          This 10/4 schedule didn't work very well for our school, because the families who had children in school, often left for the four day weekends in Williams Lake, causing the kids to miss Thursday afternoons, Fridays, and Mondays at school.  Another fluctuation in attendance was caused when the Jack kids disappeared unexpectedly from school,  because their First Nation’s family sometimes went on long hunting trips or get-togethers at the Takla Landing Reserve. 

            Nevertheless, I kept up the school schedule whether I had 12 kids, or two, in class, but after three months, the Christmas break was upon us, and Joan and I finally got to leave camp, first flying on the camp's DC-3 to Williams Lake, where we were able to make connections to fly back to Indiana with stories and slides of our life in the remote British Columbia “bush."

        Photo above shows the Camp’s DC-3.  Below is a photo of the Jack family in their boat, off to the Takla Landing Reserve.

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Mice, Looking For A Warm Winter Home

     Well, it’s that time of year again.  All those field mice that were happy cavorting around in the weeds of summer, are starting to think about the upcoming winter and are looking for a nice warm place to live.   Unfortunately, that place is our house.

    We had been starting to see some signs of mice in the house, and I was able to find one of our old mouse traps, which I baited with peanut butter, but no mouse was tempted.  So yesterday, when we went into McBride for shopping, I went to the hardware store to buy a couple more mouse traps. 

     I couldn’t any in where I thought the mouse traps would be, so I ask the clerk where they were.

    “Oh,” he said, “Since everyone was looking for mouse traps, we moved them up to this special display at the front of the aisle.”   (I guess, our house is not the only one being impacted by mice.)  

    I bought two traps and when I got back home with them I baited them, the two I bought, and the other one I had, with a bit of a cheese slice, and spread the traps around in three different places.

    This morning when I got up and checked, I was amazed at my success.  I had caught three mice.  I will continue to put the traps out, until I no longer catch any mice.

    I hate killing the pests and used to live trap them, and release them outside so the coyotes and other predators could eat them, but presently, there are just too many in the house, and I have to be hardcore about quickly getting ride of them, before their population really explodes.

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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.

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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.

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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