David Milne's talented and generous life came to an end on Sept. 28th, when he succumbed to a rapidly advancing disease. David's many friends and acquaintances were shocked and saddened by his sudden passing.
David was born in England, and dedicated his life to Art. He played a banjo in a skiffle band, and taught art in a university (one of his students was Trevor Jones), before David moved to New York City to further advance his career as an artist. There he found some success, even painting some large pieces for well known buildings, but he quickly tired of the New York “Art Scene.” With the advent of computers, David slowly evolved into a business doing desktop publishing.
In 1967, David took a break from his artistic endeavors to travel into the wilds of BC in order to do some climbing on Mt. Robson. Upon his arrival, David was so taken by the pristine beauty of the Robson Valley, that he longed to have a home here and bought a small humble farm property on Hinkelman Road, which he purchased for $6,000.
He continued to spend his winters working in New York City, but regularly returned to the Robson Valley for his summers, to live a rural life on his property. During those summers, he quickly established friends in the Blackwater Coop, a ragtag group of counter-culture Back-to-the-Landers, who were able to buy food and supplies from the Coop, and share their labor amongst the group, building their houses and developing their homesteads.
During his winters in NYC, he studied architectural magazines, dreaming and planning of the home he hoped to sometimes build on his Robson Valley property.
Twenty-five years ago, David and his wife Lyuba were in the Valley on 9-11 when the terrorist crashed planes into the Trade Center Towers. David and Lyuba extended their stay in the Valley for weeks, to avoid the chaos happening in NYC. When they did return, they found the interior of their Manhattan loft, coated with ash from 9-11.
They also discovered that, as a result of the uncertainly and confusion caused by 9-11, the many jobs their desktop publishing business depended on, dried up. They soon decided that the time had arrived for them to sell their loft, immigrate to Canada, and build David's dream home and studio in the Robson Valley.
David spent his retirement pursuing his intense interests in plants (roses and succulents) with the dedication of a scientist. He designed his dream home, which he had built, and experimented and developed the beautiful chemical glazes for Lyuba’s ceramics. All the while, maintaining his lifelong love of the Arts and Music.
Dave’s abundant friendliness and generosity spread easily through our small community and his parting leaves a hole in many local lives.
Certainly, much appreciation is given to all of the staff of the McBride Hospital for the compassionate concern and the warm, thoughtful, personal care that was given to David during his ordeal.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
On the Canada’s Victoria Day holiday (middle of May), I got the day off from teaching, so after our lunch, my wife and I were taking a nap. There was a knock on our trailer door, so I got up and went to see who it was, I was some of my students, had run out of things to do on their day off, so they came over to the teacherage and wanted to do stuff with us. I told them that we were going to take a nap for an hour, and that they could come back then.
I was sort of hoping that after an hour, the kids would have found something else to do and forget about us, but that was not to be. They spent the whole hour sitting on our door step, waiting. Obvious they were determined to do something with us, so after our nap, we went outside, and we and the kids hiked the half a mile to the Little Lake.
I had ordered a small little 8 inch mitre saw, from the beautifully photographed Lee Valley Tool Catalogue (porn for woodworkers) and I had a few other basic tools, so often in my free time, I kept myself busy woodworking. The mill allowed me to use the scrap wood which was laying around the camp everywhere, and so as the weather became nicer outside, I would sit on the front steps and started on some woodworking projects.
I made a laminated cutting board (which we still use 50 years later), a birdhouse, a ladder, some “flats” for growing plants, and a dog carrying crate for Vincent our Pomeranian, that we could use when we could catch a flight out of camp,
The Jack girls developed impetigo, so I had to tell their mother not to send them to school until they had seen a doctor and were cured. When I talked to their mother, her face was all purple and bruised from being beaten up by her sister.
While the West family caused me some irritation, it was Hazel, a Native woman who lived in Camp with her husband and family, that caused me the most grief. Hazel, who had a job cleaning up the bunk houses, was the camp gossip that really created trouble on several fronts. Her son Darwin was in my wife’s kindergarten class and he was a nice kid, but periodically, Darwin’s older brother Jackie, came to camp to live, then disappeared, then returned again.
Jackie was in my seventh grade when he was around, and he was a bully to the smaller children, causing me constant trouble. His attendance was very irregular, and later he and Rene, Shawn’s older brother, who was high school age and not in our school, was double trouble when he and Jackie were together. Eventually, the two were caught stealing from the bunkhouses, the cook sheds, and some Indian cabins, so they were asked to leave camp.
One day Frank the Mill Boss, asked to talk to me, and informed me that it was going around camp that I was a convicted dope pusher. This was, of course, news to me, and Frank said he didn’t believe it for a minute, but thought I ought to know.
I was pretty sure that it was Hazel who was probably the creative author of the rumor, but I just let the whole thing slide. It was discouraging though, any one that knew me, also knew how straight I was. I didn’t even drink alcohol or coffee, let alone, take or sell drugs.
The lake was still covered with snow and ice, (photo below) and I thought I could just chop through the ice to get some water. Chips of ice flew in all directions as I hacked away at the ice with the ax. It was hard work, I had to make the hole wider and wider as I chopped deeper and deeper into the ice.
I chopped down about twenty inches and never broke through the ice to water, so finally, with a new appreciation of the severity of Canadian winters, I accepted the fact that getting water by chopping through the Little Lake ice was a futile mission.
Luckily, we were able fill our containers down at Takla Lake, using the hole in the ice that the Jack family maintained throughout the winter for their water.
Upon returning to the camp after our Spring Break, I was once again overwhelmed and consumed with preparing worksheets, teaching, grading, and the many other school activities. Before Spring Break the camp had begun constructing a store, which upon our return, had been completed, so we could then actually purchase some food items, unfortunately, so could my students, and they filled themselves with sugar fueled energy from candy and pop.
The camp’s maintenance men did not have a stellar reputation for their work. They had once "fixed" a leak in a sewage pipe by wrapping the pipe with duct tape--which of course didn't hold, causing a flow of sewage across the floor in a bunkhouse.
One of the carpenters bragged to me about when he was putting plywood skirting around the base of a mobile home, he saved himself a lot of time by just putting in enough nails to hold the plywood to the two-by-four supports, then instead of driving in more nails to adequately secure the plywood to the supports, he just drew little dots on the plywood with a pencil, that looked like the heads of additional nails.
The camp maintenance crew did come through for us though, and got the small stove in the old travel trailer that was our home, functional. Although we still ate our meals in the camp cook house, getting the teacherage stove fixed did enabled my wife, who was always a skilled cook, to renew her culinary skills.
However, the refrigerator in our kitchen still didn't work, but fortunately, we could now buy things "fresh" (not really an accurate word in describing the produce) from the newly completed camp store and we just stored left overs and items needing to be kept cool, in the snow on our roof. This, naturally, provided a motivation to a few of my mischievous students, to scheme about to swiping our juice off of the roof.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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I put the live trap with the Pack Rat into the back of the car, then put Kona, who always enjoys a car ride, into the back seat. Although I couldn’t smell any odor from the Pack Rat, which are known for having really smelly nests, Kona immediately smelled the critter and got all hyper, even though she couldn’t see it in the back of the car.
The natural habitat for Pack Rat nests are spaces made by boulders and rocks, so I drove down the road where I found a place I thought might be suitable for the beast (photo below). When I opened the trap, the Pack Rat made a beeline toward the big rock slab and slipped underneath it, hiding in the dark.
I was happy about being able to trap the Pack Rat so quickly, and finding what seemed a better home for it.
