1975: Luckily, We Found My Family In Banff

          A few days later, Joan and I said goodbye to Vancouver Island and all of the relatives and adopted relatives, and re-boarded the BC Ferry back to the mainland.   We headed east to Banff National Park, where we had planned to rendezvous with my parents and siblings, who were driving up from Indiana.  

      I was surprised when we actually found them.  Our plans had been very vague and Banff National Park is huge.   I had planned to meet them at Banff’s East Gate, but after a long day’s futile wait, my wife and I decided we had better try to get a campsite for the night.  Upon arriving at the nearby campground, low and behold, who did we meet, but my family.

          Remember, this was a time long before mobile phones and communication between people in undisclosed places, so our hooking up with my family, was just a matter of chance.  It seemed remarkable that we were able to find each other in that huge park with so many campgrounds.   In the end however, we all decided to move to another campground, after spotting a black bear who meandered out of the bush, and then nonchalantly looked into my brothers’ tent.

        After five days of hiking, sightseeing, camping, wild animal encounters, all of the usual mountain park activities in Banff and Jasper National Parks, my wife and we said good-bye to my family and we headed back to Vancouver Island where we had a dental appointment.

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1975: After A Sputtering Start, Our Summer Vacation Begins

            For most people, summer vacations normally include some sort of  travel, but because of our circumstances, travel was a necessity.  We had no home in Canada.   During the school year, we lived in a teacherage provided by the school district, and when summer vacation arrived, we were forced to vacate the teacherage, and become gypsies, with no home base.

    In 1975, our summer vacation began with us leaving camp on the Northern Thunderbird “Sched”, a regularly scheduled flight on a small plane that stopped at Lovell Cove on Takla Lake, where the Silvacan Resources mill was located.  After a bumpy flight to Fort St. James, and then a flight on a regular airline to Prince George, we caught a ride with Frank the camp boss, to Williams Lake, where he dropped us off at a field, where our International Scout truck had been parked since March.  

    The enthusiasm we had with actually starting our summer vacation, waned when we discovered that the Scout had a flat tire, but what was worse, someone had broken into it and stolen the tape deck, radio, and our tent.  We did get a little satisfaction upon discovering that the thieves had forgotten to take the tent poles and camp stove.  While they stole a crumby hatchet, they overlooked the tool box and truck battery.

            We had to spent the day getting the Scout operational again, before we could finally settle into a our motel room for the night.  Bright and early the next morning we drove the Scout down the highway  for seven hours, headed for the BC ferry that would take us to Victoria, where we could stay with my cousin, and visit with the her relatives.  Once there, we waited for the arrival of more relatives who were due to arrive the next day on the ferry from Seattle.

  The next day after a big reunion, we were eager to make up for all the shopping we had missed while we were stuck up in the logging camp.  We bought backpacks, a new tent, and I bought my wife a tea set for her birthday.   The evening was spent with more food, visiting, and guitar playing with my cousin, before retiring for the night in our new tent that we had set up in the yard.

    My cousin, his wife, and my wife, had planned a camping trip to Galiano Island (one of the small Gulf Islands nestled between big Vancouver Island and the mainland).  One of the real joys of being in British Columbia were the ferry rides and provincial parks.  We parked our car at the ferry terminal and walked onto the ferry.  

            After the leisurely ferry ride along the beautiful, dramatic and rugged  BC coastline, we disembarked and backpacked the short distance to Galiano Provincial park, where luckily, were able to secure the last campsite.  Once we got our tents set up, we headed out to explore the beaches, take a swim, then hike back to the campground where we cooked a meal.  In the evening, we ambled back down to the shore to marvel at the sun setting in the orange of the sky and water.  After a very satisfying day, we finally climbed into our sleeping bags in our cozy tent.

Up next morning we wiped the sleep from our eyes, ready for more of the West Coast experience.  We did more exploring on the beach, then returned to the campsite where we packed up our tents and sleeping bags.  After hiking back to the ferry terminal, we snacked at the ferry terminal, waiting for the ferry that would take us back.  It was a quick getaway, but it made me fall even more in love with British Columbia.

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1975: Our School Year Fizzles Out

      A lot of the educational materials that I did receive from the School District, were not very well suited for Madelaine and Hannah my two First Nation’s girls, since they had spent most of their lives living in the bush.  I showed the first graders a photo of a man raking leaves and I asked the question, “What could this man do with the leaves, so they wouldn’t be wasted?”  I got the relies, “Put them back on the tree,” and “Save them for next year.” 

               When I pointed to the mast of a sailing ship sticking up in the background of an old historical photo and asked what the sail was.   I got a question back in reply, “Is it was a television antenna?”

               Our continually fluctuating school population plunged a couple of weeks before the end of the school year, because the Carrier Indians blockaded the railroad tracks that connected the mill to the rest of BC.  That blockade caused the mill to shutdown.  They laid off most of the employees and flew them back to Williams Lake, which left the camp without most of their families, and my students.

      My school was left with just 3 students; one whose family had remained in camp, and Madelaine and Hannah, my two Indigenous students, who lived down on the shore of Takla Lake.  Despite my decimated student population, I continued on with our school year until the official close at the end of June.

            When Madelaine found a dead sparrow on the ground, I did an impromptu science class.  After examining the bird, we buried it.  Madelaine said it would come back to life the next day, and so I told my three students we would dig it up on Monday, to see if that was true.  On Monday we did re-dig the grave, and discovered that the bird was still dead.

            On the last two days of school, I was down to just Leigh Anne in the class, because  Madelaine and Hannah failed to show up.  After Leigh Anne left on the final  day of school, my wife and I scrambled to clean up the school, taking down all of the pictures from the walls, packing up and storing all the educational supplies, and then closing up the school building for the summer.

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1975: The Silvacan Resources Mill

             You might be wondering how the Silvacan Resources’ fly-in timber mill could exist so remotely, away from markets, without access to roads that connected them to the outside.  The mill was located on the BC Rail line, which at the time was pushing its way northward through BC.   The mill made its money manufacturing railroad ties for the BC Rail track expansion.

            The mill had difficult problems to overcome with its unstable workforce.  Many their employees would get fed-up with living in the remote camp and quit unexpectedly.  Working in an isolated camp was usually a last resort of people seeking employment.  It attracted a lot of disparate people that had troubled lives and difficulty with alcohol.   Even though the camp was officially a “Dry Camp,” booze often found its way into camp.

            Being fairly naive, I was continually shocked after being told stories by my students of the drunkenness and spousal abuse among people who lived at the camp.  Months after one couple, who had a reputation of alcohol-fueled violence moved out, I heard that the man had been charged with murdering his wife.  The situation of living in an isolated camp caused strain in these already troubled families, resulting in a lot of family instability, which filtered down to the students of the school.

    Families would get fed up with the camp situation, quit, pull their kids out of our school, and move out.  Then months later I would see those same kids back in our school again, after the family, in an effort to make another try, returned to live in the camp.

                The photo, which was what we saw out of the teacherage’s kitchen window, shows the Silvacan Mill.

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1975: How Am I Doing, In Our One-Room School?

                 Our one-room school was so isolated from the outside world in our fly-in camp, that I, as the teacher, didn’t really know how my students were faring, compared to those kids being educated in the BC schools that existed in “Civilization”.  

        However twice in 1975, I received new first grade students whose family had moved into the Silvacan Resources’ camp, later in the school year.  I was gratified to discover that the kids I had been teaching all year, were farther along in their reading, writing, and math skills, than the newly arrived first graders.

        One of those newly arrived first graders had been attending a school near Williams Lake, BC.  I was shocked to discover that this young girl couldn’t read at all.  When I asked her mother about it, she replied that in the previous school, the teacher’s attitude was that reading would start “when the child wanted it”.  

        I didn’t believe in that sort of “learn-when-ready” educational philosophy, and started teaching the girl to read right away.  The girl did well, and made a lot of progress, but unfortunately, the family didn’t like the “living-in-camp” situation and they moved back to civilization after a couple of months.  In fact both of the year’s new students ended up moving away before the school year closed.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1975: No Water in our One-Room School for Four Months

             The three years I spent teaching in a one-room school in a remote lumber mill camp in the Interior of BC, were difficult and trying.  However, my wife and I were young and accepted the hardships as part of the adventure we had committed to.  

            Above is a photo of the indoor/outdoor thermometer that hung in the kitchen of the teacherage where we lived.  Not only is the outdoor temperature extremely cold  (-45°F), the temperature inside the teacherage was also pretty intolerable (36°F).  Below I continue  telling of one of the ordeals we experience while living in the mill camp.

    A few days later in the cold spell, a broken water main was discovered that was causing flooding behind a couple of the houses in camp.  Once that was repaired, we got the school’s water back, and I was told to just let the water slowly run continually from the tap inside the school to prevent further freezing, and this I did.  However, I made a grim discovery the next morning upon arriving at the school when I found that I couldn’t open the door.

    During the night the water that I had been told to keep gently flowing, had backed up in the drainpipe, which I assume was still frozen, and as a result, the school floor had been flooded.  The flooded water had run across the floor to the school’s front door and when it had tried to seep under the door, the freezing temperatures outside , caused it to freeze.  It was the ice that had formed under the door that had prevented me from opening the door.  I didn’t record in my diary how I finally got the door open, but eventually I did.  

    That first freezing water episode was only a precursor of what was to come.  On February 26th the school water again ceased to flow because of freezing and it would be months before we got it back.  It’s interesting how quickly I accepted that reality.  In my diary I don’t even mention the frozen water at school again until March 3rd, and then the next time was on April 17th, when I report that “..the water is still frozen at school.”

           The ice in the water pipes didn’t thaw until June 8th.  It seems like that would be a tremendous event, but on that day, all my diary entry said was:  “School water finally thawed out and dribbled out of the drinking fountain unto the floor.”

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1975: Frank, Silvacan Resources' Camp Boss

                On February 13th of 1975 the temperatures plummeted, reaching -40° (the same in both Celsius and Fahrenheit). 

                In the morning when I walked over for my day of teaching, I discovered that the school’s water had frozen up.  I notified Frank, the camp boss, and then after the end of our school day without any water, I spent a few hours under the school with Frank as he tried unsuccessfully to unthaw it.  I soon came to conclusion that the waterline was likely frozen under the dirt road that ran in front of the school, since the temperature in the crawlspace under the school still felt reasonably toasty.

                Frank, the camp boss was a revelation to me.  He was a wiry man, of average height, and often unshaven.  Thinking back, Frank seemed larger to me.  Not only was he in charge of the entire operation of the Silvacan mill and camp, but he was also one of its owners.  

        My socialist viewpoints made me generally look warily at capitalist’s owners; I stereotyped them as men in suits, sitting around some large table in some lavish board room, smoking cigars, and making decisions, or being driven around in some long black car.

                Frank was one of those rural pioneer capitalists.   I always had a hard time picturing him sitting around in a boardroom, since his preferential mode of transportation seemed to be a beat up, muddy old pickup truck.  Whenever I saw him, he was wearing rough, often dirty and well-used worker’s clothes.   Had he been lined up with the other workers at the mill, you would not have been able to pick him out as an owner.

               Frank was not afraid to get down in the grim and get his hands dirty.  Whenever there was a breakdown or some other problem in the camp, Frank was not standing around in a white hard hat, he was down in the middle of the problem. 

                I had once watched Frank down in the dark and grimy crawlspace under our trailer, laying in the mud and cussing while trying to fix a frozen water main.  He was sometimes gruff, but because he had “money in the game,” he wanted everything in his big operation to work, and he was always there to do what had to be done.  If Frank had a family somewhere, he didn’t see much of them, because he was always away in the Camp.

                The camp did have maintenance men who fixed things in the mill, but it seemed that whenever I had a problem, it was Frank who came to deal with it.  The school’s frozen water problem was more than Frank by himself could fix, and so the work was assigned to the camp maintenance men who worked several days in a row trying to unthaw the waterline.

        They used a welding machine attached at two different spots along the copper water pipes to try to thaw any ice in between, but they too were unsuccessful in their attempts, and as a result, I had to carry buckets of water to the school every day for the kids to use.  Fortunately if they had to go to the bathroom, they were allowed to walk across the road and use the facilities in the camp’s bunkhouse.

            An unrelated note:  Thank you to all of those citizens of the US who voted to turf out the many  sycophant Republican toadies who for years and years, kowtowed to Trump’s every ridiculous and tragic wish.  Your vote has given me hope for the future.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca