Back in 1977 when we bought our place, we were looking to live closer to the land. The property we bought was a five acre hobby farm, with a big garden, a greenhouse, and a root cellar, for keeping the vegetables we grew edible throughout the winter. While I was happy to have a root cellar, it was an ugly thing, that jutted out of the ground like a loaf of bread on a table. Adding to its ugliness was the fact that it was difficult to keep neat, it’s steep outside slopes were covered with weeds and couldn’t be mowed.
The root cellar’s function was not all that great either. Water would seep in and often cover the dirt floor. In the winter, snow would drift all around it, making the door difficult to open, so I put off getting the food we stored in there as long as possible, because it was such a pain to get them.
Anyway, after the winter of 1984 we had an early spring. The snow was gone by the beginning of March and so my outside jobs had started. Looking at the root cellar, I decided that one thing I wanted to do was get rid of all of the unsightly weeds that grew on it. The weeds were all dry, and I made up my mind to burn them off.
I lit some of the weeds along the bottom, and they took off, burning really well, too well in fact. The burning weeds caught the cedar log walls of the root cellar on fire, and suddenly the whole structure was burning to fiercely for me to put out. After the conflagration was over, there was just a big smoking hole where the root cellar used to be.
Loosing the root cellar wasn’t that big of a loss to me, like I said, there were a lot of things I didn’t like about it, but still, it was a bit of a loss.
Before April began, I decided to write an April Fools story for our weekly paper. I took a photo of a friend, standing by what was left of the root cellar, and wrote a fake news, April Fools caption for the photo which did appear in the Robson Valley Courier. See it below:
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