Those Memorable Coffee Breaks

     As a kid, I remember clearly during those family gatherings with my grandparents, how their conversations always ended up with talk of the diseases and the deaths of their acquaintances and friends.  That seemed a strange thing to talk about to my adolescent ears.   Now that I have reached my  own dotage years, and see my own friends and acquaintances suffering from disease or dying, I too now feel what my grandparents had been feeling those many years ago.

    This last weekend certainly made that clear to me.  While attending the Memorial for friendly Charlie Leakes, I heard that Roger WIltsie, an old co-worker from my days working for the BC Forest Service had just died. 

    I will always remember those coffee breaks at Forestry, how Roger and Grant Henry, both veteran employees with a wonderful sense of humor, used to keep the staff in stitches with stories about their misadventures in those earlier days working for the Forest Service.  

    Without roads to get to the forested areas they needed to get to, they often had to use “Speeders” (very small railcars) as their mode of transportation, and travel down railroad tracks, and the panic they endured upon seeing an oncoming train and trying to get the speeder off the track.  There were stories of forestry trucks catching fire, leaving them stranded in the bush without help or communications to get help.  I remember a story about driving up to Prince George for a meeting on the yet officially un-opened Highway 16.  

    Listening to their stories, I always thought, someone should record or write down their tales, and thinking back, I guess I should have, because no one else did, and now I have forgotten them.  

    Roger and Grant were both “Old School” forestry employees, but yet they welcomed me, a long-haired counter-cultured environmentalist with many opposite views, into their friendships.  

    Roger grew up in a farm family in McBride, and ran a farm himself while working at Forestry.  I hadn’t seen Roger for at least a decade, because he had moved to Vancouver Island.  I last saw Grant, who had also moved away from McBride, a few years ago at a memorial Bob Elliot, another close forestry friend who had passed away.  Grant was still the same smart, quick, and witty person I had liked so much, but I have since heard that he now has dementia.  

    Growing older makes one face the deterioration of their own physical self, but it is also painful hard to hear of the loss of friends who had meant so much to your life.

    The photo above is shows the last of several forestry buildings where so many wonderful stories were told.   Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos of Roger or Grant.

    

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