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
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