SICAMOUS

    In British Columbia, between Revelstoke and Salmon arm, due West of Calgary, Alberta, is Sicamous, smack dab on the Trans Canada Highway.  At least it used to be until they built the new bridge.  Now traffic goes whizzing by on the new bypass and doesn't see other than the few traffic oriented businesses, ie. truck stops, motels, etc., that have sprung up along the new frontage road, until they pop out of the trees onto the bridge.  For a few brief moments one is awe struck by the spectacular view of water and mountains and a quaint little community nestled along the shore of what is a channel connecting Mara Lake to the Shuswap lakes.

    I say community because it was not a town.  It was not even big enough to be a village.  It was what is known as unincorporated, which is good because then the provincial Gov't. pays for street maintenance, etc.

    North of the highway was the industrial section with sawmills and a pole yard.  A pole yard is a yard where they make and store poles.  Poles are made from logs that are long enough and straight enough to be used to hold up power and / or phone lines.  Such logs are turned into poles by simply stripping off the bark, after which some poles are treated with a preservative such as creosote. (Logs are made by cutting the branches and tops off of trees, after you cut them down).  In the pole yard was a siding, a spur line from the railroad, where the poles were loaded onto railcars. 

    When we first moved to Sicamous there was a tank car filled with liquid asphalt sitting on the siding in the pole yard.  Asphalt is loaded into tank cars at the refinery at, from 550 to 900, degrees F. (I have no idea what that is in C.  I failed Russian 101 ).  Below 500 degrees asphalt starts to solidify.  It makes it difficult to pave streets if you can't get the asphalt out of the tank cars.  To keep the asphalt liquid they connected a portable boiler to the tank car.  Guess who they got to fire the boiler.

    After two hitches and thirty-five years of service my father had retired, as a Corporal, from the Force.  We had packed our belongings and moved out of the city.  Now when I say moved that should conjure up visions of packing your goods and trundling along the street to a new residence where you would unpack.  I don't recall the packing or the trundling but I do remember starting school and still sleeping in sleeping bags because our furniture hadn't arrived.  So, for me, we hadn't really moved, we were just on an extra long camping trip. 

    I also remember the arrival of our furniture.  A large, yellow, tractor trailer that had one hell, I wasn't allowed to use that word then, isn't growing up great?, of a time negotiating our long, narrow, twisting, drive way.  I also remember how upset my mother was when the truck finally had to drive in, rather than back in, and then turn around in mom's garden.  The driveway came into the back of the house from the road.  The front of the ranch style house faced Mara Lake.

    In the late afternoons my mother would load us children and a hot supper, corn on the cob, roast beef, and boiled potatoes, kept warm in a pressure cooker, into the car and we would have a picnic, with my father, in the pole yard.

    The road from the pole yard to our house was gravel, it went past the school and past our house but not much further, and it was hard to ride on my bicycle.  My bicycle didn't have gears and it had wide, fat tires.  But at least there were no hills like I would encounter in Alberta.

    Where we lived there were few houses and even fewer people.  On one side of us we could make out a cabin through the trees and on the other side we could make out a house.  Both were empty most of the year as they were summer and weekend residences for people from Revelstoke, during the summer.  There was a boy about my age that lived in the cabin and we chummed around, swimming and hiking. 

    One day we went hiking to a place that my neighbour knew about, a forestry lookout on top of the mountain behind our house.  What a beautiful climb, what a beautiful view.  We were gone for hours and we hadn't told anyone where we were going.  When I got home I got `the belt'.  My parents had no idea where we had gone and they had the police looking for us.

    As I stated earlier the Trans Canada Highway passed through town from Revelstoke to Salmon Arm.  You could carry on to Vancouver but it was a tortuous journey.  We never went.  You could go back to Calgary, in the summer.  You could go West to Salmon Arm and then South to Vernon and Kelowna via Enderby and from Enderby you could go North as Far as Grindrod but there was no road from Grindrod to Sicamous, but they were working on it.

    In the fall, after the paving was done, they moved the boiler from the pole yard to the highway, South of our house, where they were building bridges.  My father would work nights stoking the boiler to keep the concrete from freezing.

    It got cold in Sicamous, not as cold as in Alberta, but it was a damp cold so it felt just as cold.  Sicamous gets a lot more snow than Alberta so I couldn't ride my bike to school.

    The school was a two room wooden building with a pot bellied stove in each room.  The students would take turns bringing in the wood for the stove.  By recess time the sides of the stove would be glowing cherry red.  By noon, the ink in our ink bottles would be thawed out around the edges. We could dip our pens.  By early afternoon the room would be warm enough that we could take our scarves off and later we could take our coats off, just about the time we put them back on to go home.

    The washroom consisted of a little wooden house on the far side of the playground.  It had two doors, one for girls and one for boys.

    In our room we had one teacher and grades one to four.  In my sister's room they had one teacher and grades five to eight.  In the spring they started to build a new school and we got to use it for the last month of school.

    Each morning our teacher would have each row stand up and she would check to see if we had brushed our teeth, combed our hair, and had brought a hanky.  The row with the best participation would get a star on the chart.  I never brought a handkerchief.  Not because I forgot, though I said I did, but because I knew the pretty girl behind me, would ask me, before the teacher, and would then give me a tissue so our row wouldn't lose points.

    J. was the second crush of my life.  She lived on the lake, North of us.  The only time I ever saw her was in school.

    One day the teacher, from the next room, brought in a bat hanging from a tree branch.  After it had been passed around the room so that everyone could see, our teacher finally came to the realization, that it was still alive and went, screaming, out of the room.  The bat continued to sleep.

    My room, at home, was directly beneath that of my parents and was heated by a gas space heater which glowed and hissed all night.  My sister would use the cover of the hissing to sneak down the stairs and scare me.  One evening, after my parents were asleep, the window above my bed partly open for fresh air, my sister crept down the stairs.  As she entered my room she looked up to see a terrifying face in my window.  I don't know who screamed first, the cougar or my sister but definitely the cat's scream was louder.  It not only woke up my parents but also the neighbours, we were told the next day.

    To this day you can't scare me.  If you sneak up on me, which is pretty hard to do as I have good hearing and fantastic peripheral vision, I may jump if you say boo, but it is only to play the game.

    We lived in a forest and wild animals; bear, deer, were constantly coming down our driveway, and through our carport, to the lake, to drink.

    I suppose we did the usual things that most people do when they first move to a beach property: collect sea shells, not too many on a fresh water beach, though my sister would wade out to the drop off, the point where the bottom of the lake would drop into the deep, and find clams; collect driftwood; fish. 

    My father would rent an old boat with an inboard Briggs and Stratton motor and we would putt along with fishing lines dragging in our wake, boring.

    My sister and I had a much more practical, and entertaining, way of fishing.  Besides which it was quieter and non polluting.  Father made us a wooden frame to which was stretched a piece of mosquito netting.  We would stand waist deep in the lake.  Bread squeezed into the netting would act as bait.  Holding the netting about a foot below the surface we could watch the minnows and fingerlings swim into the net, we could also feel them nibbling at our legs.  Then quickly lifting the net we would have a screen covered with little fish.  I have no idea what we did with them, after we caught them, probably put them in jars like most children do with spiders and bees.

    My father made friends with some people who lived closer to town.  They had two boys, one of whom was my age and we chummed around.  His father worked for the railway and we would sometimes accompany him, early in the morning, when he would go to the round house and start the fires in the huge boilers of the steam engines.  How I miss the haunting refrain of the old steam whistles.

    At that time they were widening the Trans Canada Highway and about a half mile down the road from us a construction company had set up a camp.  Huge Euclid trucks without mufflers would wake us up at five in the morning when they started warming up their engines for the days work.

    Also at that time they were building the road along the lake between Sicamous and Grindrod.  My father was hired to be the powder man.  It was his job to stick the dynamite in the holes and blow the rocks off the cliff.  Before my father would explode the charge he would drive to the houses in the neighbourhood and warm them to open their windows so the blast wouldn't break the glass.  That was the cue for us children to run to the lake.

    Standing shoulder deep in the water we could look down, or is that up, the lake and see the outcrop of mountain where my father was working.  Suddenly the entire area would be obscured by a rolling cloud of dust and debris.  Huge rocks would shoot soundlessly out of the cloud, light travels much faster than sound, and sail through the air to drop into the water making big sprays of water. 

We would bend our knees and slip quietly beneath the surface of the water.  There we would hear the rumble and roar of the explosion followed by the patter of debris falling on the surface and then the hard splashes as the big rocks and boulders fell into the lake. 

    Quickly raising our heads out of the water we would hear a repeat performance, sound travels faster in water than it does through air. The sound of the blast

  would be repeated as the noise hit the mountain on the far side of the lake, and repeated again as the echo would bounce off the mountain above the construction,

  and yet again as it traveled back across the water a second time. A symphony of kettle drums orchestrated by my father with natural acoustics.

    In the summer the adults up and down the beach would try to clean their section of beach by piling the wood that had drifted in during high water.  Each night, while us children swam in the clear water, each family would have a fire on the beach.  Inevitably neighbours would gather, marshmallows would be roasted, and friends would be made.  It was this way that I met my first foreigners.

    Three families had moved North from the United States of America and bought beach homes North of us. One of the boys was my age and we spent a lot of time together.  He had a canoe and we spent some time paddling it around but we spent more time trying to sink it.  We would fill it full of water and rocks and settle it to the bottom of the lake. We would swim down, wrap our legs around the cross members, and play submarine for as long as we could hold our breath.

    One weekend his cousin came up from the States, nothing to do with the movie `My American Cousin', that was filmed two or three lakes South of us, and several years later.  His cousin could water ski, boy could he.  He would come flying in towards the dock, let go of the tow rope a split second before he hit the wharf, jump up, turn around, and sit down on the dock.

    He tried to teach me to water ski, time and time again they tried to pull me off the wharf and all I would accomplice was lowering the level of the lake by drinking half of it.  Finally we gave up and went for lunch.  After lunch we skipped the wharf and tried lifting me from the water.  I was up and away first try.  Zooming across the lake.  What a thrill, what exhilaration.  What depression, as I sit here writing this and realize that only twice more in my life did I ever water ski and the memories don't bring back the carefree happy feeling of that first time.  I think my whole life has been downhill, despite the stitches in my forehead, since that one year we spent at the lake.

    Sicamous is only thirty miles from Revelstoke which gets the highest snowfalls in B. C. In the winter the lake would freeze over and we would shovel snow.  Much too much snow to shovel off the area for a rink so we would shovel paths then skate and / or play tag along the narrow criss crossing corridors. When you caught up to someone you tagged them by pushing them, off the path,  into the snow.

    Where from I know not, but my father acquired a huge stove for the kitchen.  Four burners and an oven that used propane and four burners and an oven that used wood.  The kitchen and my room are all I remember of the interior of the house. 

    In the kitchen was a double sink.  We partially filled one side with water and tried to raise two baby ducks.  There had been a terrible storm the night before and friends of our parents who lived down the lake saw a mother duck go berserk and start stomping on her brood.  They only managed to rescue two.  We tried to hand feed them but after a couple of days one died, although maybe our cat got it.  The second one, being lonely, wouldn't eat anymore and it too passed away.

    In the spring we would lay a trail of bread crumbs from the beach to our house.  Baby ducks would work their way right up to our door and eat out of our hands.  The mother would stay at the bottom of the stairs and glare at us.

    My father cleared some small trees along the driveway and cut it into firewood for the stove.  My sister and I were relegated the job of bringing it into the house.  Because I had played around all day it was after supper and after dark and my father insisted I finish my chores.  I was still playing around with the boy next door, we were throwing rocks into the woods and pretending to scare out ghosts, then we would run from the ghosts.

    I threw a rather big rock into a dark area and heard the crashing in the brush as the rock broke small branches.  This obviously chased out some rather scary spooks and I went running down the lane yelling "Ghost, ghost".  I ran into a stone. My neighbour had thrown a small stone, towards a clump of bush.

    The nearest doctor was thirty-five miles away, in Salmon Arm, and the road in daylight was treacherous.  Winding, narrow, with many steep hills.  My father was not pleased with having to negotiate it after dark.

    Different from any other stitches I ever had, these were made of metal.  Five small, nail like, objects were put through the lacerated skin of my forehead.  Later the ends were cut off and the middles were left to be absorbed by my body.  The lumps are gone now after all these years but it took a long time.  For nearly twenty years I could run my hand over my forehead and count the little lumps in the skin though there was no scar left on my head.

    My father had actually moved to Sicamous to take up the position of police magistrate but in such a small community there probably weren't enough law breakers to support the position, which is probably why my father was working at other jobs as well.  Well in Sicamous he also worked as a finishing carpenter, building kitchen cupboards in peoples homes. 

    After only one year of living in heaven we returned to the city.