Pipeline Dream

TAKE THIS JOB AND  . . . .

Remember the first job you landed that accomplished one thing and one thing only?  It was the job that illustrated, all too clearly and quickly, that you weren’t capable of doing everything you set your mind to.

I rode the bus from Edmonton to Pincher Creek in deep Southern Alberta.  It was early June, 1961, and I’d wangled a job with a pipeline company building lines from the field to a new gas plant north of Waterton Lakes National Park.   I was excited.  For college students, all construction jobs were coveted for their higher pay and long hours.  By today’s standards, the pay wasn’t great ($1.70 an hour) but it was better than what I would get driving a moving van in Edmonton and the hours were definitely long, as befits an operation that relies upon the weather – 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, overtime after 44 hours.  

There weren’t a lot of openings for inexperienced workers on a pipeline and my job was a variation on ditch-digging.   The pipeline was a fairly large one, 18-inch pipe, and large backhoes dug the ditches, roughly five feet deep and four feet across.  The ditch-diggers job was to ‘pad’ the ditch.  Using shovels and pick-axes, we would smooth the ditch so that the pipe could, more or less, lie evenly. 

I recall little of that first night in Pincher Creek, other than an aging and grubby aluminum shack with stained mattresses flung about the floor and one slightly-used bathroom.    I was the only guest.   I remember no windows, the smell of oil and dust and thinking three months of this luxury might be more than I could take.

Earlier, a foreman signed me up and told me where I was expected to be at 6:00 the next morning.  Someone would pick me up to drive me to work.  He then offered some advice.

“You don’t want to be living in that shack the whole summer, boy.  See if you can’t rent a place.   Unfortunately for you, the town is swamped with construction companies right now.  Six of them, I believe.  So getting a place to live and getting something to eat isn’t easy.  But maybe you’ll get lucky.”

I didn’t sleep much and, at six am, groggily piled into a disheveled van with 3 other men plus the driver.  A mile north of town was a place called Pincher Crossing.   It boasted an Esso gas station and a restaurant. We straggled in for breakfast.  Apparently so had half the town.   The restaurant was crammed with workmen.   The driver told us to order breakfast to go, lunch, too, if we needed it.   After practically tackling a harried waitress, I managed to garner a doughnut for breakfast and a roast beef sandwich and Pepsi for lunch.   The bill?  $2.00.  My second rude shock, the first being my palatial digs.

The four of us were taken high up into the Rockies southwest of Pincher Creek and dropped in the middle of a long scar of ditch leading into more alpine heights.   I found it all a bit jarring, this once-pristine mountain scene with this ugly ditch ripped into it.  The contrast of wilderness beauty and the prospect of long hours of manual labour was making me queasy. We were handed 3 shovels and a pick.  A D7 cat waited to take us to the worksite.  Fortunately there was enough room for the four of us beside and behind the cat operator but we were left to our own devices to find something to hold onto as the cat lurched heavily down the right-of-way. This may have looked a bit like kids riding with Dad on the tractor.  It wasn’t.

For the next two days, a shovel conspired with dirt to create a dozen calluses on my unsuspecting hands.  Here I was in one of the prettiest places on earth spending 12 hours a day with my head down in a ditch, staring at the earth, dining on gristly roast beef sandwiches without butter or mustard, and lamenting the fragility of my hands.  The work was as boring as one can imagine, and mental relief was elusive.  School, girlfriends, and friends seem impossibly far away.  Perhaps because they were.  Partial escape came whenever a foreman drove by to tell us to a) work harder/faster/better or b) what a nice job we were doing.   Thanks to this fatuous commentary, my mind could wander briefly to contemplate the merits of burying a shovel in his skull.  

My loathing for the job is tempered on the second day when one of my co-workers, an older man, gave me the name of another welder who might rent me a room, or at least a bed and his wife might even provide me with a hot breakfast and lunch.   That second night, I tracked down a vintage trailer and am given an upper bunk in a second bedroom.  I share the room and a bathroom with an older welder.  I feel I’ve returned to civilization and take a long, long shower. 

The next morning, the wife prepares a hot breakfast, oatmeal and toast, an act that would forever place me in the camp of those favoring living with a good woman.   And a lunch.  With fresh bread.  And butter and mustard.   I am fawningly grateful.

With decent food and a comfortable bed, work becomes considerably more tolerable but more adversity is never far away.  The older man – he’s probably 45 but to a 20-year-old, he’s ready for retirement – takes pity on my painful grappling with the shovel.

‘You know,’ he says, careful that the other two do not hear, ‘when those foremen who come by want to find someone to promote, they look for the guy using the pick. 

I guess they figure he’s the hardest worker.   Just telling you  . . . .’

‘If that’s true,’ I reply, ‘Why don’t you use it?’

‘I like padding ditches.  It’s what I do.’

Obviously the man’s lofty ambition was to be applauded but I had to gather myself to wheedle the pick out of one of my ‘ditch associates’ hands and test the theory.

Wheedling was minimal, my associate concluding I was even dumber than he for wanting to use this instrument of torture.   He smiles at the prospect of a day with just the shovel.

IF those foremen bastards DO pick the guy using the pick, they’re right about the user being the hardest worker.  Shoulder muscles I never knew I had start screaming for respite.  My lower back feels like someone kicked me.  Within hours, I am whining.   Sweet Jesus, how long can I keep this up?

Will we run out of ditch before someone notices me?   Not bloody likely.  There’s something hugely discouraging after spending 12 hours pampering 2 or 3 hundred yards of a slash in the earth to look up and see 3 more miles of the same.   Sisyphus had it easy.  

Just as I was preparing to hurl the pick at a nearby grazing whitetail doe, a pickup truck bounces down the right of way and stops at our work site.

A man jumps out and points at me.  ‘Hey kid, get up here.’   

I can tell he is impressed by the speed with which I drop the pick and vault out of the ditch.

‘You ever been an oiler on a backhoe?’

I had a rep for quick thinking but this question nailed me.  ‘Uh, no, I don’t think so,’ I stammered.

He stared at me.  Shit, I thought.  Was this it?  One question?  Wrong answer?  Don’t you know what an oiler on a backhoe is?  After too long a time, he growled ‘Well, no problem, I guess.  Jump in.’

Much later, I would remember that fateful qualifier, ‘I guess’.

The next day, I was picked up by Ed the backhoe operator in his new Ford ¾ ton.  We weren’t formally introduced.  Ed simply pointed to the passenger door.

‘My name is Ed.  I operate the backhoe you’re gonna be working on.  You do what I tell ya, when I tell ya.  Got it?   That’s all you gotta remember.  What I tell ya, when I tell ya.  What’s your name?’

‘Bob’

‘Bob.  That’s fuckin’ original.  This a summer job or you lookin’ for a career?’

‘Summer.  I’m going into my 3^rd year university. I – ‘

‘Fuckin’ lovely.  A college kid. ‘   He slid the ¾ ton around a tight corner with unseemly haste, I thought.  ‘Well, college kid, this isn’t the classroom. Didja bring your gloves?  You got a problem with dark small spaces?  Understand you can’t bend a piece of pipe twice?’

I mmm’ed my way through it.  It’d all become clear soon enough.

‘Ya won’t mind if I call you stupid instead of Bob, will ya?’

“Well, actually I’d mind a lot.’

‘Well, actually, get fuckin’ used to it.’

And so it began.  Me and Ed.  Team Backhoe.   To borrow a phrase unheard of in 1961, Ed had ‘issues’.  Being the easy-going kid I was, I usually explored ways to make friends with new acquaintances, but something about Ed’s seething style told me to not waste my time.

Oiler on a backhoe.  The job paid 15 cents an hour more than padding the ditch and sounded easy; keep the backhoe greased, replace teeth in the bucket when required, set pegs in a straight line to show the operator where to dig, lay out large wooden mats when the ground got too soggy for the backhoe.   I was up for this.

The backhoe was a large Bucyrus Erie with a 30 inch bucket and six ‘teeth’.  These teeth were attached by a cotter pin to six shanks fixed on the bucket.   The teeth wore down irregularly and it was my job to remove the cotter pin, replace the worn tooth with a new one and re-attach the cotter pin.  

The backhoe worked on a pipeline right of way prepared by d8 cats.  A 50-foot wide swath of mountain forest was cleared of all trees and leveled.  When we showed up for work in the morning, our first glance was to the seemingly endless swath of roadbed stretching off into the mountains.

My first task in the morning, after listening to Ed bitch about his job for the 30 minute drive to the job site, was to place the wooden pegs that gave him his guide for digging.  The rules were; a straight line, set the pegs as close to the middle of the right of way as possible and when you come to a bend make sure you set the pegs so the pipe has to bend only once.

Then I had to grease the backhoe.  This is what Ed meant when he said something about being afraid of small dark spaces.  Three times a day, I had to crawl underneath that backhoe.  Carrying a grease gun I had to put fresh grease in 6 nipples, 3 on each track.   I didn’t think it would bother me at first, probably because I didn’t think much about it at all, but this was dicey work, crawling on your belly underneath a 20-ton piece of equipment and hoping that soft mud wasn’t masquerading as hard ground.

As the backhoe edged its way down the right-of-way, it dragged two large wooden rafts behind it – the mats.  Whenever the ground got too soft, the backhoe would reach back and grab those mats and throw them on the ground in front.  It was my job to place them so the tracks could climb aboard and keep the backhoe from sinking into the mud.   This wasn’t a hard job but Ed usually found something wrong with the way I did it.  Fact was, Ed didn’t much like anything I did – or me, for that matter. 

But his special venom was saved for my inability to set the pegs on a curve.

‘How many fuckin’ times to I have to tell ya, ya can’t bend a pipe twice.  Jesus, will you look at that?’   He’d point to my peg layout and even to me it was obvious the pipe would have to bend twice.  Why did I not see that?  I think I was just following the right of way curve, instead of thinking how the pipe might actually change directions.   

Everybody makes mistakes, right?  Unfortunately, I made this mistake not once, not twice, but three times, and each time Ed’s vitriol got worse.

‘Dumb fuckin’ college kids,’ was his favorite.

If 12 hours of slugging it out at the backhoe wasn’t painful enough, the ride out at night was terrifying.   We quit work at 7 at a spot inaccessible to anything but another track vehicle, a tow cat, so named for its job of, well, towing things around.   Ed, naturally, got to sit with the operator.  I, along with any other hitch-hiking workers had to ride on the front bumper.   And hold on by gripping the radiator cap. Everyone was in a hurry to get home so the cat operator pushed that mechanical monster as hard as he could. This lead to some roller coaster rides over rough terrain where one slip could cost a man his life.  Evidently, no one but those of us who were forced to ride that way gave this extreme peril a second thought. Like the Comanchero observed in ‘Lonesome Dove’, ‘Life is cheap up here on the Canadian.’  After what seemed an eternity, we huffed our way into the drop-off spot.  Prying my frozen fingers from the radiator cap, I dismounted the tow cat.  My fingers asked me how many more times I was going to make them save my life.  Another 30 minute Ed-bitching ride to town was still ahead of me.

I was beginning to wonder how much longer I could stay employed.    The money was great but at what cost.  Would he have me fired?  Would I quit?

The problem resolved itself about two weeks after I became an oiler.  I was moving a mat and hooking up a cable to the bucket when a sliver of loose cable pierced my middle finger at its base.  It was nothing but a pinprick.  I had gloves on and didn’t even stop to look. 

The next morning my entire right arm was swollen. The foreman took one look and ordered me to the hospital in Pincher Creek.  Blood poisoning.  

I was in that small hospital for a week. I should have been hospitalized for guilt, feeling ecstatic at being given a break from work, being fed three meals a day, sleeping in a clean bed while fretting about my need to make enough money for year four at college.  When I finally went back to work, there was no work.  The oiler job was gone. So were the ditch jobs.   Part of me was relieved and I’m sure Ed was happier.  Back to driving the moving van.

I left those beautiful mountains the next day.

And crossed ‘backhoe oiler’ off my list of things I would do – or could do - for money.

Robert Alan Davidson

March 2, 2014

The Piano Lesson

THE PIANO LESSON

Soon after the ice disappeared from the arena and skates were rubbed with neatsfoot oil and put away for the winter, the oil was applied to the baseball gloves. Ball season was on – as soon as the mud disappeared.  Pick-up games were called scrubs and were played with a softball.  Baseball came later, when the adults got around to organizing it. There was good reason for this; baseballs were expensive, softballs could be ‘borrowed’ from the school, and softball allowed for a game to be played in a smaller venue, like an empty lot.   Why kids living in a small town on the prairies wanted to confine themselves to an empty lot is a mystery but that’s the way it was.

The games were unscheduled and notice was rarely given as to where or when.  Boys on bikes rode around with their gloves on their handlebars until they found each other in sufficient number to launch an after-school game.   I was 13 or so and loved all sports.  When school let out and weather permitting, I would rush home, have a bite to eat,  grab my glove and rush out the door.   Winter was over, the crows and robins had returned and a season of softball and baseball to be anticipated. 

But there was a problem – there’s always a problem.  Every Thursday, my mother would intercept me on the way out the door, press a quarter into my sweaty little hand and wish me well in my piano lesson.  Yes, a piano lesson.  My Thursday afternoons were spoken for and this was a huge intrusion into my sporting life.   We must remember that in east-central Alberta in April and May, the phrase ‘weather permitting’ took on a huge role.  The weather for anything outdoorsy was seldom ‘permitting’ and a warm dry day was clasped to our young bosoms like the gold it was.  And, unfortunately for me, those rare fine days seemed to inordinately fall on a Thursday.  In short, I had to forgo a day of baseball to have a piano lesson.

I don’t know what piano lessons are like today but in 1954, mine was an unpleasant undertaking, even if I did enjoy playing the piano.   

In the first place, the lesson was held in the basement of a Catholic convent.   I came from a tepid ‘live-and-let-live’ Protestant family, but a visit to a convent was still daunting.   In those days, what Protestants and Catholics didn’t know about each other was considerable.  What we rumored about each other was even more considerable.   For example, it was widely believed that the garden behind the convent was full of foetuses (foeti ?) of nuns’ unborn children.   I was pretty sure this couldn’t be true, but I was also a creature of the age and as impressionable as anyone when it came to scurrilous rumours.

After my mother made me wash my hands and clean my fingernails so as to not offend the piano teacher, I was off for the 12 block bike ride to the convent.   The entrance was a side door that led to the basement.  That allowed me a glimpse of the garden but all I could see was dried sunflowers and dessicated weeds.   No rotting corpses. But what did I expect?

The convent was immaculate.  Neat and tidy are words seldom used in prairie towns and for good reason.  Dust and mud and wind are hard on anyone’s fondness for cleanliness and most people simply tried to do the best they could without obsessing about it.   A little dirt never hurt anyone, was the local mantra.   But the convent looked and smelled better than the local hospital.  Tracking in mud would be an outrage.  I took my running shoes off at the door.    Rats!  Why didn’t I wear a pair of socks without holes?

I walked to the small room where the lesson took place and sat on the stool to await Sister St. Jude.   A visit to the dentist should be this scary.   Sister St. Jude was strict.  That’s the only way I can put it.  She did not smile – ever – and kept her instructions and comments to a convent-worthy minimum.   She carried a stick with which to remind my knuckles that my fingers where straying from the correct notes.

She would swoop in – I never heard her approach, which, of course, added to my discomfort – sit down in a chair next to my stool and tell me which Bach cantata to start with.  The music rack held an entire library of Bach sheet music and, based on my previous week’s lesson, I was supposed to have the appropriate piece ready and waiting for Sister St. Jude to say ‘Play!’.  Chances were I did not and this would lead to the first of a seemingly endless stream of pursed lips and sighs with which this most unfriendly nun expressed dissatisfaction.   I guess she had better students.  I got that.  Maybe she was expressing a glumness that afflicted all piano teachers after a lifetime of errant notes.  I do know my heart wasn’t in it.   My mom’s was.  The lessons were tough enough in the half-lit days of winter but now, as baseball season came into bloom, my piano lessons were pure drudgery.  I am sure this was obvious to Sister St. Jude.

Occasionally, a Sister DeSalles substituted for Sister St. Jude.   Sister DeSalles was more in line with what I thought a nun should be, what Hollywood no doubt taught me she should be, warm, smiling and tolerant.   But no sooner would I relax in her gentle hands than the frowning visage of Sister St. Jude would fill the doorway and I was back to nursing my knuckles.

To ease my pain, I would occasionally ask her if we could play some of the tin pan alley tunes I’d been practicing at home.  No.  Bach was what the Toronto Conservatory of Music required if I was to progress in piano grades and Bach was what I would play and Toronto Conservatory Music Theory was what I would study in order to play Bach properly.  Sister St. Jude did not use a metronome.  What she expected was that we students could accurately read the notation, listen carefully to what she said, and the selection would be played properly.

Things rarely worked out that way.  I could say my hands were too small for some of the chords but the truth was I didn’t practice Bach as much as I was supposed to.  For good reason.  I hated Bach.   To my ears, his music was a cacophony of piano scales run amok.  Of course I knew he was one of the ‘greats’ but, to me, he was no Scott Joplin or Cole Porter.   Or John Philip Sousa.

When the inevitable wrong note was hit, out came that stick and ‘Rap!’ a sharp blow to my knuckles.  “B flat, Mr. Davidson!  B flat!”   After a while that small stick started to look like a cat-o-nine tails.   

I am sure you can see how this all ends.   One especially sunny and warm Thursday afternoon, I set off to the convent with the 25 cent lesson fee in my pocket.  As usual, my ball glove was hooked over the handlebars.  As luck and a couple of detours would have it, I happened to pass a lot where a pickup game had just begun.   I did not make it to the convent.  I thought about later blowing the quarter on pop and candy but decided I’d stick to being just disobedient, not suicidal.

My mother rewarded my errant ways by cancelling the piano lessons with the words ‘You’ll be sorry someday for quitting like that.  It’s the harshest punishment I can think of.’   

Looking back after all these years, I can understand what she was doing.  And she may have been right, I do regret not being able to play better piano.  But who doesn’t?  Rubenstein maybe?  On the other hand, I still dislike Bach and still love baseball.

Robert Alan Davidson

April, 2014

The Local

THE LOCAL

Trainspotting, the amateur’s interest in watching trains, is an activity normally associated with the British Isles.  It has a grand tradition; after all, it led to a novel and a movie.   But think, for a moment, of the two vast railway systems that connect Canada.  For roughly 70 years, steam locomotives of astonishing diversity criss-crossed 3500+ miles of mainly unsettled country.  From the edge of a small prairie town, it was my good fortune to  have experienced 10 years of this often hectic traffic.

As a boy, our family lived next to the CNR main rail line that connected Moncton, New Brunswick, with Vancouver and Prince Rupert.    From 1946 until steam faded into history around 1955, I watched hundreds of locomotives pull their loads across the country.  Our town was what the railways called a divisional point. This meant that every locomotive had to stop to take on water, get a splash of oil on squeaky bearings, perhaps re-fuel and maybe undergo a change of crew.  A pit stop writ large.

Not every locomotive stopped.  On rare occasions a heavyweight locomotive (a 5500 series, if I recall) sported white flags across on either side of its forehead.   This meant the main rail line was to be cleared and this monster allowed to race to its destination as fast as it was allowed to go, its cargo a secret and its comings-and-goings unannounced. Where it began and where it finished we never knew.  Fortunately, our house was not fifty yards from the main line and I was able to see more of these phantom trains than most.   Often they passed in the night and only the unrelenting and fierce huffing told of their brief dash through town.  The loud noise was unusual and generally enough to waken me.   And my imagination.  Rumours abounded as to the possible cargo – silk, munitions, nuclear weapons.   I would spend hours dreaming of its mysterious cargo.

My brothers and I were self-trained experts on CNR train traffic.  We had names for the different types of locomotives that had nothing to do with the standard wheel assignation, such 2-6-4-4. We knew approximately how long a train would lay over by how far its siding was from the main track.   We knew the language of the whistle.  When a freight carried what we called a ‘dead’ engine, a locomotive headed either to the Winnipeg repair centre or the locomotive boneyard, we would try to sneak onto it and play engineer.  Thanks to this proximity to the CNR main line, our childhood was enriched greatly.

But there was one train that truly captivated us.   It was called the Local and it ran the CNR main line from Edmonton to Saskatoon.     Every day.  One train going west, one train going east.  They passed each other somewhere around the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.

It wasn’t a big train, the Local.  Often it was only three or four cars long.  Sometimes it was eight, a mix of baggage and passenger cars.  The local began its service sometime in the early thirties and continued through to the early sixties, that sadly brief period of Western Canadian history when travel by passenger train waxed and waned on the Canadian prairies.  And if you ask the small-town prairie people who lived through this era what they remember about train travel, they’re quite likely to cite the Local.  The bigger, continental trains were flashier and state of the art but they generally traversed the prairies in the dark of night (the assumption being their fare-paying clientele had no wish to gaze at unending grasslands and wheatfields  They would likely never know the subtle and varied beauty of these open vistas).  Moreover, the continentals only stopped at divisional points and then but briefly.

But the Locals were special.  They were generally stubby affairs that roamed a vast sparsely-populated swath of Canada.   They were, in a very real way, the reliable link.

The highway system was well-developed by 1950 (if not paved) but weather could disrupt traffic at any time. Not so the Local.

The locomotive itself was a sleek black machine, almost diminutive compared to its transcontinental cousins.  If the larger locomotives could be likened to noble thoroughbreds, the Local engine  was a perfectly proportioned quarter horse, no less beautiful for its smaller size.  It shone brightly in the prairie sun, always appearing as if it had received a fresh coat of shiny enamel.  The Local did its job so briskly that we boys came out almost on a daily basis just to watch it come and go, watch its huge wheels slowly begin to roll, edge as close as we dared while avoiding the sudden steam release from a side valve, and wave to the man with the best job in the world, the engineer.

Today, few people expect passenger trains to run on time (probably because passenger rail traffic has no status with railroads fixated on freight) but the Local, unless impeded by a blizzard or a crossing accident, was rarely off schedule by more than 10 minutes.  It was, for me, the model of beauty and efficiency.  Of course, it only had to go 300 miles.  Why shouldn’t it be able to keep to its schedule?

Well, between Edmonton and the Saskatchewan border – roughly 170 miles – the Local had to be prepared to stop a few times.  In this 170 mile stretch, these towns and villages were stops for the Local – Clover Bar, Ardrossan, Uncas, DeVille, Lindbrook, Tofield, Ryley, Poe, Holden, Bruce, Torlea, Viking, Phillips, Kinsella, Jarrow, Irma, Fabyan, Wainwright, Greenshields, Heath, Edgerton, Ribstone and, finally, Chauvin.  With only one or two exceptions, each stop had a small sandy-coloured station and at least one grain elevator.  23 stops in 170 miles and 5 hours.    Try replicating that in a car and you’ll have some idea of how conscientious the trainmen were to stay on schedule.   There was none of that ‘grabbing the mail bag off a hook as you whiz by’ stuff either. 

For a traveler in a hurry, taking the Local could be frustrating, even when the timetable was apparent.  All that stopping and starting every 6 or 7 miles could try one’s patience.  But most travelers took it all in stride and it was cleaner and brighter than the bus.  The occasional whiff of smoke and dusting of cinders was preferable to the gravel highway alternatives of choking dust, knee-deep mud or four-foot snowdrifts.

The Local rarely had more than one or two passenger cars, day coaches with less-than luxurious seating.  But it was an important freight conduit to the small communities along the way. The dominance of the trucking industry was in the future and for smaller freight loads the Local was a reliable option.   Prompt delivery was important and the Local delivered.

Why were there so many towns?  One word.  Grain.  Getting the grain to the elevator was an arduous task.   The grain was heavy, the equipment clumsy and accident-prone, and the ‘engines’ were dray horses.  Both the wagons and the horses  often had to be borrowed from a more affluent neighbour and keeping their loaned use to a minimum was both polite and prudent.  The town began with the elevator (if one considers there may have been as many as 60 elevators along that 170-mile stretch, there must have been one hell of a building boom in the first 30 years of the 20^th century).

The elevator was the town centre and what happened after that was a matter of speculation.   Some towns grew and others did not.  And, as far as I know, no Ph.D candidate ever researched this phenomenom.  All I knew was that physical beauty didn’t have anything to do with it.  The prettiest town locations were more than likely the sparest. Our town, healthy and growing, was set in a dreary slough bottom.  Six miles away, a beautiful valley was home to a dying hamlet. 

It may seem obvious now that not all of these towns could survive.  Yet, I am also sure no one thought that at the time.  Perhaps they were hoping the European model might be replicated and may have simply underestimated the harshness of the prairies.

Now in the second decade of the 21^st century, in that 170-mile from Edmonton to the Saskatchewan border, only Wainwright, the divisional point could be described as a healthy town.  Others, like Tofield, Viking, Ryley, and perhaps Irma are clinging to a small population base.  Edgerton has a small but vibrant arts community.  The rest have either disappeared or are nearly deserted.  And, of course, the Local is no more.  

But during its heyday, trainspotting on the Canadian prairies was a splendidly varied and exciting affair.  And there was always the Local.   I wish my grandchildren could have seen it.

Robert Alan Davidson

February 15, 2014

Small Town Christmas

SMALL TOWN CHRISTMAS

Now that the semi-dreaded Christmas season is upon us and we’re assaulted constantly by shrill advertisements and egregiously wretched versions of famous carols, perhaps it’s a good time to look back a few years to a time when Christmas was different – not necessarily better, but different.

Everybody has their favorite Christmas Story and this is mine.  I’m telling it not because there was a religious significance, not because of some personal epiphany, and not because some memorable gifts changed hands.  I’m telling it simply because of the joy and energy an entire town seemed to bring to one specific Christmas and the unique spin a small Alberta town put on the celebration.   Sure I was young and could be accused of wearing rose-coloured glasses but, hey, maybe that’s the good fortune of being born in an arguably more innocent time and growing up in a more unworldly part of the continent.  I always thought everyone should have a Christmas like this one.

Did I say a ‘few’ years?   Actually, I meant 56.  1958.   The town was Wainwright Alberta and I was 17 years of age.  I suspect my happy memories of this Christmas had something to do with the transition from a slack-jawed kid salivating in expectation of all that was good at that time of year to a soon-to-be sophisticated man of the world (in my mind anyway) about to jettison all this seasonal fooforaw for the endless bounty of a huge and welcoming world.  What surprised me was the intensity of goodwill with which the month unfolded.

Life was certainly full then.  In addition to school, my best friend, Don, and I both worked part-time at Patterson’s Groceteria.  We both played hockey for the Dukes, the town’s senior team.  We both played for the High School basketball team.  And we both had girl friends to whom we pledged the kind of devotion that somehow mysteriously disappeared soon after graduation.

I can’t speak for Don (I lost track of him some years ago) but I’d like to think he’d agree that the last Christmas we spent as high school seniors was one of the best,  due in no small measure to those part-time jobs at the grocery store..   If there was a Patterson who founded the store, I never knew the man.  We worked for Bill Riome, a RCAF veteran who might have been the straightest, most honest man either of us ever met.  The store was a tightly-run ship and we were expected to know almost everything there was to know about running a grocery store and to move quickly and smartly to see that the right things were done when they were supposed to be done.   I can’t remember what we were paid. It wouldn’t have been much but whatever it was, we never complained.  What the job did do was put us in close contact with many of our neighbors. And that was special.

Christmas season began around December 1 .  The town strung lights across five blocks of Main Street and every one waited for the arrival of Mandarin Oranges, the true harbinger of Christmas season.  The oranges made it official and stores began to decorate.  The pace of life in the town accelerated.  People walked more briskly. If there was a second harbinger at Patterson’s, it was the outsized Coca-Cola poster taped up in one of the frnt windows.  It showed Santa kicking back with a Coke in some posh highrise in New York, a tableau about a million miles from Wainwright. The marketing genius who designed that poster has likely gone to that big idea room in the sky but his descendants need to know this poster was, for Don and I, the most evocative sign of good things to come that we ever encountered.   The idea of soaking up Christmas in the opulence of the world’s most exciting city was as alluring, not to mention remote, as a beautiful girl offering us money to dance with her.

Patterson’s was one of three good-sized grocery stores in this small town of ours and competition was stiff. Luring customers with price had its place but after years of battling with each other to stay alive the three stores settled back to let service take precedence over price.  For the staff this meant staying on those proverbial toes. We were expected to keep a smile on our faces and do whatever it took to keep customers happy and eager to return.  This meant that if Farmer Joe decided to stock up on 50 pound bags of flour and his dilapidated and rancid International was parked six blocks away, we had to smile cheerfully and say, “Sure, Mr. Joe, I’d be happy to carry these six bags out to your truck, even if you’re 40 years young, 240 pounds and an ex-steer-wrestling champion”  (Okay, I didn’t say that last part). Along with, “No sir, we didn’t expect any tip.”   All this goodwill was intensified around Christmas.  Even the well-known churls and cheapskates got appropriate retail deference. 

Anyway, it wasn’t long into December before the store began to smell of oranges and chocolates and fresh baking special to the season.  Decorations and streamers were strung from the ceiling and walls.  Mr. Riome installed a tape machine that played carols, carols that people generally liked to hear.  None of that ‘All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” stuff warbled by some mediocrity who probably lost those two front teeth trying to entertain a surly nightclub audience armed with ripe tomatoes.

The aisles were crowded with Christmas specialties, chocolates, gift packages of cigarettes, candies of astonishing variety and nuts.   The store’s warehouse was in the cellar of the store. It was re-stocked once a week by a semi-trailer from Edmonton, twice a week in December. When shelves needed re-stocking, we had to rush downstairs, grab a case of whatever was needed and shlep it back upstairs, stamp the cans with the ink-pricer and while it was important to work fast, it was just as important to not get in the way of browsing shoppers (A nicety that seems to have been forgotten these days).   Produce re-stocking required a keen eye for freshness.  Bill had no tolerance for scruffy perishables wilting on his shelves.

We soon knew to keep an eye out for those items that moved quickly, regardless of the season, items like Lipton’s Chicken Noodle Soup, Campbell’s Mushroom Soup, Niblets, and Tiny Teddy peas.  (Tangent Alert!   Tiny Teddy peas were just what they advertised, small sweet as honey peas in 16 ounce cans that simply flew off the shelves.  You could not believe a canned vegetable could be so popular.  I can’t recall who marketed them but I have this vision of events taking place at the company HQ sometime in the early 1960’s.   An efficiency expert rises to announce. “Enough!  I don’t care how popular Tiny Teddy’s are.  They’re hurting the sale of adult-sized peas.  We can’t have that.  Henceforth, TT’s are no more and we blend the peas, big and small.  Better yet, let’s put the lab boys to work and make all those peas the same size, big.  What we lose in taste we make up for in fewer peas to fill a can.  Sounds like win-win to me!”)

The store had 2 check-out counters with two check-out girls. When line-ups started to form, we were expected to help with bagging.  There were no plastic bags in those days so everything went into paper bags or cardboard boxes freed up through re-stocking. We were expected to help all customers take their groceries to their cars, especially when the streets were snowy and hard to navigate OR muddy and hard to navigate OR dusty and hard to see OR  . .  well, all the time actually.

Many customers either phoned in their orders or asked the store to deliver their orders to their homes.  That meant either Don or I, when the demand was sufficient, filled the store’s VW delivery van and raced out from behind the store to deliver groceries to houses throughout town.  If there was a pure fun part of our jobs with Patterson’s, it was the delivering of grocery orders.  I wish I could say we were careful with that cranky old VW but with its stick shift and easy handling, we thought we were Tony Curtis as Johnny Dark out on the town.  I regret to say we went through 3 transmissions in 2 years but Bill, outside of shaking his head at how fast we made the deliveries, never complained.  Besides the regular deliveries, Bill had a list of people for whom some gifts of food were required.  I don’t know how he uncovered the poverty that usually laid well hidden in small towns (actually it wasn’t so much that it was hidden.  It was more a case of most of the townspeople having little wealth and detecting the really needy from the not-so-well-off wasn’t easy), but he did and we made numerous stops as Christmas approached and made deliveries to some very happy and surprised townfolk – and some not so happy.  I’m afraid Don and I were too dense to understand.

Christmas deliveries were special in that as Christmas eve approached (the store tried to close at 4 but was flexible), the customers became more appreciative of the service, sometimes offering a tip, but more often a small gift of candy or chocolate.

Soon, the days were flying by.  Social activities, concerts, choral presentations, parties were everywhere for young and old.  But for some reason, there were few events for high school students, perhaps  because, as teenagers, they chose to willfully eschew all those other events.  That didn’t mean they stayed at home.  On weekends there was the regular Saturday night dance in Kinsella, 30 miles away.  And somewhere within reachable distance there would always be a wedding or celebration of some sort that dictated a dance be held in one of the countless rural community halls.  If the youths promised to behave, not start any fights, and refrain from getting sick anywhere near the hall, they were generally welcome to join the dance. Don and I were playing hockey twice a week and Bill was gracious enough to work around our absences.  And we had to study for exams in January.

Sometime in early December, Lyle Hainsworth decided to regale the town with Christmas music.   Lyle, an easy-going – his father would say indolent – young man from a farm 20 miles northeast of town spent his free time –all his free time - driving his pickup truck up and down Main Street, hoping, everyone thought, a girl would eventually run out onto the street, jump into his International and swear her undying love.  That dream began back in 1950 and after a thousand miles of ambling up and down Main Street Lyle saw no reason to quit pursuing that dream.  Lyle, his International pickup, his Sweet Caporal cigarettes, and his shy smile were as close to an institution in Wainwright as any living thing.  It was just Lyle.  This Christmas, he decided to treat the town by turning up his radio and opening both door windows in order to grace Main Street with CJCA’s Christmas carols.   Thus presented, he drifted his way slowly from one end of town to the other and back again, over and over, turning the radio down when news and commercials were on and turning it back up for the music   It was a measure of the town’s goodwill toward Lyle that no one attempted to rip off his truck aerial to stifle yet another rendition of ‘Jingle Bell Rock’.

On the evening of December 16, a heavy snowfall brought the town to a standstill.  The town awoke to enough snow and cold to make any attempt to leave one’s house a matter requiring some planning.  What do I wear?  How little shoveling can I get away with?    Will my car handle this snow? Will my car start? How much time do I need if I’m going to make that meeting?  The school buses are likely to be grounded so the farm kids will be staying home.  Do I let my kids do the same?  Given that everyone was, more or less, going through the same routine, different times of the year delivered different responses.  November:  Jeez, not already! January:   Grrr, I hate this! I really, really hate this!  March:  If some a-hole tells me to have a nice day, I’m up on an assault charge! So help me! But on December 19, 1958:  A few people are going to need help today!

Soon, it seemed as if half the town was out shoveling, pushing, scraping, and joking with each other about car qualities, tire qualities, and shovel qualities.  Housebound seniors were looked in on.   Older homes had their wood supplies checked.  Mrs. Zoom-Zoom, so named for her habit of darting about her home like a demented pinball, had so many people dropping in to see if she was okay that she ran out of cookies.  Old man Mills ran out of his chronically short supply of patience and asked his would-be benefactors to quit bothering him.

Those on the move worked their way toward Main Street where the town’s lone grader was trying to work its way north from the train station.  Front end loaders were still a luxury for the future, so the operator had no place to put the snow except on the curb.  Stores struggled to create paths to their doors and waited with skeleton staffs for customers they knew weren’t coming.  Tomorrow. The town was a giant white mess but people were moving.  Around eleven people began gathering at the beanery and the restaurants and with steaming mugs of coffee toasted each other’s efforts and rating each other’s car models for startability and driveability.   Tomorrow it would be business as usual but today they would pause to bask in their community effort to bring the town back to life.

By two, Lyle Hainsworth and his Christmas carols were back on the street and people marveled at his dedication during such trying times.

Schools remained open but most students were exempted by their parents and soon Bushey Hill on the edge of town was swarming with sleighs and toboggans.

Sloughs were quickly shoveled and shinny games begun. Both the hill and the sloughs heard their share of whining about it being too cold.  Yet no one quit.  

A young engineer, new to the town, lost his wife to cancer at the end of November and my dad asked Don and I and our girlfriends if we wouldn’t mind slipping into his house while he was at work and decorating a tree.   We were proud of ourselves for this gesture of goodwill but the widower never said a word and left town shortly before New Year’s. Now that I look back on it, I can’t blame him.  There was a time, I guess, when we thought that the joy of Christmas could overcome any adversity. Not so.

The town curmudgeon was actually a dog, a gray-muzzled old Labrador named Bruno.  As was the custom with most dogs in those days, Bruno had the run of the town and he was a familiar sight striding purposefully about town looking for whatever and eschewing any public contact.  He wasn’t vicious and never attacked anyone as far as anyone knew but he liked his distance and would growl ever so softly when anyone pushed their attention too far. Like Lyle, he was a bit of an institution about town.  Hs perambulations took place day and night and finished when he returned to his home in the far east end of town where a dish of food was waiting.

On the freezing night of December 22, Bruno decided to explore the north end of town.  Around 11 P.M., he stopped at a small one-room shack, home to Ed Marshall and his two sons, Eugene, age 20, and Terry, age 18.  Ed was one of those tough luck men who had a weakness for booze.   Consequently, he was often out of work in spite of being a skilled handyman.  Bruno began barking at the front door of the shack, even though no lights were on.  The barking continued, insistently and loud.  Neighbors were wakened.  Eventually, Terry Marshall rose and went to the door.  When he saw the dog barking at him, his curiosity compelled him to move out into the freezing night to see what all the fuss was about and immediately saw the smoke and sparks from the electrical service box.  Terry yelled at his father and brother just as the flames began spreading from the box.  A neighbor quickly phoned the fire department and the town’s air raid siren began wailing to summon the volunteer fire brigade.  And to waken the entire town.   By the time the town’s two fire trucks arrived the shack was gone, settling into a large bonfire that never suggested a house had ever been there.   Ed and his boys were left shivering in their underwear. But not for long.

That’s the unhappy part of that story.  The happier part is that several people offered their homes to the Marshalls and the Bison Motel made a two-bedroom suite available to them until they could get re-settled.  Clothing and household goods soon swamped the Fire Hall and, best of all perhaps, Ed was offered a job with the town to help him get back on his feet.  

Bruno got his picture in the local paper and a t-bone steak for Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, Don and I took some time to drop in on Nels Carlson, a Danish electrician who invited us for a Christmas drink.  He was lonely for his family back in Denmark, he said,  and told us how Christmas Eve was actually Christmas at home and how special the dinner would be – roast goose, sweet potatoes, and cabbage.   He poured us each a glass of Aquavit, a drink we had never heard of. We sipped until Nels got tired of watching us try to finish the searing liquid and excused himself to head to the beer parlor.  We went home.

Both Don and I paid close attention to our families that Christmas, perhaps realizing it might be a long time before gathering with them again at this time of year.

But what stood out for that three plus weeks was the overall goodwill shown by the people of a small town.   The old song lyric ’Seldom was heard a discouraging word’ was the order of the day.   After all these years and all the good Yule seasons I’ve experienced, it’s funny that that rather ordinary experience in a rather ordinary place should remain so vivid.   I guess it was because of the people.

Robert Alan Davidson

December 2014