For Aunt Florence

(And the wonderful family I didn’t really know I had)

The family farm down in the Pipestone River Valley. This photo hangs in the hall by her door in the senior’s home where Aunt Florence now lives and is well-attended by three generations of descendants. I photographed that image. I’ve been there and it really is beautiful.

A view from Butler Hill Farm; yep that’s the same beautiful barn. My cousin divided his parent’s farm with a daughter and her husband. What a feeling it must be to carry on a family business and a tough but fine way of life.

Near the farm is the little community of Cromer and its church which is clearly dear to my aunt.

“Bringing in the sheaves” Auntie calls the emergency monitor around her neck her “cowbell.”

I have decided to post this blog in honour of my dear Aunt Florence with whom I have spent the past too few days visiting. Getting to know her, her sons, her grand children and great grand children has been very uplifting. I’ve learned much and am delighted in meeting family who are outstanding and all are people to be cherished. I hold my head a little higher.

A beautiful example of a stone house in downtown Virden Manitoba.

There was once a brickyard nearby. I am not, of course, showing the humbler clapboard homes on the same tree-lined streets. This one’s for sale, but let me tell you about the winters.

What would Virden be without the railway? Just another bit of prairie?

My other cousin’s house in Kenton MB. It is over a hundred years old but is solid, and very cosy and homey. I instantly loved it. He bought it for $10,000! It needed a few renovations but… he owns it. Outright!

Sadly it was time to go far too soon. Leaving Virden was not a happy event for me. I drove as far as Yorkton and then turned due North. I decide that while miles out of the way, after all that family business, I’ll probably never be back this way again. I’d better go and try find my mother’s childhood haunts. The scenery changed to scrub bush and swamps. I began to expect moose to leap out in front but I saw none. Finally, a few miles before the town of Hudson Bay farmland reappeared as a mixture of rolling fields and and forest interspersed with plenty of waterways. The area must be a hunter’s delight. It is beautiful to my eye. In the Co-op store I ask an old man if he’s lived here long. He nods, but when I ask if he knows anything about the Eldersley area he says he’s never heard of it. I explain that it is the next town down the road but he’s stumped. Now that’s parochial! Uhuh!

Weyerhauser has an OSB plant there and now on the road, logging trucks compete with all the grain and oil heavies. Roads in swampy land roll and pitch, driving require full concentration. I discover another damned flat tire on the trailer. I change it but cannot find a tire shop and decide to just go find a place to sleep for the night. I was stung on the shoulder yesterday by a tiny wasp. It is still swollen and painful, right up my neck as well, so a good night in the rack is just the ticket. I’ve found a clearing tucked back in the woods out of sight from the road. It has been a very long time since I’ve been in a black spruce forest like this. Short with thick limbs, a whole industry has been built around this forest which sprawls across the entire Canadian Shield.

Best logged in sub-zero temperatures, when the ground is frozen, they have several months of that here each year. It is no country for this old man anymore. But the mosquitoes still like me.

A prairie bush berry. Folks may call them soap berries. They make a lovely bit of colour within thickets of spruce trees.

The apex of my odyssey. The land adjacent is where the one-room school once stood. Nothing is forever but this marks where my moom and all ten of her siblings attended. no-one seemed to get beyond grade 4. Most proved to be clever people who went on to lead interesting lives. I asked a lady but she didn’t know a thing. It turns out her house is built on the ruins of the old schoolhouse.

I drive west and finally see a sign for Miners Creek. This is the site of the schoolhouse which the whole immediate family of my mother. My mother and all her brothers and sisters grew up in a homestead shack within walking distance. The nearest townsite is Eldersley. It is almost completely gone. A few miles west is Tisdale where I stopped for a new trailer tire. One geezer, when queried if he lived here long, replied that he was a newcomer. When pressed, he told mine that he’d only arrived in 1939! Another old fellow replied that he vaguely recalled the family name but nothing more. He did know about the old schoolhouse and confirmed that the site was now a farmer’s house and yard. My family mission was accomplished as far as possible. Home calls.

The Eldersley train station is long gone. I think the small elevator was there. I vaguely remember that from my last visit 69 years ago. My mother probably boarded the eastbound train to Toronto from here with a gleam in her eye. Guess I’m the result!

That old building sits beside the tracks and may be from my mother’s time so long ago. It looks as if there may have been a baseball field there at one time.

Miners Creek trickles on. Some day it will arrive at some ocean. The name remains a benchmark in my sense of family history.

Somewhere in a near radius of where I stood to take this photo is where my grandparents, and all their chidren, tried to carve a homestead farm out of the forest, one tree at a time. They did not know it couldn’t be done but perservered. It took the next generation, and the next, to find a foothold. Life goes on. When it rains, these dusty prairie roads become muddy trails the oldtimers call “gumbo.”

Tisdale. A priaire landmark. i don’t how old this water tower is but it marks what were the bright lights of town for the surrounding farmers. I’ve repeatedly heard a lot about going to Tisdale. I vaguely remember the broad main street of the old town. It wasn’t paved back then. While I waited for a new trailer tire, I ate at Tim Hortons, then headed west.

I should mention all the splendid photos I’ve had to drive by. Shoulders on prairie highways are narrow, steep and soft. It was too dangerous to stop and capture spectacular sights when dragging my trailer. Today finds me in a RV park just on the outskirts of Rosetown Saskatchewan. Morning light sifted through a heavy fog and I drifted back to sleep. I awakened to the music of snarling crop dusters taking off from the nearby airfield. I’m staying the whole day as the warm prairie wind rises now and begins to moan. It was a near-incessant sound which, apparently, drove some of the homesteaders insane. Others endured quite nicely.

A girl on a swing. Still looking good at 87. Her life as a prairie girl and farm wife (67 years) deserve a book. Wow! the things she knows! The hardships and triumphs and surrounding family leave me feeling humble and very, very proud. I love you all.

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” ―Frida Kahlo.

Well now I’ve started something. When in my last blog, on impulse, I added a sentence about how distantly we treat our children, I had an epiphany; especially in the wake of reader’s comments. I wrote about how we have displaced the value of our elders and ignore their very essential value in the continuity of our culture. What I realized after I added the bit about how poorly many of us treat our children, especially at the time of their lives when dedicated parental nurturing is necessary for healthy development, is that those kids are tomorrow’s adults. They’ll do what we have taught them. “As the twig is bent so grows the tree.” They’re the ones who will discard their parents into care facilities which dilutes the family further, just like we did to them. “Just keep paying us and we’ll keep them out of your way.” Family members become as disposable as chocolate wrappers and all our other debris. We know where a large number of Covid 19 deaths have occurred.

In my archives is a rough draft for a novel based on an opening scene where paramedics attend an accident with several victims scattered on the roadside. After checking each person for a pulse the bar code tattooed behind their right ear is scanned. The monetary system as we know it now is gone, replaced with electronic currency. We would have a system of personal credits, those earned, accumulated, spent and borrowed. Depending on your net credit worth and your present social standing factored by the degree of your injuries, a computer decision is made to save your life or terminate it as a source of fresh organs and tissue. And if you don’t have a bar code, well you’re just not part of the system. Red light! Send that one in on the slow truck.

Far fetched? We’re really not that far away now. There’s a lot to consider about the progress and regress, the ebb and flood of civilization, if you’re contemplative about humanity. Frankly, I envy those who are not. I sometimes wish a case of beer, a sack of crisps and some TV sports could placate me and keep me in a non-questioning existence. For those of us who are cursed with a questioning mind there is plenty to research in our quests. Recently a novel was brought to my attention. ‘The Plague’ written by Albert Camus near the middle of the last century is amazingly prescient. Camus, well aware of the pandemics past, seemed to understand those that were to come, perhaps because there is a pattern of natural mass population control throughout our history. Like nearly everything else, there are reviews of the work available on the web.

Then, today, there was third component introduced to my epiphany. ‘The Machine Stops’ written in 1909 by E.M. Forster is a short story which offers some amazing views on a future dystopian troglodyte society which is almost entirely dependant on and committed to the synthetic environment it has created. Communication around the planet is via an internet-like technology. People live underground, entirely terrified of being self-reliant, independent and are almost wholly insular from each other. They travel reluctantly in airships and only when necessary with little interest in scenic views of the planet passing beneath them. Those who struggle to escape this culture are accused of the despicable act of “homelessness.” This a sobering essay on how our society may be evolving. Written at the time it was is fascinating. It is work to read and digest but thrilling to discover such a brilliant mind especially in the years preceding the massive technical renaissance of the First World War. Here’s a link to the entire short story:

https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf

Future Fish. What a fabulous metal sculpture. This graces the front lobby of the Duncan Motorsport Circuit. It stands taller than me.

As a mechanic and a welder I can see the beauty in this incredible work. It took apparently 227 hours to build. I’ll bet there was a lot of beer went into the process as well as the conceptual stage. WOW!

The rain poured down as we arrived with race cars in their trailers. Eventually the weather cleared and the track dried. I was invited along for the day.

I’m not a racer but as a mechanic I can certainly appreciate the engineering and fitting here. Believe it or not, the engine is reworked from a Ford Pinto, well-known to be very tough.

My other friend’s old Mazda was also a real howler.

In the pit. It was an interesting day for me.
I’m still a sailor.

That’s around $200,000. worth of very sexy Mercedes being slithered around tight S-bends. No comment.

Our spring weather here on Vancouver Island has been cool and damp lately. Despite that the wildflowers have bloomed profusely. Fruit and berries are flowering and ripening early and in huge quantities. It is said that fools and newcomers predict the weather but my instilled rural sensibilities suggest that we may well have a severe winter ahead. Another indicator, as old wit and humour go, is about the size of the white man’s wood piles. But, it is officially summer in a few days and as Covid restrictions slowly relax, we’d best live in the moment. Remember the line from that wonderful movie ‘Bucket List.’ “If you think the last six months went fast, think about the next few.”