Old Photographs
Memories are distorted by old photographs and family stories around the dinner table. I know I learned how to ski on our sloping front yard. But there’s a coveted photo of me doing just that at age three. I remember Dad stopping the car at a railway crossing so we could see one of those new-fangled diesel locomotives come rushing past (as my son would say with mock incredulity ‘You lived in the era of steam?’) Yes, when I was five years old and we were on a family vacation in southern Ontario and then me getting my finger mashed in the car door and watching the nail peel off in the coming in the following weeks. But how much is it MY memory and how much family stories in the ensuing months and years.
Nonetheless I have two distinctly mine-only memories of those early years in Rossland, both involving watching heavy equipment. I can’t tell if that commonality meant anything or if it’s simply a fascination of all boys. One was the Barber-Green snow remover. In many ways old Rossland was well ahead of its time. Columbia Avenue where it ran through downtown was and still has as wide as any city street I’ve ever seen. Angle parking on both sides and still room for wide travel lanes in both directions. The snowplows first ran along the parking lanes and then the middle lanes and piled snow up in a huge bank running down the middle of the road. Then the Barber Green came into play chewing into that bank, a screw churning up the snow and funneling it onto a conveyor belt where it poured into the back of a dump truck that had backed into position below the belt. As this green machine ate up the snow and moved slowly forward, the truck in reverse followed until its box was full. Then a brief pause while that truck left and the next one in line backed in under the conveyor belt for it’s turn.
I was transfixed, watching this big green monster devouring the snowbank as it slowly trundled up the street. Nothing in my four tender years on this planet had had prepared me for anything like this. I don’t remember wanting to grow up to be a snow-removal man so much as just the raw awe that such a thing existed. I suspect I was even a little bit afraid of it.
The second event was the first time I really hated my mother. As Columbia street tilted downhill in front of the Miners Hall the pavement ended and it was a dirt road the rest of the way out of town. Until the day it was paved. I think I was 3 1/2 and as the paving equipment and crew were approaching our house, as coincidence would have it, it was time for my afternoon nap.
Off to bed behind drawn curtains, but the window was cruelly left open for fresh air on the hot summer afternoon. Outside the paving equipment ripped and roared and rumbled and hissed unseen by the wide awake angry young boy. By the time nap time was over, the equipment had already moved further down the street beyond the out-of-sight-of-the-house boundary set by anxious parents. We tend to have a short memory for illness and physical painful times, but for some reason we haven’t evolved enough where we forget injustices. “That’s not fair!” is countered by the snide comment, “No one ever said life was fair.” The ancient Greeks understood this right from the beginning with their dismissal of hardship as “The gods jest” – the idea being that the gods are so bored with immortality one of their few distractions is to make life miserable for us poor suffering mortals.
In contrast to heavy equipment, the octopus in the basement was more fearful than fascinating. Each morning through the long winter Dad would trundle down the steep stairway to the basement grab his enormous shovel and scoop coal into the open maw of the furnace, then rack the grates and dump yesterday’s ashes into a large galvanized bucket to be used for traction on the snowy front and back pathways. The massive beast had one main grate in the central corridor of the house – the one I stood shivering over while pulling on my pants on cold winter mornings, and where Mom set up a drying rack on wash days. The various arms of the octopus down below fed heat to other rooms, but I don’t recall they produced heat anything like the big grate in the hallway directly above the furnace. It was noisy and creaked and groaned and my terror of cellars lasted well into my boyhood and truth be told, sometimes still give me the heebie-jeebies.
