Showing posts with label winnipeg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winnipeg. Show all posts

4 Dear John


King Street, Winnipeg, in the falling snow by Bryan Scott


Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

― Alexander Pope 

I believe the launch of my army career had triggered a change in me... though I hesitate to say precisely what that might be. Fore sure, I was fitter than I had ever been since childhood, but this magnificent vigour was unlikely to last for long. How much exercise did fully trained artillery officers actually get, I wondered? And how would I react, in course of time, to a life that denied me a right of choice in fundamental matters, such as the choice of a place to live? In fact, I have to admit right now that I didn't wish to be disturbed by fundamental changes in my life. Didn't the fact that I had cast aside my chance to become an infantry officer demonstrate that such a choice would take me too far from home?

But now that I had in fact returned home, I found that I was not exactly enamoured with it, and I was soon consumed anew by the old bogy of boredom. As a result, I turned again to past distractions. As it happened, my friend Larry had broken with his old flame June and was going now with a girl called Ann, who was able to acquaint me with a friend of hers. Now, if I had been able to fathom the least little thing about females in those days, I would have sensed that this one was not for me, but to my limited mentality woman remained a closed book. Thus, I took up with Joanne.

The girl was a virtual deaf-mute. She answered anything you said in three words or less, but never began a sentence of her own. Instead, she kept her mouth in motion with a wad of chewing gum, so that getting through an evening with her was something of an ordeal.  Why did I do it?

Well, first, I ascribed part of the blame for my washout with women on a failure to seem interesting enough, a fault I hoped to remedy in the fullness of time, and second, though Joanne was not the most alluring of girls, her features were not untouched by comeliness – at least to my eager masculine fancy at the time – and she was rather petite with long black hair. In short, she was a girl, and at almost twenty years of age I was keenly feeling the need for one.

Naturally, my lack of savoir faire with the fair sex made me a bit thin-skinned and anxious to get the social niceties right, but Joanne's stony silence, a practice that lessened the link between us, sometimes made my cheeks flush. As they did one evening when we undertook the seemingly simple task of descending from an all but empty bus.

As we neared our stop on Corydon Avenue, I led the way up the aisle from the back seat and swung open the little gate before the back door and stepped down ready to descend. But ghost-like, Joanne crept past my back, it seems, for a moment later I saw her short form posed on the step before the front door! What in the world was she doing there? I wondered.


 Corydon Bus 1960s

 I was mortified. And then some wag of a passenger wisecracked: 

 “Meet you half-way.” 

 At that, my head shrank into my collar as the bus slowed to a stop and we got off yards apart. At times thereafter I fancied she'd concocted that farcical performance, just to make me feel silly, and at others I was sure it had all been a crazy mistake. But I never gave vent to any of these conjectures in view of the padlocked aspect Joanne unfailingly displayed, and she never mentioned the matter either.

 Whenever we returned to her house in the evening, the problem that preoccupied me was how to kiss her goodnight after that disastrous episode with my first girlfriend, for she always got upon the second of the three steps before her front door and just perched there eying me mutely! And chewing – always chewing! Was that done on purpose too? I never did kiss Joanne because I couldn't solve the problem in physics she invariably set me: how to embrace a girl in an authentic way while she was standing on a step looking down at you!
I no longer recall the exact path travelled by my fractured amity with Joanne. The pair of us spent several evenings together, I believe, on weekends when I visited Winnipeg from Shilo, and I likely sent her a letter in the third week of January, for a reply came dated January 23rd.  It was typed on two tiny sheets, and in it she waxed quite chatty for a change. 

 She said she’d attended a party recently and met ‘a real nice guy’ that she thought was more her type, by which she meant, you can guess, a type less timid with women! She hoped I wasn’t too disappointed and ‘as things were turning out’, she said, she didn’t think we should 'date each other again' because I could be meeting the right girl for me and she could be meeting the boy for her.
Well, I thought she’d just met one. Anyway, she went on to say ‘I think it is only fair to you that I do this, for I am only wasting your time’, adding, ‘you are one of the nicest guys I ever met. I wish you the best, and I hope we can still be friends.’
Friends? Whenever were we anything better? It seems she had a fancy for a role in which a queenly magnanimity could be paraded before a rejected lover. Being ‘a nice guy’, I felt, was not a lot of compensation for the loss of a girl, but I was not yet knowing enough to understand that ‘nice guys’ invariably end up either celibate or under the thumb. I would have to make myself more stern, more steely, more strong-willed, and I would have to banish any idea of being a 'nice guy', if I ever wished to win a woman.


He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

― P.G. Wodehouse





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1 Just a Dam Slave


                                                   Slave Falls, Manitoba, Canada

I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.
― Carl Gustav Jung.

Why do such words ring in my head when I cast my thoughts back to the past? What fiend had seized hold of my feet and directed them away from the safe and humdrum path of the vast majority of mortals and set them tramping in foreign lands? 

I don’t know the answer to those questions, but maybe there are signs in my early life that I was destined for different things, the fact, for example, that I was born in London, England, to an English mother and a Canadian father who served in Italy during WWII, so that at the early age of three I found myself aboard a ship 


    British War Brides and their children leaving England on the Queen Mary 1946

looking out over an ocean with my mother and brother, heading for Halifax in Nova Scotia, where we boarded a train bound for Winnipeg, Manitoba, to join my father... two days later!

The Provinces of Canada

You can see how distant Winnipeg is from Nova Scotia on the map above.       
                                   
Sisler High School, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Looking back across past decades, I see the path opening upon this story when I left Sisler High School in Winnipeg at the pliable age of 18. That moment was not much a matter of pride to me because I had failed to 'graduate', a fact to be explained later.


For now, the critical thing was my emergence into the world of work, much like most kids, with no clearer idea of how to seize hold of my blossoming life than a young dog. I hadn't even any clear view of how to go about getting a job. Luckily, the matter was settled for me by a neighbour who found me work at the place of his labours in the Winnipeg division of the great American corporation of Westinghouse as a trainee assembler of lighting panels. 


But, as fate would have it, just as I began to get used to  my new work, I was despatched on a weekend's notice to the remote location of Slave Falls on the Winnipeg River, right on the doorstep of the great Canadian wilderness.

                                             Southeast Manitoba

At that isolated place, I was attached to a gang of labourers slaving away at a colossal generator that had burned out in the powerhouse of the hydroelectric dam that spanned the river there.


The Slave Falls Generators


The part of the monster in process of repair was the ‘stator’, that is the enormous portion that encloses the part that moves: the ‘rotor’. After dismantlement of the entire structure of the device, the stator had been hoisted by some unimaginable means from the floor and then settled upon a massive ring of timber blocks allowing workers to access the circular space inside to make the necessary repairs. 

But the project was behind schedule, as tittle-tattle had it, which was likely why I'd been drafted to join that gang of workmen condemned to toil for twelve hours every night inside that steel arena, twisting adhesive tape around the countless coils that clung to the guts of that colossal thing.









The Powerhouse of the Dam


The workers were housed at Pointe du Bois, some six miles up the river from the dam, where the road from civilisation came to an abrupt and wearisome end in front of a couple of Nissan huts. 

   Nissan Huts

At the dusk of day the men that made up the night crew of this dreary endeavour were despatched from their drab encampment to the isolated place of their labour by means of a bus adapted to ride on railway tracks. This hybrid, like a steel umbilical cord, linked the nursling dam with its nourishing mother 10 km down the river.
Modern railbus arriving at Pointe du Bois


The night's toil began when you climbed inside, chose a seat and waited while your fellow passengers had got aboard and slumped into seats. The driver then whirred his engine into life and engaged first gear. The old bus then began grinding along its rails, absurdly slowly at first, with something like a screech and a wail of pain. The sheds of the settlement began to glide behind outside the windows, and the chatter of the passengers swelled as the rusty iron wheels began to clatter and the seats began to shake as the driver rammed home his gears.
                                                                                                          
winnipeg-hydro-railway-rail-bus-number-b-1
The Railbus that I once rode to work upon


How strange it was for a lad like me, just a schoolboy several weeks before, to wake in the late afternoon to an evening meal eaten sleepily at a table crowded with workmen, and then to go clattering into the wilderness in that outlandish craft that scattered rabbits and deer from the fringes of the line in the fading sunlight of the forest. Strange, too, it was to labour all through the night in a floodlit hum, bandaging up the burnt-out guts of that stricken thing, till it was time to come rattling back in the grey light of morning to a dozy breakfast in the cookhouse and a dazed slumber in a bunk.


The old railbus is now in the Winnipeg Railway Museum



Inside the Railbus



The Controls


Since a road has now been built between Pointe du Bois and the hydroelectric dam at Slave Falls, the rail link is no longer in use.


The Railbus en Route


The Slave Falls generator repair project must have soon got back on track, because I was directed back to Winnipeg within a week. Yes, I spent just a week at that fascinating place, but I suspect I learned something crucial in the short time I spent there. On one of those days I met a fellow who coaxed me into being escorted to the very summit of the dam. Once at the height and standing before a knee-high parapet, I saw the river seething beneath and the vast landscape of forest stretching far to the four horizons. 


Slave Falls, Manitoba, Canada

An exhilarating site. Especially for a denizen of the Prairies like me who had rarely seen anything of the world from higher than several feet. Maybe my guide had come from elsewhere, or, fed by fantasies maybe he had just accustomed himself to such heights at this very place, but now he clambered upon the parapet itself and invited me to join him there on the dizzying pinnacle of the abyss.

Much as I wished to prove myself apt at facing challenges, I declined this one. It galled me to think that this windbag considered me spineless, but in my own estimation it was simply prudent to prepare oneself beforehand for such high jinks.  


1960s Canadian Forces Fighter Jet


At heart, what I wanted was not a life of daring, but a life of action. That is why I had decided to join the Canadian Air Force. But my designs were stymied on application when a medical check revealed that I had a slight heart murmur, a condition that rendered me unfit for service. Thus, fantasies of flying fighter jets had had to be scrapped and their place taken by reveries of leading my men over enemy hills. I then applied to join the Army, where my heart murmur remained undetected or ignored, and I was instructed to present myself at Camp Shilo, Manitoba, on the 12th of September, 1962. My dreams seemed then to be on the verge of fulfilment.

Camp Shilo, Manitoba






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