My first late friends
2011/08/15
Many fond memories of my time at the farm in Manitoba have to do with the friends I made in the area. Two of them were Mark and Sonia, siblings born a year apart, from the nearby Olynyk family – close neighbors at 1.5 miles away. They were also very close to my age. Sadly, this is my only surviving photo of them, taken from the attic window of our house:
Cropped:
Left to right, Mark, Sonia and me.
They were good kids – Mark was earnest and good-hearted, and Sonia had an uncommon intelligence that she mostly hid but you could see in her eyes. We often went to each others’ places for play dates, but most often they came over to our place, because primitive though it was, it was a better place for us to socialize.
I lost touch with them when we moved away to Toronto, and I don’t recall if we re-stablished any contact during the brief period we returned in 1992. A number of years after we again left and moved to Calgary, I heard that they had both passed away. Sonia had needed a liver transplant (cause unknown, but I doubt she was a drinker even in her adult form) and her body rejected the transplanted organ, killing her. Mark fell off a roof he was working on, and suffocated as a result of the severe asthma attack that ensued.
On today’s return trip, I learned from a neighbor that almost the entire Olynyk family had been wiped out one way or another. Their older sister Laureen had died, though I don’t recall the cause of death now. Their father Peter fell down a well, was unable to climb out and died of exposure. The remainder I don’t know about, but apparently only two of the youngest children survive and are living in Alberta.
I was given the location of their graves – within sight of their home – and went to visit them one last time. The cemetary:
Turns out they all were married before their deaths. Not surprising; being single in your late 20s is unheard of here.
Sonia and Laureen’s graves:
Mark’s grave is just off to the right. His headstone:
Grave marking technology has advanced. Thanks to their headstones, I now have more recent photos of them both. Sonia:
And Mark and his wife Victoria, whom I never met:
When I received the news of their deaths in Calgary, it didn’t really have much impact on me; I had been out of touch with them for most of the last ten years already. It was sad, yes, but it didn’t upset me all that much – I feel kind of crummy saying that, but I’ll trust that you know what I mean.
Standing there in this little country graveyard, knowing their bodies were just a few feet away from me under the dirt, was a bit different. It was a little creepy actually, but it also reminded me much more strongly of how vibrant and alive and physically real they were when I knew them, and of how easy it is to associate self with embodiment. I have to remind myself that the bodies buried here are empty and useless now; it was the information content therein that made them the people they were, and the sad thing is that that information is now irretrievably lost. All I can do now is try to hold onto what remaining memories I have of them.
Occasion to once again curse our greatest enemy, death.
On a brighter note, the other neighboring family I hung out with, the Melnyks, are doing fine. My old playmate Joey is married, working in Brandon and buying a house in Forrest. One of his elder sisters, Jackie, is working at a flax plant south of Angusville and has three boys and the other, Wanda, is working at the nursing home in Russell. Joey’s older brother, Wally, is still running their farm and is married and has three daughters. I talked to Wally on the phone and his wife and eldest daughter in person, and visited Jackie briefly at work. Will try to establish contact with Joey before moving on.
The Farm
2011/08/15
As previously mentioned, in 1982 we bought and moved to an 80-acre plot of land near Angusville, Manitoba.
Roughly half of it is covered by poplar trees, 10% by marshland and the remainder is cleared and arable. There is a ~hundred-year-old log cabin with a small shed at the northwest corner. When we arrived, the house was formatted as three small rooms downstairs and two in the attic, and was insulated with a mixture of mud, manure and straw. There were barn swallows nesting inside since there was no glass left in any of the windows.
We moved in one trip using the largest U-Haul truck available. Here’s us unpacking – you can see the original state of the house to the side:
Remember when I mentioned the nice wooden camper my father made in an earlier post? He made it modular, so it could be removed from the truck and replaced with something else. So we took the camper off and made it a permanent fixture of the lot, and used it to sleep in while making the main house liveable. My father built a new cargo box for the truck:
We knocked out all that mud insulation and put in Fiberglas, and put plywood around the outside to block the wind, and glass in the windows. We also knocked out all the inside walls to make it just two big rooms – one downstairs and one upstairs. Roof leaks were repaired, telephone installed (at great cost) and a wood stove bought at action and installed. Then it was mostly livable. Here’s the furnished interior after all that:
Keep in mind that we had no running water – we couldn’t afford to have a well professionally drilled, and our attempt to dig our own was fruitless. No electricity either, and the phone was a party line, shared with two neighbors; the rings were coded to identify the recipients of calls, which meant we all knew when someone else was getting a call, and when making a call we had to check that the line was clear first. Heat was from the wood stove. Light from oil lamps, a Coleman kerosene camping lantern, and one electric light run off a car battery and recharged in the truck every few days. Oh, and we never completely eliminated the occasional mouse getting inside – and in the summer, sometimes even the odd garter snake. The cat loved those – automatic strings!
We brought drinking water in from Rossburn in five-gallon pails. Bathing was done by pouring water over oneself by cup-fulls while standing in a kiddie pool, and the toilet was a pail with a seat on it that had to be emptied every few days.
Reading by oil lamp has its charm, but its perils too – in the summer the attic sleeping area would have dozens of brown moths making their kamikaze attacks on the lamps, occasionally even succeeding in damping the flame through noble sacrifice. While the roof was waterproof it wasn’t moth-proof. Eventually I set up a small camping tent inside the attic, put my bed inside, and read with just my head and arms sticking out of the zipper. That actually worked really well. It was also nice because my father installed larger windows upstairs and at night I could lay in bed looking out and up at the stars. The night skies here are fantastic.
As are the summer thunderstorms. Sometimes it was like having giants pounding on the roof. Proper storms are something I really miss in Vancouver; they almost never occur there.
We listened to either music or CBC radio all the time. Peter Gzowski, Arthur Black and Lister Sinclair are the voices of Canada for me.
Here’s what the exterior of the house looked like after the renovations:
Note the second chimney. My favorite story about this place concerns the single winter we stayed here. On Christmas morning it was -50c outside, -30c inside, and we woke up with icicles where our breath had landed during the night. I spent much of that Christmas with my winter-booted feet in the oven to warm them.
So we installed an oil drum furnace and made part of the downstairs floor concrete to retain the heat. That worked really well, but it meant we were burning that much more wood. Poplar grows like a weed, but it’s still a lot of work to cut and chop it.
My father also built a greenhouse on the south side of the house so we could grow vegetables earlier and later in the year, and my mother and I had gardens in the yard. I was particularly proud of my sunflowers, the tallest of which eventually reached almost 14 feet.
Roughly in the middle of the property on the east field, there is a rise. Our plan was to build a new house here. It would have had this view to the east:
However, it turned out that there was very little work for my father in the area, and money was always very tight. This plan never materialized, and eventually we went elsewhere looking for work – one winter to Winnipeg, and the next year to Toronto, where things worked out a bit better.
Oh, that’s Sporty bounding through the cut alfalfa in that photo. I mentioned in a previous post that I would give his origin story.
Sporty was originally the dog of a neighbor in this area whose name I don’t recall. That person had trained him as a hunting dog, but was abusive towards him. He was then adopted by the closer-by Olynyk family, whom we often visited, but there was competition from stronger dogs there and he wasn’t getting his share of the food.
So, presumably at the recommendation of my dog Coal, one day Sporty jumped ship and signed on with our crew. Gave us a start too – it was a semi-blizzard and we were out for a walk on the road, when we saw a canine shape trotting over the hill behind us. Thinking it a hungry wolf, we picked up the pace but he eventually caught up. Imagine this scene, but with a blizzard reducing visibility drastically:
It wasn’t until he was about this close that we recognized him, with relief. He stayed with us from then on, and would happily see us off to town by chasing the truck at great speed until he got winded, and gave us equally enthusiastic welcome-homes.
There are tons more stories about this place, but some other time.
Now, to the present. Here’s the state of the house and camper now:
Some animals (probably lynx or raccoons) have broken into the house through the roof and destroyed everything inside, leaving piles of shit everywhere. The camper I’m surprised is still standing – ants had already hollowed out the wood a while back. There are huge ant colonies in this area. I was afraid to try going inside the house – better to come back another time with automatic weapons and hazmat suits.
I got a good feeling of closure from visiting the farm again. I really like the property itself – it has a nice mixture of trees, clearings and ponds, and nice rolling hills that give it some variety. It’s a really nice piece of land, but the location is not. The region and the towns here have nothing to offer me anymore. I’d rather have this piece of land closer to a major city – I’m not sure I would even want to come here on vacation if there were a nice house on the property.
So: I have lots of fond memories of this place and the area, but they’re memories from my adolescence. The things that made the place fun for me then are no longer here, and the area has nothing to offer my adult self. I’m glad I did this, because it has eliminated an uncertainty.
Angusville
2011/08/15
Angusville is the closest town to our property in Manitoba at 11 miles distant. It was the place we picked up our mail (no rural mail delivery) and did our banking.
Bustling downtown Angusville, circa 1992:
That photo was taken from the empty lot that used to be the site of the Angusville Hotel, which was standing and in use (as a hotel and weekend strip club) when we moved to the area in 1982. It burned down a few years later and the empty lot is now a picnic site.
Returning now, the town is pretty much dead. Only the municipal office still seems open. The post office appears closed, replaced by a row of locked mailboxes. The credit union branch also appears closed, as are the two businesses that mattered:
The Angusville Cafe, run by a nice man named Curnie. We sometimes ate here, but the real attraction for me was that he had an arcade machine; my parents would set aside time for a leisurely coffee so I could play for a while. For a while it was Warp, and another while it was Arabian.
Chuchmuch Store – run by a member of the Chuchmuch family, though I don’t know his first name. He was an aging, grumpy man who watched all his customers like a hawk – he had trouble with the natives from the nearby reserve drinking vanilla off the shelves and spread the same mistrust to outsiders, which means us since we’re not from one of the local Ukranian clans.
It wasn’t a terribly good store, and his prices were high, but occasionally it saved us the extra 20 miles to Russell or Rossburn.
What’s important about this store is that he had a comic rack.
You know how as kids we used to be told about how the Eskimos have 22 different words for snow depending on its type, and the Japanese have so many ways to say thank you? In Manitoba I learned that there are many qualitatively different flavors of boredom. Comics were one of my outlets; I read every book I had many times over. At the time I was into Disney talking animal comics and Gold Key / Whitman adventure comics.
But at the Chuchmuch store I discovered something new. The unusual cover art led me to pick up an issue of the justifiably famous Demon Bear arc of The New Mutants. I was hooked instantly – this was something new. Here was a superhero comic (a genre which hadn’t really captured my interest before) but with characters my age, good character development including strong female characters, and really innovative art that went beyond mere representation and into interpretation. After that I picked up every issue I could find, and branched out into Uncanny X-Men as a result of the crossovers. The New Mutants is still my all-time favorite comic series, and one of only a couple I went out of my way to complete. It was my NM collection that I took with me to Coombs to pass the time.
Another Angusville-based thing I did for entertainment was that I subscribed to a stamp club to get exotic postage stamps to look at and collect. So a trip into town to check the mail had me anticipating some new brightly colored pieces of paper to look at. Yeah, different times.
Back to today. I saw a couple of interesting things on the community bulletin board:
I admit to being surprised as how good internet and cell phone service is in these parts, by which I mean they exist.
Also, auction sale!
Auction sales are a popular form of entertainment here – a chance to get together and gossip with people you perhaps don’t see quite as often, and paw through some poor deceased neighbor’s stuff.
Yes, the word “sale” is redundant and no, they’re not selling auctions. That’s just what they call them in these parts.
Arnold & Hedley used to be the main auctioneers in this region. I imagine they’ve retired now, but man were they good. They could talk a mile a minute but you could still understand them, and they had eagle eyes – don’t scratch your nose while bidding is on or you might end up buying something. I loved going to auction sales half to listen to them work and half to paw through the goods.
Russell
2011/08/15 – one part of several to come; lots to cover about this day. Might take me a few days to catch up with it all.
In the early 1980s my father was working in construction in Calgary, but saw the end of the boom coming. My parents wanted to buy some land to live on, so my mother and I spent a lot of time travelling around looking at properties. In 1982 we bought 80 acres near Angusville, Manitoba, and moved there. More about the land in a later post.
Angusville being a tiny town, the two nearby towns that we went to for supplies were Russell and Rossburn. I’ll post about Russell first because that’s where I arrived first on the current road trip.
Unlike most prairie towns that are shrinking, Russell is holding on. A couple of buildings have come down and a couple have gone up, but more or less everything is the same as I recall. Except for the main street, which now has the future standing over every corner. Top picture 1992ish, bottom today:
Detail on the arches:
There are some new businesses though – there never used to be any chain restaurants here, but now there is an A&W, a Tim Horton’s and a Subway. The old Russell Inn restaurant is still around and still fairly good, and that’s where I prefer to eat.
The Russell Inn was founded 20+ years ago specifically as an attempt to stave off the slow death of the town by making it a tourist haven. They’ve also developed a ski hill nearby. That plus the town’s location at a major crossroads seem to have done the trick, but it means the town is really counting on the Inn and the tourist trade to stay alive.
Fond memories ensue.
Russell is where I did my driving test and first got my driver’s license – I actually learned out in the country in my parents’ vehicles though. I did my driving test in my father’s 3/4 ton pickup – not an easy thing to parallel park, but otherwise I had no problems. I grew up riding in the front seat all the time, so I was very familiar with the particulars of driving long before I got behind the wheel.
The remains of the town theater (actually there were two, the other being a drive-in on the outskirts; it died first). Disney likenesses probably not authorized. This is where I saw the first and best Transformers movie, and also saw Baby and Old Yeller (man, that one got me good).
The laundromat at the end of the main drag. We came into town every two weeks like clockwork to wash our duds here. For a while they had a Zaxxon machine, but I mostly killed time a few blocks away downtown at:
P&D’s Pizza (now an empty lot). P and D were a young husband and wife team who operated a pizza/burger joint and arcade here. The restaurant was nice because it had high-backed booths with lots of room in them, but of course I was mainly here for the games. They rotated through lots of games and I spent lots and lots of money on them. P&D’s was still around when we briefly returned in 1992, and there were newer games then. The main ones I remember from both periods were:
- Radical Radial
- Slap Fight (wish I could find working ROMs – loved this game)
- Mach 3 (impressive visuals but not much of a game)
- Xain’d Sleena
- Exerion
- 3 Wonders
- Street Fighter II – usually with a crowd of native kids around it. We had a grand time beating the crap out of each other in this game.
For the times when I wanted a different selection of games, there was a pool hall right across the street, in the grey stone building here:
Tougher kids hung out here, but they never hassled me except for one time one of them challenged me to a game of pool. I lost.
This place is where I first saw the original Street Fighter – boy, was that a difficult game! Also super popular – the controls were often busted. They also had (at various times) Blasteroids, Black Tiger (which I mastered so well during my time in Toronto that it became a way to kill time on the cheap), and Extermination, which was a rather unique vertical-scrolling shooter that I’ve never seen anywhere else and would like to play again.
I mentioned the ski hill – it’s about 20 minutes outside of town as Asessippi Park – and yes, I’ve already made all possible jokes about that name so we can take them as read, OK? Anyway, I also went back there today. We used to go for picnics, fishing and swimming there. Here’s the “beach” and swimming area:
The lake isn’t natural – there is a dam offscreen to the left. My father often took me fishing below the dam. But near the picnic area there was a delightful little stream, with a miniature concrete dam on it. I used to love to play in the stream, making more dams out of gravel. To my delight, it’s still there exactly as before:
Slow on the uptake department: I always wondered why this little dam was here. I just realized today that it was for kids, and meant as a play-sized version of the much bigger nearby dam. Duh.
Today yielded enough things to fill another post or two, but it’s late and I need sleep. Will resume when I can. But here’s today’s map (sorry, haven’t had time to look into the centering problem yet).
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August 14
Today I drove from Swift Current, Saskatchewan to Russell, Manitoba. Despite what people say about Saskatchewan, it was actually a more scenic drive than yesterday’s drive from Calgary to Swift Current. That section of Alberta is actually flatter and more desolate than Saskatchewan.
I had planned to detour to check out the historic Claybank brick factory, which looked like good camera fodder, but decided against it when I discovered the road leading there was gravel. I was willing to invest an hour driving on paved roads to go there, but not two on gravel.
So I continued on to Russell, taking the shortcut through the Qu’Appelle Valley (yes, Saskatchewan does have 3D features). Not a whole lot to say about it; another long drive with no real personal significance to me and only short stops to stretch and snack.
On arrival at Russell I just went straight to the Russell Inn, the only good lodging in town. Discovered that they had misunderstood my phone reservation request for a quiet room at the back and instead had me in a noisy room at the front, and that they only had me for one night instead of two because the next day was fully booked. Thankfully a back room was available and later on someone cancelled, so I`m in a quiet room for two nights after all.
Initial impressions: Russell has grown – it now has at least three chain restaurants where before it had none, and the Russell Inn itself is twice as big as it used to be.
Tomorrow I`ll have a better look around town, then head out to the farm and survey the environs there.
[gmap file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110814.kml” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” visible=”true” type=”satellite”]
