Logging Camp Summer

Logging Camp Summer:

May 25/05 Word Counter: 1247

The other day I saw a picture of an old log building in a magazine. Immediately, I thought about a summer I spent in a logging camp. It was 1947. I was fifteen.

Until I was twelve, we lived like any normal nuclear family: father worked and mother stayed at home raising the kids. In September 1944, we were living in Malartic, Quebec. I fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Val D’Or. An X-ray detected a problem with one of my lungs. My life took an abrupt turn. According to the doctors if I did not go where I could get complete rest and constant care my days would be numbered. My maternal grandmother, who lived some three hundred miles away, got wind of my predicament. Within a week, I had a battered suitcase packed, an assortment of sandwiches and fruit in a bag, and cash in my pocket to pay for my trip to Ansonville, Ontario.

By the next February, I was well enough to start school. Although I had cousins living next door and the usual assortment of school friends, I missed my own siblings - three brothers and a sister. My mother wrote to me at least once a month and I answered back to bring her up-to-date on how I was doing.

My dad had been a gold miner and migrated from mine to mine, whichever paid the best. However, working in the dangerous, dank darkness a mile or so underground eventually got to him. He longed for open-air work. He got a job with a logging company from Kirkland Lake cutting poplar, birch, and pine at a site about twenty miles out of town. My mother wrote to me and asked if I wanted to spend the summer with them.

She walked two miles to a small motel, The Red Pines, and talked the owner into taking her to meet me at the train station in Swastika in his 1940 Chevrolet.

That was the start of an exciting summer.

The camp consisted of an impressive array of log buildings. A fairly large main building - the cookhouse - with a large wood stove, an old washtub in the corner for washing clothes as well as bodies, three long tables with benches for dining, and a corner curtained area was the parents bedroom. Everybody else slept in the bunkhouse. There were enough bunk beds to accommodate sixteen people, so there was lots of room for visitors. An outhouse – a two-holer – was set about fifty yards from the house, for obvious reasons. Another log building, about a hundred yards back, served as the barn for the workhorse, a four-year-old stallion. There was no electricity at the camp. When it got too dark to read or play cards, we lit the coal oil lamps.

We had one horse to haul (skid, in bushman parlance) the fallen trees out of the dense bush to a clear spot near the road. There we trimmed the branches off with an axe and cut the trees, with a bucksaw, into four-foot lengths for cording. Nowadays they use tractors to do the skidding and a power saw to trim and cut; it’s much more efficient and a lot easier on the back and arms, but somehow, not as nostalgic.

Wake up call was five-thirty, Monday through Friday. It’s surprising how many birds are up at that time. Their shrill cries bounced from tree to tree, matched to the chirping of crickets and croaking of bullfrogs. A cold face wash is the best way to wake up. Then a full ladle of cold water down your throat seemed to vitalize and cleanse your gullet – a habit I have practiced all these years – my sons think I’m nuts. My mother had breakfast ready by the time I strode into the cookhouse.

While my dad sat outside, after breakfast, he sharpened the axe and bucksaw. My chore was to feed the horse and put the harness on him, ready for a day’s work.

By seven o’clock, mother had packed our lunch in a canvas bag, and included a big jug of water fresh out of the well and a couple bottles of soda pop. I will spare you the tedious account of the actual cutting, skidding, chopping, sawing, and cording of wood.

I will recount one experience, though. On those days when dark clouds started to form, blotting out the warm summer sun, announcing eminent rain, we immediately started to construct a shelter. We pulled four or five logs out from a cord pile just far enough to form a roof. My dad then chose a birch log about six or eight inches in diameter and peeled the bark off in large strips and ten cut these lengthwise. We layered the strips on the jutting logs, the first row with the curve up and the next with the curve down – much the same as Mexican slate roofs. The rain ran down and we were snug and dry. My dad had fabricated so many of those shelters that he knew he had to scrape the ground in front of us to let the water run off and not back up into our shelter. My dad was not much of a talker, at least not to his children, but, during those downpours, we were closer than we have ever been.

Every Friday afternoon, a scaler from the logging company came to measure the amount of wood in the cords. He trekked through the bush, visiting each pile of wood, and scratched an orange chalk on certain logs. My dad was paid cash; if I recall, he was paid $5 per cord (eight feet long, four feet high, and four feet deep) for pine and $7 per cord for polar and birch. Not bad money for those days.

By the middle of the afternoon, the family all piled into the scaler’s truck – mom and dad in the front and the five kids in the back - and made the bumpy trip back to Kirkland Lake. The scaler dropped my mother off at the grocery store and we kids walked to a cousin’s house or, if we got there in time, she would give us each fifteen cents to go see the feature movie, newsreel, cartoons, and the next chapter in the exciting serial (a dime for the show and a nickel for the buttered popcorn). My dad headed to the beer parlour. Let’s face it; a man gets very thirsty slugging away for a whole week in the bush without a beer.

At ten thirty, the scaler picked us up at my uncle’s home for the return trip to the camp. By then my dad had fallen asleep on the couch, grocery boxes were piled in the entrance, my mother, aunt and uncle, and I -- being the eldest -- were noisily playing cards in the kitchen, while the younger children were asleep upstairs. By the time we got dad awake enough to make it to the truck, loaded the boxes of groceries, and woke the younger siblings, it was past eleven before we started the long journey back to the camp.



That summer seemed to pass too quickly. Before I knew it, it was time to return to my grandparents, some ninety miles by rail, to finish my schooling.

I was reunited with my family two years later, but I will always look on that summer of 1947 with fond memories.