Northern Ontario Winter

I was 16 when Mom, Dad, and Twila left Timmins. The plan was for Mom and Twila to go stay with Gram Lottie until Dad got established in Elliott Lake, and then they would join him. I was to finish my Grade 11, then go off to Elliott Lake to find summer employment.

I arrived in Elliot Lake just days before I turned 17. Dad was working shift at CanMet and had no car. I stayed with family friends and soon discovered that no mine wanted to hire a 17 yr old. I worked as cleaner at a 300 man construction camp for $100/per month plus shared room and board. When the camp closed in October, I got a job with the catering company (Crawley-McCracken) as night watchman at Algom Nordic, patrolling 7 bunkhouses, rec centre, and dining hall between 9 pm and 6 am 6 days a week for $100, room and board. Mine pay-days were hell, with the Germans trying to fight with the Portuguese, French-Canadians trying to fight with the English, and many belligerents trying to fight anyone they could! My room was shared with a German engineer, who was working as dishwasher until he could learn English, a crazy Elvis wannabe from Valleyfield who drank constantly and babbled nonsense, and me, my first real time away from a caring home environment.

During the days, I would explore the woods around the camp, and do some rockclimbing. I saw Dad once every 6 weeks or so for a couple of hours, when our shifts agreed. In the winter, on my day off, I would walk the several miles into town, and, coming back to camp, with little or no traffic on the roads, I had lots of time for thought, reflection, and searching for meaning in it all.
There is something magical, spiritual, and eternal about a Northern Ontario winter, and this time of extreme discouragement, loneliness, and lack of direction, I found, in those cold, star-filled nights, an inner peace that sustained me.

When the Lake started to come apart in 1960, I was 18, but years older that the 16 year old who arrived there two years earlier. Dad and I were among the last miners to leave CanMet. He was a shift boss, and I was the deckman. He and his crew dismantled the heavy equipment, and the cageman and I made sure that the cage could handle it. We returned to NS in June: I turned 19 in July and joined the Navy effective October 12.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I well remember the sense of wonder and awe at sheer size and majesty of Northern Ontario in winter. There is never a week goes by that I do not think of it, and, although I would not want to do the whole thing again, there are aspects of that time of my life that I consider essential in making me the person I am today.