Prairie Roots
Excerpt - Looking Back
The small village of Glenavon Saskatchewan appeared on schedule ahead of the aircraft, nestled among the golden rectangular grain fields 15000 feet below. The weather was ideal for my mission, warm and sunny mid-September harvest weather. I rolled the T-33 into a steep dive, manoeuvring into position as I focused on the familiar landmarks. Spotting the school and the small figures of the students and teachers spilling out onto the school grounds I levelled out low over the village on a heading for the school. The time was exactly 3:35 in the afternoon and classes had just been dismissed. Perfect!
I pulled the screaming jet up into a tight vertical climb directly over the school, at the same time applying maximum power and beginning a vertical roll. As the T-33 shot up at 450 miles per hour I looked back over my shoulder at the rapidly receding school and the homes and buildings surrounding it. Levelling out at 8000 feet I rolled over and began another dive, coming at the small village from the west with the sun on my back.
138 pages
ISBN 0-9808979-2-0
At 300 feet I began a tight, high speed, high power turn during which I flew over my parent’s farmstead on the edge of town and saw them and many of their neighbours standing in the front yards. I completed the turn roaring back toward the school, this time at no more than a 100 feet. Pulling up sharply over the school I initiated a series of rolls as I climbed eastward to intercept the final leg of my interrupted navigation exercise. From there it would be a routine 30 minutes to RCAF Station Portage La Prairie, my training base.
As I flew what remained of the exercise the excitement of my private performance over my old school with my friends watching, gave way to the nostalgic realisation that this was my personal farewell to my youth. I was only slightly concerned that the RCMP might be patrolling near Glenavon and might report the unauthorised low flying, since being caught usually resulted in immediate cessation of pilot training. However, it was important to me to take the chance. I knew that once I received my pilot wings and began my career as an RCAF officer my life would forever diverge from that which I shared with family and friends for the first 20 years of my life.
In the ongoing years, as the winds of fate carried me through an Air Force career and a second career in British Columbia, my feelings for this province that adopted my parents and where I was born have remained intense. Many of the reasons for my emotional attachment to Saskatchewan were brought back to memory during the writing of this personal account of my youth which now follows.
Every excursion was an adventure and every weather condition had its own delights. When the sun shone on new snow and the air was still we followed new tracks and absorbed what little heat the sun gave out. When the wind blew and the snow fell and we had real blizzard conditions it was doubly adventurous to get into the woods with their shelter and listen to the wind in the treetops and watch the snow swirl and blow around in the clearings. The reduced visibility made it exciting but never frightening as the woods gave us protection and direction and we enjoyed those times the most. When the sun was setting and the wind was still the woods had a special feeling and all the wild life became active. We would startle the animals or be startled by them as we made our way through the darkening woods. As we walked we felt the dusk settle over us as the stars and moon came out and we marvelled at the beauty and the wonderful feeling it gave us.
Author on watering tank
And then there were the northern lights! As I now remember they were visible almost every clear, cold night, sometimes dramatic in their movements and at other times rhythmic and graceful. But always an awesome sight for young eyes
Excerpt - Spreading Manure
One of our winter chores was clearing the cow barns of manure. We knew this awaited our attention as we made our way back from school, trekking the mile across fields and pastures, facing the low winter evening sun and the prevailing westerly wind. It was usually a heads down, one foot in front of the other exercise, with the occasional short backward walk to thaw out the face from the bite of the wind’s icy blast. After a quick cup of cocoa we changed into our manure pitching clothes and hustled to the barns.
Clearing three barns took 30 or so minutes; the mixture of manure and bedding straw was piled on a “stoneboat”, a contraption consisting of two runners with planking nailed on top to form a platform about five by seven feet in size. The working team of horses were then harnessed and hitched to the stoneboat and Bill and I would climb on top the steaming load with our pitchforks and proceed to the fields to scatter the load over the cultivated area in a progressive pattern. Nothing was wasted including manure. Here the fun usually began.
Bill with Cholly and Manga
To start with, Dad never appreciated us running the horses with an empty stoneboat let alone a full one. We, on the other hand, thought that unloading was more fun if we could execute a swerve in the right spot and unload the manure through centrifugal force. Usually it meant a lot more work as the load usually dumped in the wrong location. We would then carry the manure with pitchforks to scatter it as evenly as we could over the pre-selected area. Pop would eventually notice our auto-offload results and would take us to task regarding the “quality” of our coverage. No doubt the tattletale tracks of the stoneboat were a clue and the result would be a lecture on abusing the horses. Not quite a supporter of animal rights to Brigitte Bardot standards he, nonetheless, was always careful with his beasts of burden - horses, that is.
Even more exciting was the influence of the wind on our work. An accidental pitch of fresh manure into wind meant you were decorated with particles of cow shit. A pre-empted throw in the right direction meant that the other person was “accidentally” speckled and if the apology was not sufficiently sincere or if there had been too many suspicious accidents, the battle was on. Pitchforks of manure, frozen or fresh, whistled through the air until one combatant beat a hasty retreat and walked home leaving the other to finish the offloading. The horses just stood there and smiled at our foolishness.
The job of removing the residue of the battle with chunks of crusty snow followed and most of the evidence stayed behind on the field. But not all of it. And we had to go through the accusations which we of course countered by blaming the wind and other such causes. Anyhow it was always a pleasure to finish that chore, get the horses back in the barn and get back into the house, change and thaw out.