Compulsion

Boats appear to be a compulsion, at least in my life. I don't think that you could call it an addiction because you don't wither away with it nor do you get the shakes without it. The compulsion can be extremely powerful just the same. One is always looking at boats, appraising different styles, spotting boating related literature, pictures, clothing, games, gizmos. And you either have the compulsion or you don't. There is no in-between. And those that don't have it just can't understand the behaviour of those that do.
 
I suppose it's the same with gear heads or sports nuts or, as the Brits say, "Anoraks"  (derived from the old time train spotters who wore anoraks) of any kind. Like any compulsion, it's difficult to give up, at least without analysis that is. It must be that it is something that is in your blood or maybe you carry a defective gene that predisposes you to suffer with this compulsion for a lifetime.
 
I didn't always have the boating compulsion because I was just a user. I went fishing in boats, travelled in boats, and acquired some skill in the use. But the minute that I opened the man-door of the big boat shop doors and whiffed the heady fragrance of teak, red cedar and yellow cedar, I was hooked. Add to that the sight of a large wooden vessel in frame, ready to be planked and what began as a firm interest grew quickly into a full blown compulsion.
 
When my compulsion began, wooden boat shops were shutting down all over North America.  Fibreglass (now known as GRP or glass reinforced plastic) was going to take over. Skilled woodworkers weren't going to be needed and thousands of boats could be popped out of the same mould by semi-skilled workers. The marketers put the spin out there that wood wouldn't last, rotted all the time, needed outrageous amounts of maintenance, was causing the ruin of the rain forests, and was just downright not a boat-friendly material. Say it ain't so, Joe.
 
Jon Wilson, around this same time, decided to publish a magazine called WoodenBoat to focus the efforts of those people who knew that wood was indeed the best boat-friendly material. Of course, all the nay-sayers, nit-pickers and layabouts said that such a magazine would not have any readership and was doomed to failure. I picked up issue #1 at a boat show in Vancouver in 1974 and have picked up every issue since, although lately my issues are in digital format and are delivered at the speed of light.
Similarly, wooden boats made a resurgence and knowledgeable buyers continue to place orders with wooden boat builders. Obviously, compulsive people.
 
I still suffer from the compulsion although large doses of sailing holds the worst symptoms in check. When, in the depths of winter, it isn't worth your knackers to go out on the water, a listlessness sets in. It's like a general malaise that keeps you dragging around the docks and boatyards. You can try and self-medicate by going to second-hand boat parts dealers and rooting through all the good jun...er, good stuff. Make lists of next summer's cruising locations, take courses, talk to other patien...er, sailors. Drink rum. Talk like a pirate. Aargh.

Home Learning II

Not all the skills that I picked up at home came from dad. Mom left me some skills that have proven to be helpful, essential, and in one case gave me work. When I was young, I didn't just mope about the house whining about how boring my life was. For that matter, I wasn't in the house much in my free time. I did though, absorb things when I was there. For instance, I can sew. Well, every sailor should be able to sew.
 
I do the hemming around our house. Anybody needs to have their new pants shortened, I'm your man. A little blind stitching on the cuffs of your suit? Pas de sweat. In fact, when it was time for me to become a machine operator (sewing machine, that is), we went to the Mothers' Day sale and brought home the Singer, for me. It's not all straight forward though. Thimbles aren't made for men's large fingers and when I show up at FabricLand for thread or what-have-you, the ladies speak slowly as to someone retarded. In my defence, I do own a sailor's palm and sail needles.
 
I can wash my own clothes, without mixing whites and colours. I have been successful in not shrinking too many things. When I am travelling, I don't need to resort to rummaging through the laundry bag to find the cleanest dirty shirt and underwear doesn't get worn on both sides. One of the chores as I was growing up was doing the laundry. It started when I was six. Dad had bought what he thought was a great deal, a washing machine that had a horizontal drum - much like today's new machines but this one was loaded from the top. When it was spinning, it used to walk across the room so we kids were planted on top for ballast. That one was replaced by a wringer washer and when we were older, that became our job.
 
I was always in favour of food, bread especially, so I learned to bake when I was quite little. I could make Finnish Pulla when I was seven or eight and pies before I was in my teens. Roasts and cabbage rolls and salt salmon were not a mystery. When I worked for the Federal Fisheries, I was sent to the counting fence at the head waters of the Skeena River. Now there is a road into there but in the 1960's the only way in was by river boat from Topley Landing near Smithers. When the boat coming to fetch me hit the beach, an old man and his bag came flying off and the first thing anybody said to me was "Lord I hope you can cook!" The previous cook, unfortunately, was fond of his booze so he was sent packing. Cooking wasn't a problem so I cooked for half a dozen guys everyday and for a dozen or more when guys who had been counting fish on the spawning creeks came to camp.
 
The first day that I had the whole big crew for dinner, I made a large roast, veggies and some apple pies. The men were all seated on both sides of the long table, napkins tucked into their shirts, cutlery at the ready. I was using a side table to carve the hot roast and I just don't know how it happened but the roast slipped to the floor. All conversation stopped and I froze. Finally an old hand with a gravelly voice said "Well are you going to carve it?". Problem solved.  
 
All the skills that I took away from home were pre Game Boy and X Box. Most of it was picked up just by watching or asking to help. How is today's little tyke going to learn anything useful if he is in the living room shooting bad guys when mom is making dinner?
 

California

I was six when my older sister Ruth, Tutta to the family, got married. The groom, Reijo, was a pretty sharp dresser when he came courting. Like all the men in the family he was a carpenter but had tried his hand at various things before arriving at that career. In his early travels, he had worked in some capacity for a Lord Something-or-Other in the UK. In Canada, he had been a caretaker of a lodge on the west coast, owned and operated a cab after he married my sister, but the bread and butter was as a carpenter.
 
When I was young, Reijo flew weekly on the Coast Airways Grumman Goose to Tahsis to build the big saw mill there, where one single log could fill up a logging truck. Road access wasn't possible then, just by air or water.  He built two homes for the family in Canada that I can remember, with my dad helping at times, and us kids getting in the way. Ultimately, though, economics in the late 1950's and early '60's just defeated any enterprise and the family, three kids now, made a move to California in 1964.
 
In those years, there was a large exodus of Finnish-Canadians from Vancouver to California. Many prospered who could turn their hand to anything and who had emigrated once already and could see what was needed in a new country. When I had to leave the country to find work, California was the natural choice. My sister, Tutta, was established in a medical clinic in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area so there I went and the Finnish community was responsible for my getting jobs on the side from my unionized work. In the mid 1980's, when I was there, Reijo no longer worked because of an industrial accident some years past but of course he was ready with opinions and advice.
 
Western Canada, at that time had very little commercial construction happening but California was booming. Construction cranes could be seen everywhere and I was able to go to work right away on some large projects. Quite a few Canadians that I knew in the Okanagan were working in the US at that time and seemed to get on well. A Canadian carpenter can take a job right from the foundations to the roof and finish the insides as well. In the States, carpenters seem to specialize more. The foundation guy just does foundations. The framer frames up and the finisher does the doors and mouldings and other interior carpentry.
 
There was so much work in California that crews were there from Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona. Homeowners who wanted renos were hard-pressed to find someone to do the work. After awhile, I stopped going to the bank with my carpenters' coveralls on because people would recognize me as a tradesman and beg me to come and do this or that for them. When I left Canada, carpenters were making 10 bucks an hour but the union rate in California was $22.80 and the US greenback was worth 30% more. The side jobs paid $20.00 so the money rolled in. I traded in my rusty pickup and got a Volvo wagon. Did that make me a yuppy carpenter?
 
This could have gone on for a little longer but my home and family were still in Canada. Mom had died in 1979 and dad got ill in 1985 so I returned to Canada. Things were picking up work-wise at home but it would be a decade before I made the kind of money that the 80's paid in California.
 
 

Lunch Buckets

When I had been in school for a couple of years, and knew the language fairly well, I still hadn't picked up on cool. For instance, I didn't have a cool lunch bucket. I didn't have a Roy Rogers or Gene Autry box. Nor did I have a  Rocket Richard even though he came to speak at Austin Heights Elementary.  With a large French Canadian population, Coquitlam was a hot-bed of Rocket Richard and the Habs adulation.
 
My lunch bucket was this puny cube shaped thing with two handles that folded over the top for carrying. Robin's egg blue. Not cool. This isn't really surprising as I never hooked onto that cool thing anyway, except for a short stint in junior high when jack boots were in. Even then, I thought for the longest time that they were called jet boots. Don't get me wrong. I knew that smokes rolled up in your tee shirt sleeve was cool. Leather biker jackets with studs and zippers and a patch on the back was cool. As was flames on the side of a '38 Merc. Brylcream and ducktails and waterfalls were all cool but just didn't work for me.
 
I played football practically from my first day at junior high but that didn't really ease me into cool either. I played in runners for the first year as I didn't want to ask for the money for cleats. Part of it was because I was large for my age so I always played on the senior team but I wasn't in the same cool age bracket. By the time I was in the age bracket, cool didn't seem to matter any more. I drove a '56 Consul for god's sake. And lunch buckets had long been given up for just a plastic bread bag.
 
Lunch buckets were important again in the working world. When I went to my first construction job away from home, I borrowed dad's black box and thermos because it didn't look brand new. Ditto for coveralls and tools. It didn't do to show up for work with brand new everything because credibility would be at an all time low and that status ladder in the eyes of co-workers can be a long climb. Over time, I was able to substitute my own tools, coveralls, and lunch bucket.
 
That was many lunch buckets and thermos bottles ago. When thermos bottles were still made of glass, they had a unerring ability to commit suicide from great heights. Now that thermos bottles are universally of stainless steel, they just collect dents and thus gain respectability. And my last working lunch box was a Tupperware tub. Cool.

Centennial Year

1967 was Canada's Centennial Year and I got some government work. Lester B. Pearson was Prime Minister and Judy LaMarsh was Secretary of State and in charge of the Centennial Commission. Lots of money was made available for cities and towns across the country to celebrate the centennial of the country's entry into Confederation. Montreal hosted the worlds fair or Expo 67 and travelling exhibits depicting the history and growth of the nation were built in the form of the Centennial Train and Eight Centennial Caravans, one for each province, almost.

The caravans were a set of eight Dodge 1100 Semi trucks with sixty foot trailers. The trailers with exhibits were designed to be set up so that visitors could walk from trailer to trailer on enclosed bridges. The entrance started with country prior to man and then proceeded to first nations, white man etc., until modern day. The fur trade era, for instance, was seen from the bottom of a river with the bottom of a trade canoe up above and trade goods, muskets and such beside the walk-way. All the trailers then had their own sounds to go with the exhibits, for instance, voyageurs singing with the sound of rivers and paddles. The era of immigration had a passenger train car that moved and vibrated to the sound of clikkety clack rails. Outside the trailers the music was predominantly Bobby Gimby's Ca-Na-Da song over loudspeakers.

Judy LaMarsh was only the second woman to ever hold a cabinet post in Canada and she did a good job with the Centennial Commission. Rather than dictating to the communities as to what their centennial celebrations should be, she allowed the communities to do their own thing and then the caravan or train came to add that carnival flavour to the celebrations. As a result of Judy's involvement, we became known as Judy's Gypsies. Our caravan, number 7, was tasked with going to the small communities in Alberta, the Yukon and Northwest Territories, that weren't on the CP or CN main lines. So starting in Milk River, Alberta, we travelled to the many, small farm communities that dot the prairies and we were always the centre of their centennial celebrations.

For me, everything came together quickly. I was interviewed, in French and English, in January of 1967 and by May I was on a plane to Calgary. I was officially a Caravan Attendant for which the pay was $400 per month plus room and food allowance plus clothing - gray slacks, wine coloured blazer with the centennial crest on the pocket in silver filigree, seven white shirts with epaulets and Canada cuff links, wine coloured tie, orange coveralls with a large logo on the back, leather work gloves and dress gloves, and a black beret. Most times the food allowance was sufficient for everything and the wages went into the bank. The caravan had an advance man who travelled ahead and organized accommodation and a park or fair grounds large enough for the trucks to set up in. This was quite a feat in some small towns when attendants, truck drivers, electricians, mechanics, RCMP and management arrived - 36 in all. In Milk River, for instance, some of us were billeted in homes.

Most of personnel were from eastern and Atlantic Canada, as far east as Newfoundland. The driver of the lead truck, Romeo Labrecque was from Edmonton and was familiar with the then notorious Alaska Highway. Two more drivers were familiar with Alberta, one from B.C., and the others were from back east. The driver foreman drove the 2 ton truck that had tires, spare parts, and a spare engine. Out of ten attendants, three were from B.C and one from Newfoundland, one from Quebec and all others from Ontario. Four of us joined the caravan in Milk River while all the eastern group had joined in Ontario and had practiced setting up at the Canadian Forces base in Petawawa, west of Ottawa.