As luck would have it, when I needed a place to live, a co-worker offered the use of the house known as the pickers' shack in the old Postill family orchard. Don and Sue Meyer lived in the farm house and I took over the pickers' shack along with another co-worker Tom Callahan. Tom and I had been child care workers for Youth Resources, a residential care facility at Camp Kopje. It was the fashion in those days for unmanageable or delinquent children and youths to be placed by court order into care, usually to non-profit societies like Youth Resources which ran a home for girls, Duchess House in West Vancouver, a home for boys in an old seamens' centre in North Vancouver, Camp Kopje on Okanagan Lake by Whiskey Island, and an outdoor education facility for older youths out by Sugar Lake. Residential school for white kids.
Tom and I, and a third worker, Paul Noel, had lived on site and took part in the day programme. Unfortunately, as we lived there we were forced to also work nights as the boys were fond of boosting the cars to get back to Vancouver. This activity picked up speed on the arrival of Bish, who the courts had sent because of his favourite pastime of stealing cars. Remember, none of these kids were of an age to get a license yet. As that summer of 1971 progressed, we three workers felt that we weren't being paid for that time at night and BC Labour Relations agreed with us, demanded sizable back pay for us and we subsequently were unemployed.
Before we could move into the shack, we had to evict the present tenants. The kitchen drawers
held large mouse nests and a broken window pane in the kitchen had let in three bats which liked to hang behind a country scene on the wall. Otherwise the shack was wonderful. It was nestled beneath a giant Ponderosa Pine that must have been a seedling when Captain Vancouver was a boy. The side facing the orchard was built into the hill so that looking out of the kitchen window you were at ground level. The side facing the lake was a wide veranda open to the pebble beach and the sound of waves. The building had been built on wooden blocks, as was done in the pre-war days - no point in wasting time and money on foundations. The drawback to this was that as the floorboards shrank and left gaps, the wind off the lake would blow under the house and straight up your kilt. There were two small bedrooms, bathroom with a tub and a combined kitchen/livingroom. Heating was by an old wood stove in the kitchen with a hot water coil to a tank and an airtight heater in the living room. The shack did have modern conveniences. There was a fridge that was built like the old fashioned ice boxes but then it had an evaporator coil on top that looked like a many layered cake. It still worked fine after at least 45 years of use. Eat your hearts out, Whirlpool, Danby, and Inglis.
To solve the windy kilt problem, Tom and I went to the carpet mill in kelowna and picked up a truck load of carpet ends. As one colour of carpet is ending on the machine, the next colour is joined to it in a ridge that runs the width of the carpet. When the carpets are wound onto their long rolls, these ridges are cut off with about 6" of both colours attached. If these had been Persian carpets or even some nondescript hotel carpet, the result would have been less striking, but this was the time of flower power, bold people and bold colours. What we got was deep shag, orange joined to purple; lime green to wine red. We just use roofing nails and covered the floor. I wouldn't be surprised if the carpet was still there.
The outside of the pickers' shack was covered with cedar shingles, unfinished. The sun in the Okanagan is strong enough that any wood left unfinished will weather like it had been burned with a torch. Pleasant to look at and very good at keeping the rain out. The corner of the house (inside corner of a bedroom) was quite rough where the shingles met and often we would be woken by the sound of the horses scratching their butts against the corner of the shack.
The best part of that shack was the veranda. It faced west and the perfect cap to a day would be to sit on the old sofa, with your feet on the railing, and watch the sun go down behind the mountains above Caesar's Landing. Or at anytime of day watch the lake when the storms moved up and down the lake. On a soft, summer evening the paddlewheeler from Kelowna would sail by on a dinner/dance cruise and the music could be heard clearly to shore. No worries.
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