Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued

Christmas of 1965 was the first Christmas I remember really well.Of course,I recall coming home in that storm on Christmas Eve.But Christmas started way before that.Before there was even snow on the ground my father put an ax in the trunk of the car and gathered the family,and we all went out into the woods and cut down a pine tree.We put it into the trunk of the car,along with the ax and we brought it home.I don't know where exactly we went to find the tree,but it wasn't a long way from home.All over New Brunswick there were a lot of trees,and I don't remember anybody ever telling us we couldn't cut one down.Most people that we knew cut down their own trees,and there didn't seem to be a lot of tree lots around back then.Of course my father never went on private land to cut.Usually he would just walk a little way in off the road,and in a few minutes he'd have one cut down and in the trunk.But it was also a nice chance to get out for a walk in the woods.My father would always tell us to watch for moose whenever we were out in the woods.He knew how to call moose too,or at least he said he did,and he would let out this awful bellow.But we never saw any moose.

Once we were ready to decorate the tree,usually a week or so before Christmas,my father would drag the tree in from out in the yard,and set it up on this red tree stand.This would seem to take forever,as he was always so particular about having the tree set up perfectly straight,and not showing any big gaps in the branches.He would put water in the tree stand too,and explain to us that every day we were to give the tree a drink of water so it would not dry out and burn down the house.

Up in the attic is where our Christmas decorations were kept.Getting at them was not easy.Only my parents could go to the attic,and they would have to use a step ladder to reach up inside,once they had removed the board over the hole.The only thing I knew about the attic is that it was never a comfortable temperature inside.In summer opening the attic was like opening up a blast furnace.And,when it came time to dig out the Christmas decorations,a cold wind would come down from the attic.It seemed as though it was just as cold in the attic as it was outside.So I guessed that's why nobody ever went there for any more that a minute or two.We would just haul out whatever we needed,then,when we finished with it,it would disappear into the hole for another year.

Christmas decorations consisted of not much more than two,or maybe three strings of lights,maybe thirty to forty lights in all.It was hard to get them in working order too,because all of the lights had to be in working order before any of them would come on.If a single light was burned out,it had to be found and replaced first.So my father would always buy a new package of lights just so he could replace any broken ones.This usually took a few minutes every year,and two or three times a light would need to be replaced through the Christmas season,because lights then were not like the ones now that seem to last forever.On those strings of lights,there were three older lights,not like the other,newer ones.These three were older style lights,like you might see in the 1940s or 1950s and were left over from an earlier set that my parents used to have.The bulbs were a little bit bigger than a golf ball,a bit smaller than a billiards ball.They had a rough texture on the outside.There was a yellow one,a blue one,and a green one.I don't ever remember seeing the green one lit,and it must have burned out no later than 1965.But the other two we kept,and they worked for many more years.This made  me happy as I've always liked old,traditional things for the Christmas tree.

After my parents had strung the lights,we would cover the tree with tinsel.This was messy,and we would have tinsel all over everything including ourselves.It always looked messy on the tree too,but later,after we were in bed my mother would straighten up the tinsel,so it looked better.In those days,that's all we would put on the tree.We didn't even have a star,or an angel at the top for another few years.And every night,right after dinner,I would remember to give the tree a drink.

Like everything else,Christmas was a thing we had to learn about.We were told two distinct stories about Christmas.Santa Claus,a fat old man who lived at the North Pole would deliver gifts to children all over the world,in his sleigh,pulled along by reindeer.He would land on the roof top,and come down through the chimney delivering toys to all good little boys and girls.Of course,I wondered how that worked if you lived in an apartment building that didn't have a fireplace.There were a few apartments around then,but not many in our neighborhood.I wondered too,how Santa Claus would manage to get up and down the chimney with a fire burning like my father insisted we have on Christmas Eve.

Of course,the other story we were taught about Christmas was the Story of Jesus born in a manger,in Bethlehem.My mother was reading Bible stories out of this big,beautiful book called Bible Stories For Children every night when we went to bed.Not only did we have a copy of this book,that we could sit and look at whenever we wanted,but it was a very popular book.Most children were familiar with it.Moreover,in those days the was always a copy of Bible Stories For Children in the waiting room at any doctor's office,or dentists office,and even in the hospital waiting rooms.The book was beautifully illustrated and while my mother told the story,my sister and I would gaze upon The Christ Child laying in a manger,surrounded by animals,or of shepherds watching sheep in their fields,or of the wise men journeying across the desert on camels,bringing gifts.In those days,the way my mother told the story,it was just a wonderful tale,not really presented with any deep theology.She would tell the story over and over again at bedtime,and sometimes would we would hear her singing Away in a Manger.It,along with Jingle Bells were two of the first songs I ever memorized.

Santa Claus did indeed come that Christmas of 1965.He brought dolls for my sister,and trucks for me.And there was one thing under that tree that I recall above all the others.It was a gleaming red tri-cycle.I would not be able to ride it until springtime,at least not outside.We did ride it in the basement though,right after breakfast.We also got a sled that Christmas,so we could go coasting down the hills in the park,and so that my mother had some way to pull my little sister along when we were out in the snow.

We'd put up stocking by the fireplace too,and they were filled up with candy canes and small gifts and toys.There were all kinds of candy and nuts out on the coffee table while we unwrapped our Christmas gifts,and listened to Christmas songs on the radio.We would enjoy a big breakfast of eggs and bacon and juice,after we'd been up for what seemed like hours.And later in the day we would have turkey.Life was good,there was plenty,though we were not wealthy.We were a close and growing family,with loving parents and good providers,as we moved into 1966.

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued.

There was one thing going on in 1965,and the years after,that was kind of typical of the age,and it seemed like it was on our television all the time,every other week or so.Of course it wasn't quite that often,but it sure seemed it.And it was something that everyone was watching and talking about,like they talk about the latest celebrity scandals today.

America was trying to get to the moon,and every step along the way was televised.Every time a rocket was launched,it was shown on television,and there were pictures in the newspaper,usually on the front page.Of course,it began with tiny,incremental steps,at first,just firing a rocket,then allowing it to orbit outside the atmosphere for longer and longer periods of time,getting closer and closer to that ultimate goal,while the whole world watched.The moon program was not always successful.I recall there was a blastoff scheduled once,and it was too late in the evening for us to be allowed to stay up to watch.So,the next morning at breakfast,the first words out of my mouth were "How did the rocket make out/" My father explained that this particular rocket didn't blast off.It just blew up on the launchpad and the men inside were burned to death.

America was not the only nation launching rockets.Russia was firing off just as many,but,beyond a vague awareness of that fact,we heard next to nothing about that.But every time the Americans fired a rocket,it was big news for days and days.You could say that there was an ongoing fascination with the whole idea of going to the moon.

I couldn't really conceive of the moon as being an actual place,where men might  want to go to and walk around on.To me,when you said"go to the moon",it was like talking about going any other place.Like downtown,or to my grandparents house.I loved to watch the moon when we were in our car,because it seemed to move all around.It would be to our right,then our left,then later behind us,and it could even hide behind hills or trees,and I'd even seen it fall into the ocean.I didn't understand that all of that was because we were moving.I had no real concept of the earth as being a planet,nor of the moon as being a similar sort of a thing.I looked at such things in a very concrete way.The earth was what I was standing on,and the moon was a big round thing that rose in the sky.To me,then,if I wanted to get to the moon,I would simply walk toward it.Except,it kept moving away.And as far as the rockets went,I recall being interested in them because,After all,watching a rocket,with all that smoke and fire was a very sensational event.But I clearly remember my reaction to what I was seeing the first time I saw it.I wondered what happened to all of the birds around the rocket,and,I though,it couldn't have been good.When I asked about the birds,my mother and father got a big laugh,though I'd asked the question seriously.So I wasn't really up on the whole significance of the space program in 1965.But space travel was not much older that I was,we sort of grew up together.When a man finally walked out onto the moon a few years later,I was understanding things a lot better. 

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued.

I believe it must have been 1965.It may have been later though,I can't say for certain.But our family began to take in boarders before I went to school.We were a small family and had sufficient bedroom  space to offer a bedroom to a nursing student at the nearby New Brunswick Institute Of Technology.Her name was Jeannie,and she lived with us for some time,certainly more that one school term.

That first boarder,as far as I know came to be with us because she was a friend of the family.At least my father,in later years always described her father as being a close friend.Her family lived north of us,up past our old community of Redmondville,in a backwoods place called Black River.They owned a store back there,and in later years,the family was destined for tragedy.

My family had a succession of borders over the years,to help offset living expenses,but they were fairly selective in who they offered accommodation to.Jeannie was already known to my parents before she came,as was the girl who followed her a year or two later.Jeannie's sister came later as well.But as far as I know,my parents never advertised for boarders,like many of the people in our community did.It was a matter of someone knowing someone who needed a room, and making a referral.

Jeannie was a slim girl of about nineteen when she came to our place.For the first while she would wake with us early in the morning,eat breakfast with our family and be off to school,which was only about a ten minute walk from our house,and was located in the same building where we always went to see the barber.She was a nursing student and later she would rise early in the morning dressed in the manner of nurses at the time,completely in white with an old style nurses hat.Sometimes she would walk to the hospital,but,in bad weather she would take a cab.

At some point,Jeannie's boyfriend,a man named Ray started coming around to visit.This never seemed to be a problem for either of my parents,and my father regarded Ray,who worked at the railway shops as a friend.Again,I believe that my father knew both Ray and Jeannie long before either of them started coming around.My parents certainly trusted both Ray and Jeannie,and often the two of them together would stay with us while my parents enjoyed a night out.

Jeannie's father came to visit once too.Aside from owning the store in Black River,they also operated a small farm,and on the day he came to visit,he was driving an old green truck with boards built up along it's side.Inside were a bunch of squealing pigs,all bound for the butcher shop. 

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued

On the return trip from New Glasgow we stopped to visit my grandmother.that is,my father's mother.She was from Springhill of course,but she didn't live in Springhill.She lived a town called Shubenacdie which is a bit less than halfway between Truro and Halifax.It's a strikingly beautiful part of Nova Scotia,with rolling hill,a lot of trees,and a big river filled up with brown water.My Grandmother lived there with a man called Mr. McPhee,or,as she always called him "Old Bill." They lived on a small dairy farm,and the thing I remember most about the place was that they had a long driveway leading up to a house and barn that was enveloped in trees.But what made this driveway unique is that just beyond the road,it had a set of railroad tracks crossing it.Mr. McPhee is the only man I knew that had railroad tracks in his driveway.

There were a lot of cows in the yard too,alongside the driveway,though it was likely kind of a compact property,and rather hilly.Now when I say a lot of cows,I mean maybe about a dozen,but I lived in the city,so more than two would have seemed like a lot.

Mr. McPhee also had hay in his barn.You could smell it as soon as you went through the big barn doors,and it seemed to be stacked about anywhere where there wasn't a cow.Aside from hay and cows there was hardly room to walk around or even stack milk cans or pitchforks.Mr. McPhee showed my father the barn,and together they milked cows,which I was surprised to find my father was rather good at.Later,he told me that was because they would sometimes take off on foot for the beach when he lived in Springhill,and,along the way they would stop to get chickens and milk from some unsuspecting farmhouse along the way.He'd milk a cow right out in the field,so he said,and it wasn't the easiest way to get milk."Wonder I never got shot at." He'd always say.But there,in Mr. McPhee's barn,he had no trouble getting milk.

Evidently my misadventure with the woodpile a few days earlier in Moncton had taught me nothing.Or,perhaps because of that little bump,I may have been having a bit of trouble keeping all of my dogs in the yard,but I couldn't have been showing exemplary judgement even for a four year old.But,when we went up to the hayloft,I discovered that there was another way into Mr. McPhee's barn.There was a window in the front of the barn,and backed up to the window there was this machine,something like a conveyor  belt leading up into the loft,or,alternately down to the barnyard.It looked to me like a set of stairs,so I stepped out onto it and headed for the ground.Along the way I spotted a couple of mice-there were a lot of mice around.I made it to the ground,then turned around and started for the top again.It was quite an incline,so the going was kind of rough,but I made it up.I never even came close to having an accident,but I think at some point I realized this was likely something I shouldn't be doing,that maybe the adults would get mad,and,I might even end up going to Hell for.I was surprised though.My alternate route into the barn was soon discovered,but nobody seemed in the least concerned about it.We visited for a day or two,and I went in and out of the barn like that maybe a dozen times.Once,Mr. McPhee even turned on the machine,and I rode it all the way to the top.And as we were going up,I saw the passenger train flashing by the end of the driveway,more mice,and Mr. McPhee,a skinny old man in overalls at the bottom of the conveyor.That's as much about Mr. McPhee as I can remember,it's the only image I've ever had of the man.

For some reason,that trip is the first time I ever remember meeting my grandmother.It is likely that we had been to her place before,maybe a time or two,but I just don't remember it.Rose Davis was a  woman of short stature,and rather heavy,looking neither young nor old on this occasion.She wore glasses and had short black hair,and had a voice that reminded me of chickens,loud,gravely and pitching rather high at times.She was said to be Mr. McPhee's domestic help-a housekeeper.

We stayed,I think one night with my grandmother.Her and my father,and Mr. McPhee sat about talking and there was a lot of beer.I recall eating roast beef and pie,while my father explained my fall from the wood pile,and my grandmother took a look at my head,noting that there was still some blood there,and a bit of a bump.She asked if it was sore,and I told her it was not.

Time came for us to leave,and when we did we drove over to Windsor,to visit someone my father knew,but there was nobody at home.We did find another roadside spring though,and I was beginning to enjoy drinking water like that.It seemed a lot better than water from the tap.Then we started for home,but of course,on the way we stopped in Springhill and visited for most of the afternoon.     

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued

Sometime in that period between my fourth and fifth year,in the fall of the year it seems to me,I went along on a road trip deep into the heart of Nova Scotia. This was not the typical road trip of a day or two,or just a day trip driving around Springhill visiting.The thing is,my father had planned the trip.What he hadn't planned on was taking me along.Events changed that plan.

Out in our backyard,right alongside the steps leading to the back door,there was a small pile of firewood.It wasn't paved there then.There wasn't even a paved walkway leading up to the door.Just grass,and a lot of dirt,so it was a great place to play.So I was there playing with these new toy trucks my father had picked up earlier in the day when we'd gone downtown to Woolworths. And somehow I'd managed to crawl up onto the woodpile.I'd been crawling around in the dirt.I can remember having this little orange colored backhoe in my hand,digging in the dirt.Then,I was up on the woodpile.In my memory,I'd chased a beetle up there.And then,the woodpile shifted a bit,all on it's own.It didn't fall over or anything,which was a fortunate thing.But it was enough to pitch me off,and I fell on my head.It's possible I may even have passed out,though I really can't say for certain.

I can feel that bump on my head,in my memory,and there was even a small bit of blood,which my mother soaked up with a wet washcloth.I don't remember being overly upset about it,or howling bloody murder like most kids would do when they saw blood,and I'm certain we never went to the hospital.Well,almost certain,but,then again,it's possible that my head wasn't working quite the way it should have been.My parents though so  too.I would have to be kept under close watch.My mother said to my father"if he goes to sleep,and you can't wake him,he'll have to go to a doctor" And since my mother was at work,and my father leaving on a road trip later in the day,off I went to  Nova Scotia.

When we left there was this friend of my fathers along for the ride.His name was Joe,and I don't know much about him,except that for years he always sent a card at Christmas time.But as I remember it,he was a kind of big, happy guy with a big happy, laugh.The first part of the road trip involved going to New Glasgow where we were to let Joe off.This was really about the longest road trip I'd ever been on.Maybe not longer than going to visit my mothers family,but farther into Nova Scotia than I'd ever been.In fact,we didn't even bother stopping at Springhill until the trip back,which is something that we almost never did.

The weather was still good out,and we took the older road,the one that's called The  Sunshine Trail for a good piece of that distance.All along the road my father and Joe were having a jolly time,driving and talking and drinking beer.I was perched between the two of them in the front seat,along with a twelve pack of Schooner,which I would open and hand to one of them whenever they asked for a beer.They even let me have a taste of beer,and it nearly made me vomit.I couldn't imagine,can't imagine to this day why anyone would want to drink that stuff.Tried it then,when I was four,and decided I did not like it.

Along the way we stopped at a place just going into the town of Tatamagouche. In those days it was a very distinctive place because of the bridge,You would approach the place from the top of a hill.Just as you got to the crest of that hill,the road bent ninety degrees and led down to the bridge,but,just before the bridge,the road took another ninety degree turn to the left.then snaked uphill into town.But,at the bottom of the first hill,there was a little place to pull over.In those days,a good many of the bridges were one way,and you would have to pull to the side to allow traffic already on the bridge to pass.Then you would take your turn.Some of the bridges that were one way had traffic lights,but this one did not.In any event,we pulled off to the side.Alongside the road there was a kind of a brick structure,kind of a big pile of stones that looked something like a stone fireplace.But it had a pipe coming out of it,and water flowed right out of it onto the ground.Since I didn't favor Schooner,I needed a drink of water,so that's where we found it.After we'd left,my father explained to me that that was called a spring,and that the water came from inside the hillside.He claimed that Nova Scotia had hundreds of springs with clear sweet water,that you would never have to go far to find a drink of water.Joe and my father talked about the bridge too,saying how it was a pain to have to wait to get across,and how it must be really dangerous in winter.I suppose that was true.There were a lot of things to hit and lots of places to go off the road.

At the spring,as I recall it was the first time I can recall learning of the vagaries of the English language.I was familiar with the word"spring",in the sense of it's meaning that part of the year when the snow leaves,the weather turns warm and flowers and leaves start to come out.But "spring" also meant water from inside a hill,or coming out of the ground.I though about that for a bit,and drifted off to sleep.When I awoke,and as far as I know,I awoke on my own,we were in New Glasgow,and it was time for Joe to leave us.

  

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued.

The best thing on our television set were cartoons.There were not nearly as many then as there are  now,with only two channels.Usually there were only one or two cartoon shows spanning an hour or so,from five to six o'clock in the afternoon.The only ones that I remember from those days,at least the ones on in the afternoon were Atom Ant,and a show called Gumby and Pokey.Pokey was a horse,or maybe a pony made out of soft plastic.And Gumby?Well I never was too certain exactly what Gumby was,except that he was made out of plastic too,and he had  a nasty green color,while Pokey was about the same color as a hot water bottle.Of course our television wasn't color,but  Gumby and Pokey were sold in stores,and I'd seen them before,so I knew what color they were.The better cartoons were on Saturday morning.It's not just that they were on for longer,but they also included Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig,then later,a few years later,The Roadrunner.Bugs and his friends were always my favorite cartoons.

One night we were watching cartoons,but as I recall it wasn't at home.There was this cartoon that was about this guy who had invented a portable hole,and he was showing all the things that it could be used for.There was a bank robber who used the portable hole to get into the bank at night,and lots of other things as well-anytime somebody wanted to get past some obstacle,they would just put up one of these portable holes and walk through it.It all ended when the guy gets home and his wife is nagging him because he hasn't made any money selling portable holes.So he puts a portable hole down on the floor and pushes her into it.A second or two later,she comes flying up through the hole,followed by a bunch of fire and a devil.The devil says "Aren't things already bad enough down here without her?" And then an adult who was in the room flipped off the television,saying something about how that was not appropriate for children to watch.I had a sense of what was happening in the cartoon,but it took years before I really got the humor of the situation.

After the cartoons,the news came on.In those days the newsman would sit at a desk and read the news from a stack of papers in front of him.There were different guys doing this,but they all seemed to have one thing in common.They never cracked a smile,like they were sitting on a ram rod.They never laughed,or talked about anything,they didn't cough,sneeze or clear their throats,and,in fact they hardly looked real at all.The local news,so far as I can recall almost never featured a reporter out in the field.Just those talking statues in the studio,reading from their shuffled papers.I guess they could not have had teleprompters back then either.

Right after the news was read,the weather came on.My father was always intensely interested in the weather.I guess that was because of the eighty mile commute to work over rough New Brunswick roads,especially in winter.

There were a few different weathermen on the television,and as it turned out,my father knew one of these weathermen.I guess they'd met in Goose Bay,or maybe Chatham,but he knew the man from work,in one way or another.One afternoon we went to visit this guy,who lived way over in the west end of town,off west Main Street.He turned out to be a very nice sort of a man,and he looked very different from the way he did on the television.Like maybe someone had actually removed that stick from the nether regions of his anatomy.In fact,I had a bit of a hard time recognizing him from the man who I'd seen on television.But I though he was a good guy to know,because he'd been on television,and he was the only man I'd ever met who had.And he might even know Bugs Bunny.I hadn't really worked it out in my mind by this point,but I kind of wanted to be on television too,and I thought,if I was at the house of a person who was on television,then I'd be there as well.All I would have to do was wait on him to start reading the report,and when I got home,there I'd be.I didn't have the first clue about cameras and the like,or,that if I actually was on television,then I couldn't very well be home to watch it too.But the weatherman just sat around all afternoon talking with my father ,and the two of them shared some beer.He never did sit down and read the weather,because it was his day off.

It really is funny how your mind works when you are a young child,then,many years later you can see how totally ridiculous the things you thought were.That's because of something called Developmental Psychology,as it turns out,but I had no idea about any of that back then.So in those days,I had this particular idea about how weather and weathermen worked,which turned out to be all wrong.You see,I thought if the weatherman said it was going to rain,then it rained.It rained because the weatherman wanted it to rain.If he wanted it to snow,then it snowed,except that he would,being a good weatherman,never make it snow in the summer time.If he wanted it to be a fine sunny day,then it would.But I though that the weather was the way it was because it was commanded by the weatherman.He had absolute power.In fact,absolute power was not just something that belonged to the weatherman,it belonged to all adults.But the weatherman was an obvious example of power.He knew better than other adults how the weather worked.My father didn't like nasty weather at all.In fact,he didn't even like spring or autumn weather.So,in my four year old mind,here was this guy,who seemed to be my fathers friend,but who could,any time he pleased,make my father unhappy simply by saying it was going to rain or snow.And,on the particular day that we visited him,he said exactly that."It"s going to rain tomorrow." That didn't set well with me,because if it rained we couldn't go to the park.So,I knew I had to be polite to this guy.I was expected.But,I was really mad at him for saying it would rain.

I guess it's just that you tend to view adults as kind of godlike when you are small.I know I did.I was in this world where thing were very uncertain to me.But all of the grownups I knew were confident in what they said,or at least seemed to be.In my family I was safe and things were predictable because of all this,so I really couldn't process the idea that maybe adults,maybe even the omnipotent weatherman were prone to making mistakes and were not really directing the world in the manner of their own choosing.If they were,what need would there be of God.My mother still told us about God all the time,so the idea of adults doing whatever they wanted was starting to erode in my mind.But only a little bit.Years later,I would come to realize that the weatherman had very little to do with the weather.He just told it as it was.And sometimes,far more often then than now,he didn't even do that.  

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 Continued.

!965 must have been the year we got our first television too.I don't really recall exactly when we got it,but I'm dating it to 1965 because one of the first thing I can ever recall seeing on it was about the civil rights riots in the United States.My father would watch the news whenever he was home,and I recall watching what was really a riot,though that grainy blue screen was not really capable of catching much of the horror of it all.But I do recall a bunch of people being sprayed with a large fire hose.I wondered if maybe sometime the firemen might come down our street,maybe someday when it was really hot and do that to us.

That first television was a monster.My father brought it into the house and set it down on a table.It was heavy,for my father was then a fit and strong man and he could move it only with difficulty.It was not made of lightweight plastic,or lightweight anything else either.The outer casing was made out of some sort of material which could have been metal,or maybe ceramic,but was in any event thick and heavy.The screen must have been about twenty five inches across and it's glass was very thick.And the back of it was stuffed with what appeared to be hundreds of glass tubes,which lit up when you turned the set on,and took a very long time to go out after it was turned off.Even after the picture had disappeared,an eerie orange glow would show on the wall behind the set and linger there for a long time.Because of that,I really wanted to see into the back of the set.I also recall that the glow made me slightly uneasy.I was used to electrical things that went off immediately when you turned the switch,so this seemed unnatural to me,as though someone or something might be in the back of the set.

On top of the television there were a set of rabbit ears,so called because of their shape.Not everyone's set had rabbit ears.In those days you would walk down the street and look up at the houses and see television antennae.Great big metal things attached to the roof that drew in the television signal.There was no cable connection then,the signal came out of the air.Not everyone had a television then either,We knew and visited a lot of people who did not.So I imagined you could tell who had a television by the presence of those big antennae. It was alleged that you got a better signal with one,but rabbit ears worked-sort of. In any event,my father didn't want to put an antennae on the roof,so we had rabbit ears.You would sit around and patiently adjust them until an acceptable picture came on the screen.And this didn't always happen.There could be a great deal of difference in picture quality from one day to the next,or even from minute to minute.

That first television must have been a used one.It never really worked very well.Both the vertical and the horizontal hold had to be adjusted nearly continuously most of the time,or you would not be able to see a picture at all.It was very rare to be able to sit through a whole half hour program and not have to get up to fiddle around with the set.

One night we were sitting around listening to-I say listening to,because we certainly were not watching-Gilligan's Island.I recall the characters talking,something to do with falling into,or being thrown into a volcano,and I remember the laugh track.But we were not seeing a picture,just a bunch of blue and white lines flipping around on the screen.It took a whole half hour and my mother still could not get the set to behave.About the time she did manage to get a picture,it had started raining outside,and there was thunder and lightening.So she turned the set off,and we were disappointed.She explained to us that you always had to turn the set off in a thunder storm,for fear that it might blow up from being struck by lightening.So for that reason,I was doubly afraid of the set.I knew about lightening,I'd been in electrical storms lots of times.Neither thunder or lightening really frightened me,but I knew they were things that belonged outside along with all the rain that always came with them.It was the thought of lightening coming into the house,through our television that disturbed me to no end.I wondered why my father would bring something into the house if lightening could come in through it,and,anytime it rained even a little bit,I wanted to be as far from the television as I possibly could.I even asked my father if lightening could really come into our house.He said yes,it could,and said that he once knew someone who had been sleeping in his bed when a bolt of lightening came in one window,blew a hole through the mattress,and went out another window.This was about the last thing in the world I'd wanted to hear,because my mother had been telling us that the best place to be in an electrical storm was in our beds asleep.My father disagreed.He said the best place to be was inside your car,because it had rubber wheels that grounded the lightening.So why then,my four year old sense of logic was always asking,didn't we just  turn of the television and all run out into the driveway and get into the car when the lightening started?

When my father was at home he seemed to have more luck at getting the television to work than my mother ever did.But eventually it just quit and he had to send it out to get it repaired.It didn't have to go far.Just next door to our neighbors,who fixed televisions in his basement.Together the two of them moved it from our house to his,via the back doors and into his basement.It was a hard thing to move,very heavy,and the two of them,both strong men had trouble moving it.

One day,just before bedtime I was out playing between our house and the neighbors house,and I decided to look into his basement window to see if I could see our television.I didn't want to get caught doing this,because I knew looking into peoples windows was not a good thing to do,but I really wanted to see.I thought I might somehow get to see the insides of our television.But,when I bent down to see through the window,I saw that there were a lot of televisions,maybe dozens in there,and they all pretty much looked alike to me.I couldn't tell which one was ours.There were also hundreds of tubes that went into the back of television sets.It seemed every square inch of the room was covered in tubes,and there were shelves of them all along the wall too.Too many to count.The room had a fluorescent tube light too,and it flickered like the television sets,only not the same color.So looking into the window was a kind of ghostly experience.I didn't get caught,but I never looked into that window again either.The whole place made me a bit uneasy,because of all the televisions.I thought that if there was a big storm,surely the whole end of his house would be blown off because of all of those television sets.If lightening ever struck in our neighborhood I was convinced that that is where it would happen,and that the explosion would be really big.So whenever the least bit of rain started,I would make certain I never went near that window.

Sometime later,we got out television back,and it worked reasonably well.There were only two channels in English and one in French,which we never watched.Most of the shows we watched back then were on the CBC.There was a show called The Friendly Giant,with a really big man,a rooster that lived in a canvas sack,and a giraffe that came when you whistled and stuck his long neck inside the window of the castle where the giant lived.The giant would then read a story,and,after fifteen minutes the show was over.It was followed by another show,which I do not recall by name,but which had a talking mouse,and an older woman who only spoke french.It lasted for fifteen minutes too,and was followed by a show called Mr. Dressup. That show had a little boy puppet,who,along with a dog puppet lived in a hollow tree.There were a couple of bird puppets too.My sister and I liked the show,but my father said a couple of times"that man is as queer as a three dollar bill." When that show finished it was lunch time.The news came on while we ate,then my sister would go off for a nap.In the afternoon a movie came on,and I would usually watch it.Sometime I'd fall asleep,because not every movie was to my liking.I liked cowboys and Indians the best,and there was usually at least one of those movies on every week.There were war movies on too,and I enjoyed them too.But most of the other movies were not very interesting to me,and that is when I sometimes drifted off.   

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965 continued.

Sometime between my fourth and fifth birthdays my mother started working again.The place she worked was up on Collishaw Street,in one of the old buildings left over from the war,and it was a place that rented and sold landscaping and construction equipment.My father was still working too,so this required childcare for my sister and I.

At first we stayed at a place,a childcare center that was up near St.George Street,on one of the numbered streets between Pacific Avenue and Saint George.The place was located in an old house with a screened in porch,which was never used while we were there because it was winter,sometime close to Christmas time.It was on a bit of a side street,but it was still noisy from all of the trains over at the railroad shops,which were not far away.In fact,those shops made it difficult to get to and somewhat less than ideal in terms of convenience.First we would get into a taxi and it would go all the way down Killam Drive,then back down Pacific until it reached where it was letting us out.My mother would  take us into the house,then disappear in another taxi,because to get back to work,she had to go the rest of the way around the railway shops.At night,we did the opposite.

Some of the children at the daycare(nobody actually called it daycare back then),didn't seem to like being there.They didn't like it when their parents left and would start crying and carrying on.Some of them cried all day long,except of course in the early afternoon when everybody was supposed to be sleeping.I don't really recall that either my sister or myself minded going there.There were a lot of other kids to play with and that seemed to suit us fine.There were also a lot more things to play with than what we had at our place,so it was an alright place to be.Every morning the woman who ran the place would tell us a story out of one of the many books she had.I don't recall most of those stories,but I do remember one,in which a man was going to move overseas,to Germany,so they were putting his car onto a ship,using a huge crane.I thought this was really neat,because I'd never seen this done to a car before and I'd never even knew that you could do that to a car.So,whenever I wasn't doing anything else,I tried to find that particular book,ans I would stare at the picture of the car for long periods of time.Or at least it seemed like a long time.Even then I seemed to prefer finding a book and playing by myself.The daycare had a lot of trucks to play with,and sometimes I would play trucks with the other boys,but mostly I preferred my own company.When the other children napped in the afternoon,I would usually stay awake because I was one of the older kids there and I hadn't been taking naps at home for some time.That was alright with the lady who ran the place,but I had to play quietly.Most of the other children there were only two or three,and there were even some babies in cribs,and they all slept right after lunch.I was encouraged to nap as well,but nobody ever insisted on it so usually I'd just sit with my favorite book.

We were not at he child care center for very long.In fact,it might only have been a couple of weeks.When we first started going there,there was no snow on the ground,so I'm thinking it was most likely November.But I recall that on the last day we went there,my mother came and got us in a taxi,and we went downtown to Eatons.It was snowing hard,looking a lot like Christmas,and my mother still had some shopping to do.Of course we were all excited about Christmas,and shopping and all of the snow. Eatons had a Christmas display in their window that year that included a really elaborate set up of model trains,and reindeer and a whole village of gingerbread houses next to this big snowy mountain.It was the best display I'd ever seen in the window at Eatons,which had a display every year.So that year we stopped and looked in at the trains,and it was snowing unbelievably hard.After an hour or so we were loaded down with parcels and we started for home on the city bus,which didn't go up into our neighborhood back then.We would get out on Mountain Road.On this particular night we got off at the corner of Mountain Road and Hastings,because there was a small store there,and we needed to get bread and maybe milk.So it was quite a walk home,and very nearly a blizzard.We were all dressed up in snow suits,except my mother,who was dressed for work,and wasn't much enjoying the weather.It was almost Christmas time,it was snowing so hard we could not even see a block ahead of ourselves,turning very cold,and there was nobody around.My sister and I were happy,looking up into the street lights,watching the snow in their greenish glow,trying to catch snowflakes with our tongues,and talking about building a snowman tomorrow.

When we got home,my mother started baking.My father was  not home from work,so he would have been working either eight to four or four to twelve.So,he was either late,trying to get home in a major snowstorm,or safe at work,waiting to start out into the weather at midnight.We were sitting around in the living room,my sister and I coloring in some old coloring books.The Eatons bags which we'd brought home with us were laying there too,and they had some kind of an intricate design on them,so eventually we started coloring those as well,green and red for Christmas.The radio was playing Christmas Songs,and the smell of my mothers cooking filled up the whole house.It seemed like a great time to be alive.

And that was the last day we went to that child care place.I remember it because of the snow when we came home.It really was inconvenient.Really,it wasn't all that far away,but because the  rail yards cut it off,you had to  go halfway across town to get there,and taxis were expensive.Soon after that we started staying with a lady who lived up the street,on Sumner Avenue.   

Chapter IX The Rest Of 1965.

Both the town of Springhill and the village of Canterbury were shrinking,their time was passing.Their industries  were drying up,and were dependent,in the best of times on the prices people were willing to pay for the things they produced.In both cases,the towns really only produced one thing.Canterbury in particular seemed to be a village of older people.There were a few young families with children too,but mostly it was an elderly group of towns people.

Moncton,by contrast was growing.Our neighborhood was still  unfinished.there were still dirt streets when construction ceased at the end of the 1964 building season.In those days there was not a lot of year round building.But when the spring of 1965 rolled around,our neighborhood was crawling with men and construction equipment again.

In 1964,there was a lot of digging.but now there was a lot of finishing up what was started,and the area really started to come together.Most of the curbs had been put in,so cars wouldn't drive into the open trenches in the snow,but not all of the sidewalks were in place,and there was a lot of unpaved roadway.So the spring,summer and autumn of 1965 was all about finishing up,and when it was done,the area was essentially finished,little different than the way it is today.

There was an impressive array of equipment out on the roads,and I still loved to sit and watch the men build.Most of the equipment was quite different than what had been there the year before.There were still dump trucks though.Some of them dumped gravel,and some of them brought pavement:asphalt,soft,smoking and sticky.It was very hot too,and we were warned not to touch the stuff,like we had done when we got into the tar.As much as I was interested in the paving and thought the machines interesting-I could watch them for hours-touching them,or the asphalt was about the farthest thing from my mind.Think back to my early religious upbringing.According to what I'd been told,I thought I knew enough about Hell,to suspect that it might have been in the road right out back of our house.There certainly was enough heat,and stink and smoke around.the machine that spread out the asphalt even had a big fire coming out of the bottom of it,and I'd been told bedtime stories about dragons.That machine was the closest thing I could imagine to a dragon.One night,after they parked the paving machine,it even caught fire,and the fire department had to come.It wasn't much of a blaze,just a bit of asphalt left in the hopper,but it was a fire nonetheless.By the time I'd turned four,I guess my sense of danger was a bit more developed,and I knew fire wasn't good.

Aside from all the paving,there were a couple of other big projects going on close to home.When we first moved in,there was not a lot on the other side of Mountain Road.We were not allowed to venture that far because it was not in sight of the house or yard,and we certainly were not allowed cross.There was no point in crossing anyway,because all that was there was a big open field.

Sometime around 1965,it was announced that Moncton was going to get a KMart,and everyone was really excited about it.There really wasn't much in the way of shopping facilities near our house,and we were likely the fastest growing part of town at that time.So a shopping center had been promised,and the machines began ripping that field apart.

I didn't get to watch them build the shopping center the way I might have liked to,but occasionally we would walk by there,when we went down to the barber school to get our hair cut,or to a small supermarket right across from the building site.The site was the biggest hole in the ground I'd ever seen and there was a huge amount of dirt being moved around.The machines and trucks crawled around as though it was a big anthill.Before long the skeleton of the building was up.We would watch them pounding beams into the ground,and cranes would swing steel beams into place.Men would walk about on the buildings frame,and I wondered how they did that without falling off.The site seemed to stretch on for as far as I could see,but really,it wasn't that big,Not like shopping centers today,but about the biggest thing happening in Moncton at the time.

Up the street,the other way,there was a big building project going on too.On Ayer Avenue,such as it was at the time,they had started building a school,between Crandall Street and the newer part of Birchmount Drive.The school was really why we moved to that area to begin with,why we moved to Moncton. Having a school just a couple of blocks from home was something like The Holy Grail in my fathers mind.It meant not only that we would not have to go to school,and live in one of the provinces poorer areas,but we would not even have to cross Mountain Road,which was very busy and dangerous.My father had not really experienced good schools-ever. He once told me a story about school in Springhill,and I was shocked by that story.But it's a tale for another time.My mother too,had gone to school in a tiny school,way out in the country,again,in a very poor area.So.in their eyes,living in Moncton,with a modern school was worth the sacrifice of moving,and having to commute so far to work everyday.

Both the school and the shopping center began to take form.You couldn't see either from our yard,but we did keep an eye on how each was progressing.The shopping center was coming along quick. Every time we walked down to the barber school,it was looking more and more finished.We would walk by the school too,usually two or three times a week.At first there wasn't a lot there,just a few big skids of different colored bricks.But once they started building,it went up quickly.both the KMart and Birchmount Elementary  and Junior High School took about a year to build,and opened in 1966.

Chapter VIII Dead Creek And Canterbury Continued.

Of course there is a lot more to Canterbury than just the lay of the land.Like any other town,it was a living thing,that made people what they were and are.People who lived there and left there never left completely and never left without taking something of the place with them.And that would have included my mother.

By the time I'd turned four I was capable  observing Canterbury for what it was.The trouble is,what it was when we were there seemed to be vastly different that what I assumed it was when we were not there.I think I was aware of this,at a certain level even at a very young age,though I could hardly have voiced that idea at the time.

The best way to explain this is to think of town as that atom,or particle,which behaves differently when it's being observed,because of the observation.Canterbury was putting on a show for us,I believe,maybe not telling lies about itself,but spinning it's own story for us.Kind of like that Farside cartoon with the cows standing around on the hillside,smoking,drinking,playing pool,until one of the cows shouts"car",and they all return to being cows.

When my mother left town,she ventured out into a world very different from her hometown.In those days she did not need to go a great distance to find that sort of world.She did so for her own reasons,which she did not necessarily make really clear to me.I'm not certain she made those reasons clear to anyone.But it seems fair to think that her motivation would have had a lot to do with making a better life for herself,and,by 1965,for her children as well.

Most people I've ever talked to seem to think the grass is greener in some other place.Not all of those people continue to think that way,but nearly everyone goes through a phase of that kind of thought.So the question becomes,how why,exactly did my mother leave Canterbury? And,how completely did she leave? Were there things she was not willing to have her family know about growing up there? The most likely answer to this last question would seem to be yes.

There is another side to these questions too,as there always is.How did the people left behind regard my mother? Canterbury was where her parents and siblings lived,and though everyone in her family left,to a certain extent,none ended up farther from home than my mother did when she ended up in Moncton.So,did her family view her moving with favor? Did her decision to move involve some form of sibling rivalry,or split with her parents? Did it involve some otherwise compelling event? The answers to those questions are not really clear in my mind,and never have been.

Still,there seemed to be a lot of showmanship going on whenever we visited.Certainly there were a lot of things that remained unspoken in the presence of children,but there were a lot of things going on there that were not really evident to all.Knowing of them is not really necessary,nor is it possible,but it tells a story,however obscure about all the people who came out of Canterbury,and my grandparents house in particular.

I believe there are untold stories because I've been able to see reflections of them.I believe Dead Creek to have held secrets,perhaps dark ones.I believe that because of having been around Canterbury,having caught a thousand nuances of it's people.They are very telling in a way,even if they do not tell what.

Defense mechanisms.My mother,I believe chose to maintain an innocence that she could not possibly have had.She chose to regard not just evil things,but most anything she found unpleasant as though it did not exist,did not work in our lives. I've seen her do that thousands of times,even before I recognized it for what it was.Living that way,I'm certain created a tremendous burden for my mother,but she lived the strategy out more or less successfully until she left this world.Her mantra was"if you can't say something nice,don't say anything at all." She said that so many times and tried to live it out so deliberately,that it must have been learned at her mother's knee.But I've come to see it as a defense mechanism.

Where could such a mantra have come from? My mothers mother would spend her days,at least the ones I witnessed,in constant activity,never sitting still,and providing a running commentary of anything she saw happening.If a car came up the street she would say who it was if she knew.If she did not,she would soon be on the phone asking about who it could be. And I know with certainty that she did this when we were not there as well,so habituated was the habit,like the singing of a familiar bird, She had an obvious concern about such things,yet she never,as far as I could tell criticized anyone,or felt any real discomfort about the presence of the unknown.At least if she did,she never said so.

My mothers father spent long hours in a kitchen chair,right next to a side window of his house,with a better view of the street than my grandmother could have had while flitting about the house.And he offered little in the way of explaining anything he saw.He was largely a silent and solitary man,keeping his own council.He would spend the day lighting and re-lighting his pipe,smoking and re-smoking it,reading detective magazines,or westerns,speaking only when spoken to and sometimes not even then. His wife would say so much that she was often not saying anything of any substance at all.And,most often,he said nothing. He would rise early and light the stove,and once it was lit,all was done that needed to be done in his day,and he settled in for the long hours.

I've come to know my mother,and the way she adapted to her world, as being something that made sense if you knew what Canterbury was like.I would have to say she was a stoic,very adaptable.She was born and came of age in a hard land,one that you would expect to give rise to stoicism because such a quality would be advantageous there.Being adaptable,though,is not always the very best of things.It can leave you settling for much less than you are capable of.In the end,I could surmise that my mother had ideas,not openly stated ones,but ideas nonetheless about leaving some part of her past behind.I truth though,I don't think that it ever entered her mind to leave and never come back.She had a lot of respect for her family and her roots,but she did not always convey much of sense of personal history to us.For that I would need to watch Canterbury very closely,and think long and hard about it for many years.

So this small village,a few miles from the Saint John River,in western New Brunswick and not far from the Maine border became a living thing too.All things that stand,stand in the shadow of other things.



  

Chapter VIII,Dead Creek and Canterbury Continued.

There really are two Canterburys. There is the town as it was,how it was planned and laid out along the ground,where each of it's buildings stood and what each of them did.The mortar and bricks,or,in the case of this particular town,boards and nails,for there was an abundance of trees,and very few bricks.

Then there was the Canterbury of myth,a town that was real,but also,not so.It too contained all of the buildings,roads,all  that could be taken in by sight,sound,smell and tactile perception,but it went far beyond what was,into the world of meaning.Like a word with meaning,then,beyond,connotation.You could see the town by wandering through.It took more than that to know it,for a town has a spirit too.

When you left the main highway,at a place called Crow Hill,it was ten or twelve miles into the bush.the road was mostly straight,narrow and not very well surfaced.There was the odd farm along the way,but again they were neither big or prosperous.Lots of hay.Some potatoes and root vegetables,but not many grain crops.A few cows and horses in fields that were rather rocky.One small stream intersected the road.

Eventually you came to town.It took about twenty minutes from the main road.there were a lot of tall trees standing by the side of the road,and they looked as though they could have been planted,though it's more likely that the finest of their type were preserved when cutting began to clear the town site. before you came into town there was a sign welcoming you to town and stating the population.it seemed to decline every year in my memory.

The high school was at the north end of town,and there was a bit of a curve in the road just as you passed it,then you came into a small downtown strip.It was nevertheless impressive for a town of it's size,having maybe a dozen or more shops,a post office,a bank and a handful of white,wooden churches,unlike the great stone churches in the town from which it took it's name. the place here that had the greatest and grandest stones was the cemetery,on the right hand side,past the school and before downtown.

The tracks bisected the road right in the downtown area.There was a station just to the right,and a building that reminded me of a grain elevator,or perhaps a feed store,and a little,odd shaped sort of silo,which I never noticed until just recently.A train came through each morning,you could hear it's whistle.You could catch the train there,but I'm not certain how many times it stopped and how many times it just drifted through.

Beyond the tracks were a couple of more stores,including the one that had rooms in the back,in which my uncle and grandparents lived.Then you went up the first hill,out of downtown.There was what people called a hospital on the right hand side going up the hill.In reality,it was inside a house very much like most of the other houses in town,and would not even rate as a well appointed doctor's office.But it had a red cross right by it's door.

Maple Street was the first side street,and it was quiet and well treed.then Orchard,that had a aqua colored house with a huge wrap around porch,sitting right on the corner was next,and it had far fewer trees.then came Elm Street,the last of the side streets,and the volunteer fire department just beyond.then main Street lifted into another hill,with maybe twenty houses along each side,until the hill crested.The department Of highways garage was at the top,on the right hand side,and my uncles Esso station and garage was just across.Annie and Fred English lived in the next house past the Esso,just on the downside of the hill,and beyond that was another house or two,then town was finished.The road beyond led to Dead Creek,Skiff Lake,Eel River Lake and the American border.

And that is more or less the physical lay of the land.Though why it came to be at all seems kind of odd.In an age when rivers were roads,Canterbury came to be located far from any substantial body of water,as though it might have been avoiding the rest of the world.

Chapter VIII Dead Creek and Canterbury Continued.

My grandparents were Thomas Graham and Alta Graham(Smith).The back country of Western New Brunswick,very remote territory in those days was home to them.Even today,long after their passing,it is a long way from the main road,and most people would never venture there.It's still deeply dark in the night,it's roads are still dusty,muddy or icy by season.There are still few people living out there,still a lot of abandoned farms.The world passes by and gives hardly a though to that country.

Thomas Graham was a farmer and a lumberman.By the time I was able to form  meaningful memories of him,he was quite old,and always seemed frail.He was functionally deaf without his hearing aid,and,I believe, sometimes used that device to retreat a few steps from the world,simply by turning it down or off.He had no discernible chin either.His face,a narrow face just seemed to merge with a narrow body.Both that deformity and the deafness are said to have resulted from a battle with scarlet fever when he was a small child. Yet he must have been sturdy in his day.He was ax handle thin and of about average height.Wiry is a word often used to describe such men,slim but well muscled once,with prominent veins running like rivers in his arms.It's hard to picture him standing up to a tall tree,felling it,then dragging it away and selling it,perhaps even riding down the river on huge masses of such logs.but he must have been reasonably proficient at it.Even after they retired,and moved to town,his shed contained all of the tools of that trade.

Alta Graham was physically everything that her husband was not.She was short and plump,generously proportioned both in bosom and hips,and she always swayed some,from side to side when she walked,like a sturdy mule.As long as I knew her she was a healthy and sturdy woman,and must have taken well to farm life,and been competent in its chores and able to withstand it's hardships with little complaint.She gave birth to both sons and daughters,and her son bore a greater resemblance to  her husband,while her daughters favored her,being shorter and more stoutly built.She had long ,thick hair,always worn in a bun,a round,moon like face,with equally moonish brown eyes, a rather broad flat nose and just the hint of a a double chin.A lot of dimples and a mole.It's hard to say if she were ever considered attractive,but she was a quiet and gentle soul,though possessed of a hyper kinetic energy well up into her later years,and an ardent curiosity about the world immediately around her.She professed to have little interest of other,far away places,though I believe her thoughts extended well beyond just the world at her feet.

By 1965,both of my grandparents were advanced in years.My grandmother,in fact had been born in 1900,and while sixty five years does not seem overly old today,it was considered to be elderly at the time,more so than today.My grandfather was considerably older than that,and so,they moved away from the farm,as many people were doing.Their move was only about seven miles or so from the old home place,but it was still a move into town,to a different way of life.

I don't recall the exact year that they moved,but it must have been about 1965,after we'd been in Moncton a year or a bit more.At first they lived in a cinder block building right downtown,at the foot of the first hill.There was a store in the front of that building,which was long and narrow,and there were apartments,or rooms in the rear.My Uncle Clifford lived in that building too at the time.That was at a time when Canterbury still had a thriving downtown,a mill and a train that passed through every morning.

Later,perhaps just a few months later, they moved into a white house up on Orchard Street,the second left as you head up the hill leaving downtown.They lived about two thirds of the way to where Orchard Street ended in a dead end,and the houses beyond their own became progressively smaller and less prosperous.And when they moved,my grandfather dragged something of the obsolescence of the forgotten countryside with him,in the form of some old farm implements,and almost certainly every license plate that had ever been on any car he'd owned.Those were nailed to the side wall of one of his two unpainted sheds.His car,a 1953 Bel Air was old in comparison to those of most of his neighbors,and had been hand painted a dark blue with a paintbrush.Some of his neighbors up the street had brought even older relics with them,and a few yards into the woods at the end of the road,there were sometimes pigs wandering about.

Chapter VIII Dead Creek And Canterbury continued.

Dead Creek is so called for a small stream that runs through it.The map,back in the library in Toronto shows it's headwaters to be near where it crosses New Brunswick Route 122,at a place called California.I'd never heard anyone refer to that place as California,but that's what the map calls it.A bit more reading revealed that it was so called because of some people who lived near there and went to California during the gold rush.By the looks of the map,there doesn't appear to be anyone living right there,and as far as I know,there are no houses anywhere along,except right along the main road.It's heavily treed now and rather swampy in places.At the road it's more of a swamp than a creek,but it runs in a ravine alongside a dirt road called The Horseback. I've been down to it,to go fishing,and it's a rough walk through the bush,and I got all scratched to pieces from the thick brush.And there wasn't much in the water except for eels and leeches.It's water is dark and stagnant in most places.Dead Creek was aptly named,because it was that kind of a place.Not at all inviting.

The Deadwater Creek came to the Upper Skiff Lake road and crossed under a small bridge.Just beyond the road,there was a place where we would go wading when we were really small,and once my father drove the car right down in the river bed to wash it.But for the most part the Deadwater was not a good creek at all.

Somewhere beyond where we used to wade it started a curve toward the southeast,below the hill on which my grandparents lived.It cut through the bush for a few more miles,until it entered a place called First Eel Lake,which,in turn emptied into the Eel River,then the Saint John River.But it must have been rough territory,because nobody ever took us there.

I have a recurring dream about the Deadwater,and I wonder if it's not been trying to reveal a secret to me,something that I imagine that I should know,but do not.

In the dream,I am walking in the stream bed,in very bright silver moonlight.That's it.That's all really.I'm walking along,and walking is much easier than I know it to be in waking hours.All of the underbrush and stagnant pools are there,as are all of the water logged trees along it's bank,but I have no trouble walking.Some one appears and asks where I'm going and I always say"all the way to the end.To Eel Lake.And I walk on,but I never get to the lake before I awake. 

Chapter VIII,Dead Creek and Canterbury continued.

The one thing that can be said for certain about Dead Creek in 1965 is that it was something of a dying community.My Uncle Clifford's tractor was far from the only relic that was decaying by the roadside.Down the road and on the opposite side there was an old threshing machine abandoned by the end of Fred And Anna English's driveway.It was a big hulking thing with peeling gray paint and big patches of rust,and it was nearly impossible to know how old it was.For certain,I've never seen one working,either out there or anywhere else.In my mind,it's the one iconic symbol of farmland left to go to seed.It sat there for as long as I can remember,and the only thing that was ever said about it was the short story my grandmother used to tell of how,one day the men with the threshing machine,the "threshermen" she called them came by,catching her unprepared,thinking that they wouldn't be there until the next day.I never could tell why that was a problem from the telling of the story,whether it was an intrusion that required her to direct some hospitality towards them,or whether she was being kept from other errands,or if perhaps she did not wish to be alone with them.She just said they came by surprise and never elaborated.

Farther up the road there was an old abandoned house,set back a long way from the road.It was a bit closer in towards the town of Canterbury,past where the Deadwater Creek crossed the road.this was where the Smith family lived,my grandmother,before she was married and her brothers and sisters.I know these people,or at least most of them,but for as long as I can remember the house was abandoned.Some had moved off into town and some farther afield,to Fredricton or Toronto and two of my grandmother's brothers had moved off to live in Portland,Maine.We used to pick wild strawberries there when I was very young.My mother used to say how I got stung by a bee there picking berries,and how she packed mud around the sting.I have a vague recall of the mud,but not of being stung.There were other hazards there as well.The place was all grown over with briars and thorns and in the late summer a child the size I was then could get lost in the towering goldenrod.My mother always kept us close when we went there,either for berries or apples,because she said there was an old well somewhere in all of the underbrush,and you could fall in.In fact,I believe there was likely more than one well,and the only way you would ever have found it would have been the wrong way.

One time when I was maybe three or four we went into the house and a floorboard gave out under my feet.I found myself knee deep in a hole with cold moist earth at the bottom,but I wasn't hurt at all.The old house scared me some though.It was a huge old farmhouse,very imposing and I think I had some innate idea as to the concept of a haunted house even before I heard the term or knew what it meant.The house must have been painted at one time.Or perhaps not.I really can't say for certain,but it didn't have tar paper or asphalt shingles,and most everyone I knew had something of an aversion to unpainted houses.But by the time I was old enough to remember it,it was just a weathered,washed out gray,water stained in places and covered with spots of lichen.When you went inside,there were things there,furniture and such,as though the people had lived there had for some reason left in a hurry,maybe intending to return,but never doing so.There were things in the kitchen,like those tins in which sugar or flour might be kept,everyday items that make up an inhabited house.Later,I found a bunch of old school books in one of the rooms,and they were filled with neatly written but faded notes and algebra equations.It always seemed to me that there were persons still living there,though the house was always vacant and nobody worked the land.The land just kept reclaiming the old farm year by year.

Out on the road,in front of the old house,there was a bit of a low spot across the road.When the air was clear enough,you could see a long ways to the west,and you might be able to see Mount Kathadin,over in central Maine.All of the hills about  Dead Creek were low,rough patches of ground,but Kathadin was a real mountain.It sometimes had snow on it's top when nothing else around did.You couldn't see it very often,but it was impressive when you did.

Maine was only a few miles away,and it didn't look so different from that part on New Brunswick where my mother came from.It was all just bush and trees and low hills,with a lake or two here and there.You could easily have wandered into The United States without knowing it if you were out hunting,and it's likely that the Americans lived lives pretty much like those of their counterparts a few miles away in Canada.From as far back as I can remember people all around knew and visited people on both sides of the border,were likely related to one another,and certainly married on either side of the line. 

Chapter VIII Dead Creek and Canterbury.

It was while sitting in the Toronto Reference Library that I really became familiar with the country where my mother was raised.While looking around the various map shelves,I discovered a map of York county,New Brunswick,complete with The Parish Of Canterbury,which showed the landowners both in town and in the country around Dead Creek and Skiff Lake,out where their family farm was.Why that map was there when a good many others were not,I cannot say.But it caused me to become familiar with the territory in a way I never had before.So I spent some hours studying it,and looking out over the urban landscape of Toronto,out past Rosedale,The Don River and beyond,to Leaside.As the city below went about it business,I read my map and thought of a place that could hardly have been more different from the green urban landscape below.

The map I'd come across was dated in the later years of the nineteenth century,but it filled in most of what I'd been told of that country by my parents and grandparents.All of those people to whom we were related were noted on the map,showing the place,and approximate shape of each of their properties.The Englishs ,the Derricks,the Hamiltons,and of course the Grahams,all  shown right where I remember visiting.

My grandfather,Thomas Graham had once lived in the back country,where he cut timber.The place had been pointed out to me any number of times,but we never went there because the road in was not able to be driven,being deeply rutted and high in the middle.People often went in there to hunt though.At some point,perhaps when he married,he moved out to the place where they were living along the Upper Skiff Lake Road.It  really was not far from the old camp,as the crow flies.If you were in the farmyard,standing near the house,there was a big hill out back,what some people would call a mountain.Straight out through there would bring you more or less to the old camp,according to the map.The hill leads down into the valley where the Deadwater Creek flows,but it must be very rough country with thick bush.I can recall being to the top of that hill once,but never down the other side.In looking at the map I wondered if the old camp,and the farm were in fact just one adjoining piece of land.I theory,you could still walk back there,but I'd never heard of anybody going across country to do that.It,s likely been fifty or more years since anyone's looked on that old place.

My first memory of Dead Creek is not a memory at all.I was baptized in the little church there in the summer of 1961,and it must have been during that same visit that a picture of me was taken of my grandfather holding me up on the back of a big bay horse.The house was a crude thing with red asphalt shingles,and there was a lot of hay and wildflowers.

Later on I remember being in the barn with my grandmother while she fed chickens from a pouch in her apron.There were other sorts of animals in the barn too,though only one or two of each,as far as I can remember.They kept a Holstein cow for milk,though they couldn't have needed more than one,with only the two of them living there.There was a pig too,the longest and fattest thing I'd ever seen,but it was penned in,not like the pigs where we used to live before we came to Moncton. Of course there was at least the one horse,and there may well have been a sheep or two as well,but never a goat.I can recall from an early age my grandmother saying that she did not like goats.Cows provided enough milk,so a goat was not needed.Besides,she said,they would eat anything,it was impossible to keep them away from the clothes drying on the line if they were not chained up.There were cats in the barn too,but they were not house cats.They roamed around in the barn,but never really came near people,and they were not fed.Their purpose was to kill rodents,and if you gave them food,they would not eat mice,so they were left unfed.For some reason I could never figure out,there was never a dog on my grandparents farm,though it was very much the custom to keep dogs on most farms.For that matter,neither the Englishes,my grandmothers sister,or the Derricks,her daughter kept dogs either.Those people lived nearby,on farms adjoining my grandfather's.

My uncle Clifford lived,at one time right across the road from the end of my grandfathers driveway.We did visit him there a time or two,but I don't recall much of what his place was like.In the back,it was well treed ,and so he could not have grown crops back there.There was an old tractor sitting right next to his house though,along with an old hay rake.But they were both rusty and,as far as I could tell,abandoned,and they sat there for years,long after all of those people moved into the town of Canterbury.The most likely thing that comes to my mind is that all of those people,my grandparents,my grandmothers sister and her husband,uncle Clifford,and Aunt Ruby and her husband,Ernie Derrick farmed all of those farms collectively.My grandfathers farm and Uncle Clifford's place could hardly have grown much of anything,but the other two farms,just down the road were a bit flatter and maybe a bit less rocky.The Derricks farm had an apple orchard as well,though the fruit from those trees hardly resembled store bought apples.They were enough to provide sustenance though.

I'm not certain if it's a memory or a dream,but I think there was once a huge cistern at the foot of my grandfather's driveway.Sometimes I remember it.But in some of my memories it's not there.There would have been a little wooden shack just in front of it,maybe partly enclosing it.Some people,in some places might have called it a spring house.This particular spring house may or may not have been used for storing such things as milk or butter.I don't ever recall going into it,but it must have been put there for a purpose,at one time.My grandparents had a refrigerator in the house,and a hand pump for water right by the kitchen sink,so the spring house,if that's what it was would hardly have been needed.But I do recall drinking out of a big open barrel,using a dipper that hung from the side of the hut.It was good,cool water,though all day long cars went by on the dusty road,so to get a good drink,you had to dip deeply into the barrel.The water surface was dusted over and there was green moss growing on the barrel's wood.Water emptied from a pipe into that barrel,so there must have been a large vault,perhaps even a cave within the mountain that my grandparents called home.