Chapter XI,1966,The Later Months,Continued.

When the day to begin summer vacation began we all piled into the car and headed out onto the highway.It was a sunny and very hot day.At least I recall being very hot inside the car.My father never was inclined to roll down windows,so it was both hot and smokey inside the car,as it always seemed to be whenever we went anywhere.

It took about an hour to get to Springhill. The trip as far as Amherst went quickly,as it was highway all of the way.But there was no by-pass back then,so you had to go nearly all the way into downtown to get onto the road into Springhill. And that road was not in nearly as good condition.There were a lot of hill and turns,and it was quite narrow,so passing wasn't easy to do.It took almost as long to get to Springhill as it had taken to get to Amherst,though it was less than half as far.When we got there,we didn't go visiting at all.My father was anxious to get settled into the cottage we had rented,and it was still a ways off.All he wanted to do was get the key,and the person who owned the cottage lived in Springhill. We went into town,to a part of town I didn't know well at all.I think it must have been near the hospital.There were trees all about and it was on a bit of a hill.When we got to the house and parked in the driveway,my father said he would only be a minute,and that we should all wait in the car.It seemed like a lot more than a minute,and it was getting really hot inside the car.There were about a half dozen kids that came swarming around the car,and I would have liked to have gotten out to play with them.One of them had some sort of stick,and they might have been playing hockey in the driveway before we came.They were a grubby looking lot,and it occurs to me that we'd pissed them off by parking there.That's what made me think they were playing hockey.In any event,while we were waiting for my father to get back with the key,one of them reached through the window and hit my sister. Didn't seem to have any fear at all of my mother sitting right there,and I'm not certain she saw any of it.When my father got back a few moments later,my sister said that one of the kids had hit her,but he just backed out of the driveway and drove off.

My father was obviously proud to have been able to rent a cottage and let us all experience an extended stay at the beach.Along the way he said"This is going to be great.My kids can get tanned and healthy looking like little nig... ".My mother shot him a sharp look,that I knew was disapproval,so he paused,then finished."As dark as chocolate." The word he was going to use was a  word he used from time to time,as  I was to find out later.He never really meant any malice in it,I discovered.It was just a word that nearly everyone in Springhill used in those days.But my mother disapproved of it's use,and he tried hard to please her and set a good example for his children.

To get to our cottage,we still had to pass through the towns of Oxford and Pugwash,and there was a considerable distance between each of the three towns.There really wasn't a lot to see until we got into Pugwash. Pugwash is a port and there were sometimes ships in,and loading pulp wood,or salt from a local salt mine. On the day we passed.there was one ship in,and my father pointed out to us how you could tell if the ship was ready to leave,by how low it sat in the water.This one,he said was nearly full,and would likely leave on the high tide.In the distance I could see the mine.with huge piles of salt piled up outside.And,as we drove through town my mother pointed out the street signs,which were in Gaelic,rather than English.She also pointed out a large wooden church and said that her uncle,who was from Maine had built the steeple.That was one of the things he did.Build steeples.

At last we came to that decrepit old road into the cottage.First,though we went down another back road that was even worse than the one leading into the cottage.We had to go really slow,and the bottom of the car dragged on the ground.What exactly my father was looking for down that road,I've no idea.Maybe it was just a road he'd never been down before.It was possible to drive right up to the cottage road on blacktop,but for some reason,we would sometimes take that old road where there was nothing but mud and porcupines.

The cottage turned out to be a little yellow and white cabin,nearly surrounded by trees.The lot was clear at it's back edge facing the water,but you couldn't see out to the road.The road was dusty too,when cars passed too fast,but the trees kept the dust from settling on the cottage.Inside,the cottage was small,with a kitchen facing the water,and two bedrooms side by side at the back,closer to the road.One of the first things I saw when we entered,was a ship,inside a bottle,resting on one wall,close to a clock.

Down at the back of the lot,there was a small embankment that lead right down to the beach.Right in front,there was a narrow,rocky strand,then miles and miles of open water.We were in a little cove,with an Island off to the east.The island was called Oak Island,but it wasn't the Oak Island that was reputed to hold buried treasure.There was another island,called Saddle Island farther out into the water.Oak Island,though was only really an Island at high tide.At low tide it was connected to the land in front of the cottages by acres of sandbars.A bit to the west,a point stuck out into the water,and my father told us that it was a long way off,but,before we went home,we were going to walk there and back.There were also said to be berries there.Mostly raspberries,but some strawberries and blueberries too.And some wild cherries.Later,my mother said,we were going to go picking berries in the bramble patch that was a ways down the road.But the first order of business,right after lunch that is,was going down to the water for a dip.

Our cottage turned out to be almost next door to Art's cottage.There was just one other house in between.When we arrived,there was nobody at that cottage.My father said that it was owned by an old German lady,and that we shouldn't go there.That seemed to make some sense to my five year old mind.The only thing I knew about German people,I'd learned from afternoon war movies,so I was sure the reason he didn't want us going there was because the old woman would have a machine gun.Nobody would ever accuse the movies of that day as being especially complimentary,never mind accurate when it came to Germans.As it turned out,my father was only concerned about us disturbing the privacy of neighbors we didn't really know.But I was feeling some anxiety about the fact that there was a German living right next to us.As it turned out,and as I would learn over the course of our vacation,I needn't have worried at all.

Chapter XI,1966 The Later Months Continued.

In Springhill,Nova Scotia my father knew a man named Art.He worked at a school for deaf students in nearby Amherst,and,as far as I can tell,Art and my father were rather close.so when we took our summer vacation in 1966,it was to the beach,right next to where Art kept a summer cottage.

My fathers's history with Art would have gone back into the late 1940's,after Art returned from the war.For as long as I can remember,and perhaps for many years before that.art lived down in the flats of Springhill,near the old mines in the foul air.I have know idea if he was ever a miner,but in the lists of miners I have seen,I've never noticed his name among the men listed.what I do know is that at some point he owned and operated a hot dog stand at a beach,and that my father worked for him during the summer.He was also involved in boxing,either as a coach or promoter,or perhaps both,and he looked the part.Art was a lean man of about average height,with a bullet like head.he'd sustained some sort of a scar during the war,which was no prominent all the time,but could flare up and give him a menacing look.To see him,he did not strike you as a man you might like to meet inside a boxing ring.he looked very capable of taking care of that sort of business.In fact though I could see no evidence of any real meanness in him.He seemed calm and even tempered, I rarely herd him swear,and he seemed,on the occasions when my father and he held court and reminisced about past days of working the hot dog stand,and boxing,to drink rather less than my father,who himself did not seem a heavy drinker.I sensed about him an ability and a desire to motivate.,for in my childhood,Art would teach me and encourage me not in boxing,but in the game of golf.one thing about art that I noticed though,is that he never seemed to talk about mines or mining.when it came to talking about the war,he was reluctant to talk about that as well.He would mention that he still had shrapnel in one side of his face,on the occasions it flared up and bothered him.But mining is something I never recalled him talking about.

Arts cottage was at a place called Fox Harbour,along the north coast of Nova Scotia,forty some miles maybe from his home in Springhill. On the road trips we'd made since moving to Moncton,I'd been to Art's cottage before,and it was a rather remote place in those days.It's located between the towns of Pugwash and Wallace,neither of which were really large places.though both were busy during the summer season.But Fox Harbour,you could say was centrally located,in the middle of nowhere.It was a dozen or so miles out of Pugwash,and not all of the roads along the way were what you would call really inviting,though there was a main road up to the point where you turned off to drive out to the beach.that road was really remote,a long way from anything,and it was in awful shape.At the time,there were a few small farms along the road,and about four of five miles in,people were starting to take an interest in building cottages,where shore front property was still available.The farmer that lived at the end of the road was down scaling his operations and had begun to sub-divide and sell individual lots.

Getting into the end of that road was like traveling back in time,maybe forty of fifty years.For one thing,I'm not certain that people back there even had phone service.At least not all of them.As we would drive along,I noticed that the utility poles all leaned over,some of them so far as too be little higher than the fence posts along the road.I could have,even at five years old, walked right up to the pole and grabbed the wires in many places.The phone repair,or the hydro servicemen would not even have needed ladders,never mind climbing the poles like they did in the city. When we first went out there,there were places where the trees were so close to the road that they would close right in on the car,and,if you rolled down the windows,you could grab the passing branches.Just beyond the last farmhouse the road took an almost ninety degree bend and narrowed down into a lane that would not allow two cars to pass going in opposite directions.The surface was dirt,and deeply rutted.at that time there were a few cottages on the right hand side as you were passing.On the left hand side there was nothing but brambles and bush.If you had ventured in that far without knowing any of the people who lived there,you would have been well and truly lost,about as far away from civilization as you could get.And it really wasn't a car friendly road.You could get stuck,even in summer,and,at other times,the road could be an impossible quagmire.More than once I recall coming to a puddle wide and deep enough that my father would not venture through it and would have to back up a substantial distance before he could turn around.Most of the cottage people back there lived in the larger towns and so were friendly and civilized enough,but there were a lot of places on the way in that I would likely have been hesitant to approach in any situation other than a dire emergency.Most of those people were people I never came to know,and the ones that I did,I never felt that I knew well. But that is where my father decided to take us for vacation in July of 1966.   

Chapter XI,1966,The later Months.

Evidently 1966 must have been a prosperous year,because there were a lot of things going on that required a good income.Both of my parents were working,and we were staying with the neighbor lady up the street,but,on the days my father was not working,I guess they had decided that we should stay at home and save a bit of money on childcare. My family wasn't wealthy,but my father had a good civil service job,and there seemed to be a bit more disposable income than usual that year.

It was that year that we first went on a longer vacation to the beach,and also the year that my father undertook a lot of building.But the first thing that happened is that we got a new car.

Car manufacturers seemed to have given up on the idea of cars with wings,like they had been making the last time my father was in the market for a new car.I think that was all sort of connected to The Cold War,superiority in the air and the idea of a Military Industrial Complex,so cars reflected those ideals with their wings. But just because the wings were being mothballed in Detroit,didn't mean that Detroit was doing anything in a small way. Motors were getting bigger,with all of the manufacturers releasing bigger and bigger power plants,all trying to out do the other.The actual Cold War had settled back a bit since the earliest years of the decade,but there was still an arms race taking place,and it wasn't limited to just the makers of war machines.My fathers new car was called a Mercury Montcalm.It was red and roughly the size of an aircraft carrier,with an engine to match.390 cubic inches,my father said.You could take one of the pistons out and hide a small horse inside,or so he used to say.It would hit ninety miles per hour before you new it,and ride as smooth as sitting home on you couch.It had a lot of features inside that my father had never had in any of his other cars.In fact,there were things fastened to the dashboard that were going to get me into some trouble down the road.The electric windows were kind of a neat feature.In keeping with the war culture,I would often roll down the windows while my father and I were out driving.Just as quickly,he would hit a button on his side,and the window would go up again.It became a game of one-up-man-ship,that was much more amusing to me than to anyone else.My father had an aversion to driving with windows down,so it seemed.He also had a habit of smoking,and I guess he didn't want to waste any smoke at all,after paying fifty or sixty cents a pack foe cigarettes.I wasn't really thinking of smoke,or letting it out of the car,though I guess it really did bother me even way back then.But it was a kind of normal thing to do.Nobody thought about it the way they do now. I just liked having a war with my father over the windows,After all,what good was a machine of war if you never fought a battle with it.

The windows were not what caused me all of the trouble though.It was another gadget that did that,And even though I never got in as much trouble as I should have for it,what happened wouldn't leave me alone for years.I felt bad about it for a long time.In fact,I still cringe to think about it.I guess that's because I really was developing a conscience,a sense of moral rightness,and straying from that was something I was keenly aware of.