by Ben Robicheau
This year I came home for Christmas. An overnight, twenty-two hour drive from Hamilton, Ont. to Halifax, stopping only for gas and Tim’s. The trip home for Christmas, family gatherings or summer vacation is a ritual that many Islanders perform on a regular basis. Whether you are coming from somewhere else in Nova Scotia, across Canada or the other side of the world, you’re on a journey that ends with a ferry ride.
Over the years I’ve travelled between Ontario and Nova Scotia by plane, train, bus, truck, car, motorcycle and thumb. I’ve done the trip driving all night by myself, accompanied by other Islanders, and with newcomers to the Islands who didn’t really believe my stories about where I grew up until I showed them.
The drive is better than it used to be. From Hamilton to Halifax it’s all divided highway except for a short section of good quality two-lane road near the Quebec-New Brunswick border. My first trips to Ontario were before the Trans-Canada was finished and the road through Quebec was a time consuming stop-and-go route along the St. Lawrence River through numerous little towns with big churches all named Saint something-or-other.
Janet Morton knows this drive well, her family was in the military and lived for many years in Ontario, the yearly trip home is burned into her memory.
“Long before the main highways, (no 401 in Ontario) the 20 and 40 through PQ and the newer one down through northern NB, we travelled that path every summer from Ontario to NS. We didn't measure it in hours but in days, Dad was the only driver and I still don't know how he ever survived those drives with us monsters in the car. Sometimes there was an extra child to be dropped off in Bear River or another quiet place. Many people where we lived on the base were from the Maritimes and would send their children with whoever would take them to visit families in the east.
I remember the heat, the windows open trying to get relief, the noise! Most of it from us kids. Stopping beside the highway, not a fancy rest stop.. for warm drinks and mushy sandwiches and if we were lucky a stream to cool off in. The wet bathing suits hanging on the aerial to dry while driving, broken up radio stations, the games we came up with to play. Counting licence plates?? I can't even see them now, they all look the same.
Richard preferred the back window for travel but I’m not sure how he could stand the heat, Barry liked to watch the road and I just wanted to get there!
We won't even get into car breakdowns, repairs and time involved in that.. Did I mention we tented both ways, those old canvas tents can get pretty crowded and hot at night! I am surprised my mother survived all those trips.”
My first Christmas in Ontario I was looking for an economical way to get home when my Aunt Minnie came up with a solution. Having worked for a car rental company in Saint John, N.B., she knew that they bought cars direct from the factory in Ontario, then paid someone to drive them east. She made a call and sure enough, there was a car in Toronto waiting to be delivered. I picked it up after school and headed east in a 1970 Duster with summer tires and power steering. I was stopped by the O.P.P. before I had barely left the city. His attention had been drawn by my unsteady driving and the fact that the car had no plates. After my explanation that I was just getting used to the power steering and a thorough examination of the temporary permit in the side window, he let me go with the observation that it was December and I really should have winter tires on. I wasn’t worried about the tires because the roads were clear and there was no sign of snow.
Four hours later I was stuck in the middle of a howling blizzard, at a dead stop in a miles-long line of traffic. After three hours of sitting, idling and watching the gas gage sink towards “empty”, I took a chance and plowed my way into tracks made by several four-wheel-drives that had passed us by. Despite the lack of snow tires, I was able to keep moving and eventually reached the head of the line where a transport truck was uselessly spinning its wheels. Continuing eastward the storm lessened and by the time I hit New Brunswick the road was mostly bare with just a thin layer of wet snow at the edges. The sun was coming up and I was the only car on the road, I had to make up for lost time if I was going to catch the morning ferry to Digby.
I was doing close to 100 MPH when I wandered into the slush at the edge of the pavement. The car fishtailed to the right, then left, then right again, making a bigger swing each time. I knew I was going to lose control and figured it would be better if I slid towards the road than the ditch. When the car slid left again I slammed on the brakes, did a couple of 360s and ended up on the other side of the road facing in the opposite direction. I made the ferry O.K., but I never told my Aunt how close I came to wiping out that brand-new Duster.
Just before Christmas a year later I got a phone call from Peggy Thompson. She was on her way home from B.C. and wanted to know if I could give her a ride from Toronto. As it happened, I had just become the proud owner of a ten year old VW Beetle with 200,000 miles on it and I was glad to have the company. Setting out, the weather was good, but by the time we hit Montreal it was snowing and extremely cold. The VW heating system was not great at the best of times, and combining an old Beetle with a Quebec winter was just asking for trouble. Our breath froze on the windshield to the extent that we had to use an ice scraper on the inside of the glass to see where we were going, at the same time Peggy had to periodically reach out the window to clear snow that the wipers didn’t get. After a long cold night, we finally made it to the Digby ferry, crossed the Bay and happily started down the Neck, we were almost home! Then we ran into a problem that is familiar to every Islander, or, as Peggy tells it:
“After a very long trip, we ventured down Digby Neck behind the snowplough...only to get to East Ferry and find that the ferry wasn't crossing! I had come from Prince George...hit an avalanche in Rogers Pass in the Rockies, driven frozen all the way to New Brunswick, gotten seasick across the Bay of Fundy, risked our necks on the Neck to find the FRIGGIN’ FERRY WASN'T CROSSING!!!!!“
Many of my early trips were in the company of Herb Barnaby, who was going to university in Ontario. One trip he remembers is when I misjudged how far I could go on a tank of gas and ran out just as we were going up a hill. Herb was just envisioning us freezing to death in the dark beside the highway when with our last bit of momentum, we slowly crested the hill to see a gas station on the other side. We were able to coast most of the way, although Herb and my sister Janet did have to get out and push the last fifty feet to the pumps.
On another occasion, I had Herb and his brother Rodney as well as Rodney’s German Shepherd, Shamus, all crammed into the cab of my Toyota truck. With the four of us in such close quarters, the windshield fogged up and froze to the extent that we only had a small hole to see out of. Herb says he remembers going through Montreal changing lanes with no idea if anyone was beside us because he could hardly see out the front and the side windows were totally iced up. When we finally got to New Brunswick the road from Fredericton to Saint John was a glare of ice and we were reduced to a crawl. As usual, we were pressed for time to make the boat and at this rate we were going to miss it. Luckily, in New Brunswick you couldn’t go far without seeing a pile of pulpwood on the side of the road. One of these appeared now so I stopped, tossed a few logs into the back of the truck, and with the added weight providing traction, was able to make the ferry on time.
I hadn’t been thrilled about taking a dog with us, but Shamus turned out to be an excellent traveller. Though I don’t know where he found the room, he laid curled up on the cab floor for the whole trip. The only sign of complaint I saw from him was when we had to leave him in the truck on the Digby boat. I don’t know if it was out of boredom or in protest at being left alone, but he chewed up my wooden gearshift knob that I had made in Herbie Thurber’s woodworking class. I was able to sand out most of the tooth marks, but I did leave a few as a memento of the trip.
Someone once said, “You can’t go home again”, but I think with a bit of perseverance, you can… a good set of snow tires might help too. - brobicheau@cogeco.ca
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Saturday, 5 January 2008
GOING DOWNHILL
by Ben Robicheau
In the days before Ski-Doos and Arctic Cats the biggest, fastest winter vehicle in Westport was the bobsled. This was a home-built contraption with four steel runners, the two in the back were fixed and the two in the front could swivel from side to side, providing a modest amount of steering capability. The main body of the sled consisted of a board which connected the front and back sets of runners and was long enough to hold four or five kids sitting in a row. The person at the front was the “steerer” and the person at the back was the “pusher”. As indicated by the name, the pusher would start the sled off by running behind and pushing for three or four steps before making a wild leap and hopefully landing on the last few inches of board not already occupied. A bobsled was built to run on ice and on a steep hill could attain exciting speeds.
In Westport there was really only one bobsled run, and that was on the New Lane. This was due in large part to the efforts of one young man. For some reason he had been saddled with the unfortunate nick-name of “Clarabell” and he lived with his parents in the last house on the New Lane, just across from the church. I’m not sure how his fascination with bobsleds started, but I imagine he must have looked out one winter’s day and realised that with a little help, the hill he was living on could provide hours of entertainment. As soon as it got cold enough, he would be out there, occasionally with others helping, scooping water from the ditch onto the road. Sometimes it would take several days of diligent watering to produce a suitable layer of ice. Only one side of the road was iced, leaving the other side for cars to go up and down. Drivers would carefully share the road with the sliders and each other. Even the roadmaster, Brad Delaney, would usually try to avoid spreading sand on the icy side of the lane. With the moderate and fluctuating weather in Westport, the icemaker’s work was sometimes in vain, just as he was building up a good bed of ice, the temperature would rise by ten degrees overnight, resulting in nothing but bare ground for his effort the next morning.
But on those rare occasions when the thermometer stayed below freezing for several days in a row, every kid on the island would flock to take advantage of Clarabell’s toil. The ice run stretched from the church down past the Back Road to where the hill started to level out. At this point you would usually come to a grinding halt before reaching the Front Road. Occasionally, after a freezing rain or maybe extra watering by the icemakers, you could continue straight on or veer to the right past the Vestry steps and down a short trail that came out near the Irishtown bridge. If you decided to go straight you had to make a sharp left or right turn at the Front Road, or make a slight jog to the right and run off onto Bowers’ wharf. These manoeuvres required an experienced and skilful pilot, there were at least a couple of instances where the unfortunate sliders were unable to master the turn and ended up continuing straight ahead over the breastwork and onto the beach.
Most of the sliding took place after dark when it was colder and the ice was a bit harder. There were three or four bobsleds on the island and kids also showed up with toboggans, one-man sleds, flying saucers, Crazy Carpets, just about anything that would slide. This made for quite a mix of ages and equipment, all going up and down at random with the big bobsleds periodically thundering down the hill scattering everyone in their way and all the while cars would be passing by just inches from the barely under control sliders. Surprisingly, I don’t recall any injuries although there must have been a few, and close shaves were just laughed off as a natural part of the fun.
Although the bobsled was the undisputed king of the New Lane, there was one other sliding device that I believe was its equal for excitement and danger, and it wasn’t even a real sled.
One day the Coca-Cola people showed up at my fathers store and attached two round, red and white signs to opposite ends of the building. A couple of summers later Dad took them down to repaint the store. He was a little slow about putting them back up and that winter it occurred to us kids that they might make good sleds. It took only one run for us to know that those signs would never be going back up on the wall.
Because they were shaped like the commercial “Flying Saucers” that were available at the time, we gave the signs the same name but in many ways they were much superior to the store bought version. They were made of heavy gauge steel and were about four feet across, so they could hold several kids at a time. Because of their size and shape, they would slide well on anything from heavy frost to deep snow, and the lighter they were the faster they would go. There was no way to steer, so you usually went down the hill while rotating wildly, adding to the excitement. The inside was smooth, painted metal so there was no traction and nothing to hang on to for the riders who would slide around and fly up in the air with every bump. The lip of the saucer was a sharp unprotected edge and every once in a while you would come down on this edge. There are probably still people on the Island with crescent shaped marks on various parts of their bodies.
One day we were sliding in Shelly Bailey’s front yard, ending our run at an old picket fence just before the Front Road, when a young lady happened along. Although she was at an age where makeup and hairdos held more interest than sliding, she decided to give the saucer a try. Not wanting to ride with “little kids”, and although we warned her about the tendency of the saucer to go faster with less weight, she insisted on going alone. We set her off with a good push and she flew down the hill, picking up speed as predicted, and when she reached the bottom of the run instead of being stopped by the fence, she blew right through it, sailing straight across the road and over the breastwork. Luckily, the tide was up so the saucer hit the water, skipped a couple of times, then slowly sank under her. Drenched to the neck, the distraught young lady waded back to shore, dragging the saucer behind her and swearing a blue streak. She had a memorable ride, but I’m pretty sure her hairdo and makeup were ruined.
One evening a couple of years later, I was hanging onto a rope tied to the back bumper of Barry Mortons’ car and was being pulled along in the saucer which was zigzagging back and forth across the road. There was quite a fierce snowstorm going on and we expected the roads to be pretty well deserted, when we suddenly met oncoming traffic. I pulled on the rope to swing in behind Barry’s car but my timing was off and I swung back out again right in front of Dick Thompson’s station wagon. Seeing that a collision was unavoidable, I hung on to the rope and stood up. I struck the front of the car and was pulled across the hood by the rope, landing on the road beside the car. I don’t know who was more scared, me or Dick. I spent a couple of days in bed with a badly bruised hip, but the real victim of this fiasco was the saucer, it ended up under Dick’s front wheel, bent and twisted, its sliding days forever over. It was dragged out from under the car and unceremoniously dumped over the breastwork, a sad and inglorious end to a great instrument of winter fun. – brobicheau@cogeco.ca
In the days before Ski-Doos and Arctic Cats the biggest, fastest winter vehicle in Westport was the bobsled. This was a home-built contraption with four steel runners, the two in the back were fixed and the two in the front could swivel from side to side, providing a modest amount of steering capability. The main body of the sled consisted of a board which connected the front and back sets of runners and was long enough to hold four or five kids sitting in a row. The person at the front was the “steerer” and the person at the back was the “pusher”. As indicated by the name, the pusher would start the sled off by running behind and pushing for three or four steps before making a wild leap and hopefully landing on the last few inches of board not already occupied. A bobsled was built to run on ice and on a steep hill could attain exciting speeds.
In Westport there was really only one bobsled run, and that was on the New Lane. This was due in large part to the efforts of one young man. For some reason he had been saddled with the unfortunate nick-name of “Clarabell” and he lived with his parents in the last house on the New Lane, just across from the church. I’m not sure how his fascination with bobsleds started, but I imagine he must have looked out one winter’s day and realised that with a little help, the hill he was living on could provide hours of entertainment. As soon as it got cold enough, he would be out there, occasionally with others helping, scooping water from the ditch onto the road. Sometimes it would take several days of diligent watering to produce a suitable layer of ice. Only one side of the road was iced, leaving the other side for cars to go up and down. Drivers would carefully share the road with the sliders and each other. Even the roadmaster, Brad Delaney, would usually try to avoid spreading sand on the icy side of the lane. With the moderate and fluctuating weather in Westport, the icemaker’s work was sometimes in vain, just as he was building up a good bed of ice, the temperature would rise by ten degrees overnight, resulting in nothing but bare ground for his effort the next morning.
But on those rare occasions when the thermometer stayed below freezing for several days in a row, every kid on the island would flock to take advantage of Clarabell’s toil. The ice run stretched from the church down past the Back Road to where the hill started to level out. At this point you would usually come to a grinding halt before reaching the Front Road. Occasionally, after a freezing rain or maybe extra watering by the icemakers, you could continue straight on or veer to the right past the Vestry steps and down a short trail that came out near the Irishtown bridge. If you decided to go straight you had to make a sharp left or right turn at the Front Road, or make a slight jog to the right and run off onto Bowers’ wharf. These manoeuvres required an experienced and skilful pilot, there were at least a couple of instances where the unfortunate sliders were unable to master the turn and ended up continuing straight ahead over the breastwork and onto the beach.
Most of the sliding took place after dark when it was colder and the ice was a bit harder. There were three or four bobsleds on the island and kids also showed up with toboggans, one-man sleds, flying saucers, Crazy Carpets, just about anything that would slide. This made for quite a mix of ages and equipment, all going up and down at random with the big bobsleds periodically thundering down the hill scattering everyone in their way and all the while cars would be passing by just inches from the barely under control sliders. Surprisingly, I don’t recall any injuries although there must have been a few, and close shaves were just laughed off as a natural part of the fun.
Although the bobsled was the undisputed king of the New Lane, there was one other sliding device that I believe was its equal for excitement and danger, and it wasn’t even a real sled.
One day the Coca-Cola people showed up at my fathers store and attached two round, red and white signs to opposite ends of the building. A couple of summers later Dad took them down to repaint the store. He was a little slow about putting them back up and that winter it occurred to us kids that they might make good sleds. It took only one run for us to know that those signs would never be going back up on the wall.
Because they were shaped like the commercial “Flying Saucers” that were available at the time, we gave the signs the same name but in many ways they were much superior to the store bought version. They were made of heavy gauge steel and were about four feet across, so they could hold several kids at a time. Because of their size and shape, they would slide well on anything from heavy frost to deep snow, and the lighter they were the faster they would go. There was no way to steer, so you usually went down the hill while rotating wildly, adding to the excitement. The inside was smooth, painted metal so there was no traction and nothing to hang on to for the riders who would slide around and fly up in the air with every bump. The lip of the saucer was a sharp unprotected edge and every once in a while you would come down on this edge. There are probably still people on the Island with crescent shaped marks on various parts of their bodies.
One day we were sliding in Shelly Bailey’s front yard, ending our run at an old picket fence just before the Front Road, when a young lady happened along. Although she was at an age where makeup and hairdos held more interest than sliding, she decided to give the saucer a try. Not wanting to ride with “little kids”, and although we warned her about the tendency of the saucer to go faster with less weight, she insisted on going alone. We set her off with a good push and she flew down the hill, picking up speed as predicted, and when she reached the bottom of the run instead of being stopped by the fence, she blew right through it, sailing straight across the road and over the breastwork. Luckily, the tide was up so the saucer hit the water, skipped a couple of times, then slowly sank under her. Drenched to the neck, the distraught young lady waded back to shore, dragging the saucer behind her and swearing a blue streak. She had a memorable ride, but I’m pretty sure her hairdo and makeup were ruined.
One evening a couple of years later, I was hanging onto a rope tied to the back bumper of Barry Mortons’ car and was being pulled along in the saucer which was zigzagging back and forth across the road. There was quite a fierce snowstorm going on and we expected the roads to be pretty well deserted, when we suddenly met oncoming traffic. I pulled on the rope to swing in behind Barry’s car but my timing was off and I swung back out again right in front of Dick Thompson’s station wagon. Seeing that a collision was unavoidable, I hung on to the rope and stood up. I struck the front of the car and was pulled across the hood by the rope, landing on the road beside the car. I don’t know who was more scared, me or Dick. I spent a couple of days in bed with a badly bruised hip, but the real victim of this fiasco was the saucer, it ended up under Dick’s front wheel, bent and twisted, its sliding days forever over. It was dragged out from under the car and unceremoniously dumped over the breastwork, a sad and inglorious end to a great instrument of winter fun. – brobicheau@cogeco.ca
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