Ah yes... the beach party at Loggieville...

That summer that I was fifteen, my cohorts at Teen Town planned and executed a beach party on the shores of the Miramichi river, down the road from Chatham and almost to the Strait of Northumberland. The water there is never warm, but that doesn't matter to a bunch of teenagers, and there was a rather nice beach there, so we had all the elements of a lot of fun.

I was much more self-conscious back then than I am now and wouldn't have been caught dead in a swim suit. (I didn't even wear shorts until I was about 30!) I was probably the only one on the beach wearing jeans and a tee-shirt, but that was okay with me. The other girls were decked out in their skimpy bikinis or halter tops and cut-offs. For a change the weather actually cooperated with our plans and the sun shone brightly.

What makes this event so memorable for me was the curiously bizarre situation that led to me becoming a drug trafficker for the day. Sort of. I was one of the kids who was not paired off at that point in time and so I spent some of the afternoon strolling along the beach with Paul Pennimpede. We came across evidence of someone riding a horse down the beach a few days earlier. This evidence was above the high-water line and was quite dried out. I jokingly suggested to Paul that we might convince someone that it was some other form of vegetative material... if it was presented correctly we might fool them into thinking it was marijuana. (Goes to show just how much I knew about marijuana! And how warped my mind was then... not that it's any less warped now.) Anyhow, Paul mooched some Vogue rolling papers from one of the other guys and then rolled a couple of "joints" from the horse manure. On our stroll back up the beach the first person we came to, Paul Farrell, took the bait. To this day I can't believe that happened because of all our crowd, Paul was the MOST familiar with horses and their effluent. His dad owned two race horses that were stabled in Chatham; Paul was responsible for their day-to-day care. But he was hornswoggled into believing that we'd given him a real joint. He fired that doobie up and took a huge toke. Then he coughed really hard before saying, in a tight and breathless voice, "That's some GOOD shit!" My partner in crime and I nearly turned blue trying not to laugh our behinds off. I don't recall if we ever came clean about the origin of the shit, but I do remember how funny it was to see Paul smoking it!

And that's the story of how I was a pusher-for-a-day.

The October Crisis... as seen through the eyes of a 12 year old

As if the notion of missiles from Russia wasn't scary enough, in October 1970 the relative safety and security of all Canadians seemed to be threatened from within. On October 5, the Front de Liberation du Quebec kidnapped a British diplomat named James Cross in Montreal. This represented an abrupt escalation of terrorist activity by the FLQ which until then had satisfied itself largely with blowing up mailboxes in the affluent Anglo neighbourhood of Westmount. I was 12 and only just developing an interest in current affairs outside of my own realm of awareness. The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and the grainy, fuzzy black and white images on Channel 7 were my sources of information. Sketchy and vaguely understood.

While Quebec was physically very far away, we had only just left there to move to Alsask. A 12 year-old's understanding of such things as terrorism in 1970 was very different from that of the modern 12 year old whose exposure to CNN, the Internet and other sources of information are a quantum leap ahead. I struggled to connect the events in Montreal to the reality of my own world and came up short.

On October 8 all media outlets in Canada broadcast the FLQ's manifesto, a rambling and incoherent jumble of demands. Transcripts of the translation read in part:

"The Front de Libération du Québec wants total independence for Quebeckers; it wants to see them united in a free society, a society purged for good of its gang of rapacious sharks, the big bosses who dish out patronage and their henchmen, who have turned Quebec into a private preserve of cheap labour and unscrupulous exploitation.

The Front de Libération du Québec is not an aggressive movement, but a response to the aggression organized by high finance through its puppets, the federal and provincial governments (the Brinks farce ¹, Bill 63, the electoral map ², the so-called "social progress" tax ³, the Power Corporation, medical insurance - for the doctors ⁴, the guys at Lapalme ⁵...)

We have had enough of promises of work and of prosperity, when in fact we will always be the diligent servants and bootlickers of the big shots, as long as there is a Westmount, a Town of Mount Royal, a Hampstead, an Outremont, all these veritable fortresses of the high finance of St. James Street and Wall Street; we will be slaves until Quebeckers, all of us, have used every means, including dynamite and guns, to drive out these big bosses of the economy and of politics, who will stoop to any action however low it may be, the better to screw us.

We live in a society of terrorized slaves, terrorized by the big bosses, Steinberg, Clark, Bronfman, Smith, Neopole, Timmins, Geoffrion, J.L. Lévesque, Hershorn, Thompson, Nesbitt, Desmarais, Kierans (next to these, Rémi Popol the Nightstick, Drapeau the Dog, Bourassa the Simards' Simple Simon and Trudeau the Pansy ¹⁷ are peanuts!)."

Vive le Quebec Libre.

http://english.republiquelibre.org/Manifesto-flq.html

On October 10, another FLQ group, the Chenier cell, kidnapped the Quebec Labour Minister Pierre Laporte from his front lawn, an act that was witnessed by his nephew. A week later, one day after le Premier-Ministre Robert Bourassa asked Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, Laporte's body was found stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car near the airport at St Hubert. The safety and well-being of Mr Cross was unknown but his captors were insistent that his release was dependent on the fulfillment of their demands for the release of "political prisoners" being held for terrorist activity by the Quebec police.

Since we lived on a Canadian military radar station, it was thought that our little community could be a target for terrorist attack. We were all kept in a state of high alert and the army was called in to ensure our safety. We were instructed to inform our parents or teachers of any suspicious strangers we might see lurking around our homes or school; since there were only 124 houses on the station and a couple dozen in the village, strangers would have stuck out like a sore thumb and we viewed it as a game. We kids really had no idea of how serious all of this was. In retrospect, we were protected from the reality of it all by the adults in our world, a job that is all but impossible today. At the time, this was our 9-11 but we didn't know it.

On November 6, the QPF raided the headquarters of the Chenier cell of the FLQ; most of the members scattered but Bernard Lortie was arrested and charged in the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte. It was nearly another month before British Trade Commissioner James Cross was released on December 3, at the same time that 5 high-ranking members of the FLQ were granted safe passage to Cuba. On December 28, the last 3 Chenier cell members to be arrested were finally caught in a 6 meter long tunnel in a farmer's field in St-Luc. They too were charged in the Pierre Laporte kidnap-murder case.

These events had far-reaching effects: popularity for the violent FLQ waned allowing the growth of the politically-active Parti Quebecois and its subsequent rise to power as the ruling party in 1976 and the creation of the Bloc Quebecois at the federal level following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord. Strong criticism of the federal invocation of the War Measures Act led to a rift in the Liberal party and the eventual success of the federal Conservatives under Bryan Mulroney.

When all is said and done, I'm happy that I was born when I was; by the time the instant-communication revolution had occurred I was already an adult and could cope with knowing of the evil man does unto man. The Challenger, the Gulf War, 9-11, Katrina, all these things that terrify our children and their children... We were protected from that. I wish we could extend that protection to the innocence of today.

Travels with my Dad

One facet of military dependency is the frequent moves necessitated by operational requirements. During the Cold War, most military families moved every two years or every three at most. And if you were posted into an isolated community, you had to request an extension of your posting if you wanted to be there more than two. Mont Apica was quite isolated, situated as it was in the middle of rural northern Quebec, so postings there were two years and few people asked to extend. That's how we found ourselves in the little Red Comet that Dad bought from Gely Bouchard, on the move to Alsask.

Anyone who has driven across northern Ontario will usually choose a different route the next time. Dad decided we would drive through the States to get past that stretch of nothingness and so there we were, rolling through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on an early August day in 1968. As the day neared its end, the weather turned inclement; we were tenting (our first foray with the huge green thing) so the parents thought we should look for a campgrounds early rather than risk being caught in the rain. Have you ever driven across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? There's a whole lot of nothing-but-trees there! So now it was dark, the three of us in the back seat were tired and hungry and the two in the front seat were wondering what they were going to do now.

Oh look... there's a state police car behind us and he's got his lights on... "Excuse me sir. Did you know you're driving with only one headlight? That's against the law in Michigan, sir. Oh, you're looking for a campground? What was wrong with the one a couple miles back? Yeah, umhmmm, there's one about five miles back. How 'bout I show you?" So Dad did a u-turn and we headed back the way we came. Sure enough there was a campground off the highway a piece, not that there were any campers there. Mom and Dad got out of the car and struggled in gale-force winds and teeming rain to erect the Green Monster. After about 10 minutes of incredible effort, they decided to take their chances with Smoky, and threw the tent back in the trunk. We'd spend the night in a motel, out of the elements, and we'd figure out how to pay for it later...

NO VACANCY. NO VACANCY. No motels for miles... by then it was really late, we'd been driving forever and the three in the back seat were sound asleep. Mom was sleeping too (she could sleep in a Leopard tank as it rolled over houses back then, I swear... but I suspect it was all the Gravol she needed just to keep her coffee down) so Dad looked for a place to pull over so he could catch a few winks.

Early the next morning we all woke up to discover that the parking lot Dad had pulled us into was next to a church. And it was Sunday. Everybody was curious about the little red car with the Quebec license plate and the fogged up windows. We looked out the windows to see the townsfolk looking in. I thought Mom would die of embarrassment. But it was just another Curry Caper, destined to be talked about at odd times when the mood to reminisce strikes. Like today!

Education takes many forms

Remember the story of moving the library? Well, there were other "educational" pursuits we carried out at John A Silver School that weren't technically approved by the Saskatchewan Board of Education. We learned a lot of things that were probably more useful through them however!

In 1971, the province of Saskatchewan threw a series of celebrations related to the signing of treaties that allowed European settlement of the grassland prairie eventually leading to the induction of the province into Confederation in 1905. Alsask was no exception to the celebratory mood. The radar station got into the act by incorporating Homecoming '71 into the annual winter carnival and by providing a lot of resources for the Homecoming Parade in the early summer.

One feature of the winter carnival was a snow sculpture competition. Individual families built them on their front yards and the four teams that the messes divvied into also created team sculptures in a central spot. In 1971, the students of John A Silver got involved too. We had the guys from Motor Support Equipment pile a bunch of snow on the playground closest to the kindergarten room, where we built a tipi and an aboriginal man sitting cross-legged in front of it smoking a pipe. We painted our sculpture with tempera paints from our art supplies and learned about the native Saskatchewan people while we worked. Well, didn't our sculpture win a special prize!!

We had SO much fun with the sculpture that we begged to be allowed to have a float in the parade. Mr Proud was a tough man to convince but in the end he relented. I'm sure we used an entire year's worth of industrial toilet paper to make the flowers we put on our float. There was a bit of a dilemma when it came to the fact that all our flowers were sort of a dingy not-quite- white, until someone suggested spray paint. We ended up with red, green and white toilet paper flowers that we stapled onto a sheet of plywood to spell out "Homecoming 1971" that was then turned into a billboard. Mr Winter, being a farm boy, provided a flatbed hay wagon and a tractor to tow the float in the parade. (There had been a devastating fire on the Winter farm the previous autumn; their home was lost but all their farm equipment was spared.) We pulled together some "period" costumes and the people riding on the float represented the early settlers of the province. (I didn't know then that my great-grandparents Mabel Shaw Cubitt and WJ Cubitt, and her father Albert Shaw had been among them!) The parade was a roaring success and we had a ton of fun building our contribution. We learned something about Saskatchewan history, but more importantly we learned teamwork and mutual respect. Who says education has to come from board-sanctioned textbooks?

Dance, dance, dance... Rock around the Clock

In 1969 a movie was released called They Shoot Horses, Don't They? It starred Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin and the backdrop of the movie was a 1930's era dance marathon. This movie finally found its way into the James Park Theatre in St Margarets sometime about the winter of 1972. Now, since there was really nothing to do in St Margarets most of the time other than go to each of the 3 movies screened in the station theatre, most of us did that for fun. This movie led to some very interesting experiences.

Most radar stations had a place for teens to hang out that was safe and handy that we called Teen Town. St Margarets had a small building right next to the outdoor skating rink that housed Teen Town. Someone donated a stereo system and we furnished it with old furniture that we collected from the curb on garbage day. We did some fun stuff, and hired a DJ for special occasions. But none of us had a large enough allowance to really pay much for our dances and parties so we had to come up with fundraising ideas. I don't know whose brainstorm it was to have a dance marathon but that's what we decided to do. (Actually, we had two of them.) I wasn't involved with the first one; I wasn't one of the "in" crowd, wasn't going to have a partner and just knew I'd never get anyone to sponsor me. It was held in the gym in the Rec Centre and lasted 18 hours. The money raised was enough to pay for a beach party at Loggieville. (I'll tell you about THAT later...)

When the success of the first marathon was noted, my Ranger company decided to take a chance and have a rock-a-thon to raise money for new uniforms. We borrowed a bunch of rocking chairs, got permission to use the gym and got our usual Teen Town DJ to agree to play some music to help us stay awake while we rocked. It only lasted about 12 hours but we raised enough money to get our new uniforms. Because there were no boys there though, it was pretty boring!

Our second dance marathon was even better than the first. There were a whole bunch of couples this time. Sharon danced with Bernie McInnis who had just had a bunch of dental surgery and was miserable. We had some couples from Chatham too; there were probably 20 couples who started out. I spent the whole time sitting with the DJ, who was by then my boyfriend. (Nobody noticed when we wandered outside to have some private time... Stairway to Heaven and In A Gadda Da Vida, you know...) The couple who won, Wally Nykolyshyn and Bonnie Stockill, lasted 24 hours! Wow!! Somewhere around here I have a picture of that event. I'll have to dig it out and add it.

I really think that we had a lot of advantages as children dependents of military members. Doing something like this would have been very difficult in another type of community. I'm glad I had the chance to be involved.

What doesn't kill ya

Kids do some really crazy things and I'm no exception to that rule. I think this time of year is when I tend to be my nutsiest too.

Way back in 1972, when I was still in Grade VIII with that horrible little man John T Cook for a teacher and right around this date, we went on a hike to Wine River. It was maybe a couple of miles out to the artesian well. We all packed our lunch and headed out the dirt road from the radar station into the woods. The weather in early May in New Brunswick isn't especially balmy, with the daytime highs usually in the 10-15 C range, but often dipping into the 0 range. On this day there was still ice on the pond near the well and some of us were able to see a beaver swimming around underneath it. The river flowed fast enough that the ice was gone from it. I don't know whose brilliant idea it was, maybe Eddie Sears', but there I was, swimming in the frigid water of Wine River in early May. Three or four of us went in wearing our clothes. That was the only time I ever went in the water there, but such a memorable swim. It was a REALLY long walk back to the townsite let me tell you, dripping wet and covered in gooseflesh. I wonder who else remembers?

... A little rain must fall

I'm feeling a little melancholy today after a really nice day with Sharon yesterday... perhaps it's a sense of anticlimax. Or it could be some other things that are preying on me. But somehow I can't dredge up a funny or happy reminiscence for today. What's coming to mind are the times I felt rejected, excluded, omitted, ignored. Inferior.

When we were kids I always felt like we were outsiders at any family gathering we attended, on either side of the family. Both grandmothers had their favourites and we weren't it. Perhaps it was because our parents were the rebels in their families, the ones that left the hometown behind to join the military, to have lives that were out of the family's sphere of influence. We almost always lived far away and were impoverished so visits were few. But even when we lived in the same town it was like we were just not as important as the others... add-ons. It's still that way and it has spilt over onto the next generation.

That sense of not belonging spilled over into other areas. I often felt as though I was a spectator, always on the sidelines observing others living. I had very few friends as a kid, spending a lot of my time reading, listening to music and teaching myself new crafts. Moving every couple of years as we did when I was a kid is really hard on someone who feels like people are only tolerating their presence and waiting impatiently for them to be gone. Whether it was true or not, it made the notion of making new friends in a new place almost torture. I still tend to hang back and watch how things unfold, only becoming involved when it starts feeling safe; I prefer the written word to face-to-face interactions. Perhaps that's why I'm so successful as a moderator on the website I work for: it's all at arms-length. I worry about meeting the other staff because I expect them to be disappointed with the reality of me.

It's ironic that I'm so introspective today of all days... my 51st birthday. Our personalities are shaped by the experiences of a lifetime, but none are as important as the early ones. Patterns develop that are very difficult to modify. Being given enormous responsibility at a very young age has made me tend to take responsibility for things that should rightly belong to others. It's a role I'm comfortable with, but wish I wasn't. I'm working on that. I need to start putting me first. I just don't know if I can.

Who needs TV??

My mom can't sing. She would be the first person to tell you that. When she was in school, they always had a Christmas concert and a spring music festival. She was admonished by the choir leader to simply lip-sync but not to make a sound. In an effort to include her in the festivities it was decided that she would do recitations. So she learned poetry and recited dutifully when her turn came. This "talent", if you will, came in very handy later on in life in a way no one would have predicted.

Most of our childhoods were spent in very isolated locales. Pinetree Line radar sites were isolated, it came with the package; fighter cops and later air defence technicians were stationed on radar sites and that was just how it was. With isolation came limitations on distractions and living on a radar site in Quebec came with the double whammy of poor TV and radio reception and the probability that the stations that were received would be in French. And so it was in St-Sylvestre.

Dad worked shift work; his schedule was the 6, 3, 3 and 3 variety: three days, three evenings, three off, three nights and three off. Many evenings when he wasn't home Mom would find herself reciting poetry while we ate supper to keep Sharon and me distracted from fighting with each other. One memorable evening it was raining and we had been cooped up all day. Recipe for disaster when you've got a five year old, a three-and-a-half year old and an infant. On this evening Mom recited Alfred Noyes' epic poem The Highwayman for us. Since she had dropped out of school in Grade IX, she must have learned it when she was about 14, but there she was, reciting it word-perfect for us much more than a decade later. The character of the poem and the language Noyes used were so evocative that I instantly loved it. It became a favourite and I would ask her to recite it for us again and again.

When the wind is a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
The highwayman came riding, riding, riding.
The highwayman came riding,
Up to the old inn door...

Mom, would you recite that for me just one more time?

Harbingers of spring

In your Easter bonnet
With all the fringe upon it
You'll be the grandest lady
In the Easter parade...

with apologies to Irving Berlin

When I was putting together the memory book for Mom and Dad's 50th anniversary I came across a picture of Sharon, Bruce and me taken at Easter... it must have been around 1965 or 1966, since Bruce was very small. Sharon wore a bonnet with a fair-sized brim and I a bandeau with organza flowers. Both of us also modeled our new spring coats. But Bruce... well he was the man with the GQ flair. He sported an off-white handknit winter-weight sweater and a fedora. (Yes, a FEDORA!) He looked like a Lilliputian Bing Crosby. All he was missing was the pipe.

I'll have to see if I still have the picture.