The Day The Outhouse Died

When we moved from the farm to Waseca, we still had no services or conveniences for a few years. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing, so of course we still had to make the journey out to the little building in the back yard. Every back yard had these little creations, basically a small shack over a deep hole. I never liked the little shacks. They were not very hospitable to us, and they were an awful place to go to in the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer.

I am not saying I was a daredevil kid, but I did have my times of stupidity I am sure. Although not exactly impulsive, I wondered about a lot of things. One of the things I wondered about was what would happen if I were to throw a lit match down the open hole of the outhouse. Now under most circumstances, it should just fizzle out and that would be it. And that is exactly what happened to the first 100 lit matches that I threw down that hole !! I had one of those large eddy box of matches that holds at least a couple of hundred wooden matches. One after another I threw them down there, watching them burn out.

I was not prepared for match 101 but I dropped that lit match, it caught on some toilet tissue, sucked in some quality methane gas, and the entire hole exploded into flames. I believe I was in shock, excited that the experiment worked but wondering where it would end. The fire was so intense that it eventually engulfed the whole outhouse, letting everyone know that I was dissatisfied with it.

I ran to the house, and somehow we got some pails of water poured on it to prevent the fire from burring the whole house, garage and yard. I was the least popular person around the house. I don't remember being drawn and quartered but I had in effect shut down the family bathroom. A great start to Waseca living. Maybe why I am such a bathroom connoisseur today !!

Grandma's Great Goodies

Now that the holiday season is over, and people start to resort back to a relatively normal way of eating, I was thinking about all the incredible food that my Grandma was famous for. My Grandma came over on the boat from England in 1905. She was 5 years of age. As she grew up, she obviously set out to become one of the best cooks around. She could and did, cook and create and bake anything you could think of.

Back in Waseca, when the Village was getting the water and sewer lines put in, there were several hungry construction workers who came to my Grandmas for a daily hot meal. And a meal it was. A sheet of plywood over two saw horses was put up in the living room of the house that they lived in , and she cooked all kinds of great creations. I was also lucky enough to partakes of these great meals every day. While other kids were stuck eating stale tuna sandwiches at school, I was feasting on every delicacy known to man.

One of my favorites for the main course was the Shepherds Pie. This was no ordinary Shepherds pie. This was pie that was loaded with all kinds of things that I have tried to duplicate several times but have never ever come close. There was no recipe for this, it just came out of her head. My mouth is watering right now as I am typing this description.

Desserts were really her specialty however. And they were numerous, incredible baked apple dumplings, lemon cheese tarts, cakes, bread puddings, raisin puddings, custard pies and cinnamon buns. There was a real favorite though that I liked. It was called "an old maid". Here was what it entailed. Pie crust that lined a muffin tin, raspberry jam as filling, which was topped by a moist white cake mix of some sort. She made dozens of those tarts and put them in the freezer out in the porch.

It did not take too long for me to realize that with a little planning, I could snab a couple of those frozen old maids once in awhile and help satisfy my incredibly pathetic sweet tooth that has been my nemesis since my early years. Who was able to stop at a couple? Not me. I ate those suckers like they were candies. I even became addicted to them in the frozen state.

I have not had one of those for over 40 years. They made such an impression on me that I can still visualize tasting one. They were insanely good, a fat man's poison, a skinny man's dream.

My sister gave me the recipe to the Lemon cheese. I have made some and it was great. All the great ingredients such as sugar and butter makes it a cholesterol nightmare but what a high you get from it.

They say that memories can make you as a person. The food sure has. The longing for all of the above has started again. Now, where were those carrot sticks again?

Better Then a Toboggan Hill

I had mentioned in earlier posts about the lack of hills that we could toboggan on. My Dad had the perfect solution to it all. He would pull us around with the car !! We had a 1969 Ford Country Sedan Station wagon. It was long car, 121 inch wheelbase to be exact. I was always good with numbers ! The winters in Saskatchewan of course were nothing less then brutal so we always drove in the winter with studded tires. Underneath there was a luggage compartment, and he would stack that full of wood so that there was a lot of weight on the back tires. Man, could that car go through snow. He would tie a long rope on to the toboggan and he would pull us through all kinds of snow at a fairly high rate of speed !! He drove down snow covered roads and even onto the frozen lake surface and boy did he put the hammer down. The snow would be coming up from the backs of those tires in a flurry, pelting our faces with wet icy snow. The faster he went the worse it got. Eventually he would be going so fast that you could not see a thing but just hung on for dear life. We would go through drifts, over drifts and under drifts. It was a wild ride. I suspect that he disciplined us through the type of ride we got. There were a lot of wet tired children after those excursions.

As I got a little older, I was looking for more challenges. My grandfather had an old pair of skis, and your foot slipped into some leather loops. These skis were not state of the art. In fact, they probably came over on the ark but I thought they would work good behind the car. I convinced my Dad to take me down a snow covered back road in the country. Now that was a ride. He wound that car up and he pulled me down the road. I tried to stay straight and keep those skis from crossing over each other. For a time I did, but there was no way to tell him to slow it down. He wound it up faster and eventually I blew a ski and rolled and crashed into the ditch. I was bruised, broken, and scraped but I felt like I just got the gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

How many kids can say their Dad did that for them? There is no question that it was different culture then but it was a culture that made me realize that fun was what we thought and made up. Anyone care for a ride?

Hockey Night in Canada

There is not too much hockey down here in the south. There is one team, the Mississippi Riverkings from the Central Hockey League. Other then that, the only other professional team around here is the Nashville Predators of the NHL After that, the only other ice around here generally comes in a bag. This brought my thoughts back to the prairies where hockey was not only a sport, but really a religion. As football is fanatical in the States, hockey is a rite of passage in Canada.

The town that I lived in was small, so small that there wasn't even a restaurant or a bar, but it did have a skating rink. No - not a covered ice surface. An outdoor rink. Why would it be easy in the 60's? The ice was flooded at the beginning of the winter when the temperatures dictated that it would not melt away. My Dad was usually the one who set up the community ice rink with long hoses that pumped water from the town's dugout. A dugout was a large hole in the ground that accumulated water. Water that was used to flood the rink. Old boards surrounded the rink to keep the pucks in. More important is the fact that it snowed a lot and snow covered the ice in large amounts, so kids could not play until the ice was scraped. We had our hockey sticks and our skates but we always dragged a snow shoved behind us when we went because you never knew if the ice was going to be clean or not. It was easy to learn how to skate because you had a snow shovel to keep your balance. You learned how to skate and angle your shovel so that you could clear the ice like a snowplow.

There was a building beside it that was used to put on skates. It was simply called "the shack". A very old building that we shared with mice and an old oil stove. The chances that the shack had heat going when you went there was about as good as winning the weekly lottery. Typically it needed to be lit, or cleaned or something but most times we put our cold feet into cold skates and headed to the ice. No one liked it I suppose, but we really did not know anything different. Even Gretzky had it better then we did, his Dad had a backyard rink for him when he started.

We scraped and skated for hours as we shot pucks. balls and whatever else we had at the time. Many a time we over shot the boards and had to go looking in huge piles of snow from the ice to find the elusive puck. Sometimes we were lucky and sometimes not. When Spring came we were the first there to find all the wayward pucks from the winter so that we had a fresh stash for the next year.

Without trying to sound old, we made our own fun. We had lots of exercise and used what we had to create a world of culture that we believed in, even at that early age.

Winter Fun

Living in a area now that practically never has snow, I started to reminisce about what we did with snow in the early days. In those days we got snow and lots of it and it stayed around for a long time, and when you had long and cold winters, you had to learn to play in them.

You either played outside or you stayed inside and became one of the most bored kids in the town. Therefore, hockey and sledding or toboganning became one of the main highlights. Being on the prairie, it was hard to find hills big enough that would constitute what one would call a toboggan hill. You had to go to the river to find them. So some Saturdays we were taken to the river. Those really were some big hills !! High above the river bottom were these majestic hills, free of trees and dangerous obstacles, beckoning for us to climb them and set the toboggan on a straight downward course. The toboggans were about 6 feet long, long enough for 2 kids to get on, but we really preferred to go alone. The thing about being a kid is there is usually no fear, just anticipation of speed through the snow.

I climbed the mountain, lots of deep snow made it hard going and I suppose I could of just went half way and had a pretty good run, but I wanted the top. It was Mount Everest to me and I wanted the whole experience. I finally made it to the top and looked down and realized that it was quite a hill and the people and cars at the bottom really did not look that big. I got on, holding the rope and stretching my feet out so I was balanced properly. I put both feet on and pushed forward, but nothing happened. I jerked my body to get it going but I was stuck in the snow on the very top of this hill. Using newly acquired swear woods that I was learning in bits and pieces, I picked up the toboggan and moved it over several feet to find a better course. I got on and knew then that this sucker was ready to fly. As soon as both feet were on the wood, it took off. I came down that hill in a rush. I was going so fast that I really could not see and all I could do was hang on for dear life. Wow - this was a speed paradise. All of a sudden I went airborne. I could feel nothing underneath. I was flying!! Toboggans are not meant to fly, they are meant to go down hard surfaces !! The balance was gone, and I could feel myself falling over in the air. CRASH.....

That hurt bad. My tailbone felt like someone smashed it with a hammer and my face was filled with cold icy snow. I lost my mitts somewhere and wet snow was melting and running down my back. I was cold and I was hurting. Did I go home? No - not a chance. I knew now what it would take to really ride the wooden slab. I was going to master it, and I started the long cold walk back up the hill. Good exercise and good fun - a culture that will never be forgot.

Held by the Train

I had been told many times that I was going to school in the Fall. I had no real idea what it all entailed. We didn't have pre-school or beginner pre - K or nursery learn at will school. We just had Kindergarten. There were 2 schools in Waseca, well school is a little overkill. Were they a school? Yes, technically they were. Were they school buildings? Not entirely. The 2 classroom brick building is where Kindergarten, Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, and Grade 4 went to. Talk about a split class !! School was about 2 km away from home. There was no such a thing as a bus for town kids. We walked or rode our bikes. To get to the school, one had to cross the infamous railroad tracks. Those were my nemesis. Canadian National Railway ran tracks through the town and it was a busy set of tracks. The beat up old path crossed the tracks in the center of town and if there was a train crossing, you just waited and waited. What did young kids do when the train stopped for a length of time? We either climbed over the top of the car connections or we scooted underneath the rail car. Both of these actions of course were highly dangerous and punishable by amputation. I had nightmares at night about trains. It was the punishment of doing crazy things around them I guess. In my nightmare the train chases me through town. It did not even need tracks, it just came after me - light bright and horn blowing. We used to count the number of railway cars that each train pulled. My record was 188 cars. A train of 6 engines pulling half of Canada from one end to another, and we as small children got to witness the whole thing. However, to a kid who wanted to go home after school - it was annoying having the train inch along the tracks taking up precious time when there were things to do and places to explore. My hatred towards trains started then I believe and it has continued through to this day. I had started to talk about school but the train has once again derailed my thoughts and created a rolling roadblock to my memories !!

My First of Many Moves

I was 5 years old, and it was time to move on. It would the first of many moves in my life. It is interesting to talk to people who say they were born and raised in one area. You usually can tell too, because they do not have the experiences and the adventures that those of of us who have moved around have obtained. Not saying that they are a little close minded, and somewhat unaware of life, I am just saying they do not fully understand what you can experience as you move through life. Even in the early 60's, it was starting to show that a small farm such as ours was not going to sustain a family. Because we were strictly into grain farming and had no animals, meant that we were fairly limited on what income was coming in. In addition to that, it was apparent that my Dad was extremely allergic to the very thing that he was working with and that was grain. It did not matter if it was wheat, oats, or barley - it caused him to scratch and itch something fierce and you could see that those days of wheat farming were coming to a close. I am sure included with all of this was the fact that my sister Denise had also come on to the scene, and I was to start Kindergarten in the Fall of that year.

So the answer was to move. The decision was made to move into the closest town, where my Grandparents had a house. We purchased a house on the north end of the town, a town with an Indian name called Waseca. It was a Cree name for "hill of the swan". I have no idea what the Indians were smoking at that time of naming, but there was neither a hill or a swan around. Never was from my days there. But who said names have to make sense. So there it was, a new place to live in a village of 100 people ( the town boomed, 47 years later there are 144 residents !! ) with a name of Waseca, Saskatchewan. A red headed boy in Indian country !! Waseca was 15 km east of Maidstone where I was born and the farm was about 12 km northwest of Waseca. As I said earlier, the house was at the north end of the village. On that same street, my Grandparents lived on the south end. It was very convenient to walk or ride a bike down that road. To a young boy it seemed like a long way but in the whole spectrum of things it was probably less then 1 km. Still close enough to taste the incredible goodness of my Grandmother's cooking which I will never forget !! Moving can be a pain, but moving also opens up new horizons for those that are anxious for something different and new. This was one of those times, although barely old enough to remember all details, young enough to embrace all the good things that I knew would surely come to pass.