Monday, August 20, 2012

On the beaches, on the wharves, in the gravel pit. . .

From the time I moved to Chatham at the age of five until my early teens, I lived in a house that was part of a group called the "hydro houses" – although the power supply at the nearby plant didn't come from water. I guess they should have been called the "NB Power" houses – my father worked at the plant – but for the sake of simplicity, I'll stick with the hydro houses.

There were six houses, three on either side of a small street. There were three styles of house and each one faced its mirror image. They were at the very edge of Chatham, on the road to Loggieville. That road is very built up with subdivisions now but then, our houses and the neighbours right behind were just about the last houses before you got to Forrest Corner which you reached just before Loggieville.

The "Welcome to Chatham" sign was in our backyard. As little kids, we thought it was fun – magical, almost – to jump back and forth on either side of the sign and do "now-we're-in-town, now-we're-not."

The neighbours behind us, on the other side of the "Welcome to Chatham" sign, were the Sprays. The elder Mr. Spray, who seemed very old to me at the time but probably wasn't, had gone to fight in the Boer War. His son, Charlie, was a carpenter and cabinet-maker. Sometimes, we were allowed to go over to Charlie's workshop and watch him while he worked. The smell of new wood, freshly cut, can still take me back to that workshop.

At the end of our side of the little street was a stand of quite large evergreens which we called "the woods." It was a lovely place to play – there was lots of walking room as the lowest branches were way higher than we were. One of the fathers had put up a swing and there was a little wooden building – left from the construction of our houses – that we called "the playhouse."

At the end of the other side of the street was a field, a field that stretched all the way to the Shore Road which ran alongside our beloved Miramichi River.

At the top of the field, we had laid out bases and stomped down enough of the grass that it served as our ballfield. We – the kids from the hydro houses – played ball with the MacFarlanes and the Thorburns from the Hollow and with other kids who often showed up from the Hill or from further uptown.

There was a path which led from our houses across the field, around the ballfield, over to a lane – more like a wagon track – that ran alongside Howard MacIntosh's field. It was used a couple of times a year, probably during haying although I wasn't keeping track. Our fathers used the path and the lane when they walked to work at the NB Power plant.

Near the bottom of the field, approaching the Shore Road, was a gravel pit. We spent many happy hours in the gravel pit – it seemed very big to me, and maybe it was. There was an "island" in the middle of the gravelly wasteland, an upward protuberance that was topped with grass and, I was told, was the last place the bulldozer/digger stood before the gravel pit was abandoned by heavy equipment. We used to scramble to the top of the island which wasn't easy as the central part had eroded away and it involved hanging almost upside down while trying to make it over the top.

On the days we were going swimming, we would pass right by the gravel pit and head down the Shore Road. We were usually on bicycles. The nearest beach was McIntyre's. It wasn't a great beach but it was the nearest and that was its appeal. Further along was The Grove, a nicer beach but frequented by older teenagers and we were often made to feel unwelcome there. (Our impression was that there were shenanigans going on.)

The last beach downriver along the Shore Road was Terrill's Point and we usually didn't go there on bikes but one of the fathers would often drive us down after work.

The real treat for an after-work swim though – or for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon – was a trip down past Loggieville to Manderson's Beach. Manderson's was sandy – it was tidal so it could also be sea-weedy – and it had a canteen for hot dogs and ice cream and other treats. There were a few cottages just to the left after driving down the dirt road and I always envied the people who were there all the time, living at the beach.

(This is not Manderson's but it's just a bit down-river and it looks similar.)

I loved swimming in the Miramichi – it couldn't have been very clean because there were polluting industries upriver, not to mention no sewage treatment – and I never liked swimming in fresh-water lakes. I found lake water cold.

I think the Miramichi would be much cleaner today.

I had another swim in the Miramichi one day that was more inadvertent than my swims at Manderson's.

I was hanging out with other kids at the cement plant wharf. The cement plant was on the extreme opposite end of Chatham from where I lived – at the edge of town on the road to Newcastle. There were ships there occasionally.

I don't remember a lot of the details about this particular day or even who all was there. There were a few kids – we had biked there – and we were all probably around 12 or 13. We were sitting around, talking about this and that. At some point, we got up – were we making plans to leave? – and one of the boys picked me up and, without warning, threw me into the river.

I could swim but I was taken terribly by surprise and I still remember the frightening sensation of sinking, deeper and deeper. I struggled to change direction and finally broke the surface, gasping and sputtering. I wasn't having an easy time of it. I was fully dressed, remember.

Just then, a boy named Billy MacLean (whom I didn't really know) jumped in beside me. He put his arms around me and "swam me" a few metres downstream until I could touch bottom and walk to shore. I have no further memory of what happened next. I guess I got on my bike and went home.

A few years later, Billy MacLean sustained a serious head injury when he ran headfirst into the boards during a hockey game. I was told that his personality was dramatically changed by the accident.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

'Is this the party to whom I am speaking?' *

My son is 17. As with most of his contemporaries, his phone appears to be permanently attached to his body. He holds text conversations, often with up to five or six people simultaneously while keeping an eye on the NBA draft, reporting bits and pieces of news items that pop up, updating Facebook, following Twitter, playing a game, watching YouTube. He lives a lot of his life inside that phone.

(I have written about the world and the language of text, right here, if you're interested.)

I don't usually play the "when-I-was-your-age" game. I try to avoid anything that resembles old-fogey-ism. I did tell him about the telephone though.

In the house where I grew up, when you came in the front door, you were in the hall. If you bore right, you would go upstairs – the stairs were open to the hall but separated from the downstairs by a wall. If you went straight ahead, you were in the heart of the house, with the living room to the left and the kitchen straight ahead.

The door from the hall and the door into the kitchen both opened into the living room area (it wasn't really separate from the living room; it was an outcropping of the living room) and were pinned back against the wall by a small piece of furniture called a "telephone bench" – or, I've since learned, also called a "gossip bench."

Ours was green, vinyl-covered, with two shelves on one side and a seat that raised to allow for storage underneath.

This is one:

And here's another:

Neither one of these is really like ours but if you combine certain elements from each, it would be sort of like ours.

Inside the storage seat were old catalogues and magazines and, for some reason, this toy:

I have no idea why I remember this, or why those things were kept there. I have no memory of anyone ever playing with them although I can still remember exactly how it felt to squeeze them and see the ping pong ball fly out. And yes, you were supposed to catch it.

Finally, this is what the telephone looked like – with the exception of the coiled cord:

Our number was 456-12 – expressed as four five six ring twelve. When it was for us, it rang one long, two short. All our phone conversations – intimate ones with boyfriends, secretive ones with girlfriends – were held just steps away from where family members were reading the paper, listening to the radio, chatting among themselves. Sometimes, if I felt I really needed the privacy, I would haul the little gossip bench out, squeeze myself behind one of the doors and try to have a jacket or something to build a little tent over my head. The vacuum cleaner was behind there too.

When we had this kind of phone, it was a party line. It didn't seem any kind of inconvenience as it had always been this way and we became used to sharing the line with neighbours. It was another level of learning to speak somewhat guardedly – maybe leading to a reticence which is not so obvious in subsequent generations!

"Listening in" was not routine at our house but we knew houses where it was. We knew one woman who kept an oven mitt beside her phone to cover the receiver when she wanted to listen in to a conversation on her party line.

Do you remember this?

When one of my friends got one – the Princess Phone – for her bedroom, we were all a little jealous. I never did get a Princess Phone. (Later on, the teen generation that was after me but before cell-phones, often had not only a phone in their bedrooms but their own phone line. They were listed in the phone book under the family name as, "teenager's phone.")

Today, our landline supports our primary cordless phone downstairs, as well as a hands-free phone (with head-set) and a fax phone. There are phones in two of the bedrooms upstairs.

Among the three of us, we have an iPhone, a Blackberry and a simple little Samsung with a sliding full keyboard (mine). I got my phone after I was struck by how few public pay phones are left in the world. (My cell phone number begins 456 – the same four five six as the first phone I remember.)

I don't intend this to be nostalgic although telephones are occasionally more ubiquitous than I would wish. I still know people who don't carry phones everywhere they go and they survive. I often get annoyed at people who have loud phone conversations in public places. And I could happily get along without the endless telemarketing even though I have gone to the trouble of getting on the no-call lists. They don't work as well as I'd like.

The telephone has been used a great source of humour, however. From Shelley Berman to Bob Newhart to the great Lily Tomlin. . .

* Here's Ernestine, telephone operator, chatting with the incomparable Cher.