The Way It Was
Teaching in a one-room school in a small, northern Canadian community had its fair share of challenges!
The place was Sweetwater School, 17 miles north of Dawson Creek on the Alaska Highway. It was an old log building when I arrived, but still good for a few more years.
It was a one-room school and the teacher was expected to teach all Grades from 1 through 8, if necessary. I think there were only Grades 4 to 8 that year, with about 11 pupils attending.
When I arrived, there was nowhere for the teacher to stay, so a “teacherage” had to be brought in. That took a week, so I had to stay with the neighbouring teacher about four miles away.
My teacherage could not have been more than 12 feet by 12 at the most. It was built of wood, but with no insulation, regardless of the sub-zero temperatures for most of the winter.
A cord of wood was hauled into the schoolyard and piled against a wall of the teacherage. There was no source of water—indeed, the water definitely would have been “sweet” had you found any! For the school, blocks of ice had to be cut from the Peace River and stored in the icehouse, which was filled with sawdust to stop the ice from melting. Still, by the beginning of school in September,
Dawn Klassen of Vancouver has been blessed to have a longstanding friendship with a wonderful lady named Dayle Sheridan, who turned 92 last March. Last year, Dayle’s Christmas card contained a letter that told the story of her teaching assignment in 1949 at Sweetwater School in northern British Columbia. Dawn shares Dayle’s letter here.
almost all the ice had vanished but somehow we slumped along until about mid-october when the snow began to fly again. After that, until spring our water supply was no problem.
I don’t recall where the paper to start the fire came from but the fire was definitely lit. I would hop out of bed in the freezing temperature, quickly stu the paper in the stove, pile the prepared kindling on top of it with a couple of sticks of wood, fly back to bed, get under the covers and stay there till the one room warmed up.
I can’t remember what breakfasts were like. I’m sure I would have had no milk for porridge, certainly no eggs, and I can’t imagine the luxury of coee.
The closest neighbours around were an old bachelor and his housekeeper, about a half-mile down the road. (I don’t think I ever went there.) The rest were a mile or more out in a great circle around me. The Coopers were three miles to the north, the Wallaces four miles to the northwest, the Myhres lived four miles to the east, the Parodoskis three miles to the southeast and the Belzuiks four miles to the west, beyond the Alaska Highway.
Regardless of the temperature, the pupils showed up. David and Vern Belzuik would arrive at 8 a.m. every morning, in spite of temperatures down in the minus 30s or even 40s, though when the temperature got down to below 40 degrees, the pupils were not legally required to come to school.
When the temperatures were low, the scarves around the mouths of the children were covered with hoar frost; their lashes, and any bits of hair showing, were thickly frosted as well.
Sweetwater School was my most dicult assignment, but also my most memorable. I was surrounded by great wheat fields, both productive and fallow, and little else except for miles of isolation and long, straight roads that led out to the store or highway, or up through miles of wilderness.
I often think now of those places of isolation and wonder if I could endure them again. Yet, I and a lot of other young teachers didn’t seem to even worry about these details, which would probably not occur these days.
Such were these pioneer teachers. Many of them, of course, were brought up in similar conditions, and so had learned to cope with the hardships they encountered.
Fall came and went. I survived on juice in place of water.
Finally, the snows came and life settled down to some semblance of normality.
Cold Comfort
Christmas was approaching and there was the usual school concert to prepare for. That happened towards the end of November and occupied hours of time, rehearsing and practicing. Concerts are exhausting work, especially on top of regular school work. I was very much looking forward to getting home for Christmas.
Not long before I was planning to leave for the holidays, I received a letter from Mom saying that
Dad was sick. He had been plagued with asthma for years, so this was not a surprise. It was also in the era before Medicare, so I wrote home and said that I would send my travel money home and then Dad could go to the hospital.
All the holiday plans were scrapped and I prepared to spend Christmas alone in the teacherage. I was disappointed, of course, but I adjusted and simply focused on the upcoming concert.
Just before school closing for the holidays, a letter came from home saying they would rather have me than my money. As it seemed too late to change my plans again, I simply put Christmas out of my mind.
The concert happened on the night before the holidays began. We had given it our all and I felt good as I heard the sounds of the horses’ harnesses fade into the semi-darkness afterwards.
Then came the following morning. I rose as usual, lit the wood fire, hopped back to my bed until the room warmed up enough to get up, make my breakfast and prepare for the day.
The inside of the teacherage looked like a casket. There was
thick, smooth frost on the inside of the windows and doors. Silence was everywhere, naturally, inside and outside. I made sure I had plenty of kindling and wood indoors then settled in front of my open oven. I sat on a chair, put my feet on the open oven and began to read a book. I think I was doing fine up to that point.
When it snows in the northern wilderness, the silence can be overwhelming. Everything is soft and very quiet. As one writer once described it, “The silence is so overpowering, you want to go outside and yell at it, just to make a noise!” and that is just how it was.
Homeward Bound
As I sat reading, I was suddenly aware that my whole body was going sti. I couldn’t move my arms or my legs. The only thing that was moving was my mind, and it was telling me in words I could not agree with: “You better get out of here now or you may never get out!” It was a command and I knew it was true. The “casket” had already been prepared—and it was obvious I would be next!
I tried to get up, but it was dicult. Neither my arms nor legs would move of their own accord. I literally had to peel them othe chair and then move as best I could. After managing to get othe chair, I made it to the dresser where my clothes were stored. I did the necessary packing and was soon ready to leave. I had no idea what was going to happen once I got outside that door.
All I knew was, getting outside the door was a must. What was to happen after that, I knew not. By this time it was early afternoon.
I had just closed the door behind me and was preparing to make my way through the unploughed snow to the road, when who should come along but Larry, the younger son of the woman who lived in the woods with the local woodcutter.
Larry was going out to the store on the Alaska Highway where I needed to go to get the bus to Fort St. John, B.C., about 40 miles away, where I could take a plane to Edmonton, then home! What an absolute godsend! It would have taken me hours to walk through the snow to the highway. Trac on that old highway was scarce. There may have been no one else travelling along the road that day!
How would I have gotten to Fort St. John? It was the north. Darkness came early and along with it, the cold. The gods must have been on hand that day! By sheer luck I was able to get the afternoon bus to Fort St. John. I was sure it was already Christmas Eve, so I would have had to get a hotel that night and fly out on Christmas morning.
I can no longer remember the details of that date, but I got to Edmonton—or was it Calgary?— from there I took the train to Notch Hill, our railroad town, where
Dad met me and took me home.
I missed Christmas Day, of course, but at least I escaped freezing to death in my spacious “casket.” Had I not, I don’t know when I would have been found. Certainly not until school opened in the new year. Almost no one would have passed by the school and if they had, would they have stopped in—especially if there was no smoke coming from the stovepipe? Since I myself was not sure I would be escaping for Christmas, it is not likely anyone else would, either.
My plight was probably not too dierent from many of the northern wilderness teachers. Stories of young teachers in those isolated rural communities were common and yet I am not aware of the people there showing too much concern. Maybe the incidents of such cases were more common than I realized.
A lot of new teachers to the north never came back to their own homes. They stayed and married young farm boys—it was an easy thing to do. The shortage of both males and females was always a chronic problem, so if you didn’t want to become a young pioneer’s wife (or even and old one) it was hazardous to go north!
And so, such is my “slice of life” of what happened in those earlier days in the central Canadian provinces. This sort of thing comes with the building of a new nation, but these stories may easily be lost because who is there to keep the pot boiling with Canada’s early tales?