‘Ottawa’ Capital Voices: ‘In the Winter we’d Take a Snowmobile to School’
In anticipation of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations, the Citizen’s Bruce Deachman has been out in search of Ottawans — 150 of them — to learn their stories of life and death, hope and love, obsession and fear. From Feb. 2 until Canada Day, we’ll share one person’s story every day.
“I worked in a flower shop — Rose of Tralee — in L’Esplanade Laurier. Now I’m retired. I’m 74. I don’t do much of anything. Play badminton.
“I’ve always come to Parliament Hill for Canada Day since moving to Ottawa in 1984. I like the ambience. My husband was in the armed forces, so we were transferred here.
“I was raised 16 miles from Hearst, Ont., in the woods, in a lumber camp, until I was 14. My dad was an accountant for Rhinelander International Paper Company. There was a little village three miles away — Coppell — where we went to school. We were only three families at the most: my parents and my two sisters, Yvette and Francoise, and a family with my five cousins. And at times there was a blacksmith and his wife and a kid who stayed there, but not all the time. I played a lot with paper dolls. But I wasn’t lonely.
“We lived at the landing. In the spring we had to go to school by train, because the roads were washed out. The train went right by our house. In the winter we’d take a snowmobile to school. The rest of the time I don’t remember. Maybe somebody drove us? There was no schoolbus.
“The men came from the cities. They had a cart with narrow rings that they’d take into the woods. And they’d have different camps where they cut the wood. Then in the winter they would bring it back out, with trucks on an ice road. They would take the bark off the trees, and then load them onto a train and send it I-don’t-know-where.
“And there were bears. Everything went really quiet — the crows would stop crowing — and we’d look and we’d see a bear. It was kind of exciting.”
— Louise Robert, Parliament Hill, July 1, 2016.