Voices From the Past...

This year seems to have a definite theme to it. In the past 12 months I've become reacquainted with a dozen or so people from my past. Old friends, school chums and even a cousin I haven't seen probably since the late 60's. A few days ago another one surfaced because of a blog entry I made many months ago.

Roddy was a young fellow from Oban, Scotland who had been brought over by the Hudson’s Bay Company as an apprentice contract clerk. When I was sent to my first posting with HBC it was to Mistassini and to fill the position left vacant by him when he went on to other things. (Roddy is the fellow in the back on the right in this photo but I have no idea who the long-haired gentleman wearing the tie in front of him is. Wish I could remember that party, looks like it must have been a good one).

(I just have to pause here for a moment to mention that Oban where Roddy was from produces one of the finest scotches in the world. Please try it if you ever get the chance.)

He must have been searching through the internet for some of his old locations and ran across my entry about Mistassini and my first Store Manager, Glen Speers.

Anyway, I've replied to his comments on my entry and I hope he gets back to me. For some reason the people I knew years ago are getting more and more important to me. A sign of old age, you think?

Memoirs?

Someone asked me this week if I was going to write a book when I retire. It’s certainly something I’ve thought about but the answer has to be no. The main problem with me writing a book about my 35 years with The Hudson’s Bay Company and The North West Company is that too many people are still alive. I can think of more than a few happenings that would make at least a TV movie but there is no way I could afford the certain lawsuits!


Actually I’m just joking as there are lots of little things that could be told. Things like me being lectured by a fellow in Mistassini because I cut down a living tree and learning that “you never kill anything you’re not going to eat” for example. How about the time we chased the bears up the river bank with only .22 caliber rifles and me finding out later that the bullet in the chamber was a dud and didn’t fire?

How about lighting up the muskeg with ski-doo headlights in the middle of a winter night so the DC-3 bringing the students back home from school for Christmas would be able to land? Along the same theme how about stuffing black garbage bags with snow and laying them out on the drifts so the Twin Otters with our grocery supplies could have some sense of depth perception while trying to land in the mountains of Salluit?

Having to go to work by helicopter when it was freeze-up or break-up time in Moosonee and Moose Factory… Seeing half the sky blacked out when the geese all took wing at the same time at the mouth of the Severn River… Watching 500+ white beluga whales feeding in the Churchill River one evening… Glaciers on Baffin Island… White-out on the Barren Lands… Fish ‘n Brewis with Scrunchions and Cod Tongues in Labrador…

Hmmm… maybe I should give that book some thought.