Editorially speaking…
Have you ever studied faces in old photos and wonder whatever became of them?
I sure have, this photo in particular. These young boys were coal miners, doomed to work underground for the whole of their lives. Pulled from school to help put bread on the table for their families, they had no hope whatever of improving their lot. They were trapped, just as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them.
(My maternal grandfather went down in the mines of County Durham, England, at the age of 10. Somehow—and I’m sorry to admit that I’ve never known the details—the cobbler’s children need shoes—he made it to Canada where, come the First World War, he enlisted. He survived although twice gassed and shot through the knee, but he still managed to marry and raise a family.)
About the only chance the American boys in this photo had to really break out, to make something else of themselves, was to rob a bank.
And we think we have it tough?
—Public Domain
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Mentioning my grandfather reminds me that it’s time to write the annual Remembrance Day edition for the Cowichan Valley Citizen. This will be the 25th time. That’s a lot of stories about the (mostly) men who served and, too often, died for King and Country.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the first of three generations of my family who didn’t have to go to war. Am I grateful? You’re damn right I am. So the tributes that I pen about those who did, is my pay-back, and perhaps the most meaningful writing that I do.
Talk about a real labour of love!
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They’ve made a movie about a locomotive lost in Slocan Lake when a barge tipped in 1946.
About the most persistent legends throughout British Columbia (aside from those of lost mines) are those about lost locomotives. I’ve encountered them dozens of times over the years, as close as Cowichan and Horne lakes. (The Cowichan Lake one is historical fact.)
I’ve talked with men, mainly loggers and hunters, who’ve even claimed to have seen them at low water. But, mostly, these lost locies appear to be more myth than real.
The single exception occurred while I was giving a talk. Somehow, the subject came up and a man in the audience spoke up to say that he knew of a locomotive tender (the coal car that was linked to a steam locomotive) in a swamp in the Fanny Bay, V.I. area.
When I politely (I hope) expressed my skepticism for all the stories I’d heard, he assured me that he’d seen it himself. It’s in a swamp and when the water dries up in the summer the old tender sits high and dry!
I was hardly about to argue with him and when he offered to email photos to me, I willingly agreed. He was as good as his word; a day or so later, there they were, several good, clear shots of the old tender that’s still out in the woods, decades after it was abandoned by loggers.
There’s something about old ‘lost’ trains that seems to fascinate us. Which likely explains why a film crew would go to the expense of trying to locate and to shoot the lost locomotive in Slocan Lake.
This is what a steam locomotive’s coal tender looks like. Just like the man’s photo of one in a swamp up-Island!