From one great escape to the final one

“The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman goads them on behind; and I am broken by their passing feet.”

– Yeats

Stumbled across that morose but meaningful quote the other day, just as I learned of yet another friend passing away here in our little mill town.

At once I thought of my father and his plaint of a few years back, “We just got a good big cards group together up at the old Lang Bay Community Hall and within a year or two there were only two of us left!”

And that’s the way it feels for me up here right now – if I dwell upon it that is.

Big Pete, an old British Army “tanker” who saw service in the Libyan desert among other places and told good stories of such, passed on not too long ago. A generous man who always gave me a text or a magazine from among his amazing collection of books.

Now Carlos, our retired Chilean carpenter, is suddenly gone too. A week before he spoke of how tired his legs were as he walked past on a sunny day and offered up his feelings that he “wouldn’t make the winter!”

He’d “made his peace” I was told by a gal. I remembered finding out upon moving up here how talented this South American was, when the kids and I saw his wondrous Christmas offering to the community: A big festive story book style Christmas train for all to enjoy as it huffed and puffed in its place upon his porch amidst the Christmas lights.

We stared in awe at it and I imagined the many hours of craftsmanship that it had entailed. Perhaps, if possible, his son will resurrect the train if possible as a memorial this Christmas? I could help too.

And then I began to recall so many others long gone from my community.

There was old Elmo, the likable and often humourous East German tradesman who could weld so well. He liked to tease non-smokers who’d complain about his favorite habit, “Second-hand smokers should pay half!”

Oh to hear such from him again!

But I think of his exodus from Germany as he told it to me. How there were just two or three stops on the old East German subway line that interfaced with the freedom of the west. This was back in the days when a bullet from the infamous East German “Stassi” would end your mad dash from freedom from that “Worker’s Paradise” – oh the insanity of it!

He told me of getting on the train and approaching the station, the doors opening suddenly and – DASH! – as he roared through those open doors like a linesman from the Green Bay Packers into freedom and eventually a place in a pulp mill thousands upon thousands of miles away.

Another East German tradesman, who thankfully is still alive, retired and moved away, came to mind. He chose the exact opposite plan of escape.

Over the mountains by night he went in a longer, but just as daring, escape. It all seems so long ago now.

Yet another long gone face coming to mind, a Hungarian this time. Those Magyars laid a licking on the Soviet troops in their ill-fated but brave revolution. But once that evil and massive Soviet machine got nasty the tiny nation sent refugees by the thousands throughout the world.

A goodly number ended up in Powell River where their forester’s school continued to put out graduates. Others, like the fellow I recall, made a living in our pulp mill.

I spoke with another Hungarian still with us, who told me of the first man’s heroics on the very front lines of that memorable revolution five decades ago.

How this fellow was right up there fighting tanks with Molotov cocktails and rifle fire, among others. This other Hungarian fellow telling me modestly of his own revolutionary service as a young stretcher bearer. How a Mongolian Soviet trooper turned him around at rifle point and sent him away from the action, then fired shot over the top of his head to scare him further!

These are the kind of men that came to British Columbia to live and raise families. Every one of them an interesting tale I’ll tell fully some day.

Bruce Lloyd lives in Port Alice.

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