Dear Lord, this was my home!
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It comforted him somehow.
That big yellow locomotive sitting there on the tracks – though silent now. Not enough to take the pain of this melancholy visit away mind you, but at least this one familiar piece of equipment somehow allowed him to touch base with his past – at least in part.
Even before he had made the turn off the highway he had espied the carnage that time and carelessness had spun. There, to his left, just off Highway 19 sat a few of the many old trailers and trucks, some of which he even recognized from his days here at lonely Nimpkish Camp.
The filling station with its faded blue and orange metal greeted him woefully. This had been the pit stop for all, as they tore out of that big dynamo of a logging operation seemingly not so many years before.
But like the skeleton of a loved one found, it horrified him and hurt him to see what had become of his camp. Thirty years he had laboured here, loved his wife, raised his kids and enjoyed a quality of life far better than anyone else on this good old earth. Now this?
A few remnant and ramshackle old houses that he recognized had given him no comfort though dearly recalled the names of the families who had been attached to them. But there were no flower pots on the lawn and no clothes flapping from the line in the gentle breeze out back as they surely would have been in his day.
He turned his head and caught a glimpse of nothing but alder where a cluster of other homes used to sit. Homes that had been filled with people who had names and smiles and stories which all rushed together in his head at once! It hurt like there had been a death.
The big shop sat there all right, but seemingly abandoned. In his day there would have been all sorts of folk scurrying around fixing this and that. The smell of oil, sparks, welding rod and sweat would have touched his nose by now and he would have felt so much at home.
He knew the cookhouse had been moved to Port McNeill to become the Lions Hall. Old neighbours had told him that much.
The cookhouse, now that was the heart of every camp, eh? He thought of the cooks, the flunkies, the bakers and all of the great food that he had always been blessed with.
You couldn’t find a restaurant in the world that could do for you what a good square meal of working man’s fare would do for you! That was for sure. His mouth even watered a little at the thought.
An old standpipe-style fire hydrant, corroded with chapped paint protruded from the ground. But it had nothing left to protect out here!
A trailer as dilapidated as anything he had seen in the Baja desert on his last “Snowbird” trip disgusted him. “Why didn’t someone at least come by with a wrecker and move half this junk out of here?” he thought.
This was his homecoming? And no one seemed to care.
He realized he was being irrational, but his senses and his sentiments cried out from deep within, “Dear Lord, this was MY home!”
Then he had come upon the big yellow locie sitting there seemingly ready to go. It comforted him somewhat.
Faded, yes, but this piece of the last logging railway in Canada looked almost like some sort of old sweetheart to him now! He admired her lines - a big diesel that looked like it should. Nothing about her had changed.
He stepped out of the truck and walked over to her. Reached out and touched the solid steel plate.
Yes, this was all too real. A piece of permanence left in a land that seemed to have been bombed. It felt good to touch this remnant of his past.
He kept his hand in place for a good long while and looked up to the familiar lines of the mountains that had surrounded him for more than three decades of life and a few tears fell.
He knew he would be heading down to the Lake next and dreaded at what he might find. Yet this visit had to be done in its entirety. It was his duty to his very own past.
Bruce Lloyd lives in Port Alice.
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