One Time I Rode a Caboose to Work

Memoir (1)

Late one Sunday afternoon in 1971, I stepped up onto a train that seemed to have arrived in the Edmonton station from half a century earlier.

Barely 20, I was a newly minted teacher; the following morning would be my first day of professional employment. Outside, it was nearly minus 40, the air a shattering cold that is particular to the Prairies. I had been looking forward to settling into an upholstered seat in a well-lit and well-heated train car for the journey north to Thorhild, the village where my new school was located. I still had preparation work to do — most notably I needed to finish reading Shane, the novel I would teach to a grade nine class that week.

I would be teaching junior-high-school Language Arts. Known as “middle school” in some places, junior high encompasses grades 7 to 9, and the students range in age from about 12 to about 15. They are at the very cusp of adolescence, with some still looking, feeling and acting like children, and others well into puberty and the typical discomposure of the early teenage years. It is not an easy age to teach, and I was nervous. I hadn’t encountered pre-teens as a group since my own time in that particular hell, in which bullies had played a regrettably significant role.

Months earlier, as I’d completed my Bachelor of Education at the University of Alberta, I’d envisioned a teaching career that involved sharing my love of William Blake, Harper Lee, Paul McCartney and the intricacies of English grammar with bright university-bound senior-high-school students. But at almost the same moment as I’d graduated, the Edmonton Public School Board had decreed a freeze on teacher hiring. After weeks of searching among the slim pickings in my field, I was about to spend six months covering for a teacher who was accompanying her husband on a teachers’ exchange to Australia. For now, it seemed, I was stuck with junior high.

A couple of weeks earlier, my then boyfriend and I had driven up to find a place for me to live during my term at the village school. Nothing was very far away from the centre of Thorhild (pop. c. 500), and I’d settled on a furnished basement suite about four blocks from the elementary- junior-high. As I would learn later that evening, it was also not far from the town’s grain elevators and its railway stop.

I hadn’t lived in a small town before. I’d been raised in London, Ontario and then in Edmonton and, although those are not large cities, I was very much a “city girl.” I was also, of course, given the era, a bit of a hippie – or as much of one as a person could be who lived in ice-tight Alberta rather than on the flower-scattered streets of San Francisco, and who was dating a law student whose career necessitated the avoidance of recreational drugs. As well as being nervous about teaching a cohort of young teens, I was apprehensive about my forthcoming term in a very small, mostly Ukrainian-Canadian community .

I planned to stay in Thorhild during the school week and come home to Edmonton on weekends. The train had not been my first preference for my weekly commutes: I had imagined that a bus would be the easiest and most practical method of transportation, particularly since the Greyhound station was right in downtown Edmonton. But none of the bus schedules I consulted listed Thorhild as a destination, so I made my way to the Northern Alberta Railway station to the north of the city centre and bought myself a ticket.

The NAR was primarily a freight service, carrying construction materials, equipment and agricultural products from Edmonton to small towns to the north, including Lac la Biche and ultimately Fort MacMurray. The last car on the afternoon train had been made available for passengers and so, suitcase in hand, book in my handbag, I climbed aboard and stepped inside the carriage.

The appearance of the compartment I had been anticipating was based on several journeys I had taken between Ontario and Alberta on the Canadian National Railway. They had featured sleeping and dining cars and porters, and would not have been entirely out of place on a passenger train today. The car I entered that wintery afternoon in 1971 was something else entirely.

Passengers Will Please Refrain

To my left as I entered the car was a toilet which, I would learn to my distress before too long, involved no flushing system but rather a straight, open-air drop to the tracks. (Still in use in many parts of the world, the proper name of this waste disposal system is a Hopper toilet; it is also called a “drop chute” or “direct flush” toilet.) (Note to self: You can find almost anything on the Internet.) You may be familiar with a few of the drawbacks to the “drop chute” if you have heard the Oscar Brand song which begins “Passengers Will Please Refrain from Flushing Toilets While the Train Is Standing in the Station. (I Love You.)”

A bit further inside the car was its heating system: a “caboose stove.” This was a coal-burning, pot-bellied stove like the one pictured in this image (which I found online and reproduce with a link and a prayer that I don’t get sued for copyright infringement):

from CoalPail.com

It emitted a satisfying heat, but one that dissipated quickly the farther you got from the stove. The only other passengers in the compartment were an elderly Ukrainian couple with carrying bags full of groceries and dry goods they’d bought on their trip to Edmonton. They had wisely seated themselves next to the little furnace.

I decided on a bench at the back of the car, because that’s where the light was brightest: I still intended to read that book. The source of the light was a kerosene lamp attached to the wall above my head that needed to be pumped up every half hour or so by a trainman, a person who seemed to appear out of nowhere as required. As minutes passed following each of his visits, the light grew dimmer and dimmer until I could no longer see the book — at which point I’d move closer to the stove in order to get a little warmer and wait for the trainman to come back and pump up the light again. Being on a diet (Atkins) that required me to consume eight glasses of water a day, I occasionally also found it necessary to water the railroad ties. I did this in great haste, to prevent icicles from forming on my private parts.

The train trip was slow and uneventful. At one point after the early winter darkness had descended, we stopped at a hamlet that was even smaller than Thorhild where, the trainman later explained, the engineer got off the train, walked across the snow-sculpted median between tracks and dwellings, knocked on the door of a small grocery store, and got the proprietor to sell him a can of asparagus that he had promised he’d bring home to his wife. When we finally arrived in Thorhild, I descended from the train, and made my way across the dark and frozen village to my new basement dwelling.

A Horse in the Parking Lot

As is typical in Alberta, Sunday’s deepfreeze had followed a ferocious blizzard, which had left banks of snow strewn across sidewalks, roads and highways – and, at the bases of these drifts, bare ice. The morning after I arrived in Thorhild, I learned that the schools in the county had been closed for the day — not due to the cold, which is relatively common in that part of the country, but due to the effects of the blizzard on the roads and surrounding highways. There would be no school buses on the roads, but teachers were required to attend as usual.

As I sat in the principal’s office that Monday morning, receiving an official welcome and helpful information on how teachers should conduct themselves in the school and the community (i.e., not dressed as, or behaving as, hippies), I saw with amazement through the window behind the principal a woman, bundled head to toe, approaching the school – on horseback.

The woman dismounted and tied her steed to a metal fence in the parking lot, then headed into the school. By this point, I felt a mixture of dismay and astonishment: clearly my train trip had reversed the clock.

Past Meets Present

There are several reasons why Thorhild was a very good place for a brand new teacher to begin her career, most of which are rooted in the strong sense of community I encountered there. When students received reprimands at school, they knew they faced worse reprimands at home. (In the city even then, by contrast, if you disciplined a student you were likely to find the student’s parents in the office the next morning, complaining to the principal and ready to rip your head off.) It was a hard-working farming community, and not wealthy: at least one family still lived in a house with a dirt floor. Several of my students started school only after harvest was over in the fall, and left early in the spring to help out with the planting. For some, school was a welcome break from “picking rocks.”

Soon after I arrived, I learned that although Thorhild reverberated with the past, it was not actually situated there. One could, in fact, take a Greyhound bus from Edmonton, and it took half an hour less by bus to make the journey than by train. The first official stop of the bus was listed in the schedule as Lac la Biche, but if you asked at the ticket wicket in Edmonton, you could buy passage to Thorhild. The driver would turn off the main highway and drop you off in town, and he made no stops for asparagus along the way. I never took the NAR again.

I also learned that the teacher who had arrived on the horse had done so out of fury at the county – specifically at the directive that required teachers, but not students, to attend school before the roads were cleared. After determining that neither her car nor her tractor could manoeuvre through the snowbanks on her long farm laneway to the highway, she had saddled up her horse and ridden it to town. Before coming to the school, where I had watched her secure the horse’s reigns to a pole in the parking lot, she had stopped at the school board office and got someone to take a photograph of her. She was going to send it in to the local paper, along with a few choice words of protest. I was impressed with her feistiness. (Hippies do love a protest.)

As I took my seat in the teachers’ lounge for the first time that day, I found myself surrounded by kind and generous souls who over the next six months would offer me unending support and encouragement, and would share more tips, advice and knowledge about teaching than I’d acquired in four years at university. They patiently helped me with the pronunciation of student names like Panchyschyn and Olchowy, and fed me home-made perogies and cabbage rolls. All I had to do in exchange was remind them from time to time that I didn’t speak Ukrainian and bring salad to the potlucks.

I am still not certain you can actually teach anything to junior high-school students; they are far too distracted by themselves and their peers to pay much attention to what you believe they ought to learn or how they ought to sit. If I had started teaching in the city, it probably would have turned out very differently, but I did learn to appreciate the enthusiasm of young teens in Thorhild, and my affection for that age group hasn’t faded yet.

I taught in the Alberta school system for five years after that — six months in Thorhild and a year in Wetaskiwin before I finally got a job in Edmonton. I never did teach senior high: the jobs I was offered were always middle schools. But thanks to my distinctive introduction to the teaching profession, that was okay with me.

(For Ksenija, who told me to write it down.)