Helen

There are times in life when one can step back in time a little and glimpse a period of life that has long since gone…Life as it was…. before what we know today seemed the norm….a time when life was simpler, goals were easier to define, and when there truly was a pulling together to reach common ends…that’s not to say it was easier, it wasn’t, but things seemed to be more clarified and easier to explain….. We had such an example of this through our Servas contact here in Edmonton..Helen Ready….like the singer only spelled different, as John Coffey might say. Helen was born in 1932 and grew up in a small coal mining town named Cadomin, which got its name from “Canadian Dominion Mines”….There were no roads into the area, and the only transportation was the twice weekly train. Her graduating class from high school in 1951 was 6 people…She spent an extra year as a senior so that she could take the required classes to enter nursing school, and the school was so small they didn’t offer them all the same year. When Helen found out we were staying in Hinton, she told us we were close to the town of her youth, and so we decided to drive to it and see it for ourselves…It is now a shell of the once-bustling town of the 30’s and 40’s….but she told us that she still had two friends from her youth who lived there still and ran the only café and store. An hour’s drive on gravel roads brought us to the hamlet, as it is called, a stretch of scattered homes, some quite nice, some is disrepair…Helen gave us the address of her “cabin.” We found it, took photos, and saw that the store was open so we stopped and went in. When asked how they could help us, we said that we were staying with Helen and the faces lit up…”Agnes, these are friends of Helen.” Agnes turned to Lois and announced: “They know Helen.” And so we sat down and listened to tales of days gone by and a life which no longer exists. The mine shut down in 1952 and since the mine owned the town they gave everybody 60 days to get out….no compensation…no golden parachute….no severance package…..just get out. And so they did, but some owned land not controlled by the coal company, and so life was kept alive in Cadomin… A booming town of somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000…Louie said officially there were 1,200 people in town, but he always says there were 2,000…then he adds “But, I’m a fisherman..” and by definition they exaggerate. Sports were huge in the area and if you were a good baseball player or hockey player, the mine company would give you a job, and in the depression a job was a job, so they always fielded good teams. In a small town so isolated, sports reigned king. During WWII, the mines a were critical national occupation, and so the miners did not go off to war, but stayed in Cadomin and worked the mines. The town was an eclectic mix of many nationalities…Welsh, Scots, Italians, Serbs, Slovaks…wherever there were mines in the old country, people who came to Canada could work in places like Cadomin…”Everybody got along,” they told us…there were no ethnic tensions…”We were all in it together,” as they said…when there is no distractions, people find a way to find common ground. “We could call each other ethnic names, which today would be incorrect, but nobody took offense,” Helen said. I asked them to tell me “A Helen story,” but they couldn’t recall any because she was always such a nice person…very pretty and so liked by the boys, but also very popular with the girls….The big mischief in town was knocking over the outhouses (outdoor toilets)…..and hoping nobody was inside…they all laughed at this story because it obviously evoked a time when mischief was just that, like the old days of Halloween where we waxed people’s windows as mischief, but did no real damage. The ladies chimed in that the boys knocked them over, and the girls put them back right….for the girls the really mischievous activity was raiding people’s gardens and running away with purloined potatoes to be roasted and eaten on the mountainside, while giggling and feeling like they had done something really bold. Ukrainian weddings were always a highlight of life…2-3 days of drinking, partying, dancing and drinking…did I mention that alcohol was involved…Helen’s father used to ask her if she drank at these affairs and she would reply…no, just rum and coke…In a town like Cadomin, when there was a wedding, it was a community affair and everybody was invited, and naturally everybody came. Helen’s father had a stroke and the only way they could get him to the hospital was to put his bed in a box car on the train and transport him in that manner….and that was the incident which led her into nursing at the same time as the mine was shut down…but her roots, her youth, and her real being were all Cadomin and so she bought a cabin where she goes often to sit in the café with Louis and Lois. The first road was punched through the forest and over the hills in 1946 from Edson nearly 80 miles away....A huge event when the first car came to town…It had to be pulled by tractor through the muddy spots….It was a town holiday…School children sang and everybody turned out to see it. There were cars in town, however….shipped in by rail, they could go from small coal town to the other similar towns in the area….nobody had driver’s licenses, nobody worried about that..you couldn’t really go anywhere….and nobody could come in. Of course, it was a coal mine, and tragedy goes along with that aspect of town life…the cry of the whistle sent chills down everybody’s spine as they rushed to see what had happened…Helen lost a very good friend who had quit working at the mine, but was asked to do one more shift before leaving Cadomin…a cave-in claimed five lives, including her friend whose luck ran out before he did. Frank is the financial success story of the town…He got a job cleaning chickens, worked his way up, bought a store, bought another one, and now owns 15 supermarkets scattered around Alberta….”He’s our millionaire,” Helen says. Margaret and Chuck moved to B.C. but came back and bought the store after retirement…it’s a “If you need it, we’ve got it,” sort of place….literally a mom and pop enterprise. They couldn’t make it by catering to the minimal population but they are Cadomin people and that’s where they want to spend their lives, and so today, they fix breakfast in the café part of the store…four tables in an area about the size of an average kitchen…the local gathering spot where the coffee pot is always on…serve yourself, and find out what, if anything, is new. Agnes and Frank come down from Peace River to take care of their house there and keep the connections open and alive…Only 29 post boxes are active and 34 people live there today, but they couldn’t kill the spirit of the town or its inhabitants. They have had big reunions and everybody always shows up…they may reside somewhere else, but they will always live in Cadomin. Small, isolated towns like Cadomin had a profound effect upon the lives of the hardy people who came and populated the remote areas of Canada…they came from all over the world and found their niche in this vast land….The U.S. has been dubbed “The melting pot,” but Canada is no less so….and Cadomin was a fine example of that….there are no exotic, tropical areas of Canada…no Southern California beach boardwalks….no Texas panhandle…but it is a remarkable land where hard work and perseverance made the country what it is today…and places like Cadomin played a big hand in forging that identity. We were really fortunate to get up close and personal with it….thank you Helen, thank you, Servas, thank you,Canada.