While my mother taught school,my father worked a few miles up the road at a military base called Curtis Park,in the community of St.Margarets.He worked there for many years after we left Goose Bay,and even after we moved to Moncton,he would commute the eighty miles to and from work.
The military base was much like every other base I've ever been too.Clean,well organized,well painted buildings and a bunch of houses that all looked alike.You would enter through a gate house with a closed gate.There was a guard posted at the gate,but rarely,to my memory was my father ever asked to present identification before the gate was lifted.sometimes he would stop for a while and talk with the guards.It was a small community and he knew most everyone we encountered on the base.He was very good friends with one of the guards,and occasionally we would visit his place which was maybe a mile from the front gate of the base in the opposite direction from our house.
The guard was a big man,always dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark pants and a kind of a policeman's hat.But when I saw his house I would wonder where he got such clothes as they were completely at odds with the appearance of his house.His house was set just off the road and was nearly strangled with bushes and trees.It appeared long and narrow and only had a couple of rooms.There were no children there.Just a wife,who was nearly as big as her husband,and a scruffy looking dog.The guards wife was a woman I liked right away because she made me a snack of bread and Cheese Whiz,which was something I never had at home.But I ate it happily there while the dog sniffed around,no doubt hoping I would drop some of the sandwich.The guard sat drinking a beer with my father and they were doing some kind of work on his house as well.It seemed that there was something wrong with the lights as he had strung an extension cord across the entire length of the house and attached lights to it at various points.Evidently the guard fancied himself as somewhat of a comedian because while they were working on the lights,he wrapped his fist around one of the light bulbs and asked my father to plug in the cord.When the cord was plugged in,he began to holler and jump around as though the electricity was flowing through him.To me it looked as though something was very wrong.He may have gotten a small jolt from the cord or the light,but really,he was never in very much danger.There was no hair standing on end-unlike most of the military people my father knew,this man actually had some hair.There were none of the other more messy,unsightly aspects of an electrocution either.After a second or two,he let go of the bulb and began to roar with laughter.
Sometimes my father would take me right into the place where he worked.The whole reason for the base at Curtis Park was to supply power,and it had a huge diesel generating station.The station was fenced off and was the largest building on base,or,for that matter for miles around.It was topped by some large domes that looked like giant golf balls.All about were army trucks and jeeps and other heavy equipment,and I loved going there as I had a bit of fascination with all things army when I was small We would go right into the building too,to the office where my father worked.It was noisy with the sound of huge diesels and smelled of machine oil and iron There were thousands of tools,it seemed,on benches or hanging on the walls.Some of the wrenches were nearly as big as I was.There were also control panels with buttons and lights-hundreds of buttons and lights.I was always provided with the stern warning not to touch any of the buttons.The place was,to a child,awesomely big and it vibrated with power.
Usually our visits to my fathers place of work was for him to pick up his pay.We would go to the base store too,where we could make purchases,even though we lived off base.Sometimes we would go to the barber shop,or the snack bar which were both in the same building.The snack bar had a rich odor which I came to recognize as coffee.It had a wonderful sort of a machine too,that was green with a huge silver cup beneath it.The man behind the counter would scoop some ice cream into the silver cup and turn on the machine,which had a powerful buzz.After a short time he would turn of the machine and empty the cup into a tall glass.Those things were something my father called milkshakes.He never had a milkshake though.Always he would have a banana split and I would eat ice cream or sometimes just have a coke in a glass.I don't recall that my sister ever went with us on these trips to where my father worked.She was really not much more than an infant at the time,and I'm not certain that my father regarded the power plant as any place for a small girl.Tools and motors were,to his mind ,manly things,so I'm sure this was an early form of role modeling for him.To me,it was huge,amazing ,and to be honest,just a bit scary.I was a little bit afraid of all the noises coming from the power plant and of the fact that the whole building seemed to shake.The army trucks were so much bigger than any other cars I'd ever been close to,and even the thought of stopping at a guard house and talking to a policeman before you could go where you really wanted to go,was a bit intimidating.But going in the car with my father,to the base-there really was no other place to go in the backwoods of New Brunswick-was a favorite activity.
No comments:
Post a Comment