EPISODE 1, 240 SUMMER 1958 — COCHRANE, NORTHERN ONTARIO — FOSSILS, CLAY BELT, NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

Begin forwarded message:

From: ALAN SKEOCH <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>

Subject: Fwd: PART B: BURN BABY BURN…NORTHERN ONTARIO ON FIRE

Date: March 15, 2025 at 9:02:46 AM EDT

To: Alan Skeoch <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>

Begin forwarded message:

From: Alan Skeoch <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>

Subject: PART B: BURN BABY BURN…NORTHERN ONTARIO ON FIRE

Date: March 17, 2015 at 11:20:19 AM EDT

To: Alan Skeoch <alan.skeoch@rogers.com>

EPISODE  1, 240   SUMMER 1958 — COCHRANE, NORTHERN ONTARIO — FOSSILS, CLAY BELT, NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

The summer of 1958 was different.  No mining exploration job. Instead we were wading though an ancient bog in the Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario.

Who were we?  Just a bunch of high school kids on a make work project.

Serendipity occurs when events turn out to be fortunate though those events were not sought after.  Horace Walpole invented the word back in 1754 when he was surprised while reading a Persian (Iranian today) fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. These princes made pleasant discoveries by accident.  The word took

root in dictionaries and language.  Serendipity. 

   

My summer of 1958 was not expected to be remarkable compared to the mining adventures of 1956 and 1957.  But serendipity occurred.  Do human beings naturally make the best of things.  Are we prone to become ‘Princes of Serendip?”  I tend to think so.  Some human beings tend ‘to see bridges where others see holes’ as did the Princes of Serendip.

Or, to use a rather hackneyed expression, some people see ‘the glass as half full rather than half empty.’  

Can serendipity be applied to the summer of 1958?  Not perfectly for there were had tragedies and near death experiences in the form of an axe thrown and rock dropped…aimed at a hip and head.  Those two events certainly were outside the definition of serendipity.  

The Princes of Serendip would have loved the trip north to 

Cochrane.  By pure chance I boarded the last steam train driven north.  I had not idea this was the case until we reached Cochrane and by happenstance  noticed a small crowd gathering around the huge black steam engine.

The 701 was still on the rails in July 1957.  The last trip.   The engine and tender still exist on a special siding in Englehart…weighing 195 tons and 70 feet long built in 1921.

Imagine!  I had no idea this was the last steam train moving in Northern Ontario.  Now that is serendipity in operation.   July 1957.  Steam Engine 701 and her tender did not go to the scrap yard.  They are both sitting as museum pieces in Englehart the former HQ of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario railroad for whom my Grandfather Edward Freeman once worked in 1912 while living in Krugerdorf near Englehart.  Thatis also serendipity at work.  Anolther weird piece of serendipity occurred a few years later while sitting in a history lecture with Barbara Pellow.  Her father, Hap Pellow, maintained these engines in North Bay.  He probably worked on 701.  Hap Pellow knew ever nut, bolt and valve of engines like 701.

What a sight!  The last steam driven train to Northern Ontario.

Last Steam train…black and blowing white steam as if a dinosaur about to leap.  I know that is an old comparison but it seemed so fitting on that June evening in 1957 as I boarded. The last steam train.  It was a Night train so not easy to see through the great blasts of steam and smoke.  But it was there. Black and massive…puffing and blowing like a race horse yet as big and threatening as Tyranosaurua Rex.

Alan, stop those bloody comparisons. 

Where is this story going? It’s heading toward the ‘Hunta Cut-off’, a slab of highway that was once a tropical reef millions of years ago and the bottom of an ocean or lake thousands of years ago. Now filled with muck and clay … piles of rotting vegetation.   And strange fossils. 

Somehow the Trans Canada Highway…northern loop…had to be carved and infilled through this ancient bog.

  Lots of kids…high school kids…were able to get summer jobs in exciting places in those days.  Some worked on Hydro projects…others for the Department of Lands and Forests planting or counting trees…and others hired by the DHO to wade through watery slop that was supposed to become a highway.

Luxury living.  We had a modern bunkhouse for eight of us and a trailer cook shack complete with a cook who prepared meals for us in morning and night and lunches for the job site.  This was not a bush job.

  The cook served some rotten balogna at one point…not his fault for he thought it was fresh.  Meals were hearty…sometimes less so.  Anyone doing this kind of work knows what I mean. The Groundhog River job in 1957 and Chibougamau job in 1956 meals had surprised maggots regularly.  After eating those meals,. I never got sick.  But that rotten balogna was another matter.  Splat! Splat!  Couldn’t work…couldn’t move.  Took three days to get rid of the stuff.

Our job was to determine how much fill was going to be needed to make the swamp into a highway.  So we had these long rods marked off in feet and rammed them into the slop until they hit bottom.   Like using a measuring tape really.  But sometimes we could not even find the bottom.  On one occasion we were placed in the big excavating mouth of what is called drag line. “Find the bottom boys!”  We hung over a bottomless mass of spongy slop that has become a highway today.  We did

      not find the bottom that day but among the excavated slop were treasures of an ancient kind. Fossils..

 

Nah!  You probably think that was boring.

Try this on for size then.  The road construction company had a dozen or so earth movers scooping up soil and muck steadily.  Sometimes they got stuck…some nearly tipped over.  That’s when the big bulldozers got into action.  D-6 and D-9 Caterpilar dozers had to push the earth movers out of the swamps.  Boring? Driving an earth mover was like riding a dinosaur…same shape, same weight and maybe the same speed although dinosaur speeds are a matter of conjecture.  They were dangerous machines.  On another job a few years later an earth mover jockey about my age in BC tried to see how close he could come to my rental car.  He got very close…took off the whole drivers door.  Being a rodman or surveyor with these machines whipping by was like living in Jurassic Park.  

“Oncoming!”

“Jump out of the way, you nincompoop!

“To hell with the rod, jump.”

Probably an overstatement but I think you get the idea.  This was not just a job…it was also

an adventjure.

 At the bottom of these great holes we found ancient lumps of coral.  Real coral.  The kind only found girdling tropical islands.  Like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.  Now what was coral doing way up in Northern Ontario?  Corals need warm water and bikini clad damsels to thrive.  OK, sometimes the bikini clad damsels were not present on desert islands.  They are present in all the cartoons I’ve read.  

What were corals doing in bogs that drained into the Arctic watershed?  Miles and miles from any tropical ocean.   Now there is a mystery..   

See that strange blue swath above the red.  That was once the bottom of a tropical sea where corals polyps and sponges built living reefs that attracted cephalopods, crinoids and other weird living things 400 million years ago.  Proof that at one time Northern Ontario was located thousands of miles south of its present location.  Proof that the place we were excavating was really the spongy remains of that far distant world.  Proof that we were trying to build a highway on top of an immense ancient biomass.  Now known as the Northern Ontario clay belts.

I took them back to Mr. Wismer and our science teachers at Humberside.  He kept them.

   “Found these buried near Cochrane…Arctic watershed. How did coral get that far north?”

 Wiser seemed interested but I do not remember his answer.  I still have a few fragments stuck in my sock drawer I think.

  Those corals lived 400 million years ago…in salt water.”

 .

  The coral fossils found beneath the mud of these lakes was linked to a time 400 million years ago when the huge sheet of rock on which we lived was moving form the Equator to the Arctic.   It has been said that the only permanent thing in this world is ‘change’.  Too bad that none of us live long enough  to notice. 

  This was and is the Great Clay Belt of Northern Ontario.  The land of broken dreams.

So There we were…a bunch of 18 and 19 year old human beings excavating a hole with layers as deep and mysterious as any on this earth.  Most of us were unaware of this.  Most did not know the lake bottom that we were excavating was once a tropical paradice.   Let’s be honest, most of us did not care. We had work to do and precious little time in the short summer of 1957 to get it done.  

Lots of cabins like this were speckled here and there along the highway and more could be found close to the gravel side roads.  Some better , some worse than seen in the snap shot.

I found a bearskin coat in one of the cabins and brought it home with me.  Still have it at the farm.  Was this theft?  Hope not.  The coat was doomed to be mush.  This picture was taken in 1957.  the cabin was likely built around 1920 or so.  Today, 2015, there would be no sign it ever existed.

We were living in Hunta, about 20 miles west of Cochrane.

The tiny village of Hunta had one claim to fame as Steve Suchan, one of the members of the notorious Boyd gang once lived in the village.

Seemed a matter of some kind of twisted local pride since the Boyd gang had achieved the status of Robin Hood and his Merry Men by those who like to glorify armed bank robbers.

Hunta is located in a region of Ontario that is called ‘unorganized’ which means no building permits are required so residents can pretty well do whatever they want including hunt moose, bear and deer on their properties.  At one point Hunta had a fairly large agricultural population.  Probably back in the 1920’s and earlier when demobilized soldiers were given farms all across the  

province.   Free land but not necessarily good land. Collapsed and collapsing log cabins seemed as common as mushrooms along the highway right of way.  Barns as well.  Granted there were still a few large farms that were making a success of farming.  But Hunta* and Cochrane are a long way north.  750 kilimetres north of Toronto.  So far to the north that they are within the Arctic watershed which means all the rivers and streams flow north to James Bay.  Polar bear country.  It is not accidental that Cochrane keeps a few polar bears.

Today, in 2015, a person wishing to escape urban life can buy a farm at Deception Lake, Hunta, for $135,000 and have 115 acres to do whatever your heart desire.  This includes 1,800 feet of frontage on Deception Lake.  “At night,” according to the real estate agent, “The view of the stars is breathtaking.”  The buyer can build whatever ramshackle thing he or she wants and by the same token can shoot anything that lives, breathes or move on the property.)

Let’s get back to the people who I met.  All of them young post pubescent males like I was.  So, what to do in our spare time.  Well, as we discovered early in the job there was group of young people in Cochrane who ran regular dances at the Anglican church.  Sort of a ‘save our young people from the evils of liquor and the fast life’ kind of thing.  

 “ Boys there are girls in Cochrane. Dances!  Dances?  Where?  Let’s go.”  Fossil hunting lost interest.  Fires of spring.

One of the guys was a little better financed than the rest of us.  His parents gave him a car to keep at the camp.  Fancy car.  Anyway we all piled in that car on many evenings and whipped into Cochrane.  Met some nice people…girls that is.  I remember one of them confided to me that she was ‘blue baby’ thinking I would know what she meant.

I thought she must be follower of Roy Orbison and our man Elvis.

Blues, man, blues.  Turned out it was something to do with blood.  She had her blood drained at birth or some such thing.  She told me more than I wanted to hear.

Our sojourns with these Anglican girls lasted a while but was terminated when the local Cochrane boys intervened and told us to get the hell back to Hunta and our bunkhouse and to stay away from their women. I wonder if that happens when strange herds of caribou meet in the bush.  Do the males chase the other males away.  Wonder what Charles Darwin would have to say about that.  Could be a kind of survival of the fittest thing assuming the

Cochrane boys were fittest and we were unfit.  Or vice versa as we liked to think. The mixture of new genes is supposed to be good for general herd health.  Or so I have read.  We never got to the gene mixing stage.  We did not even want to do that.  We wanted to dance and laugh and talk and eat.  Jumble that sequence if you wish.  We tried to make peace with the local stallions and got the dust down a bit.

Which leads me to the big trouble at our camp.  No laughing matter.   Two near death experiences. Trouble.   Bound to happen when strangers are stowed in cots cheek to jowl.  Differences of opinion?  Well, this was way beyond that kind of thing.  

We had this rather odd kid, John C. by name (I am omitting his last name since he probably has surviving relatives in Halton County).   He did not fit.  Could not fit.  Never would fit.  John was a very disturbed young man.  Initially he kept totally to himself in the bunkhouse.  Would talk to no one except himself.

Now I must admit that occasionally I talk to myself, especially when I want  answers to the big questions in life.

But John muttered a lot.  No one knew what he was saying.  When you meet a guy like that it is a sure invitation to teasing.  OK, you can call it bullying if you want.  I call it teasing because we were just trying to draw John out…to make him into one of us.

Nervy.   

Well things went from bad to worse.  No one wanted John C. on their survey crew.  He did not work well with others.  And he got a little more dippy as the summer progressed.  I felt sorry for him and laboured under the illusion I could draw him out.  Presumptuous goody goody kind of thing on my part.  I failed big time. And dramatically.

John had the axe one day.  In order to site the levels we often had to cut brush away so we needed an axe and the big rod along with the surveyor’s level.  That day my job was to take depth readings with the level.  John had the rod and the axe.

He deviated slightly from the line we were running.  John was only about 15 feet away.  Really close in other words.

“John, move a foot or so to the left so we keep our line straight.”

I also gestured… a bit to the left.

John turned.  Looked at me,.  Wound up and threw the axe right at me.  It passed within a foot of my hip which I swivelled fast.

“What the hell did you do that for?”  I did not say ‘you prick’ but I thought the word.

John barely reacted.  He just stood there anger blazing from his eyes.  By trying to befriend him,  I had instead alienated him.  He hated me it seemed.  We finished the job that day and I told the guys about the incident for it really worried me.  Now do not get the idea that I had been hazing John.  I had not.  I really felt sorry  for him and I believed stupidly that by having him on my crew we could draw him out.  Amateur psychologists must get killed often.

That night was very dark.  No moon.  So our bunkhouse was like a dark cave.   About 1 a.m. there was suddenly a loud crash…splintering crash.  Glass breaking crash.  The sound of a very heavy object smashing into something.

“Turn on the light.”

“What happened?”

“Was it the camp bear trying to break in?”

“Holy shit, look at this!”  Our big tinware water jug lay there in pieces

“Smashed to smithereens.”

“Could have been my head,” said one of crew, a guy from the Lakehead as I remember.

“And look at size of this rock…must weigh 20 pounds.”

“Someone dropped it…my head was beside the water jug.” said Hazuda who was a big tough guy…

We all turned to look at John C. who was in his bed.  He had not bothered to jump out of bed.  In fact, he must have jumped into bed.  In the darkness he had dropped that huge rock on what he thought was Hazuda’s* head (unsure if that was his last name, close to it anyway).  Did he miss the human head…in other words intent to kill.   Or did he want to warn the human head?

No matter.  John C. was out of control.  Dangerous.  More dangeorus than the bear at the back of the cook shack.

“He could have killed me.  I think he wanted to kill me.”

We sat up all night waiting for the crew chief to arrive.  He was older and in charge of all of us.  Once the rock and smashed water jug were shown to him, he immediately put in a phone call

and a car soon arrived took John C. away.  Not sure if he was bound in a strait jacket or not.  My mind says he was but common sense says he was not. 

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What was certain is that someone knew John C. was disturbed and whoever made decisions had decided that maybe John C. could be helped by living with other young men of his age in a work environment.   That did not work needless to say.  

We never saw John C. again.  I often think about him when I drive through Oakville.

Did I mention the axe incident to the crew chief.  Wish I could be certain.  Think I did.   Should I have done so?