A
date that tends to chill the blood
by
Robert LaFrance
Each of us has one or more dates that are, to
tell it like it is, scary.
Of course not everyone has the same
scary and blood-chilling dates. Many Americans cringe when September 11
approaches, or December 7, and people from all over the world try to avoid
doing anything on Friday the 13th.
One of the dates that really frost my psyche is April 2. That was the date in 1987 when the Perth-Andover flood and
ice jam took out the railroad bridge and nearly drowned several people. I was
uptown when it became clear there was a slight problem, so my first wife and I
picked up my Aunt Ella, 82, who lived in an apartment in Perth, and brought her
down to our estate high on a hill in Kincardine. If it flooded here the waters
would have been high indeed.
(NOTE: The same wife is still here,
but I like to keep her on her toes by referring to her as my ‘first wife’.)
That 1987 flood, little did we know
at the time, was not a 100-year event. There had been a flood in 1976, but a
lot of people didn’t count that. However, when you look out your window and see
a railway bridge tumbling into the St. John River, you know it’s serious.
On that subject, just as a side
note, I have heard many times that the reason NB Power doesn’t want to take any
responsibility for any flooding is that CP Rail still has an open lawsuit
against them because of that lost bridge and others, and the minute NB Power
admits any responsibility, that’s BINGO for CP Rail! I don’t know if any of
that is true, but I do know that companies and governments often seem willing
to spend $50 million (in lawyers’’ and tame consultants’ fees) to avoid paying
out $10 million. Sort of a guy thing perhaps.
Back to the fun of having Aunt Ella
staying with us: we had one child at the time, and my wife was almost ready to
go the hospital and have our second daughter. (She was born May 6.) Aunt Ella
explained to us that we were doing everything all wrong, and kept explaining.
Finally I told her that there was good news about her apartment; she could move
back if only we could find a small boat to get her there. Once I pointedly
explained this to her, she settled down to watching Sesame Street with our
daughter Kate.
Three years earlier, before we had
moved here, we had had a house in Birch Ridge. Since we didn’t have any
children at the time we sometimes actually got to spend a weekend away from
home and asked Aunt Ella to stay at our house and look after my dog Belvedere.
And the house of course.
One weekend, just after we bought
this house in Kincardine and planned to move during the next week, we went to
Fredericton. When we returned Sunday evening, Aunt Ella, being helpful, had
packed ALL of our dishes and dry goods into boxes. The main problem with that
was that we wouldn’t be moving for five days. We thanked her profusely for
looking after the house and Belvedere and also for doing our packing for us.
“And we didn’t even ask!” we marvelled.
It was an interesting five days. If
we wanted a bowl of Sugar Pop Honey Nut Flakey Bomb breakfast cereal, we had to
(1) find the box, (2) find a spoon, (3) find a bowl, (4) find a place to sit
and eat since every flat surface was covered with boxes, and (5) find the
spiritual and psychological strength to carry on when our house was jammed with
boxes, and (I should add) unlabelled boxes since she evidently didn’t have a
pen to indicate their contents. Example: we found many cans of this and that,
but couldn’t find a can opener.
As in the April 1987 flood, we did
prevail and got all our stuff moved to this estate on Manse Hill, Kincardine. I
had a 1976 Chev half-ton at the time and my brother Lawrence borrowed a halfton;
we only had to make two trips each. There was a slight hitch; it was raining –
hard. Oh yes, and another slight hitch; I had a flat tire in Lower Kintore. My
wife and I had that changed in no time, if ‘no time’ can be defined as an hour.
You see, there was another slight hitch; the spare was underneath everything on
the back of that truck.
Although Aunt Ella is gone now, we
remember her fondly; she was only trying to help. We are hoping that in 2014
nobody else’s Aunt Ella has to be evacuated and that the ice goes out without a
jam and flood.
-end-
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