Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “There is properly no history, only biography.”
That means personal stories of people matter more than events or circumstances. My brother had a two-year period in his life that profoundly affected the lives of those around him.
I always looked on my big brother as bigger, stronger, more capable and definitely more bossy. Following my father’s illness and hospitalization, the government of Alberta seized the farm, prompting mother to leave it.
As my brother, Harry, grew to maturity, mother chose to return to the farm so he could manage it. We arrived back on the farm in the summer of 1946. Having made a few hundred dollars on the sale of a house, mother equipped the farm with two cows, chickens, turkeys and pigs. She also bought saddle horses for Harry and me and a team and democrat for family transportation (Americans call a democrat a buckboard).
The next two years, up until the fall of 1948, belong to Harry. The fences immediately commanded his attention. With me trailing along carrying the tools, he walked the line fences, replacing missing staples, putting tension back into sagging barb wire and replacing broken fence posts. When he had finished the first round, he decided he would need to replace a number of posts, so with axe in hand and Daisy, his riding horse, for company, he headed for the wood lots. Daisy pulled home a great number of posts, which Harry then piled to dry for use the following year.
The farm needed a well closer to the house, so Harry arranged for a water “witch” to find an appropriate place. He then began to dig, building the cribbing and pounding it deeper as the hole slowly progressed toward China. After days of heavy labour on his part and reluctant assistance from me, he sank the hole down to a depth of ten feet. Harry rarely admitted defeat, but recognizing the impossibility of the task, he threw down his shovel and gave up. He stood staring into the empty hole for some time before making an announcement. “It’s perfect for an ice well. We need an ice well.”
Harry had it right. Most Alberta farms that didn’t have electricity used ice wells to keep food cold throughout the blistering hot summers. Every ice well needed an ice house, a six-foot square shed with a trap door to open over the well. Harry changed from well digger to carpenter and began building the structure. Again he called on me to help lift the walls into place and carry the lumber. When winter arrived, we cut ice blocks from the coulee pond, and with the help of the team and a sledge we filled the well with ice. Harry built a pulley system to lower milk and meat through the trap door down to the sawdust layer that covered the ice.
Throughout those two years we milked cows, fed chickens, slopped pigs and went to school in a horse-drawn van. Sometime during the summer of 1948, as Harry moved into a fence-rebuilding phase, he collapsed due to a congenital heart problem, prompting us to abandon the farm.
One other thing about Harry: he began that two-year venture in the summer of 1946 at the age of 13.