Ever heard of downhill skating?

Sam Gerrard ran the single cylinder gas-hoisting engine. We had a bare, two wire electric bell, signal system, which was operated by shorting the two wires with a small file or pinching them together where possible. One ring for up, one ring for stop and two rings for down, it worked amazingly well, except when small rock falls would give Sam a false signal by shorting the wires.

A weather phenomenon of the most unusual kind took place in winter 1947 on Long’s Sawmill log pond. The pond was free of floating logs when it froze solid. The pump that supplied the pond water either froze up or was shut down, consequently the water under the ice slowly lowered as did the ice in the middle of the pond. This created a downhill skate from the pond’s edge to the centre which was about three feet lower. Unbelievably, the ice did not break up so we christened it “rubber ice” and spent many fun filled hours downhill skating. I never again witnessed this unusual set of circumstances.

My underground work at the coal mine rewarded me with $1 per hour which was a pretty good starting wage in 1947. One can still see these 35 degree angled measures where the truck route constructed south of town cut through the outcrops. There is only one underground Merritt coal miner besides myself still living in the valley. There was a crew of seven workers at the coal mine, so when warmer weather arrived, the latest hires would be temporarily laid off. Long Brothers Sawmill (now Tolko) supplied me with a job on the open air green chain that first summer. As time went on it became almost a ritual moving between the coal mine and the saw mill with the season. Eventually my job at the mill was upgraded to driving a Ross straddle lumber carrier.

Morva, during this time was working as a switchboard operator for the B.C. Telephone Company. Her uncle, Ralph Smythe, Fred Petrie and Len Penny were the outside crew. I used to keep her company in the office some evenings as she was on duty from eleven at night to seven in the morning. We had to be on the alert for the boss, Archie Hardy, because it was strictly against company policy to have visitors. He would occasionally check the office on his way home from the poker game at the pool hall.

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