Chapter 3 - Chores, Chores, Chores
Making a home in Black Creek
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The ordeal of the leaking cabin was only one of the many ways Walter’s life changed after the move to Black Creek. In the Okanagan, he’d had chores, but also plenty of freedom to explore, play, and follow his curiosity. In Black Creek, though, life felt more serious. At seven or eight years old, he was still a kid, but now a kid expected to contribute. There was always work to do, and with his dad working long hours for a local logging company, some of the most critical chores fell to Walter. The two biggest tasks every day were fetching water and cutting firewood.
The family of seven went through a lot of water, and there was not yet a well on the property. Although a creek, a tributary that fed into Black Creek, ran through the lot, it was difficult to get to. Not to mention, the name “Black Creek” was apt, as its water, and the water in the smaller creeks that drained into it, was near black. It was discoloured by tannin, released by decomposing cedar bark, roots, and fallen boughs upstream. The water was not fit for household use. Fortunately, their neighbours had a well with lots of water, and they invited the family to draw water from their well, when necessary, over the winter. Containers of water for cooking, bathing, and laundry for a family of seven needed to be carried along the trail that ran between the Enns’ property to the Harms’ cabin regularly. Bathing was a once-a-week activity, as the water needed to be carried to the cabin from a distance, then heated on the stove before being added to a washtub. Walt’s mother filled the washtub only once, then everyone took their turn. Walt learned that the pleasure of a bath diminished the further down the line he was, and with three younger siblings, he was rarely the first one in the washtub.
As the weather cooled, there was also a continual need for firewood for the stove. As soon as Walt returned home from school in the afternoon, the woodpile was waiting for him. At first, he could cut wood from trees his dad had felled to make the clearing for the cabin. He used a Swede saw, dragging it back and forth until his arms ached, cutting each log down to fit in the stove. He had to chop some of the wood even smaller to make kindling. Some evenings, he and Jake used the larger crosscut saw together, or Gerda helped him, their uneven heights making the work harder. The littler kids sat on the logs to hold them steady, thinking it was a great game. Most of the time, though, Walter worked alone. No matter how much wood he cut and chopped, the stove was always hungry, and eventually the woodpile was gone.
That left him no choice but to venture into the bush to find fallen trees left behind by loggers two decades earlier. The Comox Logging and Railway Company had logged the land long before the Harms arrived, using rail cars to move the timber. An old rail grade crossed the slope behind the cabin, with a large berm along its downhill side. The rest of the land was a combination of massive stumps, as it had been old-growth rainforest before it had been logged, and recent growth that sprouted up as thick as hairs on a dog’s back. There were a lot of smaller logs on the ground, left behind by the loggers, and those were the ones Walter looked for. They had been on the ground for years and were rotting. They weren’t the best firewood, but they had to do. He cut them down to a length he could manage, then dragged them home to cut into smaller pieces.
Despite his work, his mom struggled to keep the fire in the stove burning. The saving grace was that although that first winter brought a lot of heavy rain, it wasn’t terribly cold, and the family managed.
Walter knew his sisters had more responsibility as well, particularly Gerda, as she was the oldest. She helped their mom more in the cabin. Mary had developed severe eczema on her hands, making tasks like kneading dough, washing dishes, or doing laundry painful, if not impossible.
Despite the hard work and challenges of their new life, the first Christmas in the cabin was special. On Christmas Eve, Jake led the kids out to find a tree. They wanted it to be as fresh as possible. They found a nice one, took it home, and set it up in the cabin. Walt’s parents decorated the tree with candles that sat in little trays, clipped onto the branches. On Christmas morning, the family gathered around the tree, and their dad carefully lit the candles. They stood together in awe, watching the flickering candlelight, and taking in the sweet smell of the Douglas fir. They stood close enough to react if a candle fell, but far enough back to take it all in.
After Jake safely extinguished the candles, there was another surprise – a Meccano set! The unexpected gift delighted the kids. It was the basic set, ready to be added to in the future, and it was such an exciting departure from the usual utilitarian gifts of clothes or other everyday items the kids needed. It was a very special Christmas.
In early spring, Walt’s dad was keen to dig a well so the family would have their own water source. The weather had not yet warmed when a neighbour came by with a willow rod and doused the land, walking slowly around the area outside the cabin, holding the willow rod in front of him. Suddenly, the rod bent downward; signaling, he said, that water lay beneath. Walter watched with fascination. How could the stick know there was water underground? His dad didn’t seem to have any hesitation. That spot where the stick pointed to the earth, right next to the cabin, was where the digging began.
Walt watched as his dad marked out a square, about four feet by four feet, and pushed his shovel into the soil. The early digging was relatively easy. His dad flung shovel-loads of dirt and gravel clear of the hole, but once the hole was four or five feet deep, the shovel struck something that didn’t budge. Jake set the shovel aside and pulled out the pickaxe. Walt peered into the hole and heard the dull thud of metal on rock-hard ground. His dad explained it was “hardpan”, a dense, almost cement-like layer of soil that wouldn’t yield without a fight. His dad set aside the pickaxe and turned his attention to shoring up the hole as it was so far.
He cleaned up the sides of the hole to make it nice and square before he cribbed the sides. He used rough-cut lumber to build a wooden frame inside the square shaft. Walter lowered the boards down to his dad, who stacked them horizontally, one layer at a time, before nailing the boards at the corners to hold the shape. It was like building a giant wooden box. The cribbing sat on top of the hardpan as that layer would not need cribbing; it was already like concrete. The cribbing kept the walls from caving in, and it also extended up out of the hole, giving Jake a stable edge to set up a windlass. With the windlass, Walter could help lower tools and raise buckets of dirt safely.
Over the next few months, whenever Jake wasn’t at work, he would be down the well, swinging the pickaxe, making agonizingly slow progress, chipping away the hardpan. The pit that was slowly forming below the cribbing was no longer square; it was round, and just wide enough to swing the pickaxe. Jake said other men had been so frustrated with the dense layer of hardpan, they had resorted to using dynamite to blast through the stubborn layer of earth. They reported mixed results. The blast often collapsed the sides of the well above the level of the hardpan, and where they had successfully blown through the hardpan, they said the water had a lingering taste and smell of sulphur. Jake had decided that, although it was grueling work, it was better to dig the well manually and have good water in the end. While Jake worked, Walt stayed near the well, peering down as his dad chipped away at the stubborn ground, bit by bit. When Jake called up, Walt jumped into action to raise the bucket of dirt from below using the windlass.
Then, finally, after weeks of effort, the pickaxe punched through the hardpan into a layer of blue clay. The clay was still very hard and dry, but the sound of the pickaxe striking the ground was different. More importantly, each swing moved a bit more earth. Walt threw the first buckets of clay onto the dirt pile, noticing the striking colour difference between the clay and the hardpan. The clay added a slash of blue to the otherwise brown mound of dirt.
The digging went faster now, and finally, at the 22’ mark, Jake noticed a damp area forming in the clay. Curious to know if he was getting close to water, he borrowed a dirt auger from a neighbour. He climbed back down into the hole and, leaning heavily on the auger, started drilling down through the dense clay. He didn’t drill far before the auger suddenly pushed through the clay to the handle, and cold water bubbled up around its spiral blades. They had water! By the time Walter pulled the tools up in the bucket, his dad was standing in knee deep water and had to hurry to climb out of the hole as the water was rising quickly. By the next morning, the well had filled to within a few feet of the top of the hardpan, and it never drained down. The water came from a sandy aquifer, deep in the ground. It was cold and clean, and it tasted good. With the new well right outside the cabin, daily life became much easier. It was a huge step forward for the family.
Walt’s dad decided to build a barn in the open space between the cabin and the raised berm shortly after completing the well. The barn went up quickly. It was a simple structure with two stalls and a hayloft. Its sloped roof ended just a few feet above the top of the berm, though Walter didn’t realize the barn’s full potential right away, though he did notice it was possible to step up from the top of the berm onto the barn roof.
It wasn’t until the following winter, after a heavy snowfall, that he and his siblings discovered how perfect the setup was for sledding. They could start from the barn’s slanted roof, carry on down the snowy berm, and continue all the way to the rail grade at the bottom.
The new barn quickly became home to a Jersey cow, a breed known for rich milk and thick cream. After the cow calved that spring, Jake began milking her daily. He soon showed Walter how to squeeze the milk carefully into a tin pail so he could take over the chore when Jake was busy elsewhere. Walter carried the bucket of fresh milk into the cabin, where his mother let it sit until the cream rose to the top. She carefully skimmed off the cream and divided it, some for the family, the rest to sell to a nearby dairy. She poured the separated milk and cream they kept into pails and lowered into the well to stay cool.
One summer afternoon, Walter noticed a man and woman walking up to the cabin. Curious, he watched as his mother answered the door. The couple were there to complain. They’d bought cream from the local dairy, and it wouldn’t whip. They had gone to complain to the dairy, and the man there had told them the cream came from the Harms’ cow.
Walter stood by as Mary listened to their complaint. Without saying a word, she grabbed a whisk from the kitchen, marched over to the well, hauled up a bucket of cream, and began whipping it right then and there under the surprised gaze of the now speechless couple. In no time, she had a bowl full of thick, fluffy cream. She wouldn’t stand for that sort of talk about their cream!
During the first summer in Black Creek, the family made more improvements to their new home. Perhaps the most dramatic change occurred when a D8 Cat came and cleared land between the cabin and the road. The government contracted the heavy machine and its operator to help new VLA landowners clear their land, with the residents paying an hourly rate for the work. The D8 Cat chewed up the slope, unearthing huge stumps and uprooting the young trees that had sprouted up around them.
Before the operator finished, he pushed the stumps together near the top of the clearing. There was a tangle of roots reaching out in all directions, a wild sculpture of wood and dirt. Once they dried out, Walt started cutting the roots into sections for firewood.
Jake and their neighbour, Mr. Enns, had also arranged for the D8 to clear a rough track along the boundary between their properties. The rough lane gave both families better access to the back of their land and the creek that cut across their lots.
The bulldozer also flattened a wide strip of earth to form a proper driveway. Vehicles could turn off the Island Highway and drive straight up the cleared slope to the Harms’ cabin, now visible from the road. Walt helped his dad plant hazelnut trees along each side of the new driveway, so one day it would look tidy and welcoming.
Walter’s mom started a garden in the newly turned earth just below the cabin. The soil was not very fertile. Coniferous trees had covered the land and leached most of the nutrients from the soil. After digging manure into the soil, Mary had some success growing vegetables, though coaxing the garden to produce was an ongoing struggle.
On Saturdays, once his chores were done, Walter had more freedom. He and his siblings had a particular interest in the creek that crossed their lot about a quarter mile back in the bush. They accessed the creek by walking up the cleared track that bordered the Enns’ property and their own. It was impossible to get to the creek any other way. A dense thicket of “hardtack”, or bramble, grew in the wet soil along the banks of the creek. It was a thick snarl of branches, making it hard to walk through and easy to get lost in. The kids avoided it. One afternoon, they lashed several logs together to make a raft. None of them could swim, but they had a great time poling themselves back and forth across the creek. Other weekends, Walt spent time with Corny, a school friend who lived nearby. The two boys usually fished in the creek or explored the bush behind the cabin. The property was 300 feet wide and stretched back more than half a mile through a dense forest. Beyond the berm and rail grade, it became a tangle of new growth and old stumps. Trails, some from wildlife, others from the wandering cow, twisted in every direction. They never made it to the back of the property; the brush back there was too thick, and the ground too rough.
Some afternoons, Mary sent Walt into the bush to find the cow and bring it back to the barn. The cow roamed free, and although there were no fences, the bush was so dense she couldn’t go far. She was usually at a grassy area across the creek, on the Enns’ side of the cleared track. Beyond that was a thick stand of Douglas fir, and nothing that interested a cow. Sometimes Walt’s mom went to find the cow herself, a rifle slung over her shoulder. If she spotted a deer, she might take the shot. On those days, Jake would hike in after work, find the deer, quarter it, and carry it home. With no refrigeration, they smoked most of the meat to preserve it.
Sundays were days of rest and church. No matter how hard or dirty the work was through the week, the family was clean and well-groomed each Sunday for church. There were two Mennonite churches in the small community of Black Creek, the General Conference Mennonite Church of Black Creek (now the United Mennonite Church), and the Mennonite Brethren Church. The Harms family were members of the General Conference Church. On Sunday mornings, they would dress in their best clothes and go to the Sunday Service. Their parents dropped the kids off at the “brown house,” a small building beside the main church, where they attended Sunday school while the adults joined the service in the main building. The smaller building was also where older kids attended on Saturdays for German lessons. Although most Mennonite families spoke Low German at home and English in school, parents wanted their kids to learn High German too. The kids were not wild about those Saturday classes, but there was no getting out of them.
Despite the divisions between churches, Black Creek was a small community, and everyone knew everyone else. Several times a year, the family would attend a funeral or a wedding at the Mennonite Brethren Church. On Thanksgiving, the family was especially thankful, as they attended erntedankfest (harvest festival) services and festivities at both churches, one Sunday at their own, and the next at the Mennonite Brethren Church. During erntedankfest, community members brought the season’s best vegetables and produce to display. Community members auctioned off the produce to raise money for missions. People were out to give. Walter watched with surprise as a fellow paid $20 for a pumpkin, almost a week’s wages! That was just one of the generous gestures he saw; people really went above and beyond to donate.
During ernedankfest, there was a tremendous amount of food at both churches, and everyone was together. Corny’s family attended the Brethren Church, so for Walter, erntedankfest meant not just food and generosity, but two Sundays in a row with his friend. The food, the festivities, and the community spirit of entedankfest were always anticipated as the season approached and warmly remembered long after the annual celebrations passed.
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Author’s Notes:
N.B.1: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?"
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom, and you can read her story here, and now, “Learning to Fly” is the story of my dad.
Walter Harms was the oldest son of Mary and Jake Harms, Mennonites who fled to Canada in search of safety and the hope for a better future. He was a curious child, always interested in the land they lived on, and how things worked. As a young man, this curiosity led him to respond to an advertisement for flying lessons, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Walter is my dad, and this is his story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024-25. The story is pieced together from Dad’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person.
N.B.2: If you are interested in reading more about the Mennonite settlement of Grigorievka, Ukraine and the migration of its residents to Canada, you might find this account: Memories of Grigorievka, edited by Ted Friesen and Elisabeth Peters, published by the Canadian Mennonite University, to be enlightening.