Chapter 4 - Visitors, and Odd Jobs
Finding family, and making ends meet
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It was Sunday afternoon. Gerda and Margaret had tidied the kitchen after lunch while their mom went to lie down for a rest. Their dad quietly called the kids back to the table and said he had some news. Curious, they gathered around.
Jake told them that their mom needed an operation, and in just a few days, he would take her to the hospital in Comox. She would have to stay there for some time afterward and would need extra help when she came home. The kids were worried and full of questions. Jake reassured them that everything was going to be alright, and once their mom healed, she would be as good as new.
The older kids glanced at the younger ones with concern. Norman and John were still too young for school, so who would look after them during the day? That’s when Jake told them their Oma — his mother — was coming to stay until Mary was back on her feet. In the morning, Mary would travel to Vancouver to meet Oma and accompany her on the sailing to Nanaimo. The kids, though still worried, were looking forward to seeing their grandmother.
But when their mother returned from Vancouver, Oma wasn’t with her. Instead, there was Uncle Herb, grinning from ear to ear! The kids squealed with excitement. What a surprise! They knew if Uncle Herb was there, they were in for an adventure. Mary explained that Oma was a bit unwell, and wasn’t able to travel just then, so she had sent Herb in her place.
Although Herb was still a teenager himself, and was missing school to be there, he enthusiastically took on the challenge of caring for his nieces and nephews. Despite his eagerness, however, it quickly became clear that his cooking skills were, at best, primitive. Walt suspected his uncle didn’t really know how to cook at all.
On the day their mom left for the hospital, Uncle Herb shot a couple of grouse for dinner. That part was normal; their mom cooked grouse for dinner regularly. After plucking the birds, Herb flipped them onto their backs, tied their legs together, and placed them in a pan. This wasn’t how their mom did it, and the girls said as much. Uncle Herb said he had seen a photograph, and this was the way it was done.
He slid the pan into the woodstove oven, then he packed the firebox of the stove with as much wood as it would hold, before going out to shoot more birds. His idea was the fire would burn slowly and cook the grouse while he was gone. The fire did indeed cook the birds, first with a roaring sear, then it roasted them into shrivelled husks as it burned itself out. When Jake and the kids sat down to dinner that night, they stared wide-eyed at the dark, leathery lumps on their plates. Jake offered a bit of advice, “You know, Herb, you really should take out the guts before you cook them,”. Walt and his siblings picked tough, chewy strips of meat off the bones where they could. It wasn’t the best meal they’d had that year.
The next day went better. When the older kids came home from school, the house smelled of roasting meat. Uncle Herb pulled a pan from the oven containing a rather sizeable chunk of roast that looked and tasted good. It was tender and flavourful. The kids asked what it was. Uncle Herb told them it was a crow he’d shot on the property. Dinner continued with animated talk about how surprising it was that a crow had so much meat on its bones, and how it tasted oddly familiar. Only later did they learn the truth: Herb had shot a deer while they were at school. They were just eating venison, as they often did.
One afternoon, Herb asked Walter for a bit of help. Curious, Walt went to see what he was doing out by the barn. Uncle Herb said that he was building a shower. Together, they hauled a tub up onto the roof of the barn on the berm side, drilled a hole into the side, and secured a hose in place. Herb said they could fill the tub with cold water from the well in the morning, and by evening, the sun would have warmed it enough for a shower. Walt was impressed, it was a pretty resourceful idea.
Not all of Uncle Herb’s plans worked so smoothly. Once, during a winter visit, he decided to make a pair of snowshoes. He found some willow boughs, shaped and secured them into teardrop frames, and wrapped them in burlap. After securing his creations to his boots, he enthusiastically set out across the deep snow. He was just far enough out that he couldn’t get back when the burlap gave way. Walt and his siblings had a great laugh as Herb sank to his waist in the snow, with the loops of willow up around his bum. He eventually figured out the burlap issue, but he hadn’t included toe-holes in the design. With every step, his snowshoes flung clumps of wet snow into his back pockets, to the great amusement of the kids. Herb’s ingenuity and attitude, and the fun and laughter it brought, left a lasting impression on Walter.
True to Jake’s word, Mary’s operation went well, and she returned home from the hospital as expected. After a period of recovery, she was back to running the household. Uncle Herb went home, and life went back to usual – until another relative arrived, and turned everything upside down again, in the best way.
Many years earlier, when Mary was just 14 and her parents had suddenly died back in Siberia, her youngest brother, Henrique, had been sent to an orphanage. When the Enns family took Mary in as a domestic worker and eventually migrated to Canada, she was separated from her siblings and lost all contact with them. Since arriving in Canada, Mary had lived with the fear that she might be the only one of her family to survive.
Imagine her astonishment when, through the Mennonite Church, her younger brother Henrique was able to contact her. She was over-joyed; it was an incredibly emotional reunion when he arrived in Black Creek. He told her he had indeed spent time in an orphanage but was taken in by a family named the Brauns. They eventually brought him to Canada. Now a grown man, he went by Henry Braun. He had recently been working in a gold mine in Yellowknife, but as soon as he learned Mary was alive, he made his way to Black Creek to be with her. He was just as thrilled to find his sister as she was to be reunited with him.
Uncle Henry quickly bought a small lot and built a two-room cabin, about a half mile from the Harms cabin. He was a frequent and welcomed visitor, making up for lost time. Walter liked Uncle Henry right away. He was a large man, strong, with a very kind nature. When Gerda became sick with the measles and had to lie in the dark to ease her headaches, Uncle Henry set up the ironing board nearby and did the ironing in the dark, just to keep her company. He also helped Walter with chores, especially with firewood. They spent evenings pulling the crosscut saw back and forth, as Uncle Henry told Walter stories about his life. Walter was captivated – there was a whole world out there, and his uncle made it sound so interesting.
Even Uncle Henry’s car was fascinating. It was huge, an old DeSoto Coupe with only two seats and wooden spoke wheels. He told Walt he had bought it for $5. Everything about him seemed cool.
Not long after Uncle Henry arrived, Walt’s dad got a car too, old Ford Model A. It was already old when they got it, and while it was more function than flash, it certainly made life easier for the family. Before owning the car, Jake had travelled everywhere on his bicycle. He rode it to work in all kinds of weather, and used it to haul supplies. Walter remembered one day watching his dad push the old bike up the driveway with a 100lb bag of flour balanced over the handlebars. The car simplified many of those basic tasks.
Soon, the weather cooled, the days shortened, and Walter and the rest of his siblings, except Norman who was still too young, started a new school year. Although school wasn’t especially difficult for Walter, he was a lousy student. He did just enough work to get by. After school, he had chores, and he didn’t have interest or time for homework. Besides, the family had a new enterprise: they were harvesting cones for the BC Forest Service.
The Forest Service had a nursery, and they paid $3 per bag for Douglas fir cones, and $10 per bag for Hemlock. The problem was that Hemlock cones were smaller, harder to find, and it took more to fill a bag. Cone collecting became a regular after-school and weekend activity. Mary took all the kids along, sometimes on their own property, and sometimes onto the large tracts of crown land nearby. Walter did the climbing, scrambling high into the tall firs to reach the cones at the top of the trees, while the others searched for cones on the ground. The trees were full of pitch, and their hands stayed grubby and sticky for days afterwards.
Occasionally, they came across a squirrel cache. A good cache could fill a bag or two, so finding one was a cause for celebration for everyone – except the squirrel.
Eventually, the Forest Service began using helicopters to harvest cones, and the Harms family had to find new ways to make extra money. They picked berries in their neighbour’s raspberry fields, earning only a couple of cents a pound, but every penny helped. Another income stream was selling eggs. Jake built a chicken coop and bought a flock of laying hens. There were about 60 hens the first year, and Jake put Walter in charge of them. Walt fed and watered the birds, cleaned the coop, collected the eggs, and cleaned them for sale. Some years, they had as many as a hundred chickens, and one year, they even raised turkeys.
One night, after Walter had carried in the last armload of wood for the night, and the family was beginning bedtime preparations, there was a knock at the door. It was unusual to have visitors arrive so late. Jake answered, and Walter peeked past him to see a group of young men. They greeted his dad in German – not Plautdeutch, like the family spoke, but High German. Walt’s mom gathered the kids and hurried them off to bed. Walter went reluctantly, his curiosity piqued.
The next morning, when Walter stepped out into the living room on his way to the outhouse, he saw four young men stretched out in makeshift bedding on the floor. One of them caught his eye and gave him a shy grin as he tip-toed past. By the time Walter was ready to start his chores, the young men were up, had folded up their bedding, and offered to help with chores.
Walter learned they were German refugees who had just arrived in Canada. His parents called them “the boys”, but to Walter, they were men, at least in their twenties. They told him how they’d been drafted into the war as soon as they turned sixteen, handed machine guns, and sent straight to the trenches. By then, the German army was already in retreat, and the front lines were in chaos. Walter tried to imagine himself, just a few years older than he was, being sent to war. He couldn’t. And he couldn’t picture these soft-spoken, gentle young men in a trench either. He knew little about war, but he considered these fellows particularly unsuited to it. It must have been awful. Now, they were away from home and family, in a strange new country.
The men stayed with the Harms family for only a few days before finding work and renting a cabin nearby. Walter continued to see them regularly, and they often visited. They always pitched in when there was heavy work to do, and they became like extended family.
Before the snow fell the year Walter was ten, he and his dad found a massive tree that had been blown down deep on their property. It was a huge Douglas fir, and its roots stood twelve feet high where they had been ripped from the ground. The massive root system held the base of the tree off the ground, keeping it from rotting like most of the other blow-down.
The tree was far too large to move. Jake arranged with a neighbour, Mr. Nickel, to use his dragsaw to cut it into rounds. A team of horses pulled the saw into the bush, and the men set it up for the first cut. Each round of the tree was about a foot thick so that, once split, the wood could fit into the stove. After every cut, the saw had to be re-positioned, which often meant clearing more bush around the tree. Even with the dragsaw, slicing that tree up was a massive job.
The horses hauled the wood out of the bush on a stone boat. The tree had been about 120 feet to its first limb – a real monster – but it solved their firewood problem. Walter sawed and chopped his way through that tree for over a year.
In his spare time, Walter had another big job. When Jake built the cabin, he had set it on a slope and propped one side up on pillars, planning to eventually dig out a rough basement for storage. He had tested the idea the first winter, storing sacks of carrots and other vegetables under the cabin. Unfortunately, the deer welcomed the easy access to crunchy treats, and there wasn’t much left for the family.
To make the space usable, the ground under the cabin needed to be dug out and enclosed. That task fell to young Walter, who was the only one small enough, yet strong enough, to work beneath the cabin. He spent a few hours after school each day digging. At first, the work wasn’t too difficult. He began at the end of the cabin where the natural slope left the most space between the ground and the cabin floor. He dug through the topsoil, working his way deeper under the cabin, making steady progress.
Near the middle of the cabin, his shovel struck something solid – hardpan. Remembering how hard his dad had worked to chip into the hardpan when they’d dug the well, he tried to make a dent in the concrete-like earth, but it was too much. His dad eventually suggested he stop. Walter had already dug out a decent storage space, deep enough that he could at least stand up in it, so they called it finished. They nailed skirting around the base to keep out the deer and other curious creatures, and the space was ready for cold storage.
The year Walter turned eleven, the community of Black Creek got electricity. By then, the family had lived there for two years, and life without power felt normal. They used oil lamps for light, and Mary’s washing machine had a gasoline engine. The washing machine had to sit outside because of the noise and exhaust. It was notoriously difficult to start, but Mary suffered from bad eczema, which made hand-washing painful. The gas-powered washer, for all its trouble, was the best option.
The first electricity came from a diesel generating plant and ran at 25-cycle, not the standard 60-cycle. Although appliances were available, with motors wound down for 25-cycle power, Jake didn’t buy them. The next year, when the first dam on the Campbell River system was completed at Elk Falls, 60-cycle power became available. Jake hired an electrician to wire the cabin. Walter watched intently as the man installed a fuse box with four spaces – though only three were used. Each room got a light and a plug; the kitchen received two. Even the front porch got an outlet, and that’s where they plugged in their first real electrical appliance: a brand-new washing machine.
The lights in each room were basic, each a bare bulb with a pull-string, but they changed the experience of daily life in the Harms’ cabin. They felt like progress.
Walter experienced another kind of progress at school. The two-room school in Black Creek taught kindergarten through grade six. When students reached grade seven, they took a bus to Tsolum school, about six miles away. When Walter started grade seven, he developed a newfound interest in school. His teacher, Dick Eisenor, made learning interesting, and sparked Walter’s natural curiosity. His academic performance improved drastically. Later, he had another teacher, Miss. Cartwright, a strict disciplinarian, and continued to do well under her watch.
After school, and during summer breaks, Walter kept working. As he got older, the work became more interesting and often came with pay. The summer he turned thirteen, he landed his first real job: forking hay into the loft of a barn on a neighbour’s farm. It was only supposed to last a day, but he would be paid.
Walter climbed up into the loft and waited while a team of horses pulled a wagon heaped with loose hay to the front of the barn. Large forks hung on cables, suspended from a boom attached to the roof of the barn, waiting to scoop up a bundle of the hay and swing it up into the loft. Walter waited for the men to use a pulley to pull the bundle of hay up and position it in the middle of the loft, before releasing the forks. The hay dropped to the floor, raising a cloud of dust. Walter worked quickly to fork the hay to the corners of the loft, careful not to let it pile up too high in the center. Every layer got a scatter of salt to keep it from heating up and going mouldy, then Walter would stomp it down, packing it tight with his own body weight. As soon as he finished one load, another was coming in; there were two teams of horses working in rotation between the field and the barn.
By mid-afternoon, the loft felt like an oven. Dust floated in beams of sunlight and stuck to Walter’s sweat-soaked skin. His clothes were heavy with sweat and grime. At the end of the day, after being paid a quarter ($.25), he returned home, more tired than he had ever been. He walked right past the cabin and headed straight for the creek. There, he dunked into the cool water. It felt so good to scrub off the filth of the day.
He was pleased with his earnings. He knew exactly what he would spend it on: a box of .22 shorts – the smallest and cheapest ammunition available. At just 26 cents a box, they were perfect for target practice, and the occasional grouse. Walter had a single-shot .22 rifle, a Ranger that he’d bought second-hand. A brand-new Ranger cost $9.00 at Eaton’s, but he’d got his for half that. He wanted to improve his shooting; with a clean shot, a .22 could bring down a deer, though it wasn’t legal.
Mary still hunted for deer occasionally, usually when she was out looking for the cow. Walter hunted on weekends. The deer on the island were small, not much bigger than the jackrabbits he remembered from Osoyoos. A single deer didn’t feed the family for very long, but every bit of meat helped.
That same summer, when he was thirteen, Jake taught him to drive. The old Ford Model A had finally quit, and Jake now had a 1946 Chevrolet that he’d bought from a friend. The legal driving age in British Columbia was sixteen, but everyone expected farm kids to know how to drive. Most families Walt knew lived in much the same way – the women and kids cared for the home, the animals, and the land, while men worked in the bush and tried to make ends meet.
Many dreamed of turning their acreage of land into a full-fledged farm, but in truth, only a few succeeded. The rest, like the Harms family, lived with modest means and steady effort. Life in Black Creek followed a rhythm of hard work and gradual progress. But now and then, something disrupted that pattern.
In 1954, Walter’s Uncle Henry left for Alberta in search of work. Tragedy soon followed. The family received word that Henry had been in a car accident. He’d been thrown from the vehicle and landed on a culvert, severing a major artery in his leg. By the time anyone found him, it was too late.
Walter’s mother was devastated. She had lost her brother once as a child, and now she had lost him again. The news struck Walter hard. Henry had appeared unexpectedly, become part of their lives, and now, just as suddenly, he was gone.
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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.