Chapter 5: The "Powder Mule" and "Whistle Punk" Years
An introduction to real work
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Walter’s shoulder slammed hard into the door of the 1946 Chevrolet 4-door sedan. He was wedged into the back seat alongside his sisters and younger brother John, while Norman sat up front, held tightly by their mother. The car bounced around something fierce, even though they were going so slowly. Walter wondered if they would ever arrive at their destination. He tried to brace himself against the seat, and kept his complaints to himself, as did the rest of his family. The vehicle pitched again as Jake hit another pothole. Walter knew his dad didn’t shy away from a road less travelled, but this was a not just “less travelled”, it was barely a road at all.
The family was on their way to visit one of Jake’s brothers in Alberta. From Black Creek, they had driven to Nanaimo, boarded the steamship to Vancouver, and then made their way through the Fraser Valley along the Lougheed Highway to Hope. From there, they turned onto the newly built Hope-Princeton Highway on their way to Oliver, where they stayed overnight with Walter’s grandmother.
At that time, there was no road to drive straight across the province, most people crossed into the United States at Christina Lake, or Grand Forks, and drove on American roads before crossing the border back into Canada.
Jake had heard about an old mining route known as the Rossland-Cascade Road, a narrow, single-lane dirt road that offered a fully Canadian route through the mountains. The road began at Christina Lake and stretched 45 miles, winding its way over two steep mountain passes before reconnecting with a more maintained roadway near Rossland.
When Jake turned off the main highway at Christina Lake, spirits were high. It was already late in the day; it would soon be dusk. Before long, rain began to fall, lightly at first, but soon it was pelting the windshield. The road became more rugged. The old Chevy bounced around like a jackrabbit, its coil springs and elbow shocks well past their useful lifespan, though that road would have been a test for any vehicle. It didn’t take long for the usual chatter in the car to die down, and everyone silently hung on so they wouldn’t get tossed out of their seat.
They crawled along, gaining elevation with every switchback, until they were in the clouds. The fog was so thick Walter could barely see ten feet ahead. He watched his dad’s rigid profile – gripping the wheel, leaning forward as if each inch would allow him to see further into the blanket of fog. Without warning, his dad stopped the car, flung open the door, and wretched. The kids sat wide-eyed and silent, they had never seen their father like this. Jake climbed back in, shifted into gear, and continued on. No one spoke. For once, no one had any advice to offer. Walter had never seen his dad under so much strain.
It was well into the night before they finally reached Rossland, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief as the car lumbered onto a more maintained road. From there, they carried on to Trail, where they met Gunther, one of the young German fellows who had stayed with them a few years earlier. The other young men had married and had families of their own by then, by Gunther had stayed single, and now worked for the B.C. Parks Service. He was staying in a work camp at Champion Lakes Provincial Park, and he had invited the family to stay with him there. After briefly greeting Gunther, they warily climbed back in the car to follow him to the camp. The experience of the last few hours was still heavily on their minds. Walter wasn’t sure the family was up for another battering like they had just experienced.
The gravel road to the park was better, though, and it was easy to follow Gunther’s tail lights in the dark. On arriving in the camp, Gunther pulled up in front of a row of ATCO trailers and stopped. Jake parked, and the exhausted family stumbled out of the car, happy to feel solid ground under their feet. Gunther showed them the trailer where they would stay, it was set up to house a work crew, and it worked just fine for the family. They collapsed into bed, exhausted, and happy to have the ordeal of the Rossland-Cascade Road behind them.
The next day, Gunther gave them a tour of the camp. As Bull Cook, he wasn’t just the camp cook, he also oversaw the lodgings and managed the camp. After serving up a hearty breakfast and impressing Walter with his cooking skills, Gunther introduced them to another side of his work. He was also a stone mason, currently building the stone fire pits for each of the new campsites. Walter enjoyed wandering through the future campground, and listening to Gunther’s stories about the other parks where he had worked. Many of the campgrounds in Provincial Parks were being upgraded, and Gunther had worked at most of them.
The next day, after enjoying more of Gunther’s cooking and hospitality, the family set out for Nelson. The drive was far less eventful, and Walter enjoyed the small cable-ferry ride across the west arm of Kootenay Lake. They followed the winding road along the lake to Balfour, where they boarded a larger car ferry that took them across Kootenay Lake. The kids very much preferred the scenic, daytime ferry rides to the foggy night-time travel over the mountain road.
After another full day of driving, they arrived at their relatives’ farm in Alberta. Walter met cousins who were close to his own age. His uncle had a field in fallow, resting for two years before new crops were planted. Walter listened intently as his uncle described that, because the area was so dry, it was important to clear the weeds off a fallow field, so they didn’t leech water and nutrients from the soil. This became even more interesting to 14-year-old Walter, when his uncle told him he and his cousins could cultivate the field. That involved hitching a cultivator to an old John Deere tractor, then dragging it around the field. It was the first time Walter had driven a tractor like that, and he thought it was a pretty great way to spend a day.
After a good visit, on the way back home, the family experienced car trouble in earnest. Just outside Chilliwack, the Chevy began to struggle, and by Abbotsford, the family was browsing for a car in a used car lot. Jake bought a 1951 Mercury Meteor. It had a load of miles on it, almost 100,000, but it was affordable. They set out again, but by the time they reached Nanaimo and boarded the ferry, it was clear something was seriously wrong. Halfway between Naniamo and Black Creek, the engine seized completely. The exhausted family eventually made it home that night, happy for their own beds. That road trip had been quite something, there had been a lot of adventure, and a fair dose of misadventure as well.
Rather than buying yet another car, Jake put a new engine in the Meteor, and it turned out to be a pretty good vehicle after all. Walter learned to drive in the Meteor, on roads, not just “farm driving”.
Once the family was safely back home, a new school year began, and Walter turned 15. His dad also started a renovation on the cabin, which was a big project. The younger kids were getting bigger, though, and the family needed more space. The goal was to turn the cabin into a house.
Before the project began in earnest, Walter helped his dad build a lean-to on one of the sheds in the yard. Walter and his brothers would sleep in the lean-to while parts of the cabin were torn up for the renovation. That would leave a spare room in the cabin for Mary and the girls to move to when necessary as the renovation progressed. Jake was working at a sawmill at that time, and he brought home a bunch of "scants" – boards that were too thin to sell. The scants were just fine for building a lean-to, although the wood was still green. When they dried, the cracks in between the boards widened to half an inch or more. Once Walter and his brothers had moved out to the lean-to, they could lie in bed and see what was going on in the yard. As fall became winter, it got colder in the evenings, so an air-tight heater was added to the lean-to. The lean-to was small, so it didn’t take much to heat it, and the stove was within an arm’s reach of Walter’s mattress. In the evening, Walter or one of his brothers filled the stove with paper, kindling, and wood, but didn’t light it. In the morning, Walter could reach out from under the warm blankets, open the door of the stove, scratch a match, light the paper and close the door. Five minutes later, the lean-to was stifling hot, and the boys could get up and dressed in comfort. The fire burned out almost as quickly as it had started, and the lean-to returned to the outside temperature, but the boys were already long gone and getting busy with the morning chores by the time that was a concern.
In school that year, Walter took a special interest in his Industrial Arts class. The school had built a new shop that housed the Home Economics and the Industrial Arts classrooms. Rather than the usual, basic woodworking projects students often worked on in shop class, in Walt’s class the students played a role in outfitting the shop with hand tools. They used the lathe to turn handles for tools, as well as learning the basics of metal work to make tools like hole punches. They even had a forge so they could temper the steel. As the class began turning out useful tools, Walter was inspired to look at building and creating items as more than just “work”, or “chores”, and see the ingenuity and craft in it. Having meaningful projects to work on also helped the school year fly by, and before long, the weather warmed, and the days grew longer again. As summer break drew near, there was a hum of anticipation among the boys in Walter’s class. Most of them were 16 years old and were going to try to get paying jobs through the summer. Walter was only 15, but he was going to try get real work as well.
Getting a job didn’t involve filling out applications. Early in the morning on the first day of summer holidays, Walter and many of his classmates joined hundreds of other men at the marshalling yard in Campbell River. This was where all the logging companies, and everybody else picked up labour. Men who were looking for work showed up, lunch buckets under their arm, wearing hard hats and work boots, as foremen from different companies walked around selecting workers. Although the legal age to work was 16, and Walter was only 15, he was tall for his age and was quickly selected by a foreman from a road-building company that was contracted to clear a swath of land for a new logging road.
He was assigned to the blasting crew, and told his job was to be the “powder mule”. The blasting crew was responsible for blasting out stumps that were in the way of the new roadbed and were too large to remove by any other means. The powder mule carried dynamite, blasting caps, and other tools of the trade to the blast sites, where the powderman would set the charges. The equipment was lashed to a trapper nelson board, and Walter carried it on his back. His foreman advised him to stay steady on his feet, as he should avoid jarring his load. Walter noticed no one walked with him on the trail.
Walter was impressed by the powdermen. They set the charges around the stump, then, before they lit the fuse, Walter ran back down the steep hillside to alert the rest of the crew to the impending blast. Sometimes it took a whole load of dynamite to dislodge one stump. There was one stump that was so big the D8 Cat could park on it overnight. That one took two boxes of dynamite.
Walter’s crew was on early shift. The weather was hot and dry, and they wanted to minimize the risk of fire as they worked in the dry forest. Walter needed to get up at 2:00 am in the morning to catch the crummy, a truck that hauled the crew up the island to the job site. That meant he had to go to bed much earlier than the rest of the family each evening. The renovation on the cabin was complete, and although there was much more space, his siblings were still rowdy in the early evening when he needed to turn into bed. He hauled his mattress down to the basement under the cabin. In the renovation, a new concrete wall enclosed the basement, leaving it cool, dark, and quiet. It became Walter’s summer bedroom.
One afternoon in the middle of summer while Walter was at work, a Worker’s Compensation Board inspector visited the job site. He was looking for safety infractions and underage workers.
Before Walter knew what was happening, his foreman said to him, “Sorry son, you are fired. Get your lunch and go sit in the crummy.” As he was driven off the worksite, he realized had been the only under-aged worker on the site. Confusion turned to resentment. His classmates were all still working, and he was going home.
Fired. The word rattled around in Walter’s head. What was he going to do now? He trudged home from where the crummy had dropped him off, his shoulders slumped. He must have looked as dejected as he felt, because his neighbour, Aaron Enns, called out and asked why he looked so glum.
“I was fired. I’m too young” Walter said. He told Aaron about the inspector’s visit. Aaron didn’t seem troubled at all.
“Come to work with me. The inspector has already been to our site, and it’s unlikely he’ll come back this summer,” Aaron said.
Walter met Aaron the following morning and got a ride in a crummy to an Elk River Timber Company job site. He was hired on the spot and given the job of “whistle punk”.
He had never seen a high-lead logging system in action before. He was quickly given an overview. There was a tall tree called a spar tree, stripped of its branches and rigged with a heavy-duty pulley up near the top of the tree. A thick steel cable called the main line ran through the pulley at the top of the spar tree, though a yarding-machine, and out into the forest, like a giant clothesline. Out in the bush, it was attached to a tail block at the furthest point of the logging site. Heavy rigging was fixed to the cable. An engineer ran the yarding-machine, while loggers attached 28-foot chokers – steel cables – around logs deep out in the forest, and attached them to the rigging so the yarding-machine could drag them into the clearing where they could be loaded onto trucks. Some logs were so massive they needed two chokers. Walter saw one cedar log that was 12 feet in diameter.
Walter’s job as the whistle punk was a vital communication link between the engineer on the yarding-machine, who controlled the lines, and the loggers in the bush. The engineer couldn’t see the loggers, and he needed to know when the rigging was in place for the crew to put chokers on another log, or when to haul the log out of the bush.
As the whistle punk, Walter carried about 1000 feet of whistle wire, more formally known as cab-tire cable, coiled around his neck. It hung in long loops almost down to his knees, making walking through the bush awkward. One end of the cable was attached to a whistle on the yarding-machine, and the other had a switch called a bug. When he closed the contacts on the bug, the whistle would blow. He watched for hand signals from the loggers, then used the bug to blow signals to the engineer. Once the chokers were secured around a log, and connected to the rigging, the loggers gave Walter a hand signal, and he blew the whistle for the engineer. The engineer fired up the yarding-machine and pulled the log out of the bush. Once the log was released, and ready to be piled up, or loaded onto a logging truck, the engineer would send the rigging back out into the bush. Again, the loggers would signal to Walter when the rigging was in the correct location for the next log, and Walter would sound the whistle for the engineer to stop the yarding-machine.
In addition to watching for signals from the loggers, Walter had to pay close attention to protect the wire on the ground. On occasion, the wire would become damaged, and he used the black electrician’s tape and the tools he carried to quickly repair it.
Once, while the crew was repositioning the rigging, a D8 Cat operator drove over the whistle wire, the grousers on the cat’s tracks cutting the wire into 8-inch pieces. Walter was a distance from the cat, and unaware it had happened. The engineer was sending the rigging back out to the crew, and everything was in motion. Walter saw the signal from the crew as the rigging swung into position, so he tapped the bug to convey the message to the engineer. There was silence. The whistle didn’t blow. Walter realized there was a problem, the rigging was still moving. If the engineer didn’t stop, the rigging would hit the tail block, and the whole line would need to be reset. Walter began running to get within eyesight of the operator to signal him manually. He stumbled over the uneven ground, trying to collect up the cable as he went, flinging it around his neck in large loops, trying not to strangle himself. The unwieldy coil dangling around his legs threatened to trip him up and throw him to the ground. Still, he clambered along the rough track as quickly as he could. Even when he was within sight of the engineer, frantically waving his arms, it took a dangerously long time to attract his attention. Finally, just before the tail block was pulled down, the engineer saw Walter, and stopped the yarding-machine.
With the crisis averted, still trembling from adrenaline and effort, Walter began collecting up the lengths of whistle-wire that had been cut by the bulldozer. He needed to repair the cable before the loggers were ready to make the next move.
The work was hard, but the pay was good. Walter earned $1.80 an hour, a top wage for the time. Most labourers made around $1.25, and a skilled carpenter could earn $2.00 an hour. He and his classmates were paid like men and expected to work like men. On payday, Walter brought his cheque home and handed it over to his mother, who added it to the household funds. She always gave him a bit of spending money in return, though he rarely had the time, or much interest, in spending it. What mattered more was the quiet shift he saw taking place at home. With his wages added to the family’s finances, they weren’t just scraping by anymore. They could make real progress, and in small ways, life became easier.
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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, the route Walter’s father followed, you might find this account: Memories of Grigorievka, edited by Ted Friesen and Elisabeth Peters, published by the Canadian Mennonite University, to be enlightening.