On a deathly still winter night it could be heard for miles and it sent shivers down your spine.
There are certain sounds that, particularly if first heard when we’re young, resonate in our minds forever — once heard, never forgotten.
I have no other reason to remember when, as a child, I accompanied my mom as she returned home from visiting her friend Win who lived several miles south of and around Swan Lake from our home on Brett Avenue.
Win’s husband Ozzie, like my dad, was away at sea in the navy; hence the friendship between career seamen carried over to their wives and kids, particularly when the dads were away.
Rural Saanich, on a winter night in the early 1950s, was dark, almost black — little traffic, no street lights, no Uptown Shopping Centre to light the way. To me, walking beside my mother as she pushed the baby carriage with my brother Bruce, it was so cold and overwhelmingly, even oppressively, dark that we might well have been the only people on earth.
That’s when I heard it.
It was everything that ex-Prairie folk like to say and write about it — the lonesome wail of a steam locomotive in the distance.
Now, I’m not talking about the higher pitch of a small engine such as they run at the B.C. Forest Discovery Centre, but the full, deep sigh of a full-sized CNR freight locomotive. On a deathly still winter night it could be heard for miles and was so mournful that it sent shivers down your spine.
That whistle, the squeal of steel wheels on steel rails and the one-of-a-kind grunts of shunting box cars are part of my DNA from growing up beside the railway tracks — something I wouldn’t trade for anyone else’s youthful experiences.
There was another sound of my childhood that I can still hear in my mind’s ear, the sound that inspired this reverie. A front-page story in Friday’s Vancouver Island Free Daily told about a new wrinkle in selling dairy products: a milk dispenser.
It’s the brainwave of Morningstar Farm which has a market at Parksville and its new way of dispensing milk into consumers’ own containers is thought to be “the first of its kind in B.C. and possibly in Canada”.
It brings back memories of my summer working at Pendrays’ farm, Saanich Lake. Besides sweeping the barn, baling and herding cows there was the introduction to bottling the finished product. Every dairy farm had its own dairy where the milk was cooled, separated and bottled for delivery.
We’re talking raw, not pasteurized milk, ca 1957. Milk with lots of butterfat that rose to the top of each bottle and created several inches of cream like the meringue topping on a lemon pie. It was so thick that you had to shake the bottle vigorously to distribute the cream evenly through the milk. Once, I forgot, and took a swig directly from the bottle; the cream was so thick and so strong in flavour that I almost gagged…
But back to Morningstar Farm’s which, I quote, “offers its own, labeled one-litre glass bottles, for a one-time cost of $4. They can be used, washed and re-used, similar to refilling a growler at a brew pub…”
Which is precisely my point — real glass bottles, not plastic or waxed containers.
But there’s something missing in Morningstar’s program. It all sounds very efficient and appealing and all that, but it’s missing the key element (besides that of delivering milk to your home as in the old days). I’m referring to the musical chorus of dozens of milk bottles, particularly the empties, as they rattled inside the metal dividers of milk crates.
You could hear John McLean or Bob Pendray coming from at least a block away as they made their rounds, delivering fresh quarts of milk and picking up the empties for re-use. Milk bottles, you see, were returned and re-used over and over again, long before the word recycling came to the fore.
That sound of those jingling quarts and pints, like that of a real steam engine on a winter night, aren’t just memorable, they’re indelible. Something to be recalled and savoured when memory’s on the job.