DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush
Chapter 4 Working On the Railway
We are the navvies who work on the railway,
Swinging our hammers in the bright blazing sun
Living on stew and drinking bad whiskey
Bending our backs ‘til the long day is done.
~ Gordon Lightfoot
THE EXTRA GANG
Back in ’65 life took a desperate turn. I had to go to work on the ACR ‘extra gang’. That’s the track crew replacing derelict ties, rails and ballast to the railbed. The work is seasonal, hence the ‘extra gang’ to distinguish us from the year round section gangs who also maintained the track.
The crew was rough; jailbirds, the mentally challenged, everybody’s whacko, every mother’s problem, they were all there. All of them unwashed and prone to misunderstandings, looking like they chewed railway spikes and spat rust. This was in the days when jobs were plentiful and only a man needing money in a hurry or who was unemployable went up there.
You got some sense of what it would be like just by applying for the job. Nobody got into the ACR track gang employment office, no formal interview. There was a counter and you passed paper back and forth through a space in a glass front. They’d fill the form out for you if you needed help. There was a little round hole through the glass to speak through to answer the few simple queries they might have. If you looked husky and didn’t have any immediate court cases pending, you were hired.
We slept about thirty men to a bunk car. You might have to fight to get a top bunk or risk the man up top puking over the edge or pissing through the mattress. They all chewed. You would take a run from the end of the car to reach your bunk skidding and skating on the tobacco juice. You hopped up top and took your boots off and placed them darn near under your pillows so they wouldn’t be stolen and so that they would be there in case a drunk or sexual deviant accosted you in the night.
Mennen after shave was the biggest seller in the van. The worst of them drank it.
There was no sanitation, only outhouses and a few washstands that nobody used. You wore your clothes ‘til they rotted off. We were all covered in track grease, sweat, dirt and E.coli. Hell, you have to remember that back then the train toilets flushed directly on the track.
At night as a newcomer you were expected at least in a rite of passage, to play one of two games. You either wrestled with one of the guys or had to touch one of the bears that hovered around an open garbage dump beside the camp just out of sight in the bush. Do neither, and you found yourself in deep dirt with the rest of the boys. I saw what could happen in the wrestling matches and chose to touch the bear instead. Came very close too until some of the boys started playfully chucking rocks at it from atop a boxcar.
All this for one dollar an hour, which was below the minimum wage. Finally someone who could write blew the whistle and a government man came up. Then we got one dollar twenty-five, but I can’t recall getting any retroactive pay.
This was at Scully, a siding at Mile 206, ACR. A buddy of mine had a portable radio that if you held close to the rails of the track at night you could get the Sault Ste. Marie station. The hit that summer was the Rolling Stones ‘Satisfaction’. I could surely identify with that.
CONCUSSION
Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine
And I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that
But that again there’s only one I met
And he just smoked my eyelids
And punched my cigarette.”
~ Bob Dylan, Memphis Blues Again
THE COOKERY
Now let me tell you about the cookery. You had to climb five or six steps to get in the car. When the chore boy rang the iron triangle you had to be ready to move or be trampled. It was a race like it was the Last Supper.
They fed us. There were platters of steak. Pork chops and roasts, mountains of potatoes, salads, fruit and vegetables, bread and butter. And desserts- even for breakfast- pies, and cakes and lots of them. You could eat all you wanted. The man directly across from me was pure dinner theater. He ate everything with a knife, even peas. He was something but in many respects not unusual. When they called us in, men would rush to their places and take an entire pie or cake and over turn it on their plate and start with that.
After being there a couple of weeks, an older and semi-domesticated fellow and myself approached the cook. He was the spokesman- I didn’t have the guts or the credibility- I was young. He told her, politely, that we never got any desert and asked if occasionally she might put a piece of pie away for us. Well, she blew. Told us to fuddle off, get the duddle out of the cookery, don’t ever fuddle duddle speak to her again. She’d take a cleaver to us and boil up trouble between the Push and us.
We had broken the law of cookery. We had spoken which wasn’t allowed during mealtimes. Men got fired for it, perhaps slapped around by the burley Push. You didn’t say a word. The cookery folks wanted you to eat and get out. They were hard-used, and that alone was a good reason for silence. It was the same all over in bush cookeries. The saying was, “Quand on parle, on ne mange pas”.
HEALTH CARE
The Push on the track repair gang back in the sixties when I was there had little patience for anyone feeling poorly and unable to work. In his mind a sick man was a sissified malingerer, a possible contagion (he was thinking more in terms of attitude here), and therefore not to be tolerated. You’d hear him bellow at the rest of us, “Any man who ain’t dead in three days is not sick at all!”
Old fellows have told me that it was the same in the logging camps away back. A sick man might languish in his bunk with, say, the flu or pneumonia, and at best the cook might prepare a mustard plaster for his chest. It was hard to recover in a drafty camp heated by a raging wood stove that gave you two choices. A man could roast his head by lying toward the stove and freeze his feet that pointed to the wall or turn around and bake his toes and refrigerate his head. And more than likely his pajamas were the same set of work clothes he’d spent the entire winter in. Comfy.
There was sometimes simmering resentment in the camps. You see, if a horse got sick it was more likely to see a vet before a sick man a doctor. Often a contractor owned the horses, which were expensive then, so they took good care of them. A bucheron was a disposable item and could be replaced at no cost. That was the way of it.
It was never quite that bad on the track gang. The most common ailment there was called the Scully Quickstep.
ARCHIE MACINNES, PORK CHOP, CASTRO, AND FRENCH GUYS
The only other high school student on the gang was Archie MacInnes. Archie was about five feet six, tough, wiry, fearless, and a foreman. He’d been on the gang in the summers since he was fourteen. He had come up with a more efficient way to spread ballast on the track, so they let him run that crew. Archie, youth aside, was the kind of guy who didn’t have to demand respect, you just naturally gave it to him without really thinking about it. He helped me along, insisted I take the bunk on top of his. Archie knew I was about to get a stark initiation.
Pork Chop was a lifer on the bottom bunk across from us. He didn’t trust ACR accounting, and so he had a calendar tacked up and a pencil hung there on a string. After each day’s work he’d painstakingly cross out the day and wright down the hours he put in.
A steady hand like Pork Chop was allowed to take a few days off every couple of months for a spree downtown. After one such occasion Archie and I picked him up after he flowed out of the baggage car and helped him to his bunk. While we were pouring him into it Archie glanced at Pork Chop’s calendar with a look of calculation, picked off the pencil, and stroked off another week or so.
The next morning we lay in bed, squinting out of one eye, suppressing a chuckle. We watched old Pork Chop dangle his legs over his bunk, open his whiskey embalmed eyes, scratch himself, and mutter as he stared at the calendar, awe-struck over what a great time he must have had on a holiday that turned out longer than he figured.
Castro was an immigrant from somewhere, Greece he said, if he remembered correctly. He was heavily-bearded and wore a towel for a turban. While you were working with him he’d be audibly converting how much he was making into drachmas, since he liked to tally his increasing net worth.
Evenings he’d be studying the Sears catalogue admiring a camping cook set he’d ordered- one of those kids’ kits of nested pots, pans, and utensils. He’d also send for a little knapsack. When they arrived he said he was heading for the bush, independence, and would work no more on the track.
The stuff came and Castro left. A freight engineer told us he’d spotted him miles to the south of us and that was it. I’ve often wondered if Castro ever picked up his pay or reported in anyway; who would care or who would ever know.
There were a lot of French guys on the crew from Hearst, a town at the north end of the line. These fellows were rough, unpredictable, touchy, right on the edge, an image they liked to promote. They were largely uneducated. In those days there were no French high schools in the province so they never really had a chance: their community had been marginalized for generations.
I got on with them alright and used to play poker with them in the evenings. The currency was cigarettes, and they’d be changing hands all night until they were coated black by dirty track-greased fingers and a sophisticate like myself no longer wanted to smoke them. We should have used something for chips.
We were playing one night when the guy across from me started to cuss in French, and all the guys except me knew an eruption was coming and ran out. He’s sat on a wad of chewing gum that stuck to his trousers. I didn’t see this as too big a deal and besides I was holding a red-hot hand so I kept my seat. He started to trash the car- things were flying- so I took off with only my regrets.
Another time I was lining the track with a bunch of them. That’s a job where there’d be ten or more of us with lining bars dug in against the rails, the idea being to shift and straighten the track. The Push would stand about sixty, seventy yards down the track, eyeballing it. The track ran north and south. If it had to be moved west he would holler ‘Winnipeg’, to the east ‘Montreal’. One time we couldn’t seem to get it right. We used too much or not enough force, shoved it over too far or too little. We’d tried a dozen times or so ‘til a French guy snapped, hurled his lining bar down the track at the foreman, screamed ‘Quebec City’, and quit- taking a few of his buddies with him.
This was a regular occurrence with those guys. But they were good, very hard, tireless workers and were always rehired when they returned broke and ready to go again.
THE GANG
“Those that aren’t retarded are too drunk to tell.”
~ ACR Human Resources employee circa 1965
OZZIE AND ROSIE, THEIR STORY AS TRACY MULLINS REMEMBERS
Ozzie and Rosie were partners. They were both in their late forties or early fifties, on the skids and rarely seen out of each other’s company. Ozzie dressed in a union suit, the components of which were wool pants, suspenders, a ratty wool jack shirt, and an old army greatcoat, accessorized by a green toque. Rosie looked about the same except he wore a railway man’s cap. When heading out on a spree he’d dig out his brown plaid pants and a green plaid suit coat out of the bottom of a plastic garbage bag that served as luggage. Rosie was the fashion plate of the two. Both men had perpetual damp and greasy hand-rolled smokes hanging out of their tobacco stained mouths unless they were well-heeled just after a payday in which case it was a tailored made.
As for me, well I always fancied myself as a healer and could, I’m sure, have been a doctor had I ever spent any time in school. Anyway, I always carried a kit full of herbal remedies that was handy at jackknife surgery, like lancing boils and digging out ingrown toenails. So, of course, when Rosie came to me with a head ailment I knew I could help.
Rosie was kind of hard to understand because he communicated in Joual which was a stir-fry of French/Ojibwa/English, but the gist of it was he had brain cancer because his head hurt when he lay down to sleep.
He pulled off his cap to reveal a brown knobby head with wispy tufts of hair plastered against the skin. After a dousing of hot soapy water that made him howl I wrapped his head in a hot, wet towel liberally soaked with Pine Sol. After a 20-minute marinade it was back to a soap and water scrub. At the bottom of it I found a baby pink scalp. He just needed an excavation of the track grease, creosote, dead skin, and mud he’d accumulated over the last year or so. Rosie initially thanked me but grumbled later that his newly-scrubbed head itched terribly.
The next time I saw Rosie and Ozzie was in Hawk Junction. They’d come up off Joe Hammer’s section gang at Montreal River for a time at the Big Bear Tavern. After a heady night of bullshit and booze the boys started thinking about a flop. They knew that they were no longer welcome in the Trainman’s bunkhouse because they smelled so bad, so they were heading over the tracks to the diesel shop to sleep on the warm deck of an idling train. They’d staggered about half way when Ozzie realized they were running out of smokes. Since he was the one with the dough, Rosie became the designated and was sent back to the Big Bear.
Ozzie tramped on over the sidings ‘til a string of ore cars loomed obstructively before him. Too liquored to climb over the top or to walk around, Ozzie made a fatal error. He crawled under a car, was caught and dragged by a shunting train. His near unidentifiable body was found a short time later by a switching crew.
They thought it was Rosie and passed the word by radio. Everyone gathered yelling that Rosie’d been run over. Rosie stumbled out of the Big Bear and headed towards the commotion. As he heard his name being linked to his death in all shouting he became hysterical. A couple of guys dragged him over to the bunkhouse. He spent the remainder of the night curled up in a ball on the floor softly moaning “Not Rosie, Not Rosie, Not Rosie,” like perhaps he wasn’t quite certain. For all of us it was a sobering episode.
*****
Robert Currier, or as many know him- Farmer Bob, has lived on the land traditionally most of his life. He has built wilderness log cabins, logged, guided and prospected. He was the first recipient of the CBC/Big Brothers “Northern Moose Award” for best personifying the spirit of Northern Ontario.
Farmer Bob lives on his Mockingbird Hill Homestead Farm in beautiful Hiawatha Highlands, which backs onto Odena, Mile 9 on the Algoma Central Line. The farm is a singular burst of colour and beauty and one of Sault Ste. Marie’s premier attractions. It is open to the public year round.
Mockingbird Hill is a horse drawn replica of a Métis homestead in the thirties and forties. In summer the farm features wagon rides, market gardening, a petting barn, a corn maze, and a spectacular wild flower walk.
In winter Mockingbird Hill offers horse drawn sleigh rides and cutter rides on trails that are breathtakingly beautiful by day and romantically lantern-lit by night.
De Big-Shot Train by Robert Currier can be purchased at the Art Gallery of Algoma.
1.705.253.4712
