Fond memories of Junior Ranger program

A few weeks ago it was announced that the provincial government was
closing down its Ontario Ranger program as part of its far-ranging debt
reduction efforts. From the description of the program, I take it to be
a lineal descendant of the old Junior Ranger program. That reminder
brought back memories of a summer well spent.
In 1963, I and 26 other 17-year-old Ontario males found ourselves near
Red Lake, employed by what was then the Department of Lands and Forests,
later Ministry of Natural Resources. We were Junior Rangers and in
those days our numbers were legion across the province. We were a lot of
guys, the girls getting their own camps perhaps five years later.
Getting there was half the fun. A whole bunch of us had been mistakenly
directed to Sioux Lookout when we were supposed to be at Pakwash
Provincial Park on the Red Lake road. To move us, we were loaded into
the back of a large uncovered stake truck with bare wooden benches
running along each side of the box. We sat down, flinging our baggage
under the seats or into the aisle in front of us. Pakwash was 180
kidney-jarring miles away on a cool, late June evening.
When we got in around midnight, things weren’t quite ready. For the
first three nights we slept with one blanket, no pillow, on the floor of
a tent-frame which was basically a plywood and two-by-four box with a
canvas cover. It was like heaven when the cots came.
There was no such thing as a wash house, rather there was a rough-lumber
wash stand on the beach with basins hanging from a cross pole. You took
a basin, walked to the lake, got your water and returned to the stand
to freshen up. A friend from those days remembers we were told to bring
“soap that floats” so we could wash up as best we could in the lake
without losing the soap.
When I think about it, a lot of what we experienced that summer would
bury the premier in lawsuits if it happened today. Oh, I suppose we did
some grumbling but it was mostly in fun, and instead of feeling
aggrieved and in line for a settlement, nobody really complained. This
was too much of an adventure.
I must mention the sharp objects. We prided ourselves on how keenly we
could sharpen our axes and one good-natured giant of a guy carried a
Bowie-sized hunting knife on his belt. That camp was a groaning buffet
for lawyers, but at the end of summer nobody had been seriously hurt.
I gather that the ranger program ran out of steam partly because once it
had been in operation a few years, there was little work left to do in
the parks to occupy a summer. That did not seem to be the case at
Pakwash, which was a fairly new park with a fair bit to be done.
We cut roadways by ax and brush hook, cleared slash and shovelled gravel
when the truck came. We dug by hand post holes, outdoor toilet holes
and ditches.
Two large docks were made from scratch: Our foreman sawed down tall jack
pines which we limbed and peeled and dragged down to the shore to build
the cribs. We filled the cribs with rocks, decked them with rough
lumber and slapped the creosote to them.
There was always park clean-up and general maintenance. We worked eight-hour days, six days a week at 50 cents an hour.
Early on at Pakwash, I asked a department employee why they would take a
bunch like us, pay us and feed us to get us to do this work. His frank
reply: “Well, if it wasn’t you guys, they’d have to hire a bunch of
winos to do it and in no time they’d be gone or drunk and harassing the
visitors.”
Our tour of duty at the camp was interspersed with a handful of tours
and presentations on tree species, local geology, etc. One of our
guest-presenters was Jack McKirdy, an early-time guide and outfitter on
Lake Nipigon and inventor of McKirdy’s Fly Repellent, an unctuous but
effective bug dope. Jack gave us a thorough rundown on life in the bush
and capped it by doing several chin-ups from the rafters in the cook
house. He was in his early eighties.
If anyone was ever moved to complain about the conditions at Pakwash
’63, it would never be about the cooking. After a stumbling start with a
cook who may have had a drinking problem, we were blessed with the
arrival of Marie Snow, a tiny angel who treated us like her sons and
cooked accordingly. The hamburgers came with home-made buns.
From what I have heard, in later years the JR program began to be
weighted more toward supposed youths at-risk or those belonging to
minorities. It seems we accomplished much the same without the tweaking
of social engineers.
We spanned the gamut of Ontario society. We included the son of the
president of Studebaker Canada and a couple of native guys from the
northern reserves.
One fellow who became a lifelong friend grew up literally in the shadow
of the steel mills in Hamilton. This particular JR had never seen the
real North and was so blown away by it that he remembers every single
thing about that summer after nigh-on 50 years.
I have in my possession a photo of most of the Pakwash gang gathered in
and around the notorious stake truck, along with foremen Charlie and
David Bannatyne. A couple of things catch your eye in this picture:
Nobody is wearing jeans, rather plain cotton work pants, usually brown.
And nobody is fat. We appear to be in pretty good shape, though a few
are indulging in a smoke.
I like to think, and I think I’m right, that when our seven-week stint
was up and it was time to leave, most of us didn’t entirely want to go.
Surely we also felt a measure of pride in living and working in basic
conditions, or what was tossed off as “roughing it.” It was a very good
summer.
Bob Ekholm
Thunder Bay