Eastern Passage by Farley Mowat Read Free Book Online

20-by-15-foot cellar under one end of it. I had hoped to cut the logs from trees growing on our own property but there were not nearly enough of sufficient girth. This stymied me until I heard about a newborn company offering construction logs at a price even I could afford. The upstart Air-Lock Log Company’s product was cheap because the logs were actually industrial waste – the cores of birch logs that had been peeled down to a uniform diameter of six inches to produce thin sheets of veneer from which plywood had been manufactured. At a total cost of $404.60, delivered, these logs were the answer to a poor man’s prayer. Ours were scheduled for delivery in the later part of May, which meant we would have to hustle to prepare a foundation for them.
    To keep us until we had our house built, we had a borrowed tent under a clump of spruce trees, with an outdoor fireplace, and a table and a couple of benches knocked up from scrap lumber.
    Two days after we had set up camp, a dump truck backed onto our property and tipped out a huge pile of naked yellow logs. It tookFran and me a full day to sort out this pile of giant pick-up sticks and stack them so they would not warp out of shape under the summer sun.
    Then we got down to work.
    My tool kit was not much different from those of the first homesteaders in Albion Township. I had an axe, round-mouthed shovel, spade, pickaxe, sledgehammer, crosscut saw, and a kit of smaller carpentry tools. I had
no
power tools, not even a chainsaw, and no access to any source of power except our muscles and Lulu Belle.
    The first major job was digging out the cellar. When outlined on the ground with sticks and string, it did not look as if it would be a very formidable problem, but once the sod had been stripped away and its third dimension laid bare, I found myself facing a Herculean task. I set to with pick and shovel, heaving the dirt into a wooden “dump box” I had built into Lulu Belle’s after-end. About a hundred shovelfuls were needed to fill this box, by which time I was very glad to get behind the steering wheel and bounce slowly across our hill to a ravine where I could dump the spoil.
    Unloading was fun. Having backed Lulu to the lip of the ravine, I would hook one end of a logging chain to the box and the other to a stout old maple tree on the far side of the hollow. Then I would put Lulu into bull-low gear and four-wheel drive and inch her ahead until the box was pulled out of her rear compartment to spill its contents into the ravine.
    As the cellar hole deepened, it became increasingly difficult to fling the dirt up into the box. By the time I had dug three feet down, I could no longer manage. The solution was to cut a ramp into the cellar wall and back Lulu down it. As the cellar grew deeper, the ramp had to be deepened and lengthened. Digging the cellar and the ramp required the removal of at least eighty tons of earth from a hole that, had it been filled with water, would have made a good-sized swimming pool.
    —–
    Spring came and went. The world around us flowered, and a multitude of birds sang, made love, and reared their young. But I was hardly aware of anything except the gaping pit into which Lulu every day backed a little farther, and I sank a little deeper.
    Fran was game to help with the excavation but it required more strength than she had. So she kept “house,” got the meals, washed the few bits of clothing I bothered to wear, kept me supplied with tea or lemonade so I wouldn’t become completely dehydrated, and generally fetched and carried. When I could spare Lulu, Fran drove to Palgrave for the mail but mostly to hear another human voice (it belonged to our gossip of a postmistress, who also kept the village store). Occasionally Fran drove as far afield as Bolton, in search of essentials. Luxuries, such as beer and booze, were not to be had nearer than Toronto, except from bootleggers at prices we could not afford.
    By mid-June, the pit was about five