Prompt # 54 - School Trips

Prompt # 54 - School Trips

Trips were not part of our school culture. We didn't have any school teams or drama clubs. If you were in the choir, you would go to the nearest music festival once a year. I remember only one, in Hamiota, the next town to the north-west, about ten miles from our school. The two songs I remember most are “The Skye Boat Song” (speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing over the sea to Skye) and “The Little Drummer Boy” (come they told me pa rum pa pum pum). I wasn't in the choir. Or, shall I confess, I got booted out of the choir, for mouthing. Honestly, I thought I was doing everyone a favour. I have no voice. But one time, I skipped school with an accomplice and rode on the bus with the choir and then ran wild around Hamiota while the others were singing in the competition. I think we missed the bus, or maybe someone called our parents and informed on us. I know I ran into my parents downtown and went home with them. This could have been just pure luck as otherwise there was no way to get home except to hitchhike.

In Grade Twelve we did go on one trip to Winnipeg, the provincial capital, about two hundred miles east of Oak River (this was before metrification). We toured the university and the general hospital, where some of us planned to go for further education or training. There were about five or six of us in one car driven by Mr Hall, the science teacher. We stayed in a hotel. I think that would have been the time we went to a play at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. It was The Fantasticks, with the song “Try to Remember the Kind of September.” I do wonder whether it was a travelling troupe, and if so, whether Jerry Orbach played one of the young men. I think this was also the time that my best friend Leona and I went to see the movie Dr Zhivago. We both loved it, especially the Ukrainian symbolism in many of the scenes including the opening funeral, which were so similar to our own experiences in rural Manitoba.

I was honoured to be chosen for one special trip, the summer between Grade Eleven and Grade Twelve. The school named me as a Centennial Traveller, a special federal program to celebrate the upcoming centennial of Canadian Confederation. I went to Winnipeg and joined a group of 23 others of my age from all over the province, along with two chaperones. We travelled by train, two nights, to Montreal and were then billetted with a Quebecois family, going on group tours along with 24 Quebec students during the day. To Old Montreal. The Botanic Gardens. Ile St Helene which was being built for Expo '67. Private parties. Outings with the host family to Sorel and to the mountains. A bus trip to Quebec City including tours of Old Quebec, the aquarium, the Plains of Abraham, where the English defeated the French during the Seven Years War, and Canada became British. In Quebec City we girls stayed in a nunnery and the boys in a monastery, miles away. On our way home to Winnipeg, we stopped in Ottawa and toured the Parliament Buildings.

This trip was one of the highlights of my life. It helped expand my love of Canada. At a folk club our group had met students from McGill and the University of Montreal. I remember one was an engineer and he asked simply: Why do I have to learn English and study and work in a language not my own? Thus, when the Quiet Revolution happened in Quebec, followed by the October Crisis in 1970, I felt I had some personal understanding of some of the issues, from these meetings, and from the pen pal relationships I maintained with students from the host group.

This visit also made all the Montreal references seem real once I became a passionate fan of Leonard Cohen. Because I'd already been down to that place by the river. And to Our Lady of the Harbour, the Notre Dame de Bon Secours Church in Old Montreal, which is still one of my sacred places. When you walk in, your eyes immediately go up, towards heaven, to see a navy of miniature sailing ships floating in the sky, carved by sailors and given to the church as votive offerings as their boats were leaving the safety of the seaway and the harbour and setting off back out over the sea to who knows where.