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A childhood friend told me about this website and I see a couple of
reminiscences about Dorreen have already been posted by Brian Gregg.
I thought I’d offer a contribution of my own. My name is Howard Neighbor.
My father and I moved there in the summer of 1949, when I was
eight. He worked as a
section hand for the CNR. Between
fifteen and twenty people lived in or near Dorreen at the time and only
three were kids: Jack and Molly Scully and myself.
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The author (left) with Jack & Molly Scully,
about 1950. |
Luckily
for us, a teacher with five school-age children was found so the school
was opened that September. I
believe it had been closed for a number years.
The teacher’s family was named Williams and they stayed for two
years before moving on to Smithers.
Another teacher followed the Williams family for a brief time
before the Greggs arrived.
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Tommy Hennessy (left) and Roy Scully; Uncle to
Jack & Molly.
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What are my memories of Dorreen?
Well, Brian Gregg and I share quite a few, though I arrived
before him and moved away in 1953 so not all are the same, though I do
recall a lot of the people he wrote about.
I’m glad I wasn’t there when Tommy Hennesy died.
I remember him as a kindly, if eccentric fellow, and I know his
death would have saddened me.
What stands out most clearly for me is the isolation though I don’t
recollect it being bothersome. Hey,
I was a kid, and except for the very odd trip to “outside” I
didn’t have much to compare to, but I was aware of it just the same.
Dorreen was on the railroad, or opposite side of the Skeena from the
highway. If memory serves,
we sat about 55 km east of Terrace and roughly 160 km west of Smithers.
Our sole link to the exterior world was the passenger train.
Every second day it arrived going west about 5:30 p.m. and every
other second day it arrived going east about 2:15 a.m.
Terrace and Smithers pretty well bracketed our universe.
Happily, the trains frequently stopped.
In addition to passengers they carried our mail, foodstuffs we
couldn’t grow ourselves, Eaton’s catalogue orders and whatever else
we needed to survive. Of
course it was the same for the other little towns along the line like
Usk, Pacific, Cedarvale, Woodcock, etc.
And still being the days of steam, one my most evocative memories
is the wail of a far-off train whistle on a cold winter night.
I still think of it as the sound that connected us to the rest of
humankind.
As transportation went, that was mostly it.
Oh, if you were really in a rush, you could walk a kilometre or
two to the Skeena, jump up and down, yell and wave your arms.
If you were lucky the fellow who lived in the house across the
river might see you and row over in his boat to pick you up.
Then you could hitchhike to Terrace or Smithers.
For reasons that quite elude me, not one resident of Dorreen
owned a boat. Nor do I
recall anyone ever choosing to cross on the ice in winter.
It simply was too unstable.
Isolated we may have been, but we didn’t lack creature
comforts. By the standards of the time and place, we lived very well.
Set in context of the world today – or perhaps any time – it
was a decent life. As
children we played in safety where we wished and drank from any stream
without risk. We filled our
lungs with clean air and our bellies with uncontaminated food.
We were adequately schooled and lived in snug homes. We had warm
and sufficient clothes, medical attention when we needed it and thrived
in peace and political stability. Not
a single person alive today has enough wealth to buy every one of those
luxuries. Two-thirds of our
planet’s population can barely dream of most of them.
Do I miss Dorreen? Well,
it has been over half-a-century since I last was there.
I wonder if it exists anymore.
Today I’m retired in Kamloops where we settled in the early
seventies. I’ve lived
many places since I was a small child, before and after Dorreen.
But I believe it was by far the most distinctive.
Communities of that particular sort of remoteness have virtually
vanished and even fifty years ago must have been uncommon.
I was privileged to know good and unique people there, and a life
few today would even imagine. The
extraordinary isolation created a community of folks who were amazingly
trustworthy, generous and mutually supportive.
I never again experienced a place anything like it.
People my age too often wax numbingly nostalgic over memories of their
childhoods. I hope I have
not. What was good about Dorreen was good, but even as a small boy
there were some things I just plain yearned for: indoor plumbing,
electric lights and central heating topped my list.
Such comforts widely bypassed Dorreen back then and very likely
do today. It took some
years and several moves before I finally gained them all.
I have no wish to yield up those extravagances any time soon.
Yet strangely, no place I have ever been rises in my memory or my
dreams half so often…
-fin-
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Annie
and Ed Olson, pioneers in Dorreen and grandparents to Jack & Molly
Scully. |
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