Ocean Falls Museum - Personal Recollections

Leif Knutsen - Resident ('66-'70)

I live in New Jersey, although my background is in Norway, where I was born, where my parents live, and whose passport I still hold.

I lived in Ocean Falls from 1966 to 1970, corresponding to the ages of 5 through 9. I have vivid recollections from my time there and am dreaming of sometime visiting. I believe living in Ocean Falls was a formative experience for me - among other things, it taught me the value of diversity and the importance of community. I don't think I would have dreamed of moving to a place like Ocean Falls now, but that makes me appreciate the experience even more.

Eyolf and Leif

The Teacher is Miss Hoon

Back:    Ray(?), Robert Wilde, me (Leif Knutsen), Clifford (?), Teddy, Sigmund, Peter, Alan.
Middle: Lucy, Janet, Anita, Susan, Cindy, Mary (then Elizabeth) Potyrala, Kathy.
Front:   Sophie(?), Julie Petersen, Rita Strebel, Tracy Tiemens, Lucy, Patty, Teresa, Unknown

You have to start with the little town's setting. Its location has nothing to do with convenience for the townspeople, but only with hydroelectric power and lumber flotation. The name of the town gives it all away: Ocean Falls. It's built next to a waterfall from a lake straight into Cousins Inlet, a branch of the Pacific Ocean on British Columbia's central coast.

The town is perfectly situated for a pulp and paper mill but not much else. Huge mountains of either side hover oppressively over either side of the falls, and there really isn't enough flatness for much of anything people would ordinarily build. Add to that the greatest annual rainfall anywhere in Canada, and the proposition should give cause to anyone but very dedicated back to nature types.

The town was built, operated, and governed by the mill. There were no local elections. The two most powerful people in town were both loyal company men: the townsite manager, who ran everything on the side of the falls where people lived, and the mill manager, who ran everything on the mill side of the falls.

The two sides were linked by a bridge, over which only employees were allowed to cross, coming or going. There were housewives who lived in Ocean Falls for decades without ever seeing the mill side.

The townsite had a few flat areas, where the oldest and arguably nicest houses were built. Front street faced the falls, dry by virtue of the power plant. The street quickly turned into a steepening hill that followed the falls up to the lake. Alongside the road there were built some modern apartment buildings, a decidedly 40's movie theater, and the ugliest recreation center you ever saw.

But for their lack of aesthetic appeal, these buildings were of central importance for the people in town. The swimming pool in the recreation center was the venue for a swim team that had brought international fame to the town, and the theater was the gathering place for all children Saturday mornings. Kids generally had two scheduled extracurricular events - swimming and the movies.

In the other direction Front Street led past the only bank in town to what an imaginative mind might dub the town plaza. This was the bridge landing, perpendicular to the entrance to the general store. Really it was the dock for Ocean Falls's main lifeline to the outside world, the "Northland Prince," a freighter with a few passenger cabins that went up the coast and back every week.

A pretty little park in front of the townsite office covered the other side of this imaginary plaza. On a rainy dark afternoon you'd see women struggling with brown grocery bags that were disintegrating from the rain. No one really complained - it was how we lived.

On one corner stood the hotel, called Martin Inn. It was supposed to be the third largest hotel in B.C., but was really a dormitory for single mill workers on a short-term stay. The mill would also put families up there until their company-assigned homes were ready for them. Many of us kids had memories of the cafeteria food, the hallways, and the lobby of Martin Inn as our first impression of Ocean Falls.

The bridge pointed up to the side of Caro Marion, the highest and I always thought most ominous mountain surrounding Ocean Falls. For one thing, you couldn't even see the top from the townsite, it was that steep. But the mountain had its name from two children, Caro and Marion, who had wandered off onto the mountain and were never recovered. Their memories were enshrined in empty caskets and buried. Although the story seemed a little implausible to me - the woods were nearly impassable and downhill would inevitably lead to the shore, it served as a deterrent to us all - you stay on the townsite.

This central street also culminated in a hill that stopped at the forest's edge. On the right side was the Charleston school, a no- frills K-12 offering one could sense the province had set up only reluctantly, the town having only 2000 residents.

A road went by the front of the school cast in concrete only for a short while before it became the most prominent of Ocean Falls's wooden roads, structures that looked more like scaffolding than permanent thoroughfares. These wooden roads provided precarious access to houses that were built in a spirit of audacity on outcroppings of the cliffs that surrounded Ocean Falls. The wooden roads were crude but solid and apparently impregnated very well. Still they were slippery when wet, and they were usually wet. Steep, slippery and curvy roads, combined with the smallness of it all, made owning a car a ridiculous proposition, but a few did anyway. A gas station opened a few hours once a week to accommodate these motorists, who, I can only speculate, were driven to their purchase by a fervent need to live more like the vast majority of increasingly affluent Canadians.

Going back to what we're illustratively considering our plaza, another mostly wooden road fronted a surprisingly vast marina on one side and federal buildings on the other. Here was the post office, the RCMP station, the Legion, and the customs office. At the end of this "federal strip" was the liquor store, open twice a week and strictly off limits to minors.

I lived in the row of houses on the bluff behind the federal buildings. These were three-bedroom houses with a front- and backyard. The hospital, an old large building that would like a residence anywhere else, was on the edge of the bluff. The hospital and our row were separated by a nice walkway and a lawn with trees. I always thought it was one of the prettiest places in town. Our next door neighbor was the one physician in town, who - I would have to guess - became a general practitioner per excellence.

More houses had been built along the shore toward the inlet's outlet, as it were. Along the edge of the forest, just where it became too steep for anything, another wooden road led to a dead end that seemed almost like a frontier. Once I saw a little boy lose control over his tricycle down that hill. He went past me with a calm expression and went right off an unprotected edge in the road, into a pile of rocks. It was a beautiful day, and all this happened without a sound. I literally couldn't believe my eyes - the boy had vanished without a trace and without a sound. It seemed like minutes but couldn't have been more than seconds before his mother appeared and pulled him out, bleeding and presently screaming.

Along the shoreline the marina continued, and the road actually went out of town, ending up in a suburb of sorts, known as Martin Valley. Here some people who had come to love their peculiar life in Ocean Falls, built their own houses in a beautiful scenery. At Martin Valley, it ended. Many years ago, a brothel stood on an outcropping beyond, but it had burned down.

And this was what Ocean Falls was all about - a place remote from the rest of the world. The only way in or out was by seaplane or boat. The isolation was profound even if it wasn't absolute. People would take vacations on the outside, but a surprising number didn't.

I have to think that were many reasons why people chose to come to Ocean Falls, but only a few why they stayed,. My father was moved by the mill's holding company in and out of the town, so we knew our stay was temporary. I remember the night our next door neighbors left. They celebrated through the night, culminating with the husband standing in the middle of the street, yelling at the top of his lungs "F*** YOU OCEAN FALLS!". Even as children we were thrilled to be leaving, to try our wits in the real world. To us, a town with a drive-in restaurant was a metropolis.

The climate and the isolation seem difficult to even contemplate now, but our lives there were placid and filled with the small things that take up most people's lives. There were a few tragedies that swept through the town, slowing it down for a while in communal grief. A boy drowned in the swimming pool, trying to swim laps underwater; a young man fell off a cliff he was climbing with a deer on his back. Friends of my parents lost an infant to SIDS. People were buried in the little cemetery in Martin Valley; dying in a place that everyone thought was a temporary place.

The shared hardship of life in Ocean Falls created community and trivialized class distinctions. Status may have determined what kind of quarters the townsite assigned to you, bit few cared much. Certainly children didn't.

To me life in Ocean Falls provided an object lesson in doing the best with what you had. There were small scout, brownie and boy cub troops, a judo club, swimming of course, a small library. There was TV programming only a few hours a day, and it consisted of selected shows taped and rebroadcast locally. The mountains and distance got in the way of regular reception.

Outdoor life wasn't as abundant as you might think, either. Quite a few people went fishing, and I dare say that leisure boats outnumbered cars by an order of magnitude. A few people went hunting, and there was even a little skiing. But all this took some determination. It simply rained too much.

I remember the school fire quite well. I believe I was 8 years old at the time, and we lived in the house right next to the doctor's (I can't recall whether the doctor was Ian Taylor or Tom McQueen at the time), so we had a view to the school from our kitchen, across the playground.

I remember that I woke up one night and noticed my parents were in the kitchen, talking softly with each other. I asked them what was going on, and they said that the school was on fire, but that they would probably extinguish it. Now, there had been another fire recently that had been extinguished quickly, so we figured this one wouldn't amount to much either. But more and more smoke developed, and people around the school got more and more hurried. Since we lived right next to the hospital, we heard that one or two firemen were admitted with smoke inhalation problems. It seemed that efforts to stop the fire were utterly frustrated, though to this day I don't know why. From our vantage point, I couldn't get much of a sense where the fire was or what was being done about it - we saw some smoke and activity, but no flames in the beginning. I believe my father went out a couple of times to find out what was going on - he wanted to offer to help retrieve things out of the buildings if help was needed. It became apparent to me after a while that they were unable to control the fire, and before long, we saw some flames in the high school. After some time, the school was ablaze in what looked to me to be a tornado of a giant flame, with a deafening roar. We were wondering what would happen if houses started burning; whether the whole town was in danger. I started wondering where we'd go if that happened. My parents said they thought we could have gone to one of the Norwegian freight boats that were docked in Ocean Falls at the time - the Rondeggen or Beseggen.

For a while we thought that the fire would be limited to the high school, but then the roof of the elementary school caught fire. I remembered that I had left a pair of slippers and two books ("History of the World for Young Readers" and "World Geography for Young Readers") in my desk there.

A fireman was brought to the hospital with smoke poisoning. It wasn't long before we saw more and larger flames, and some of them jumped over to the roof of the elementary school, which was a tar roof.

Soon the entire school was like a fireball - it was roaring like a mad animal, and we felt the heat through the kitchen window, which seemed to buckle. I was at once exhilarated and terrified of it - my parents reassured me that the entire town could be evacuated to the mill side if necessary, and that we were good friends with the captain of the Norwegian boat that was docked at the mill. I think we were all worried that the whole town - wooden streets and all - would catch fire.

It became clear to us that the firemen had given up on saving the school and had concentrated on preventing the inferno from spreading. As the flames started dying down, we went to bed. I wondered what things would look like in the morning. We had learned that one or two other buildings had been lost, but that there was no threat to the rest of the town. It was hard to believe that a place as wet as Ocean Falls could sustain any kind of fire, but it was pretty violent.

Where the school used to be, there was nothing but twisted metal and ashes. Over the Christmas break, it snowed, and some friends of mine and I rummaged through the ruins (which I'm sure we weren't supposed to do). There was nothing to scavenge, which was pretty unusual - there always seemed to be something worth scavenging in Ocean Falls.

This happened on the first day of the school's Christmas vacation, and we walked around the charred remains for days afterwards. It was a strange atmosphere - I'll never forget the smell.

We were convened in Crown Theatre the day school was supposed to start, where we were instructed where to show up for school the next day. My class (Miss Gomez's 3rd grade) was housed in Cascade Lodge, where we had more space than before. We lost one day of school to the fire, which must be pretty impressive.

I'll never forget the smell that lingered in the charred remains of the school for weeks afterwards.

Among ourselves, we wondered who had the bad judgment to set fire to the school on the first day of the break, rather than the last one. As it was, our first day back in school was in the Crown Theatre, where we were told to show up at Cascade Lodge the next day and were given the rest of the day off.

Rumor had it that a disgruntled (and slightly insane) teacher set the fire. This was never confirmed, but it was clear that it had been caused by arson.

As I remember it, the school did an excellent job of improvising in the provisional facilities. In fact, I seem to have fonder memories of classroom life there than in the school itself. We left Ocean Falls that spring. I remember thinking: I am one of the few people who saw his school burn down to the ground. To this day, it is one of my most vivid memories.

I am struck by a surprising sense of affection among the residents of Ocean Falls. I think most people were glad to leave Ocean Falls, but few regret having lived there.