Mabel (Timms) Tapanila

November 1983

Arriving in Kaslo

When I came to Kaslo, we came from Creston, or Erickson. We came on the train to Sirdar, to Kootenay Landing, and there was a big boat waiting for us to go on. I'd never seen a big boat like that, with the lights all on. I came across [the Atlantic] on a big boat but I didn't see it from a distance. This boat waited and took all the passengers on, and brought us as far as Procter. There was a hotel there, operated by people by the name of Snow, and everyone went inside and waited. This is the day after Christmas Day, so it was cold. We waited inside until the other boat came up from Nelson. Then we had to go down to the wharf and get on the other boat coming up here. The other boat was called the International, that was a K&S boat, Kaslo and Slocan railway boat. We came up on that to Kaslo and somebody, I don't know who it is now, had a cutter and horse down at the wharf to take anybody up that wanted to go. We came up to Kaslo Hotel and there we stayed overnight.

Going to Nelson

The boat left at 5:30 and you could have your breakfast on the boat, if you wanted, it cost seventy-five cents. You'd get to Nelson about half past nine and you'd do your shopping and get back down to the boat before 5 o'clock and you'd get home about half past nine or ten. On days that we had to go around to Crawford Bay, two days a week, I've forgotten which days they were, but that took two hours extra so we tried to make our trips between the Crawford Bay trips.

It was quite an experience, especially at Christmas time because we used to come home every Christmas to stay with my folks over Christmas. On the boat, coming up at night, he usually came up on the twenty-third of December, there would always be so many people coming home for Christmas. That was the only way they could get here, they couldn't get here any other way don't you see but we used to have such lovely times on the boat. Everybody would be having dinner because dinner was only a dollar.

They were wonderful days. As I grew older, I managed to get up to the Captain's table because I was engaged to a boatman and nothing was too good for me then and I married a boatman.

Sunday School Picnics

Oh! They used to have the Sunday School picnics. Every summer they'd have one day when all the Sunday Schools would go and we had Sunday Schools then. We had about 240 kids on there one time and we used to always go down to Pilot Bay because there was nothing there. The kids used to like the steamer ride, a lot of them never got out of the town so this is what they did. The teachers and the parents or guardian or whoever went down with them. They took their lunch, a big lunch box and they arranged races and that sort of thing for the kids. We used to get down there about ten o'clock in the morning and then we'd leave there at night, right after supper. We'd have an early supper and then come home. This one night, we had about two hundred and forty kids on there alone, besides the grown-ups and coming out of Ainsworth we hit an awful storm. It blew right from the land, across the water. I was up in the pilot house with the skipper and the wheels-man had to go downstairs because the kids needed looking after and they had to put all the kids down in the hold of the boat. So he asked me if I was afraid. I said no I'm not afraid so he asked me to stay up there and look after the search light. You see, its on a rope you know. The little shavers were just terrified. The whole boat was just pitching sideways and back and forth and they had some trouble with it in the morning going down and they had taken a heavy cable and wrapped it around the bow of it so there was no possibility of it breaking. When we got to Mirror Lake, the Skipper was awfully worried, he wouldn't go into Mirror Lake. There was no thinking about going in there tonight because we still had to find some way to get home. He said we'd be lucky to get to Kaslo without any further trouble. So we got to out here and he said, I think we'll go up Shutty Bench and get out of the wind and then we can turn around and head into the wind. So this is what he had planned to do. But when we got here to the light out here, there was no wind or anything. It was as calm as glass and we just came in without any trouble but he was pretty worried that night. I'll tell you, I was scared to death because I figured something was going to happen.