So you just image there's like hundreds and hundreds of farmers all lined up with their farm equipment like with shit-spreaders and-whatnot...

Whatever the- the big songs were and eat french-fries and shoot the shit and flirt with the girls and-all-that-stuff…

Interviewer: Do you sing songs around the fire? Are there like specific camp fire songs that you do or no? Speaker: No, no I don't do that. No, not at all, but we have campfires and shoot the shit.

Speaker: Shoot the shit is a general word for just- Interviewer: Oh. Speaker: Socializing and um, talking about what did you do today- what- you-know, it's like, "Oh guess what happened", you-know,

Interviewer: Is it shoot-the-ship or shoot the shit? Speaker: Shit. Interviewer: Oh the shit? Okay (laughs). Speaker: Shoot the shit (laughs). Interviewer: (Laughs) That makes a lot more sense.

So I hired three or four c-- ah students out of college um didn't have a lot of accounting experience but they were (inc) and- and one of them got siphoned off into a- the regulation and he ah- he impressed the general manager pretty good um not always in a good way but negatively, and he cut the feet out from underneath me and he become the treasurer, all of this ah overnight.

Interviewer: Now, you're talking about the men being in the bush doing the lumbering in the winter. Why was it winter? Why did they have to do it in the winter? Speaker: Well, that's when they cut the logs. ... And skidded them to the lake. .. They had to skid them all to the lake and many times, they had to skid them across rivers or creeks or lakes and that's- that's when they did it and it was easier to cut the timber in the winter, there's no flies, no bugs, might be a few wolves and moose ar-- ah wolves and moose around but that's what they would do and they'd, you-know, they cut two-thousand logs or five-thousand logs, skid them to the mill, pile them up in big piles beside the mill and get them ready because we had our sawmill there for the summer. So as soon as ah- soon as the first part of May come, they'd start the sawmills, throw saw in these logs. Interviewer: Then you say skid them, now what would that mean? They put them on? Speaker: Put them on sleighs, put them on sleighs and well, they'd do two things. They cut a tree down in the bush, take all the limbs off it and then cut it in sixteen-foot lengths and then they'd get the horses and one one or two horses ah, usually two-horse a team and they'd put one or two of these on a chain and pull them out to a place ah ah (inc) call marshling yard and then there'd be another coop-- load them onto sleighs, another team of horses will pull the one sleigh s-- on a little winter road to the mill. So it was a continuos operation ah and ah that's what he did.

And ah, so buddy mentioned to me that they were going to ship their bikes out to- ... To Vancouver and they were going to ride back. ... So on the Tuesday before the August long weekend, I took my bike to Barrie and ah, we put it on a metal skid like the- is inside the crates that Harleys come on. You kind-of drive it into this thing and it drops in and then you strap to the skid and they pick the whole skid up with a forklift, put it right in the trailer.

When we got to the end, he started racing down the runway. And I clouted him in his ah earphone and told him, I said, "The flap lock." And he had to shut everything down and we skidded off the end of the runway just about into the trees.... Well apparently the same guy had that happen to him and the same pilot about a month later with some guys and ah he flew right into the trees and killed everybody.

He- right now he's working um in the forestry industry and they work to ah set up the plots for the tree planters. So he's driving a huge skidder in the middle of nowhere.

Interviewer: You played in mine shafts? Speaker: Yes, we did. ... They're just dark and damp and dank and- but there's a place called The-Slimes over in Cobalt where this all is all mining stuff. I don't know what it's like today. Um, but we used to play over there all the time.... Nobody ever worried about us. ... Nobody ever got hurt.

Well he was going up that hill, it was slippy.

...never would let them away with what I felt was not right, eh? And that- that's the way I tried to do it. So that it was done right. And it's proves to be- has to be right. And the way that- i-- on the road that I worked on, wherever they were a (inc) the roads are a lot better than where they were slipshod.

She- she was- you-know, so I got a little snarky with her one night. And she got into a fit of crying. She pounded her first on the bed, she kicked the wall, she said she was going to go out...

And- and there was a bit of- at that time there was a bit of snobbery attached to going to Haileybury because not everybody could go because you had to have those marks. And I don't think that was the reason I went. I just went there because it was closer and because my brothers and sisters had gone there and I knew it had a good- it was a good reputation and-all-those-things.

And he came and said, "Haven't I seen you some place before?"

In our- in- right in that little area wasn't a big deal, French or English. Some places it was, yeah.

The- it's on some place, on the tie or in the corner.

... always going for a picnic with them. ... And it didn't matter, rain, sunshine or storm anything, we'd still go. We plan, we'd go. Many times we'd gone out and it's pouring down rain. Ah, we're out, we'd stop over at a rock some place and we'd have a picnic anyway.

And we'd camp out we'd go camping some places in the tent. And she'd sleep in- her, him would sleep in the cardboard box, the rest- rest of us sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. Things like th-- we did things like that all the time.