Ch 19: Kitimat yarns.

My first impressions of Alcan were good. I had a nice office overlooking the Douglas Channel and would watch the changing tides and ships coming and going. One day I was rummaging through my desk and found the logbook of my predecessor. His last entries made for interesting reading. It went like this:

March 15: More than 10” of snow overnight. Late for work, got stuck in the driveway.

March 18: Snowing all day, more than 3 feet of snow. Spent ½ hour in the parking lot digging out my car only to find out that it was not mine. 

March 19: Shoveling snow off the roof all evening. The weatherman is calling for rain tomorrow.                                                                                                

March 20: It rained all night and again this morning. Wife depressed, stuck in the house for a week.                                                                                        

    There were more entries but the last one was short:  March 28:  QUIT!   So that is how I landed my job in Kitimat!  

      Our boss was Charlie Fox, an arrogant Englishman who divided his employees into different categories: the British were on the top, then British subjects, followed by immigrants and lowest on the totem pole were Germans.  Draftsman Jerry Friedrich belonged to the last category. His claim to fame was a personal, hand written letter by Werner von Braun, the famous rocket scientist. Von Braun thanked Jerry for being interested in working for him, however the position was already filled and he wished Jerry good luck in job hunting. So instead of designing rockets, Jerry was drafted to the Wehrmacht and spent the war on the Russian front. He was an older, quiet, fumbling, mumbling person; it was hard to imagine him fighting the Russians. Sometimes at coffee beaks he would talk about the war and his luck that help him to survive:               

              

       One summer day he was at a forward observation post and his relief came half an hour early to enjoy the sun. Jerry left the post and a few minutes later it got a direct hit, killing his relief….. Another time their position was attacked by Russians. Jerry was drawing water from a well when a shell exploded nearby and the force of the blast thru him into the well. The position was overrun by Russians and all the soldiers were killed or taken prisoner. Jerry spent two days at the bottom of the well, listening to Russian soldiers talking above. The position was retaken by Germans and Jerry was fished out.  Or the time when they were retreating in the winter from Leningrad and Jerry broke his leg. He was lucky, it was a compound fracture and he was evacuated on the last train out of Leningrad.….  “I am a very lucky man, I survived the Russian winter” Jerry used to say.                                                             

        
However his luck had run out with Charlie Fox. It was a time when inflation was running high and the company gave all the salaried employees an extra raise. Charlie called each draftsman into his office to inform him about his raise. All but Friedrich were called in and he became upset, mulling about what to do. Eventually he screwed up his courage and knocked on Charlie’s door.    “I came about the raise, I didn’t get any….” Jerry mumbled but didn’t get any farther. He was interrupted by Charlie:  “You know Jerry, today is a special day for me, my anniversary. Thirty years ago I was in the RAF, flying a bomber to Berlin and we were shot down. I was the only one to bail out, the rest of the crew were killed. I broke my leg on landing and the Germans treated me like a piece of shit. I spent two years in a stinking POW camp.  And you come to me on this day and want to talk about money. Not today Jerry, pick another time…”   “But it was not my fault, I was on the Russian front…. “Jerry was mumbling leaving Charlie’s office.

       In Kitimat lived a few dozen Czechs that came after the Russian invasion in 1968. I heard various stories about their early days in Canada and some make interesting reading:  One recent arrival bought his first car and invited a friend to come along for a drive. The weather was bad, freezing rain made it dangerous. After a while they were passed by a speeding car.   “This guy is crazy, he is going to get killed” commented the driver. And sure enough a couple of miles further the car was smashed in a ditch. Inside were two occupants, heads covered in blood, moaning. They hadn’t worn seat belts and their heads had crashed into the windshield. Our Good Samaritans were not sure how to help, so they handled the accident as they would in their old country: They pulled the victims out, loaded them into their car and drove to the hospital in Terrace.                                                                                                                 
They stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. The road was glazed with ice. Another car arrived at the gas station and unable to stop, hit the Czech car broadside. A woman driver got out to look at the damage. “I am sorry, I am sorry, I couldn’t stop ….” She looked inside the car and saw two occupants spread on the back seat, covered in blood, moaning. “I AM SORREEE, I AM SORREEE….” She started to scream, believing she had caused their injuries. An ambulance arrived and took to the hospital two injured men and one hysterical woman.

      There was a famous story about the first bank robbery in Kitimat: Just before closing time, three men wearing balaclavas entered the bank. One carrying a gun stood by the door. “HOLD UP don’t move ” he yelled. His accomplices jumped over the counter, pushed the frightened employees into a corner and scooped money from the tills. They then ran out of the bank and into bush just a block away.

      The robbery was perfectly executed but the planning was lousy. A Hudson Bay Store cashier recalled that a week before three men had bought balaclavas. She remembered the men well. It was unusual to buy balaclavas in the summer and they spoke with a heavy accent. She gave the police good descriptions. There was only one road heading out of Kitimat and police quickly set up a road block, looking for people speaking with a heavy accent. When three Czechs didn’t show up for the afternoon shift at Alcan, their names were broadcast over the radio as robbery suspects. They managed to avoid the roadblock but within a few months two were arrested. The last robber escaped to California and lived there happily, feeling safe in another country. One day he was hitchhiking and the driver ran a red light. He was nailed by the police and the alert cop asked the passenger for his ID.  BINGO, his name came up, being wanted in Canada by the RCMP for a bank robbery…..

     My friend Otto was a fellow with itchy feet . He would work in Alcan for a year or two to save money and then quit. “Time to move!“ he would tell the family and take his wife and three children on a long adventure trip. Their apartment was sparsely furnished: a kitchen table with chairs , a creaky sofa and few bookshelves made from wooden boards and bricks. No beds, they slept on mattresses and all their stuff was piled up in cardboard boxes.  “Otto you live like gypsies, why don’t you get some furniture?” I asked him. "If we buy furniture my wife will get used to comfy life and she wouldn't go on another trip"
  

       A few months after we met, Otto quit his job in Alcan and was getting ready with his family to leave for California. He made big plans. “We are going to Los Angeles to Marina del Ray. I am going get a sailboat there  and sail the Sea of Cortez for maybe a year. Then we will sail back to British Columbia to Kitimat. See you next year!”

                                                                                                                      

A year later Otto was back in Kitimat. “Where is your boat?” I asked him. “It is on Vancouver Island.  We ran out of money in Seattle and my wife had to pawn her wedding ring. We managed to sail to Sydney and left the boat in the marina. I want to bring the sailboat to Kitimat and need a deck hand. Do you want to come with me?” Of course I would. But there was a snag, Otto only managed to get a week off of work, not enough time to go to the pawn shop in Seattle. We arranged that I would fly ahead to Vancouver, rent a car, drive to Seattle to pick up the wedding ring and meet Otto in Sydney. 

I picked up the ring in the pawn shop and on the way back stopped at the duty-free shop at the US border. As I was leaving the shop I heard “Jardo”, somebody calling me by my Czech nickname. I turned around and was dumbfounded. Standing in front of me, wearing a Greyhound bus uniform, was Franta, my climbing buddy who had escaped with me and who was supposed to be dead for the past five years. We shook hands. His was warm and firm, it was not a ghost.

       “You would not believe it” He said, “I have been running the Seattle- Vancouver bus route for two years. Each time I stop at the duty free shop so the passengers can buy booze. But I always stay in the bus to keep an eye on their hand baggage. Today, for some reason I got off the bus to stretch my legs. It was raining so I went into the shop and you were standing there.”

       “What happened to you? You were supposed to be killed in a car accident five years ago. I never heard from you since that time. Is it you or your ghost I am talking to?”  Franta smiled. “It is a complicated story and I don’t have the time to tell you everything now. But I have a two hour layover in Vancouver. Can we meet in Stanley Park?” Franta was waiting in Stanley Park and I couldn’t wait for his explanation. He was an oddball but faking his death?  

“Do you remember my girlfriend Hanna?”He asked me. I certainly remembered that pretty blond.  “After we escaped I got a letter from her that she was pregnant. She and insisted that I was the father of her daughter. Somehow she got hold of my address in Seattle and I started to get letters from her, from the Czech Embassy, from her Czech lawyer, and even from an American lawyer. All were asking me to pay child support. But I found out that she was going with another guy when I was dating her. She couldn’t prove that I was the father. Those letters were upsetting me so I decided to disappear. I wrote to my friend back home to spread the news that I was killed in a car accident. It worked, the letters stopped coming.”

“But why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do”? I asked. Franta looked at me with a smirk on his face. “I know you , you have a big mouth, you couldn’t keep a secret.”   

We stayed in touch. A few years later the company sent me on a course in Seattle and I saw Franta again. He changed jobs and was now driving a bus for a travel agency.  “I mainly do tours of the Rocky Mountains. We usually stay in one place for a couple of days. I keep my climbing gear in the bus in case I got a chance to go climbing.  Sometimes I catch other climbers, few times I took a passenger with me but usually I climb solo."  

“You are crazy to climb solo, you could kill yourself.” I told him. But Franta was fatalist. “What is supposed to happen will happen.”

  

Every year we would exchange few letters to stay in touch. Then one day my letter came back with a postal stamp “Addressee unknown” and I never heard from Franta again. I don’t believe he faked his disappearance again, he probably never returned from one of his solo climbing trips.

Alcan  aluminum smelter