AFLOAT IN TIME
If you'd like to absorb some British Columbia History, learn a great deal serendipitously about early logging and relive the experiences of a young boy growing up aboard a floating logging camp, then Afloat In Time will give you many hours of enjoyable reading. James Sirois, the author of this autobiography, certainly led a charmed life. My heart was in my mouth as he fell into the saltchuck, slipped on logs, cut himself badly with an ax, encountered a bear and nearly died of exposure on many occasions. He managed to brand himself on the stove, and to singe his hair and eyebrows several times, when the door was opened and the damper was down. The lighter moments in this tale had me roaring. When the large lady stepped into the boat from the wharf and the boat headed out, and she headed down and James caught Grandpa in the buff practising his Charles Atlas poses. Even funnier was the cat and the vodka, the young man with the condom, and the boyfriend trying to leave the house silently but taking the screen door with him. Spare the rod and spoil the child it certainly didn' t happen in this book, and James (deservedly at times) was at the receiving end of a switch or two by four, and worse such as the thimble which grandmother wielded with force and dexterity on poor James' skull. He maps out for us the areas attacked, and what the application of a thimble felt like. There were times when I felt sorry for him -- when he had to share a bed with a bed wetter while boarding for school in Ocean Falls and the sheets were never even dried, let alone washed. James certainly developed some stoicism in these early years. The book is written in tiny chapters so that you can pick it up, read for half an hour, and then put it down. But I will almost guarantee that you won't -- put it down that is. I thoroughly enjoyed every page and suggest that you beat a path to the nearest bookstore and get a copy of this eminently readable book. It's an account of how people used to live, using their own two hands and some common sense to wrest a living from the land -- and you'll never look at logging or the coast of BC again in the same way.
Sheila Gair, Director, BCRTA
British Columbia Retired Teacher Association |
