School Days at the Dump (storey 20 of 40)

I remember when I walked five miles through snowdrifts that were up to my butt; packing my little brother on my back cause he didn’t have any shoes. All we had to eat were potato samwitches made out of crumbling home made bread, scooping snow to melt in mouths when we were thirsty, you kids today don’t know how easy you have it.

Isn’t that how that old whine goes? Well, in Fort Good Hope we had to walk a mile to school. There were two choices of approach. One was to climb the staircase that leads us up past the Corliss’s house, the alternative shorter and much more dangerous route is the short cut through the town dump.

We are little kids; we walk to school in total black in the winter, there are no streetlights. The rule is that school commences up until the temperature drops to -40f. It is an amazing trip to school at -35. You have to run so that you don’t freeze your mukluked feet, (feet in store bought boots of that era would freeze in fifteen minutes) but you cannot breathe in the cold air so quickly that you freeze your lungs.