Not in the book — “Six Days in Rosenort, Manitoba,” written down in October 2020
As I mentioned elsewhere in one of my stories, the farm auction sale was April 27, 1996. It was a good sale. Suddenly there were no crops to seed, hay to make, fences to repair.
Our beef cow-herd was divided approximately into thirds. Some we kept ourselves, grazing on some of our land, while other farmers did the active daily care of the cattle on a share-of-profits basis.
From Coquitlam, I visited my friend Lawrence Joiner at his ranch west of Clinton B.C., staying with him at the “Green Buildings” of the ranch several times during the summer and fall of 1996.
In the spring of 1997, the Red River in Manitoba flooded a large area south of Winnipeg to the United States. Though the Red River had flooded a number of times previously, this severe one became known as “The Flood of the Century.”
Jeanie and I heard on the radio, in perhaps mid or late May, that the Mennonite Central Committee was organizing volunteers for cleanup and flood relief, from across Canada, to come to Manitoba and help.
I phoned MCC in Abbotsford and was told that groups were travelling to Manitoba for six day stints; airfare, food and lodging would be supplied.
Arrangements were made, Jeanie took me to the Vancouver Airport and I flew to Winnipeg, likely on a Sunday.
A pleasant retired Mennonite farmer from Winnipeg met me at the airport. Soon we had three more men from Alberta and Ontario join us and we drove to Rosenort.
Rosenort is a small, predominantly Mennonite town. Roughly translated from German it means “place of Roses.” The town is completely surrounded by a six or eight foot earthen dike, likely constructed in the sixties or seventies, after several previous devastating floods. No flood water had entered Rosenort.
We had supper with a lot of other volunteers in the church hall of a large Mennonite Church. All of the various Mennonite churches worked together to lodge and feed, breakfast, lunch and dinner, to the volunteers.
I was lodged in a modest, smaller home with a retired Rosenort couple. It was immaculate and the elderly couple very friendly. However I didn’t even have breakfast with them as all the meals were back in the same church hall that I could walk to within walking distance.
At the full breakfast one of the organizers looked me over and asked if I was interested in helping the “fridge and freezer removal crew.” I said yes.
The job of the four man crew was to remove flooded basement fridges and freezers and haul them to a designated disposal area set up by the county or municipal district. The freon in the fridges and freezers was to be removed at a later date.
The water had mostly disappeared from the fields and farmyards and the late spring seeding of crops had already started, as we drove around the very flat countryside.
The pickup truck driver, who was from the area, was friendly and informative. The crew all wore coveralls and had been issued yellow rubber gloves. We travelled in two vehicles, two in the truck and two following in a car.
It looked like everything was coated with a light layer of dark mud, left behind as the waters receded. The driver said that the mud seemed to act as a fertilizer, crops were better for several years following a flood.
Generally the removal of a fridge or freezer, (sometimes both) from a basement, was straight-forward. We carried four — ten foot planks in the pick-up. We placed two, side by side with a space between, on the stairs resting against the basement floor. We manhandled and slid the freezer to the planks and got it on. Then we placed a sturdy nylon rope around the freezer and through a loop at the end. With two men pulling on the rope and two men pushing and guiding the fridge or freezer, we pulled it close to the end of the planks. Then we set up the other two planks just under the first two and pushed and pulled again. At the top of the stairs the weight of the freezer pushed the overhanging planks down and became level. Sometimes we could back the truck close to the porch and we could load the freezer directly onto the truck. If the truck was further away, we used the freed planks to slide the appliance closer.
I should mention that all the food that was stored in the fridges or freezers had, of course, been removed and disposed of, but the odour coming out when the door was opened was indescribably bad. As well, the waterlogged insulation of the freezer and lid made the freezer extremely heavy.
One very large freezer was almost impossible for the four of us to get on the planks. We just could not, after several tries, slide it up the stairs. The solution was to back the truck as close as possible to the house, attach another heavy rope to ours and pull the freezer out with the truck. One man was at the top of the stairs signalling and shouting instructions to the driver. The rest of us were guiding and watching to see that the freezer didn’t catch on the stairs or slide to the side and damage the wall. We got it out and loaded.
We usually took one fridge and freezer per load and could make two trips in the morning before a soup and sandwich lunch at the church hall. We could make three trips in the afternoon if the distance to the disposal site wasn’t too many miles. There was always a large tasty meal and pie at six o’clock.
As we drove around I noticed that all of the newer farmsteads were built on a four or five foot high, man-made earthen mound or raised area. These farmsteads usually just consisted of a house, a larger separate garage, a large steel quonset machine shed and large steel grain bins. There weren’t any beef or dairy cattle, or hog or chicken barns or even fences in the area we were in. There were only grain farms on very productive soil that was periodically, but fairly often, in danger of spring flooding of the Red River.
I remember sitting in the cab of the pickup truck while travelling to another flooded home. We were listening to a local radio station, perhaps Winkler or Steinbach. The announcer told of a farmer, held up in his seeding operations by some rainy weather, who called the local tire shop and wanted all eight of the tires on his big Versatile tractor replaced, four sets of duals. The tractor was parked in some field near some road. The tire shop came out and did the rather big, expensive job. But it turned out they replaced all the tires on the wrong Versatile tractor, also parked in some field near some road! We laughed and wondered how that costly mistake eventually turned out…. did some farmer get a really good deal or even possibly eight free tires?
One day we were fairly close to the larger town of Morris, where our farm cultivator was made. Our driver took us through the town and past the industrial area where it was built. It was a short, unexpected tour of a nice, neat Manitoba town, also surrounded by a dike.
We finished our work at noon on Friday, I believe. In the afternoon, I was given the job of taking out or breaking off all the exposed drywall screws left in a finished basement, after the drywall removal crew had taken out the waterlogged drywall. That job would have been a difficult, messy and slow process. I was glad I had been on the fridge and freezer removal crew.
There was a handicraft and souvenir shop in Rosenort that the volunteers were encouraged to visit. There were a lot of woodworking and sewing or knitting items of good quality in the little store. I bought a “Flood of the Century” T-shirt and a patchwork blanket made of different shades of used denim, even cream-coloured. It is unique, colourful, heavy, but not very warm!
I flew home, flying through a rough and scary lightning storm somewhere over southern Saskatchewan or Alberta.
It was “nothing to worry about,” we were told!
It had been a well-organized and interesting six days.