The woman who owned the farmhouse told Dad that the one-room schoolhouse still existed, so once we were finished exploring the grounds of the old homestead, we got back into our convoy of cars and continued deeper down the road.
Dare I admit that when Dad used to tell me stories of his long walk to school — ten kilometers through wilderness — I would inwardly roll my eyes? But as we drove and the odometer kept track, it was indeed ten kilometers, and even now it was remote. How must it have been for Dad and his siblings eighty years ago?
“It should be right here,” said Dad, as we went up yet another narrow incline with bushes and trees all around. “Pull into that lane.”
We turned into a laneway big enough for a single car and the two cars behind us idled on the road. I hopped out and looked through the bushes to see if I could see the fabled school house. I spied a small red roof that seemed in far too good repair to be and 80+ year old school house.
“There is a small wooden building down there,” I told Dad though the window. We got out and looked around. Sure enough, it was the old school house, but it had been fixed up.
The door to the school house was secured with a piece of wood. We walked in.
It had been renovated, but the new blackboard was where the old had been, and the windows and floor were in the same place. Dad told us that when he walked in he had a vivid olfactory memory of the old potbellied stove in the winter. Some of the kids would arrive without boots or shoes. What they’d wear in the winter to protect their feet was raw matted sheep’s wool wound around their feet. It would be frozen solid when they got to school and they’d put their feet up by the pot bellied stove to thaw them out. The smell of the wool and their feet was quite ripe.
Dad did not want to leave until we were able to leave a note for whoever owned the building now. He didn’t want to use any of the paper in the schoolhouse. One of my cousins found a receipt in her purse that was blank on the back, and we found a pen. Dad wrote a note of thanks and left it on the table, along with some coins.
When we got back into the car and began to drive away, Dad told us about his sixth birthday in mid-May and how he, and his older siblings Olga and Steve, got lost coming home from school. They had spied mushrooms off the path and went into the woods to pick them. Then they saw more, and more. And then they were lost. It was terrifying for three young kids to be lost in the wilderness like that with the very real possibility of being attacked by a bear or wolf. They wandered kilometers away from the school and home.
In the dark wee hours of the morning, they spied a light in the distance. A man had got up in the middle of the night and had lit a match to get to his outhouse. The three ran in that direction and the farmer took them in. It was about three in the morning.
He loaded them up on his democrat and took them home.
They got home around 6am. Their parents had been organizing a search party.
