Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe

    Ten Months As A Teacher  - Part Three


          I soon realized that there were very few places to hang out at in Powell River once school was out. I was used to going to libraries, gyms and movie theatres in Vancouver. Yet in this town there were no shopping malls, no regular bus service and no inside swimming pools. As for a library, a woman opened a library for three hours once a week in a church basement. The high school I taught at, namely Max Cameron High School had a small library where I did find some books I liked. Yet compared to small cities that I'd gone to in the past, like Vernon in the Okanagan, Powell River struck me as a culturally deprived area.
      So where did people hang out? If they were adults they ended up at local hotels that had a liquor license. I wasn't a great drinker so once the school day ended I would walk down the hill to my basement suite I rented in a house. There I would put pop records on the record player I'd brought with me. Like many lonely people, music became my close companion.Still, very soon I started to feel bored and shut in, especially after the rains came.
     This town of about 10,000 had only one big main road that ran north for a few kilometres and ended at the fishing town of Lund. "There's not much to do around here," one of my students told me. He was right. I'm a city person who'd by now in 1969 had lived in three cities, namely London, England, Montreal and Vancouver. Powell River struck me as a barebones of town. Also the people there quickly saw me as a freaky character.
      "My grandmother thinks  you're really weird," my landlord's granddaughter said to me. "You don't have a car or even a television. She's never met anyone like you." The lady was right: I was a weirdo then and now. In the cities I'd lived in till now, I could hide my strangeness. Yet in Powell River I stuck out like a sore thumb.
    The pulp mill kept churning out its products day and night. This was the reason for the town's existence. After two months in this town, I felt I was living at the ends of the earth and was thinking of quitting my job and vanishing back to Vancouver. I didn't do this because of some of other teachers. Sue was a transplanted American who taught English just as I did to grade 10 and 11 students. Like me she faced some hostile students.Tony was a man from Britain who sometimes felt frustrated by the young people he met in his socials classes. I've already talked about Rodger in another part of my blog. We became friends and this short but very knowledgeable British-born teacher was invaluable in his advice and encouragement. Another teacher who helped me was Cliff, a somewhat older person than me, who gave me topics to discuss in my classes.
      Without these people around I wouldn't have finished my ten months of teaching, that's for sure.