When George was working on the pipeline in Saskatchewan, he came home on leave once a month. Lillian remembered: “He would drive day and night to get home, and then when he got home, he wanted a home-cooked meal, and I wanted a break from the kids. Those were terrible weekends; he was tired, and I was just looking forward to a break and going out. He didn’t see much of Craig as a baby. Delia and I visited him in Regina; we flew down in a Northstar [DC-4] just for a weekend; it was a very rough ride.” In a later interview, George and Lillian’s daughter, Delia Christianson, told me that this trip is one of her earliest memories: “I remember the propellers of the plane, and I remember my dad standing there, watching, pants flapping in the wind, wearing a white shirt and sunglasses, hair slicked back — looking like Sean Connery.”
While George was away in Calgary working on his apprenticeship, he often wrote to his wife. Lillian recalled: “George would come home every weekend, so his letters were just a daily communication. People wrote letters in those days instead of [using] long-distance telephone.” She kept the letters for many years:
Once, when my grandchild was visiting, after George died, she asked me what was in a chest. I told her that it was just a bunch of old letters, but she begged me to just see one letter. So I pulled one letter out and read it, and I said “OK, you can read this letter.” We were married by then; he was spending two more years at technical school in Calgary, but he would write every day. My granddaughter emailed her mother, Delia, and said “Grandma allowed me to read one of Grandpa’s thousands of love letters!” She was so thrilled that she was allowed to read that one letter. George was working for his room and board in Calgary, doing carpentry in the home of a friend of his parents, and that was partly what was in the letters; as well as occasional ski trips with his friends. I didn’t want my family to read them, but later I was told that it was very important that my granddaughter could read that letter.
While their children were small, Lillian and George would take them camping, sometimes to Jasper by train before the highway was completed from Prince George. Lillian recalled that Delia was a very social person, and Craig’s friends were always calling on him. She noted that George knew how to play with the kids, adding that “sometimes it got a bit rambunctious, and I had to separate them.” Years later, when he was visiting Delia in Kimberley, George had once told me that he was left in charge of his grandchildren, who were still quite small, and when Delia returned, he was teaching them how to climb a wall.
During his years with Hume and Rumble, George Evanoff had many interesting experiences. Lillian remembered that he was something of a daredevil and would get good pay for climbing microwave towers. Craig related a story that his dad had told him of the time he was working on a radio tower: “He was on a ladder, when the guy working above him dropped a hammer. In those days they didn’t wear safety belts and the hammer came down and hit George on the head, about a hundred feet off the ground. He almost became unconscious and fell, but one of the ladder pieces ended up under his arm, and he hung there while he got his wits back together.” George had once confided to me that on another occasion he and another person were assigned to wire a pipeline building. When they reached the site, they found that a fierce wind had blown the structure over on its side. Wondering what to do, George proposed that they just wire it anyway — perhaps the only building ever to be electrically wired while lying on its side.
George’s responsibilities extended beyond pipelines, and included the electrical system and panel in a new brewery that was built on the south side of Edmonton. After touring the brewery, George’s cousin Bob commented that “George saved the company a lot of things; unbeknownst to them, too. He had everything so programmed that the machine would almost be thinking for itself.” According to Lillian, the manager of Hume and Rumble, George Firth, liked George Evanoff because he was dependable. He put him in charge of a crew and gave him a lot of responsibility. Like some of George’s other work relationships, this one extended into a friendship outside the job.
Reconnecting with the Outdoors
During his years in Edmonton and before making the move to Prince George, George Evanoff’s life had settled down sufficiently to allow him time to resume some outdoor pursuits. At that time, George had not yet taken on the mountain-based activities that he was known for in his later years, and was still mainly interested in fishing and hunting.
George and Paul Kindiak were both living in Edmonton, and Bob was still in Edson, where he was busy with the family farm. Bob had a cabin there that George could use, and this helped provide a connection to the countryside of their youth. The focus in this three-way friendship had shifted to George Evanoff and Paul Kindiak; they became fast friends through their outdoor pursuits. Occasionally they were joined by Bob and/or George’s brother, John.
One of Bob and Paul’s projects in the early 1950s was to build a new sixteen-foot canoe, a superior craft to the pirogue that almost took George and Bob’s lives as youngsters. They made it from waterproof mahogany plywood. It was wood-framed, wetted, steamed, bent, stretched, glued, clamped, and screwed to the framework. After drying, the outer plywood was completely covered with fibreglass cloth, and resin applied two or three times to finish it. Paul showed me this canoe in his backyard during a return visit to Edson in July 2006. Although patches marked various misadventures, the now forty-five-year-old canoe looked well cared for and nearly as good as new. Paul, then seventy years old, but looking fit and twenty years younger, was still using the canoe. The canoe was hard to tip because of the unusual concave keel that they had designed. The three of them once took a whole bull elk across the McLeod River in the canoe with almost no freeboard and without mishap.
Using this canoe, they fished the creeks and beaver dams twenty kilometres northwest of Edson that were part of Little Sundance Creek. There, beaver dams had flooded the muskeg valley, and the only access into and out of the central areas of the stream was via channels made by the beavers. This was where George developed a passion for fly-fishing. Paul described how they could often see fish jumping everywhere, although it was difficult to fly cast because of willows and other bush close to shore. On one occasion, Paul, George, and his brother, John, came out to Edson to fish the Little Sundance Creek beaver ponds. The three of them packed the canoe about a kilometre down a seismic cutline, and then across almost two hundred metres of muskeg to a large beaver dam. George became so excited that he started fly casting as soon as Paul and John paddled out into the first stretch of open water. Paul remembered that he sat at one end of the canoe, with John at the other end and George in the middle: “Each time George fly cast, in his excitement he would lean over one side, John and I had to lean over the opposite way to avoid George dumping the canoe.”
On another occasion when they were fly-fishing at Little Sundance Creek, an eclipse of the sun caught George, Paul, and Bob by surprise. They were out in the beaver ponds with the canoe, and although the fish were biting, they had to work for them. Suddenly, George noticed that the light had changed, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud, except that it was darker. It became as dark as evening, and the fish began jumping and biting so much so that they couldn’t get them off the hook and into the boat fast enough.
Another favourite place to fish was Beaver Creek, a tributary of the Athabasca River, located fifty kilometres northwest of Edson. The Athabasca Hills and Beaver Creek area was once home to the Grand Prairie Trail.6 Bob related the story of an epic day that he, George, John, and Paul had while fishing the creek:
The rivers and creeks around Edson were an important part of the outdoor life of George Evanoff both as a child, and later as a young man.
The creek was a beautiful stream, crystal clear with many boulders and fast water tumbling into various sized pools where we would catch up to