The hill’s greatest danger appeared only in spring. Beside Dawson Street was a deep depression in the side of the hill and it filled with runoff water, occasionally to a depth of six feet or more. It froze and thawed and refroze in spring. Older kids, like us eight-year-olds, knew instinctively to stay away from that hole. Nobody told us about it. It was just something you knew from being out in the neighbourhood. My sister Barbara, then five years old and three years my junior, had not been blessed with the instinct. She decided to walk on it and plunged through. The rest of us kids were sliding nearby and heard her scream.
The ice was so rotten that she had gone through on the first footfall, right at the edge. She was screaming and crying as I skidded down the bank and grabbed her hand. She pulled, I slipped, and we were both thrashing in the mushy ice water together, clawing at the bank for leverage. I managed a handhold and dragged us out as the other kids arrived and made a chain of hands.
As I pulled Barb up the hill and along the street home, kids scattered everywhere to shout news of the miraculous rescue. I was a neighbourhood hero, and kids everywhere sang my praises, for at least a day or two, all except Barbara. She was unimpressed that I had so daringly risked my life to save hers. Her lack of gratitude was inexplicable. She seemed to labour under the misconception that I was assigned to look after her and that by calling her scaredy-cat and shooing her off because she was afraid to slide on the steepest part of the hill, I in fact had created the problem.
Fame is fleeting and mine slipped away swiftly. Before the year was out, I was no longer the hero of the Prospect Hill. A combination of circumstances led me into another incident that earned me the name Fire Bug.
The grass was high, brown, and dry along the hill that fell off the Dawson Street cliffs and into McVicar Creek. We were playing in our pueblos as usual when I made an incredible discovery. I found in the rocks a perfectly good, unused wooden match. One of those stick matches about two and a half inches long with a fat red head topped with a white cap. Sometimes the heads were blue and white, but the ones my parents kept for the old stove were red and hidden away in a sturdy cardboard box with red birds printed on the cover.
You have to understand the times to understand the significance of the match discovery. In an age of wood-frame houses filled with flammables such as untreated heavy fabrics, straw insulation, cracks packed with coal dust, matches were dangerous; definitely adult things. Children did not play with matches — ever. “Never play with matches” was among the most holy of the prohibitions, right up there with not talking to strangers.
My little friend Brett, a couple of years younger than me and awestruck by the find, immediately advised me to bring it to my ma. His big brother Earl wondered if the match was any good. That got me thinking. I had seen my father take such matches and scratch them across the side of the matchbox and had always been mesmerized when they burst into flame. What made them do this? Could they be scratched anywhere and made to explode?
I suggested that we might have a campfire, catching my breath at the boldness of the statement.
Brett, becoming visibly nervous, said kids don’t know how to make campfires. Only dads did.
I knew he was right. The consequences of a campfire would be enormous and I really didn’t know how to start one. But the match. Was it any good? I made a lightning-quick decision, sweeping it across the rocks, watching it explode into flame. The explosion of flame was so startling that I tossed it away in fear.
The chances of a wooden match, barely struck when thrown into the breeze, landing still lighted in the grass were tens of thousands to one. My match rode the breeze over the cliff, gaining flame as it fell onto the rocks and bounced into a patch of high grass. Within seconds, the patch was ablaze, sparks blowing into other patches. We stood on the cliff spellbound as the breeze whipped the flames from patch to patch into the high grass. Within minutes, the valley was ablaze and we ran off the cliff and up the lane to our secret hiding spot in the loft of the garage at the rear of Earl’s house.
Grass fires normally are not a big deal. Many people started them in those days to clean the vegetation and green up for spring. This grass fire, however, had the makings of a major catastrophe. Two dozen old houses lined the west side of the McVicar Creek valley. The breeze was from the east and the fire marched quickly to the backyards filled with sundry outbuildings and dry fences. If it hit the backyards, the fire would be blown into the houses and we would have a neighbourhood conflagration of Biblical proportions.
We could hear the scream of the fire trucks as we hunkered down in the loft’s bed of old straw, dust, and dried pigeon shit. It was dark there except for the light spilling through cracks in the weathered barn boards. The cracks also let in the sweet smell of burning grass. We had heard fire reels, as we called them then, many times before but never to this extent. It seemed the fire departments of both Port Arthur and Fort William had arrived, and there were sounds of urgent activity and shouts everywhere. My friends’ reaction to all the commotion was the same as Trixie’s had been that day at the creek. They looked at me as if someone had just planted on me the kiss of death and fled, abandoning me crouching alone in the dark and peering out through a crack in the garage siding.
Four generations of Polings gathered in the back yard of Robert and Eva’s house at 331 Van Norman Street, Port Arthur. Left to right: Veronica, Robert, Ray, Barbara (baby), Eva, Jim (the author), and Grandma and Grandpa Desilets, Eva’s parents from Superior, Wisconsin. This picture was taken circa 1948 and the Desilets would have been well into their eighties.
My father, called home from work as were other fathers in the neighbourhood, found me and led me to the scene of the crime. Earl and Brett, under light questioning, had given me up, adding how they had warned me not to do it. Dad and I stood on the hill overlooking the blackened valley. Firemen with sooty faces rolled dirty hoses while others checked for hot spots in the charred grass and along some of the fences that had caught fire. There was no “oooh, nooo!” or “Jesus Mexican Murphy!” this day. I had not seen my father so wracked with emotion but regretfully would again, many years later when another mistake changed our lives forever. I absorbed the scene of my destruction, then received a spanking on the spot and a lecture on the seriousness of my actions. Dad explained that only a superhuman effort by the firemen and volunteers had saved the houses.
Veronica and Barbara waited at the door when we arrived home. My mother’s face was pale and drawn. Barbara’s was round, shining with glee. She saw this as superb payback for the Prospect Hill incident. She referred to me as the Fire Bug. My parents’ disappointment with me lingered for a long time. The neighbourhood had received a serious scare and they were at the centre of it.
I learned later that fire created a special fear in the Poling family. Fire was part of the reason the family had moved to Canada from Minnesota. The Great Fire of 1918 wiped out Cloquet, Minnesota, where my grandfather worked at the paper mill and where my father was born. Family lore told of how my grandmother held her babies in her arms as she waded in the St. Louis River as the fire consumed the town. My great-grandparent’s house burned down and the lack of future work in the Minnesota woods and mills influenced my grandfather’s decision later to take the family to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, where a new mill offered steady work.
The Cloquet Fire started October 10,1918, as a smoulder at a Great Northern Railway siding called O’Brien’s Spur. It spread under a pile of cordwood and crews tried to extinguish it over two days but left it because it didn’t seem serious. On October 12 it erupted into