February 8, 2011
I live in the city that is the primo destination for almost every class trip in America. Each spring and fall thousands upon thousands of students, teachers, and parent chaperones descend on Washington, DC from Middle America. All of the kids look insanely bored as they trudge from museum to historic site to yet another monument. I’m sure every single one of them is thinking, “I could Google all of this stuff in two minutes on my I Phone so why not just do that so we can go to the Hard Rock Café already?” A handful of adults with clipboards and whistles shepherd the students around the sites while trying to maintain some semblance of control. They too are deep in their own thoughts but their internal conversation trends more towards, “Why in hell did I let my wife/husband volunteer me for this gig?” and “there isn’t nearly enough booze in this whole city to make this right.”
Back in the Dark Ages when I was a kid in Saskatoon, the class trip was to the provincial capital of Regina. We went in Grade 7 which would have made us about 13 years old. I remember 13 well, and trust me, visiting Regina was not at the top of my “To Do” list. In fact I vividly remember thinking Regina was a dump. Now whether that was true or not is not relevant; it was just one of those city rivalries that are deeply rooted in the past. In this case it went back to the formation of the province in 1905 when Regina was made the provincial capital and Saskatoon was awarded the province’s university. From that time on, the two cities competed for everything and residents bickered constantly over the worth and value of their fair city as compared to the other which clearly was substandard. Moreover, a big chunk of Regina started out life as a slough, and masses of mosquitoes and god knows what other critters populated the city, so people in Saskatoon easily wrote off Regina as a Nowhereville dive. After all, Saskatoon had the university so clearly we had the intellectual wherewithal to articulate such a well thought out yet concise analysis of the Regina landscape…
At any rate, Regina was the destination for the Grade 7 class trip for all kids in the province. Our class, Miss Mills’ Grade 7 students from Hugh Cairns VC School, took our grand tour on March 31, 1970. There were 25 kids in our class – 14 boys and 11 girls and most had been in the same class since Grade 1. You can well imagine that by Grade 7 we pretty much knew everything about everyone which made school and school activities – even field trips --exceedingly boring from a social point of view. We were 13 and restless although we really didn’t know why. Energy ran high but our interests were firmly grounded in the present. No one was dying to see the provincial Legislature or visit historic sites except maybe Walter Orr, our class nerd. The past was, well … past and the future was incomprehensible. Still, going to Regina was better that sitting in Miss Mills’ class doing math or social studies so I do remember looking forward to the trip. The real hook though, was that we were going on the train!
I’m willing to bet that at that point very few kids in my class had been on a train so most of us were a lot more interested in the trip once we learned we would ride the rails. This gave the whole exercise a bit of glam or even drama that was appealing. BUT THEN WE GOT TOTALLY SCREWED. Every Grade 7 class in our school that had gone on this trip before us had taken the train to Regina but at the last minute there was a change of plans we got stuck on a bus. Not kidding. It was a regular old everyday bus with no redeeming qualities. What a come down. We were some kind of pissed.
But here’s the thing, in my diary that day I wrote across the top of the page in capital letters: MY LUCKY, LUCKY DAY!!! Obviously it had not been a total write off, so what happened? It’s elementary: we met boys from another Saskatoon school who also were on the Grade 7 Regina class tour. And they were cute. Me and my group of friends immediately were in love. I mean seriously, boys we did not know from another school who were really cute looked in our direction and smiled. We were hooked.
Here’s how it all went down: between Saskatoon and Regina is Davidson, a small town that is more or less the half way point between the two cities. Most people stop there to get gas, have a snack, and use the facilities. The trip to Regina was unremarkable other than we got off the bus in Davidson for a few minutes and then kept right on driving to Regina. The whole trip would have taken about two and a half hours. In my mind I remember it as a typical grey, wintery Saskatchewan March day. I don’t recall any sunshine or blue sky which often means it is goddamn cold, so lets assume it was cold but not more than about 10 below, snow all over the ground, and we were all bundled up in parkas, boots, and gloves, kind of like we were every other day but our “outfits” under our jackets would have been a little nicer than on a regular school day because we were going on a “TRIP.”
We arrived at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (was it called that in 1970? I think it had a different name) and began our tour. There was a lot of archeological history, plants, stuffed animals etc. and I found it all rather unnecessary. Until, as I noted in my diary, “we saw some cute boys” from Greystone Heights School. Now this was interesting. We didn’t know any of these boys; Greystone was just far enough away from where we lived that we would not have interacted with them. Forget the dioramas, teepees, and stuffed buffalo; we were hunting cute boys from Greystone.
The Greystone kids were on tour behind our class so if we hung back just long enough from our group, we could watch them and “flirt” in our giggly 13 year old girl fashion. One of the Greystone boys had a camera and started taking pictures of us. WE LOVED it! I mean WE REALLY LOVED it! We each picked out the boy we liked and began to spin stories in our head (“I bet he is probably my soul mate for life!”) and then assured each other we were definitely perfect for the boy we had targeted. We were just on the front end of puberty and were entirely clueless as to what romance and love was all about, but we knew for sure that it was what we wanted. This trip occurred at the height of my major crush on the Monkees and the Cowsills so I was looking for a boy who fit that mold –cute, great hair, big smile, nice teeth, and by definition was sweet, fun, and very popular. Hey, I read 16 Magazine all the time and was very familiar with how sweet and nice all the boy stars were in real life! I wanted someone just like that. And on that day, in that moment, it was Dean Houston of Greystone Heights School.
At any rate, as the day went on we crossed paths with them several more times: at the RCMP Barracks, the Legislature, and finally in Davidson when the bus made the requisite half way home stop. No one exchanged phone numbers or suggested plans to meet again – we never did get that close --but it was clear as a bell to the girls from Hugh Cairns that the world was way bigger than we’d thought and there were cute boys at Greystone who thought we were cute too. There was life outside of South Nutana where we lived and we were now determined to find out how to make that work for us.
And so the games began. As it turned out, Kim Davidson’s grandparents lived in Greystone and Kim frequently stayed with them while her troubled parents did whatever they were doing. We visited Kim’s grandparents and had sleepovers in their basement and snuck out at night to walk past the homes of the Greystone boys in case they would suddenly come out. But that’s a whole other story.
