After on and off discussion about whether we would ask our friend, Alvin, to come in and help us with the excavation, Chris and I decided to pay him a visit today to see what he was up to.

After a house inspection in Clearwater for one of our customers, we loaded up 41 tires at Clearwater Kal Tire and headed south again to Little Fort.

Alvin is a very experienced old time sawmill operator. In his late 60’s Alvin has, in the last few years, mainly given up the sawmill racket and returned to his roots, literally. He has transformed his 20+ acres by the North Thompson river into a grain producing farm. He was born and raised in Saskatchewan and I think remains a prairie boy at heart. He grows wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, and a number of other grains-using no chemicals! He has a grainery (home built) and keeps pigs and laying chickens, feeding them a mix of his no-chemical grains. He and his wife are superb gardeners, planting a tremendous amount of vegetables and fruit every year. We count them among our many “garden” resources, along with Jennifer, Monica, Karen, Florence, Linda and Lee-Ann and Henry.

We surprised Alvin at a late breakfast and got talked into toast made with wheat from Alvin’s fields. Scrumptious. (And VERY strong coffee, which we don’t drink much of anymore so we got nice and jittery!) We got caught up with the news (we hadn’t dropped in to visit since before Christmas).

After an hour and a half I got down to brass tacks and asked Alvin if he’d sowed his fields, and if he had a few days to help us excavate while he waited for all his lovely grains to show their heads.

Alvin began helping us out at our sawmill about six or seven years ago. He was still running his own headrig at the time, but mostly by himself and not full-time. We bought some of his wood and did some planing for him. He eventually became our part time heavy duty mechanic, dirt mover when we were landscaping the grounds (he owns every kind of equipment one would need to move dirt) and it would not be untoward to put him together with my father in the “mentor” category when we were learning how to run a sawmill. We’ve had many, many good laughs with Alvin and hearing about his upbringing and experience running a sawmill in the good old days and raising four children has been very entertaining and interesting.

He admitted today that he was getting bored and agreed to help us excavate. I think it’s more that he likes us and likes to help us and that’s o.k. as a reason, too! He charges very reasonable rates and is always in a good mood when he works.

Best of all, he is FAST. Much faster than Chris and I will be, so we are hoping that in 2-3 days we will be able to start placing our first tire while Chris starts pounding. I, of course, will be taking the first photos of the first tires. (Of course).