Queens Line Ditch Burning and Picking Pop Bottles

 

The crazy days and times we are living in makes me long for simpler ones and harken back to my upbringing when they definitely were. The simple, boring, mundane, and routine has it in spades over complex, anxious, volatile, and eventful no matter what age you are. 

Things we a lot different when we were kids on the Queens Line. Things were approached and done differently. 

Nowadays we are told to recycle. Then we just did. Enter the Pepsi or Coke bottle. Today there is no such thing (that I'm aware of, anyway) in Canada as soft drink bottle redemption. When we were kids, it was all the rage. Nowadays all bottles go in the recycle bin. Back then, we got, initially 5 cents a bottle for pop bottles of any type or brand, and later a whopping 10 cents a bottle. So, we always took our 'empties' back to the store for the reward, which was immediately blown in pop, chips, chocolate bars, and candy. Mom and Dad could buy us jeans and t-shirts and shoes. That was their job. Our job was to be kids. 

One of the main ways to get junk food money was to just cash in our own bottles, of course, but there were other ways. Folks without young children of their own kept their empties in a box by the back door. Whenever a kid under 16 was there, they would offer the box to them "to get it out of the way". If they didn't, trust me, the enterprising youngster would ask for it, for the same reason. When those two easy ways of acquiring spending money exhausted themselves, there was one more way: 'picking bottles' in the ditch.

People threw stuff out the car windows in post-war days. Everything short of your little sister that you didn't want was tossed out the window into the ditch. Roadside ditches had become absolute eyesores. By the time we were kids, advertising campaigns had greatly reduced littering and the ditches had cleaned up a lot from drives to reduce trash. What had remained, however, was tossing pop bottles out the window. Why? So kids could find them and cash them in. Adults generally didn't throw pop bottles out the window where no one lived because that was just complete waste. No, they saved them for the outskirts of town, or, in our case, along farm roads. Pop bottles were tough, and, as long as they didn't hit a rock, they would survive a pretty long fall into the ditch. If there was grass or snow, survival was practically guaranteed. 

Mid-summer to late winter wasn't a very good time to head out on our bikes to look for bottles. No, the grass was too tall and thick in the ditches and made it too hard and frustrating to find them, or the snow was too deep and fluffy and totally engulfed and obscured them. The best bottle picking was from when the snow really started melting until the grass really started growing. As the snow in the ditch melted, the bottles that had been thrown out over the winter revealed themselves, just sitting there waiting for whoever would wade out to them in snow that was too crystalline to support your weight. They were obvious, but they weren't necessarily easy. You could plunge through the melting snow up to your waist and be soaked and cold for just one bottle. Even for kids, that was hardly worth it. You were better off to wait and hope no one else went for it before you. If you were lucky, it was cold the Friday night before and the snow was more icy Saturday morning before it warmed up too much. Then you could gingerly tip-toe out on it to the bottle no one else saw first. You normally wouldn't risk it on a school morning in case it didn't go well and you ended up having to go to school wet. Getting wet added a whole new level to that misery. You just didn't do it. Besides, if you were like most farm and country kids, you weren't standing out there on a windy open farm road waiting for the school bus any longer than you absolutely had to. If you went out too soon you'd be chilled to the marrow, because it just wasn't cool to actually dress appropriately for the weather. We were all guilty of that. Sneakers, Levi's, a t-shirt, and as light of a jacket as you could possibly get away with were a long piece from survival gear in the southern reaches of the Arctic Circle otherwise known as the Ottawa Valley. You went down to a Levi's jean jacket the first day you wouldn't actually freeze to death in it. Being cool sure came at a price. 

Whoops, I got off on bit of a tangent there. Anyway...

The best, of course, bottle picking came after burning the ditches.  In those days, people burned the grass in the ditch in front of their property in the Spring after all the snow had melted and there was no rain and a few sunny, dry days. It was usually left to the teenage kids of the family or the adults if they had time. It was a big thing. Almost everyone got in on it. You could look up and down the road on those evenings and there'd be patches of smoke as far as you could see on either side. Everyone was out. Cory and I in front of our places. Stewart's and Tabbert's and May's up the road. Robert's and Ferguson's and Afelski's and Oattes' down the road. And everyone else beyond. You could see them standing on the shoulder of the road leaning on their handy shovels. Folks driving past would often stop and chat with people burning grass. If they didn't they'd certainly wave out their open window. It was kind of the Springtime community thing before the much-awaited summertime Strawberry Social at the local rink. The burning grass had a nice, almost festive smell of its own to go with the occasion. 

Before my time, the ditches were sprayed by the township or county for weed control. By my time, that practice had pretty much ended. So weed control was left up to the ratepayers. If we didn't do it ourselves, it didn't get done, period. And the ditches would have become unsightly wildlands in a very short time with trees growing in them that would be very dangerous in the event of someone taking the ditch on our very fast road in the wintertime. There were many, many benefits to burning the ditches, but the most obvious one was just how neat and tidy the practice made them look in front of your property.

We'd pick an evening after school when it was calm or only a very light breeze. If it was blustery we just plain didn't risk it and waited for better conditions. We would go with the breeze toward our driveway if we wanted a quick burn, or go against the breeze if we wanted a slow, more controlled one. Going with the breeze gave you a more complete burn, but going against it was easier to control. It would still burn its way back against the breeze, just slower. It was always fascinating to watch the little flames slowly lick their way against the breeze upwind. If a wind suddenly struck up, you quickly beat out the fire with the shovel you always carried for that purpose. You could scoop water out of the lowest part of the ditch if it was available, or just beat the fire out with the bottom of the shovel. If you had a long stretch of ditch to burn, the safest way was to do it in patches of back burns. The gravel driveways were all firebreaks, so you would burn a patch toward your driveway, typically the bank up to it, and then you had a longer firebreak. Then you went back 25 or 30 feet, or whatever you were comfortable with, and burnt up to the firebreak you just made. In grids of burns you completed all the ditch you had to do. More daring individuals would start the furthest away from their driveway and burn towards it in the breeze, but if the wind struck up the wrong way they were in trouble. The fire could jump the driveway and get away down the next ditch and then it was a fire department call. As the old adage always went, 'Fire is a great slave but a poor master'.

I expect, but can't remember for sure, Dad helped Cory and I the first year, and then left it to us after that. As pretty well all farm youth were, we were responsible and trustworthy kids with all chores no matter how dirty, difficult or monotonous. In contrast to a lot of necessary farm and homestead chores, burning the ditch was actually fun.

Most people driving on the road knew enough and were considerate enough to keep their speed down to not make a wind as they passed by someone burning. Folks were a lot more courteous in those days.

Cory and I found the easiest way to manage our grass fires was with a scrap piece of ABS pipe. We lit one end of it, then carried it along as it dripped off burning pieces of plastic. We could just walk along a line from down at the fence to up to the shoulder of the road, while small lumps of fire dripped off of it. Let that patch burn back to the already burnt grass and then start another one. If you set the pipe down when you didn't need it it burned much slower and didn't get consumed. Pick it up to set a new fire and the chimney effect up the pipe hanging down in your hand caused it to burn hotter and start dripping gobs of little fireballs again. They made neat little rockety-bomb, almost video game sounds as they dripped off. The little fireballs were like baby incendiary bombs and reliably lit the grass instead of being down on your hands and knees on the damp ground fussing trying to light the driest grass with a cigarette lighter or a box of matches. I forget how we came upon the idea for certain but it was most likely from seeing a piece of it on fire and dripping at the dump and realizing how well that would work for ditch burning. Anyway, it worked great, and that's how we did it for years.

The dry cedar posts our road and line fences were built with had to all be provided particular care that they didn't catch fire. We used our round mouth shovels to preemptively scoop some ditch water around them to keep them from catching. You always checked every post after your burn to make sure it wasn't smoldering. If it was you scooped some more water onto it with your shovel or you chiseled the smoldering part away with the shovel's point. They could smolder away over the night to be pretty near gone by morning if you weren't careful. Some people used a flat shovel in their management for the fire tamping ability they provided, but we found the round mouth shovel much preferrable for its chisel point when cedar posts were involved. 

Burning the ditch in front of unused pasture was altogether a no-no. That was just begging for a wildfire. In front of mowed lawns or cropland was the best because there just wasn't any fuel for a runaway onto property, with regular pasture or hay fields like ours next in line, preferentially. 

Besides aesthetics, the great benefit of burning ditches was weed control. It kept down things like thistles and milkweed and goldenrod. It also killed off saplings of any species so no trees grew in the ditch. Only grasses or cattails really predictably survived the burn. A good burn would leave a uniformly blackened ditch. That wasn't pretty, but the eyesore of it only lasted a week or two at the most. Burning the ditch only burned off the exposed grass. It didn't kill the roots. The blackening of the ditch warmed up the soil from the sun for fast regrowth. After the next good rain, the feathery, wispy charred remains of last year's grass would be washed down flat or completely away, and then green grass would very soon and quickly begin to emerge. By early to mid-May, all the burned ditches would be smartly dressed with uniformly neat and beautiful, bright green healthy grass. The overall effect was satisfying to the maintainers, and very pleasing to everyone's eye. It just made the countryside roadways so much nicer looking and the scenery of a country drive so much more pleasant. Many of the ditches were too steep or rough to be safe to mow in any mechanical manner, so that was our only real way of maintaining them. Controlled burning also had the preventative effect of eliminating all of that dry material for a potentially devastating all-at-once wildfire caused by the careless tossing of a cigarette butt on a windy day or an errant spark from an exhaust. 

The one downside to burning the ditch was healthy green grass - and lots of it - that was pretty well unmanageable. We effectively created our own monster in that regard. The grass growing in the ditch after burning thrived better than anything growing in our own hayfields. It grew abundantly thick, lush, and tall. If only our hayfields grew like the ditches after burning them! The explosive growth a woodland sees after a forest fire is the exact same thing. Ash is a wonderful fertilizer. The death of one thing almost always brings life to another; that is the Cycle of Life. The most important example of that of all time being our Lord Jesus Christ's temporary death on the Cross gave us access to eternal life that we otherwise never could have had. 

Yes, I just had to get that in. There's nothing more important to comprehend in this world than that.

Besides being free of the resources-robbing burden of weeds, regular vehicular traffic provided the ditch grass with a steady input of carbon dioxide which really fosters growth. And it sure showed. A lot of people today don't understand that simple biological concept. People that tell you carbon dioxide is 'bad for the environment' know about as much about that as a Canuck knows about life on the bayou. 

By mid-summer the ditches right up to the shoulders of the road had dense, four to five foot tall grass standing straight up. It was a very dangerous barrier to visibility out of your car or pickup when you were trying to pull out onto the road. The sight of the County roadside mower tractor making its way down the 'Line at that point was a welcome one indeed. Ours was a little Massey Ferguson 135 Diesel with a cab and a 7 or 8 foot mid-mounted sicklebar mower. I don't know what the protocol was to get the service, but it seemed that, if the County mower guy liked you, he mowed right in to your driveway up to your lawn on the one side and then back out the other, then ahead on down the road. He always mowed ours. Some he just drove right past. Visibility on to the road was greatly improved by his service. You always breathed a sigh of relief after the County mower passed on by down your road. It instantly became much safer for everyone, particularly energetic and spontaneous farm and country kids on bicycles. It would be a monotonous job except for the dicey part of working around mailboxes and road signs and guardrails. We sure appreciated it even though we never got to personally tell him so. Well, that I know of, anyway. Upon reflection and in hindsight, most likely Dad knew him and thanked him at a store or feed mill some time during the year. I imagine it was pretty uncomfortable in that non-air conditioned cab on a hot summer's day so he appreciated anyone who appreciated him. The take away from that is be nice to others and they'll most likely be nice back to you.

Now, after burning, and especially after the first rain, was our time to 'spring' into action. During burning we generally found a few bottles. It was after the first good rain that we really had our harvest. The rain washed the blackened char off of the bottles and left them laying there clean and glistening in the sun in plain sight and vivid contrast, 'ripe for picking'. I guess you could call it our time to shine even though it was the bottles that were doing so. 

We'd go out on our Sears Free Spirit or Canadian Tire Supercycle bikes with bags and scan the ditches for bottles. Or we'd just walk the ditch to make sure we didn't miss any. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, 7-Up, Sprite, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Schweppes, Vitality (here in the Upper Valley) Fanta, Tab, Orange Crush, Creme Soda, etc... they were each worth a guaranteed 5 or 10 whole cents to us. As we went along, and spied a new bottle, we excitedly pointed our finger and yelled, "MINE!" before the other kids claimed it for themselves. Disputes inevitably did arise but were always quickly and amicably resolved. There were always more. Our bottles clinked together in our plastic shopping bags as we went along in a high, clear, rewarding sound I can still hear to this day. That clinking sound was money; hard to come by money for financially poor farm kids in those days. We'd fill a bag, and leave it sitting on the shoulder of the road and keep going. When we were done we'd collect all of our bags and hang them from our handlebars and maybe carry one in our left hand and head for home. We sometimes just kept our bags inside the gatepost, jealously guarded in families where there were two or more kids of bottle picking age. 

Sometimes there'd be a bummer bottle that hit a rock and was broken, and was either just left where it lay, or, less likely by the most responsible of us, picked and brought home to be thrown in the garbage. That also prevented it being a bummer bottle again next Spring. 

The adults would pick anything else that was exposed by the burn for disposing of in the trash.

The end result of all that burning and picking were neat, tidy, almost groomed looking, ditches free of weeds, trees, and litter along the farm roads. And a Saturday junk food pig out extravaganza for the participating kids at the local general store after enthusiastically cashing their bottles in. We'd take our bottles down the Queens Line to Ferguson's General Store at the Queens Line Rink, or out Kohlsmith Road to Roscoe's General Store across the Kerr Line at the tracks. Maybe even into Foresters Falls (the Center of the Known Universe) to Bell's General Store if we were feeling particularly adventurous. We transformed our harvested bottles into tasty treats. We turned garbage bottles into Garbage Candy (remember that?) that even had uncapped pop bottles in it! We 'recycled' without having to be told to do so. It was a great system and great fun from start to finish.

We have forgotten a lot of good, ordinary things over the years. Among scores of others, one of my absolute fondest memories of being a Queens Line kid was the simple pleasure of burning ditches and the excitement of picking bottles with my farm kid friends in the Spring. They were great times with great people.