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WHITBY FREE PRESS. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 1987. PAGE 5 Swimming holes, as everyone knows, are largely imaginary places where fathers and grandfathers spent much of their youth, and have been lying about what hap- pened there ever since. In my case, however, the swimming hole was real and the events need no embelishment. I could not invent a place as wonderful and as apt as 'The Sheep Hole.' Local legend said that about the turn of the century, The Sheep Hole was actually used for dipping sheep, or some such, although no one I ever knew what dipping sheep meant, and no one for miles around raised sheep anymore. The name stuck. By reputation, The Sheep Hole was a deep, cold, mean place to swim. At least that's how my father described it when I was'eight. He had almôst drowned in the deep end, he said, where the snapping turtles lay in wait, and because of that and the undertow and the bloodsuckers I was forbidden ever, ever to swim there. So of course, once I had learned to swim a stroke and a half, it was the first place ever I went. You could get to The Sheep Hole by bicycling a mile and a hall to Jack Bell's farm - Jack was my best friend, then - and biking another half a mile past the Parker farm. The gate was the first to the left past the Capling place. The Sheep Hole was a bulge in an ox-bow in the "crick". A stream fed it with a trickle at the west end and drained it with a trickleat the east end. Between those two points, perhaps thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, was The Sheep Hole. Thé north side was a gentle slope of grass and mud; the south side, however, dropped off sharply, so that three feet out from shore, lay the deepest part of the hole. It was this that had terrorized my father in 1912. When I was ten, this was shoulder deep. You have to remember that this was on the river flats which are no good for cultivation. They do make passable pasture. Thus, we shared The Sheep Hole with a few dozen WITH OUR FEET UP by Bill Swan Growing up head of Hereford cattle. Cattle will stand in water until their hooves suck up mud. Then they stir the mud in with cowpies until the water is always brown. All my boyhood, we swam in brown water, which in all likelihood was still Iess polluted then than Lake Ontario is today. Before you could go swimming you had to play cowboys. And~the first thing cowboys did, see, was create a cattle stampede. The rumor about the snapping turtles would have remained but a rumor, had not Jack and I stumbled on a real snapper one day in May before real swimming could begin. We probed him with sticks until he got mad. Then he chomped down on that maple branch until we lifted him shoulder height off the ground, and then heaved him into the water. All that summer we swam with extra caution. We'd seen the original jaws in action. The summers between nine and 12 blurred into one another. But finally one summer father caught me at The Sheep hole and I knew, without anyone ever saying, that I had grown up. It happened on a Saturday. Some of the household chores had been done. But somehow, lunch was late or I was early. Anyway, I ended up at Jack's and then shortly after we ended up, as usual, at'l'he Sheep Hole. Somehow I had not thought that Mother would miss me at lunch; She did, and father came after me. His first mistake was in bringing a whole carload of kids - all my younger brothers and sisters and most of their friends. His second mistake was in driving the old Essex down the river flat trail. We hadn't hit the water yet, and were still in the middle of the second stampede when Dad drove up to the barbed wire fence. "Get in the carI" he yelled. I knew then he was angry. Dad never yelled. How angry he was I didn't anticipate. I hopped into.the car and Dad bent me backwards over the seat. Then, with six or seven pre-schoolers and first graders looking on, he commenced to spank. It wasn't a bare-bottom spanking, and it didn't hurt. But for the first time I realized how much fear he harhnured. It wasnt't that I had disobeyed him, although that may have been part of it. But I had walked into his most terrifying fear and he couldn't handle it. The spanking administered, Father turned to start the car. It wouldn't budge. The starter motor would lurch, but that's all. Jack and I had to bicycle back the three- quarters of a mile and fetch Jack's Dad, dour Andrew, with his tractor and jumper cables. I knew then that fathers, too, had fears and that fathers, too, had weaknesses. And in the middle of a thrashing that did not hurt I had glimpsed some of his fears. Then, in his frustrations over the car that wouldn't start, over the cur- ses, over the funiing, I saw my father as an ordinary per- son for the first time. No omnipotent giant, this. It took me years before I could tell him, but that was the day I first realized I loved my father. Lean on board...Drumm Whitby councillor Joe Drumm wants the Town "to lean" on the Durham Board of Education and ask them to reconsider increasing the size of the parking lot at Ander- son CVI. Drumm said residents on streets opposite the school, such as John- son and Crawforth, are com- plaining about the number of students parking on their streets. Drumm said school ad- ministration is aware of the problem and had askedthe board to consider increasing the school's parking lot. That was turned down. But according to Drumm, enrolment at the school is expected to increase, and the problem is not going to go away. "Let's work with them (the board) to fix the problem," said Drumm. Subdivision plan approved Whitby council has approved a 10-unit subdivision in the Rossland Rd./Anderson St. area. The homes, single family detached lots, are part of the latest phase in the Coscan (formerly Costain), development. An estimated 375 people will live in the homes. Before council approval, coun- cillor Joe Drumm asked if both the public and separate school boards had been informed of the sub- division. When advised they had been, he made no comments. Heart fund up Funds totalling $38,400 were raised for this year's Heart Fund. Campaign -chairman Jim Gar- tshore says the total was 12 per cent higher than last year. Two Whitby schools have been chosen as part of a pilot project between Durham Board of Education and TV Ontario for a special science education course for junior grades. The quality education project for students of Grades 4-6 was set up in response to the Ministry of Education's initiatives in the scien- ce education area by TV Ontario. It will teach about eight teachers in Durham Region how to used the medium of television more effec- tively so that once the first educators are trained, they will be in a position to train more of their peers. The manager of utilization, of education services at TVO, Lynne Hines, stated in a press release that the project provides teachers with an important opportunity for meaningful implementation of the new Ministry of Education science initiatives. "TV Ontario is very pleased to provide a possible solution to the challenge of these new changes," she added. TVO is hoping the schools will realize the full education value the network can bring to students through use of its shows and sup- port material. Teachers, chosen by their schools, will be from West Lynde and R.A. Hutchison schools in Whitby and from Ridgeway, Athabasca Street and Dr. J.S. Phillips public schools in Oshawa. The project will be in force for a two-year period through a special grant from the provincial gover- nment. Additional quality education programs are underway in primary, intermediate and senior levels in the Bruce County, Timmins and Lincoln separate school boards. I -u c, o m '0 ~CD a0. 0. c' M (n < 0 71. -,ý >0 *CD cri - ze 0 0 - - zmuo CD-M N) ALGOER CA)RL R 1O0z O Zr OWAVIL 0 M~OAIYFR RS ROV CDP B WM N I L Two Whitby schools.to take part in pilot science project