The Yacht Pond

By Doreen Marion Gee

My skin was tingling and my heart was pounding with pure joy. Soft snowflakes covered trees like tinsel within an enchanted winter wonderland. Anything was possible as I swirled and danced on a frozen pond under lemon moonlight. My feverish mind was focused on one exquisite thought: Christmas! Even the word made me gasp for more chilly icy air. Our wonderful cosy big brown house was just a half a block away - chock full of savory smells, the Hallelujah Chorus and the sparkles, glitter and razzle-dazzle of the holiday season. Harrison Pond was affectionately called the "Yacht Pond" by our "Jubb" clan: it was the epicentre of some of my most rapturous childhood memories.

Fifties and sixties James Bay was a much different place than today. There were no areas of high-end affluence like today but many sections housed post-war shacks and families that were dirt poor. Our middle class family did well but many of my friends survived without proper food or health and dental care. One affordable form of entertainment for kids was hanging out at the 'yacht pond', launching tiny homemade ships out to sea in the sizzling summers and strapping on an old pair of skates for a magical skate around the small bumpy ice rink in the winter. Life started improving in James Bay with the social services explosion of the seventies.

Winter skating on the yacht pond was not for the weak-hearted: if the jagged edges on the ice didn't send you flying, the crazed kids streaking across your path definitely did. It was the law of the jungle at Harrison Pond. There were no rules. A native Victoria girl, I have personally seen local climate change with a definite warming trend in the weather. I recall fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk summers and winters that were so brutally frigid that our local pond solidified overnight. It was a wild and woolly time.

The passage of time tricks the memory in bizarre ways, but I still have to challenge the record-keeping of W.H. Warren, Parks Administrator, back in the fifties. Janis Ringuette, refers to Warren's reports on when the yacht pond turned into an ice fantasyland in her excellent historical journeys into our past: "The pond was used several times for ice skating. There were two days of skating in December, 1956 and three days of skating in early January, 1959, according to Parks Administrator W. H. Warren's Annual Reports for those years." Sorry, Warren, but I remember sliding around under the stars more often than that - and many times just before Christmas in the late fifties. However, the most likely explanation is that my rascally scalawag brothers also took me down to skate when the ice was not formally approved for skating. Unbelievable! That explains the night time ice capades on a moonlit oasis, guilty pleasures under an icy sky.

Harrison Pond, built in 1955, was the brain-child of then mayor, Claude Harrison, after whom it was named. Since that time, the little seaside gem on the emerald lawns has brought happiness to small boat-makers, duck groupies and happy visitors from age 2 to 100.

It is remarkable how a little pond can transport me back to a gentler, more innocent time of my life with a flood of blissful smells, sensations and feelings that linger on the arc of my memory like gold dust.

(formerly Doreen Marion Jubb of the James Bay Jubb family)

Many thanks to Janis Ringuette for her historical source material in BEACON HILL PARK HISTORY 1842-2009.