Forest Grove area resident Kay Gibson has just had her first book, It Was a Hard Pull, published and it's on the shelves at Nuthatch Books in 100 Mile House.
It's an autobiographical story of a young woman who had a comfortable urban upbringing, and then one day in 1975, she packed up her belongings and moved to a 240-acre chunk of raw land on Tatton Station Road, just north of 100 Mile House, with her husband, Ernie, and their six-month-old son, Graeme.
Kay says she met Ernie while she was a librarian in Duncan and they have been together ever since.
Noting Ernie grew up on a dairy farm near the Vancouver Island community, Kay says he always worked around cattle and horses and he always wanted to go ranching.
"He always needed a partner, so that's why we headed to the Cariboo."
Kay notes they experienced a sharp jolt of reality when they got their first taste of the trials and tribulations of a Cariboo winter.
"We didn't realize that things just froze up in the winter. In Duncan, you could leave the hose outside all winter, but here it's totally different – your gas lines freeze ... everything freezes. We were totally unprepared for real cold."
Kay says she, Ernie and Graeme were living in a tent and didn't have hydro or running water on their first Labour Day weekend at the ranch. They woke up in the morning and the roof of the tent was collapsed from the weight of the snow.
"All of our [11] cows were from the Coast and they were standing around the tent bawling their heads off. I'm sure they were wondering what the heck they were doing there.
"Then we realized we didn't have hay lined up for the cows – we had nothing."
Noting she got sick and was pregnant with their second son, Jordie, Kay says Ernie sent her and Graeme off to her parents. Then he sold the big truck he had used to move the family and cattle up to the Cariboo.
"He bought a single-wide trailer and put it on the ranch, but we didn't realize it had oil heat and it froze, too."
Our neighbours, Claire and Connie Burrows, told us we needed wood heat and the boys put an airtight heater in the trailer and cut a hole through the roof for the chimney, Kay explains.
"And that's how we survived our first winter in the Cariboo."
For the rest of the story, folks will just have to read It Was a Hard Pull.
