Yesterday afternoon we met up with "Nearly Normal Norman" over at his Ocean Falls "museum" that he was kind enough to open it up for us to tour.
Norman, giving us a little history of Ocean Falls:
He even picked some wildflowers to gussy up the place:
Norman's museum is in the gray Marine Ways building, right down on the waterfront.
This is the lounge section of the "lunch room" where the men's group meets every Wednesday night. There are apparently three members of this men's group (with an occasional guest). One night they may be having elk burgers for dinner, another night, they may have ordered pizza (flown in on the float plane that comes every Wednesday):
Looking out toward the marina:
Walking into Norman's museum of things found around Ocean Falls is quite a shock, really. All of the items here were found in and around Ocean Falls after the mill closed:
He truly has a little bit of everything:
This is one of my favorites…note the glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth mixed in with the others:
"I'm a winer!"
Oh yeah, a couple more photos of Nearly Normal Norman:
So I think I mentioned in the previous post that Ocean Falls was once a booming mill town with over 5,000 inhabitants, and then after the mill closed in 1973 things went downhill and it eventually became the semi ghost town that it is today. There's an interesting history still evident in the buildings and the people (and most definitely in Norman's "museum").
After the museum, we wandered around town a bit and up to the falls. The power created here supplies electricity to Ocean Falls, Bella Bella, and Shearwater.
The abandoned Cypress Hill apartment building up on the hill:
The old church:
They forgot to take the holy water!
Ocean Falls is an interesting little town.
Oh and…great crabbing here! We pulled our two traps and had eight Dungeness crab. Two were female, and two of the six males were too small, so we came away with four large crabs. Here's Mark showing Kevin his secret cleaning method:
Ocean Falls wildflower bouquet:
We cooked and picked all the crab after our potluck dinner up at "The Shack" and I think we'll be making some crab enchiladas for the next potluck!
