FIRE AT TOTAL LOSS FARM: the case of the missing mailbox

A CURIOUS PHOTO of this lost object suddenly appeared in my email recently, under the subject line “Total Loss artifact.” I gasped when I opened the attachment.

It showed an old, handmade mailbox that once marked a rural property where I lived as a university student. How had it resurfaced, after all these years? I hadn’t seen it since 1982, when we suffered a “total loss” fire.

The name immediately conjured places and people from my early days at Trent University, with its picturesque main campus five kilometres north of Peterborough on the Otonabee River. I lived in residence at the original downtown “Peter Robinson” campus in 1978 but moved to a dilapidated farmhouse near the Otonabee campus with a new student friend, David Orfald, at the end of my first year.

The farmhouse was on property that had been expropriated by Trent as it created the new campus. It was originally known as the “The Peconi House,” after the family that had farmed the land going back generations.

When the university determined that it didn’t need the house or land, which was about a kilometre away from the new campus, it began renting the place to students, sometime in the late 1960s.

It became my home in the spring of 1979, along with David and some existing residents. Our total rent was $260 a month for the three-bedroom home. And that was split five ways, $52 each!

Sometime in the decade before we moved in, the home had been rebranded as “Total Loss Farm” by previous student tenants. Everyone called it that. Who wouldn’t want to live in a place with such an alluring name?

New applicants were vetted by the existing occupants. “Interviews” were conducted during a dinner invite, which included gentle questions about political views, culinary prowess, and a willingness to live together.

The fabric of Total Loss Farm

Here’s what greeted a newcomer to the two-acre property:

• A front yard of sugar maples that we sometimes tapped in the spring
• A long, gravel driveway leading up from the mailbox, gradually revealing the shape of a 1-1/2 story house through the trees
• A chicken coop, but no chickens (we were city kids with no farm experience)
• The ruins of a barn out back and the shell of an abandoned grain silo that we’d climb to watch the sunrise on summer solstices
• A veggie garden surrounded by a split rail fence
• An oil tank beside the house to fuel our basement furnace
• Corn fields beyond on rolling hills

Our furniture was mostly hand-me-downs from previous tenants. For example: a ragged blue sofa that we dubbed “the Willie P. Bennett” couch, because of a legend that the Ontario folksinger had slept on it after playing a Trent gig.

We had a pantry cupboard stuffed with preserves that we put up with produce bought from the Peterborough Farmer’s Market. Near the kitchen we installed rough-sawn wood shelves with a line of glass jars holding staples like brown rice, sunflower seeds and sultana raisins.

We made our own bread, granola, and yogurt. Vegetarianism was a given. We cooked and ate together, joined the local food-co-op, and tried to live our countercultural and anti-capitalist ideals. We drank non-instant skim milk and frozen orange juice, because we were thrifty and the goods were easier to transport without a car. Sometimes we shared each other’s clothes!

We banked at the downtown credit union and scorned the more convenient CIBC branch on campus. We had no television. Our news came from the radio (CBC of course) and alternative magazines like The Last Post and Canadian Dimension.

We played music on guitars, pennywhistles, and a mandolin. We also had a turntable and a collection of LPs. We used our bicycles or the university bus for transport to town and walked back and forth to our classes at the main campus.

We did our laundry at the coin-op services provided for students living in residence on the main campus, lugging it back and forth in backpacks. We eventually acquired a portable home washer that we filled at the kitchen sink and dried our garments on a clothesline.

One winter, we endured an invasion of rats that sought refuge in our basement. We hunted them at night with contraptions that looked and worked like regular mousetraps, except blown up about 400%. Catching them was an unpleasant task, delegated to the male housemates for some reason.

It was hard work living at Total Loss, with lots of lugging. But despite the discomforts, we were proud of our rustic abode with its peculiar name and cultural pedigree. Our self-sufficiency was a badge of honour.

Origin of the strange name

The moniker Total Loss Farm kind of fit us, but only loosely. We suspected it was lifted from a 1970 back-to-the-land memoir by Raymond Mungo, who lived with 6–10 other people in rural Vermont commune.

The slim book traced his evolution from ideas of political revolution (in the late 1960s, before the farm) to personal and cultural transformation (in the 1970s, at Total Loss). His new ethic was opting out of consumer society and creating an alternative lifestyle, separate from mainstream society.

Perhaps our predecessors at the Peterborough house felt it was an ironic comment on their own place? In any case, that was the tale we inherited when we took over.

Here’s what didn’t jive with Mungo’s story: we were integrated into the university community, albeit on the left wing, active in a student environmental group and the university newspaper. We were young, earnest, studious, and pretty care-free, learning to live away from home.

We had no children and our garden produced little. Our lodging was cooperative, but we were tenants in someone else’s place. We didn’t share our income; it was more of an imaginary commune than Mungo’s deliberate one.

Whatever! Despite its down-market name, Total Loss felt like grandeur to us because it was our own, even if the house and “farm” had seen better days.

Get the picture?

The Ides of March

Our idyllic home was abruptly destroyed by fire on March 14, 1982. That was a day before the Ides of March, a symbolic date on the Roman calendar that portends doom and disaster. Its destruction took less than an hour.

I escaped with Nichola Martin (my girlfriend, who’d moved in the previous September), David Orfald and Debby Clarke (who had arrived the year before that), plus a fifth housemate, Marian Bredin (who had lived with us on-and-off since early 1980). We also had four pets: two dogs, Lisa (a sweet mongrel we were babysitting), and Skeena (Deb and David’s new puppy), plus two inherited cats.

Here’s how the dramatic night unfolded.

Our sleep had been fitful. Dogs woke us with barking around 3 am. Debby investigated in a sleepy stupor and let them out — but nothing seemed amiss on the porch. Then an hour later, we heard more barking and, ominously, a shrieking smoke alarm.

What was going on?

David and I scampered downstairs and immediately checked our wood stove, a new airtight device we’d installed the previous fall with a subsidy from the federal “off oil” program. But it was cold. We’d cleaned the ashes out days earlier, and the first spring melt was underway and the weather was warm. So why the alarm?

Puzzled, we turned to go back upstairs and then noticed a frightening scene outside: sparks were blowing past a side window. We saw no flames but suspected that trouble was lurking at the front of the house, beyond our vision.

We yelled to the others: “There’s a fire! We have to get out of here!”

Nichola called the fire department from our black rotary phone on the second floor. “There’s a fire at Total Loss Farm,” she bellowed, then added in response to their questions: “Highway 28 and Second Line Smith Township.” That was a lot more specific than RR#2, our mailing address.

Rural emergency locator numbers didn’t exist in 1982, and she wondered if they’d understood her panicked message delivered with an English accent. We all ran downstairs to see what was happening. Here’s what we found when we finally opened the front door.

A fierce wind was blowing. The metal bucket containing the stove’s ashes was overturned, and its embers had blown into the porch wood pile. There weren’t many flames there, but when David and I looked under the porch, we could see white hot wood, like when you blow on a campfire to get it started.

We knew immediately what that meant. The fire’s tinder was the substructure of our farmhouse. It entered via a basement window and was already burning the wooden beams that supported the first floor. Driving it all was the wind, like a bellows. And although we couldn’t see the blaze, we could hear it, a sickening, whooshing sound of burning.

Panic ensued.

We all have different memories of the next few minutes, each of us mentally isolated in the rapidly unfolding calamity. We were scared but also wanted to save the house (and our possessions), if we could.

Here’s what I recall. There was no fire extinguisher, but we began filling plastic buckets with water from the kitchen sink, attempting to work together, brigade style. In reality, we were fumbling and disorganized.

Our water supply was a well, and the pressure from our old pump had always been feeble. It took 30 seconds to half-fill the first bucket. We ran outside and tossed that on the wood pile … which accomplished nothing.

It didn’t take long to grasp our futility and set a new course of action: we should flee, and fast. We began to see open flames licking around the side of the house, even though there was still very little smoke inside. The alarm had given us a few precious minutes, enough for escape, but the reprieve wouldn’t last.

Fleeing for our lives

We grabbed hats, coats, boots and our two dogs — plus some precious research work from a fourth-year labour history course that some of us had in school bags by the door — and fled for our lives. Debby had an impulse to retrieve a down sleeping bag she’d just purchased, ignoring David’s protests against running back upstairs! To our relief, she reappeared outside (with her prized possession) a few moments later.

Our two cats were nowhere to be seen. We dared not go back inside to look for them. Nichola had already dashed 200 metres down the road to alert our closest neighbours (more student tenants, Robin and John) and to call the fire department again, because there was no sign of help.

We left the house, closed the door, and lingered for a few more minutes as flames began to engulf its exterior.

Fire trucks did arrive, finally. However, there were no hydrants because we lived beyond city water lines. The first truck struggled up the snow-clogged driveway (we didn’t plough it because we had no cars) and emptied its tank, quelling the flames a little.

It couldn’t turn around and backed slowly down the narrow lane. By the time a second truck crawled up to the house several minutes later the flames had advanced further up the structure.

It was still nighttime, with an inky darkness in the trees and a waning moon in the sky. A bonfire was raging where our house stood, illuminating the scene dramatically. Was this for real? Or a movie? Or maybe a haphazard dream?

We could see where the story was heading and didn’t care to watch the finale. We retreated to Robin and John’s house by about 4:30 am, too shocked to cry, and blurted our story out. We attempted to sleep on their floor, but couldn’t, our nerves jangling and minds racing.

We knew we were fortunate. But we were also stunned by our how fast the fire had taken over and our complete inability to alter the course of events.

At 7 am, some of us walked back to Total Loss Farm. The house was gone and the firefighters had left. All that remained were the charred remains of twisted metal appliances lying haphazardly in the basement, covered with piles of ash.

Strangely, the Willie P. Bennett couch sat alone on the driveway — we had watched as the firefighters yanked it off the porch immediately after they arrived.

Sickened, we turned away. It was Sunday morning and the day was dawning.

My new home — the first “permanent” one since leaving my family in Vancouver after high school, and where I’d lived for three school years with David and others — had vanished in the night.

I was 23 and this was my second brush with death in four years. I was involved in a truck accident while hitch-hiking in northern B.C. just before entering Trent. A friend was killed in the crash; I escaped with minor injuries. After the fire, I felt forlorn and even foolish.

Why had we left the ashes on the porch? We normally took them out to the garden. Our new airtight stove had replaced a much more dangerous sheet metal “trash burner” we’d used for two winters before. The new one had even been inspected by the fire department as a condition of the home efficiency government grant that subsidized its purchase. It seemed ironic that the new “safe” stove was somehow connected to this sudden disaster.

However, we were all unharmed, which seemed miraculous. We thanked our smoke alarm. The nighttime inferno wasn’t as horrifying to me as my earlier truck accident, but it bore the same life lessons of fragility and finality.

I was very lucky — again.

We had no classes to attend because it was Sunday. With nowhere to go, we walked back to the university campus. We still held passes for a weekend film festival, so we entered the main theatre and sat there, dishevelled and stunned.

A friend approached and asked, “What’s that smell?” Our clothes reeked of smoke, as if we’d been sitting by a campfire all night.

“Our house just burned down,” we mumbled, almost giggling at the incongruity of the situation. We attempted to explain but couldn’t. Soon the film was rolling, and we could have an hour of mental, but not emotional, reprieve.

Aftermath

Nichola called her parents. She and I took the bus to Toronto the same day, for a hug, or just to get away from the shocking experience. David called the Peterborough Examiner, which had somehow found us by word of mouth, and did an interview. It was the lead story in the daily newspaper on Monday:

That cheeky sub-headline hurt a little, but as a budding student journalist, I had to admire the cogency of the writing. It was accompanied by a small photo of our mailbox by the highway with a terse caption: “All that remains of Trent landmark.”

Some of us returned to the property later in the week, to look for the cats, without luck. We climbed into the basement and picked through the wreckage. We couldn’t recognize much, certainly no photos nor papers, no furniture nor clothes. None of our treasured LPs.

Our woodstove didn’t cause the fire; the errant ashes were to blame. And it looked intact on the morning after, lying on its side in the basement. (Later in the week, it was inexplicably gone, looted.)

We did find one object that hadn’t been destroyed by the blaze — a pottery jar that we used for our food kitty money. We kept that. Nothing else was salvageable. We were sobered and sad.

As we left, we reached the end of the driveway and looked for our trademark mailbox. It was gone, maybe because of the newspaper publicity? We weren’t that upset. It wasn’t the most valuable thing we had lost. Think letters, photos, clothes, and everything else we needed for living. The house was insured by the university, but our contents weren’t.

Trent was helpful, offering four of us — Nic and I plus Debby and David — a one-bedroom apartment in a house they owned downtown. Marian found another place. And the city immediately gave us $300 from a disaster fund. That paid for underwear and toiletries for five bereft students. Some friends staged a benefit night at The Commoner, a student-run campus pub.

The spirit of Total Loss lives on

Nichola and I stayed another year in Peterborough, living in a communal apartment again with Debby and David. By the spring of 1983, our extended collection of Peterborough friends all left the city and started their post-student lives. Two of them, including Marian, went on to grad school, and became professors in time, at Brock and Queen’s.

David went to work for OPIRG, the student environmental group we had served voluntarily at Trent. Deb and I worked in graphic arts at a Toronto printer together. Nichola became a union organizer!

The four of us (Nic’n’Art + Deb’n’David) lived together again in Toronto, mid-1980s, in a rented semi-detached home on Manning Ave, near Bloor Street. We got involved in various environmental, women’s movement, and El Salvador support groups and newspapers.

Our bond of friendship was exceptionally strong, and became lifelong, forged by the joy and compromises of communal living, and also by the trauma of the night we narrowly escaped tragedy together. Both couples got married in 1985, just a few months apart.

One morning in the Manning bathroom, Nichola and Debby were brushing their teeth together when Deb confessed some news to Nichola.

“Guess what? I’m pregnant!”

Nic replied, “I might be pregnant too!”

Our first children (Jamie and Zachary) were born five weeks apart in the spring of 1987, while living in the house our friends had just purchased near Roncesvalles Avenue. We bought our first house in the same neighbourhood a few months later, our lives in perfect synchronicity.

But they soon moved to Ottawa, so David could take a job at Oxfam Canada, and where Deb eventually became a school teacher. For the first time in nearly a decade, our paths diverged.

Our fear of nighttime fire remained. Once after we had children, Nichola and I were awoken by loud banging on the front door of our house in Fergus. We could see a glow outside the house and a stranger yelled “FIRE!” A pile of leaves we’d raked the day before were alight. (We easily quelled the flames but wondered how the fire had started.)

Student friends forever

Whenever we visit with Deb and David, we fall into easy banter and even easier cooking and game-playing. The spirit of Total Loss Farm endures. We’ve attended weddings, funerals, and welcomed grandchildren over the years. Memories stay strong and life rolls on.

Our phone calls aren’t always frequent but last an hour or more when we connect, fast exchanges in a shared shorthand of jokes and anecdotes. We compare notes and discover we’ve often read the same books, streamed the same TV series, or bought the same small house appliances. It has to be more than just demographics, doesn’t it?

When Nichola’s younger sister died tragically of a hospital-acquired infection in 2006, we beat a path to Ottawa, and the embrace of old friends who knew our history and could feed us while providing quiet empathy. Right at the beginning of Covid, Debby was seriously injured in a bike accident. We counselled and supported David over the phone — he wasn’t allowed to be with her in the Ottawa hospital ICU as she was being treated for a concussion and broken bones.

Solving the mailbox mystery

That original email about the mailbox came from David but was forwarded via a chain of former Peterborough student friends and acquaintances.

It originated with Curtis Driedger, who had fronted a rock band that often played in Peterborough in the early ‘80s named “The Ceedees” (his initials). We didn’t know him personally, but adored his music, which was funky, quirky and danceable, a bit like The Talking Heads of the same era.

He was helping his friend Yvonne clean out her Reid Street, Peterborough garage and had discovered the mailbox under a pile of old stuff.

“I do remember Total Loss Farm by reputation,” he emailed, “and may have visited once or twice. I wonder if there’s anybody out there for whom this thing might have significance?”

His query travelled like this: Curtis Driedger > Ken Brown > Bay Weyman > James Weyman > David Bennett. That last name overlapped David O. and I at Total Loss by a few months in 1979, before he moved to Ottawa. We recognized all the other names too. David B. forwarded the email to David O., who then sent a quick reply-all to Curtis and the others:

“OMG, what a find, and a blast from the past! Yes, indeed I remember the mailbox,” he said.

In fact, David made it sometime during our first year at the farm. We took a photo in the spring of 1980 as we installed it out at the road, posed with the five students living there at the time. (How did that photo survive the fire, when we lost everything elsse? It must have belonged to someone else.)

David replied to Curtis saying his grandchild in Peterborough was taking piano lessons with the former rocker, who he and Debby had danced to as students. And … yes, he’d happily take the mailbox back!

The invisible string

The chain grew larger and ricocheted around for more than a week, collecting memories of the house, and searching for answers about the mailbox’s disappearance. It also revealed the myriad connections between us all from our Trent years — and even before, and since — like Taylor Swift’s Invisible String, tying us together over time and space.

Our former housemate Marian Bredin finally cracked the code on the mailbox mystery. In the mid-1980s, long after the fire, she lived at a house on Reid Street, with its owner John Muir, a pioneer of Trent student radio.

“Whoever removed it from the farm might have given it to me because I was the only one left in town after 1983,” she speculated in an email to us. People knew she had lived there and had escaped the infamous 1982 fire.

She stored it in the house’s large garage and lost track of it when she moved to the UK to do her MA. She recalled seeing it when she visited Muir shortly before he died in 2019.

Curtis Driedger is a friend of Muir’s widow, Yvonne Lai, which is how he ended up doing garage clean-up and stumbled upon the “artifact” with the place name he recognized. We are indebted to him for his curiosity about the object, and the fact that he didn’t just decide to throw it away!

Case closed!

Total Loss Postscript

Two interesting remnants of our long-gone home live on, because the land still belongs to Trent University. It established 15 “nature areas” in 1989 around the main campus. The first of them was named the Total Loss Farm Nature Area.

No kidding!

The Trent website says, “Much of the Area was once a farm, and there are several rail fences and a low stone wall still present. The farmhouse and outbuilding both were removed long ago, although the house foundation is still visible.” No mention of the fire, or the origins of the strange name.

A December 2023 Trent enewsletter gave this (probably erroneous!) origin for the name: “Total Loss Farm Nature Area earned the moniker because the wetland complex made farming the site challenging, often coming up as a total loss.” Maybe they used AI to figure that one out?

Just north of our old intersection (now called Hwy. 29 and Woodland Drive) Trent and peopleCare Communities are building a 224-bed nursing home. Work began in September 2025, and the long-term care facility is slated to open in 2027 (concept below).

They are NOT calling it “Total Loss Care for the Elderly” (as I spoofed in an April Fool’s Day email to my old Trent friends in 2022)! But the new building is just a stone’s throw away from the stream that ran alongside our former driveway, very close to our old home and mailbox.

Great timing! In a couple of decades we could retire to our old homestead, in spirit and location, if not in name.

Total Loss Farm residents

1979–1982: Mary Bender (deceased 2014), David Bennett, David Orfald, Art Kilgour, Marian Bredin, Nancy Sheppard, Marie Bradford (deceased 2023), Debby Clarke, Ken Summers, Pat Dixon, Nichola Martin.