In the end, it only took a few short days.
It began at 11 a.m. on an overcast Thursday when the first bricks tumbled to the ground. It was all over by Saturday night, when the original Humboldt Public School building was nothing more than a massive pile of rubble. The decision had been made long ago and there was nothing to be done about it now, but that didn't lessen the pain for Carol Oleksyn, who stood in the snow next to the temporary blue fence surrounding the worksite and watched the school she'd taught at for more than two decades come tumbling down.
"I'll talk to you if I don't end up crying," she said.
Oleksyn was a teacher and principal at the school between 1979 and 2001 and even though she understood why the demolition had to happen - "it just hasn't been taken care of properly" - it wasn't easy to watch.
There was one small consolation, though. The contractors doing the work had agreed to do their best to save the two stones on the third floor inscribed with the date, 1913, that the building first sprang up alongside what was to become Highway 5. On that Thursday morning one of the stones was already on the ground, relatively undamaged. Oleksyn hoped the second would follow suit and that the stones could then be used as part of a commemorative display on the school grounds.
Watching the demolition happen, it seemed a minor miracle that the stones would be saved at all. The work began on the west side of the building and it didn't take much for the old wood-and-brick structure to begin to crumble. Beams hung from the ceiling like icicles; glass shattered and dust rose in a choking cloud as the innards of the building were exposed. As it settled, there was something on the second floor that caught Oleksyn's eye.
"That's my old Grade 7 classroom," she said.
Sure enough, there it was. The blackboard was still against the wall, almost as if students had been practicing their spelling on it only the day before.
One of the students who had used that classroom over the years was Sean Moore. He stood next to Oleksyn that morning and retraced his eight years at the school, pointing here and there - to the French room on his right and to the lunch room in the basement.
"It's kind of crazy," he said. "Every room has some memory that goes with it."
There were even memories all the way up to the third floor, long since condemned as unfit for use. It was a place Oleksyn used to reserve for troublemakers.
"When I needed to discipline the boys I'd send them up to clean the third floor," she said with a laugh. "Sometimes it would backfire on me because they'd bring the girls up there to show them how good of a job they'd done."
For Moore, who attended the school from kindergarten to Grade 8, the age and history of the place was something to be proud of.
"It was pretty cool, actually," he said.
The demolition wasn't just attracting former students and teachers, either. The blinds were drawn in many of the classrooms at the new wing of the school as the current students had lined up in the windows to watch the old building go down.
"Well, it's getting a little cold for me, so I'm getting out of here," Oleksyn said. She turned and walked away, leaving Moore behind. After a brief chat with the demolition supervisor, he was on his way too.
A few minutes earlier, Moore had pulled out his phone. On the screen was a picture of the old school as the sun set behind it. The picture had been taken by Moore's wife Robyn, a teacher at Humboldt Public. Robyn had taught in that same Grade 7 classroom that had once housed her husband as a student. In a few short hours that classroom would be gone, just another pile of twisted wood and pulverized brick. For now, though, there was still one wall left.
One wall, and, of course, a blackboard.
