Alberta to Manitoba

Recording History.

Left Calgary early in the morning, drove down to Medicine Hat, then south to Cypress Hills.  Never been to the hills before, though it's a provincial park.  Elkwater, on the edge of the park, is a tiny summer village, no more than a hundred cabins or so.  We were stunned that it was so empty:

This is taken at 12:30 p.m., about four and a quarter hours from Calgary, on Saturday, July 22.  At this same time at Sylvan Lake, where I went to the beach a couple weeks before, it would be wall-to-wall people ... but Sylvan is just 80 minutes from both Calgary and Edmonton, both million-plus cities.  Elkwater is no where near such people.  Here's the beach, taken about the same time:

Just a tiny beach, yet mostly empty.  Might fill up through the day; seemed to be getting busy as we left at 1 p.m.  Elkwater is on a reservoir by the same name; here's a shot of the north end, then the west end:

Drove back to the Transcanada hwy and into Saskatchewan.  Temperature was hitting 38 C as we passed north of Maple Creek, a usual high for this time of the year.  As a kid in Regina, we had a lot of 100 F plus days, when Canada was still counting in Fahrenheit.

Tamara found it odd that they grew and cut hay in the space between the highway lanes, so I took a picture of it.

Reached Moose Jaw in the early evening, called it a day.  Rose the 23rd and completed the trip into Regina.  There I visited the house occupied by my grandparents, who both passed away in hospital, during the 1990s.  Their house was condemned, as it was built in the 50s and not well taken care of, and I was surprised to see that someone had refurbished it ... but it's definitely the same house I remember as a kid.  I hadn't seen it since 1987.

Went over to see the government buildings in Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.  The building is rather imposing for a province with just under 1.2 million:

Finished August 31. 1908.  We enjoyed the geese on the lawn and parking lot:

Because it was Sunday, we didn't take a tour ... and anyway, we had places to be.  My grandparents, and later my uncle Tom, owned a cabin on Last Mountain Lake, sometimes called "Long Lake" in Saskatchewan.  When my father passed away, this picture from his basement came into my possession:

The picture was taken in the 1960s, from an airplane above the lake.  My grandparent's cabin is the one second from the left, a white two-story cabin with a peaked roof.  Later it came into my uncle Tom's possession.  The name of the summer village used to be "Strasbourg Beach" but nowadays it's called "Island View," because an island can be dimly seen across the lake and it sounds better.

The last time I'd been here was July, 1980.  I was 16.  I was staying with my uncle, his 1st cousin Ken (and my 2nd cousin) and their friend Rory.  They were in their 30s.  Now, what happened is difficult to relate; my uncle and I reconciled years later, in 1987 (the last time I was at the house above), and would speak regularly on the phone after.  See, he was an alcoholic.  He also died in the 1990s, of organ failure related to alcoholism.  And the others were his drinking buddies.  At some point, he forgot that I was just a kid, and started barking at me for some reason.  This ended up scaring the hell out of me, such that I ran off.  In fact, I walked a mile and a half up the road, shown at the top of the picture, to where there used to be a country gas station.  And a payphone.  I got there about 12:30 in the morning.  I phoned my parents in Regina, an hour and some away, and begged for them to come get me.  Then I waited.

When they did, they drove back to the cabin and my mother (Tom was her brother) gave him a royal screaming for a long time, as I sat in the car.  My father kept them apart.  The thing drove a wedge between my mother and my uncle for the rest of his life ... but as I said, I met my uncle in 1987 and we talked it all out.

Turns out, right after I left, they sobered up fast.  My uncle realised what he'd done, and they all realised that they'd gone over the line, and for the whole time my parents were driving up from Regina they were desperately searching the village and calling out my name.  They never thought I'd head off into the middle of nowhere, to a gas station that was closed, in the dark, after midnight.  And if I hadn't acted so strongly, things would have been sorted out in an hour and my mother wouldn't have known anything.

I don't fault what I did.  It seemed my best course of action, and of course I was just a kid.  And I don't entirely forgive what my uncle did ... but the error he made had been made when my uncle was a teenager, when he decided that alcohol was his relief from his struggles.  And his struggles were indeed many, as I learned later from other family members.  So in all, it was just a bad scene.

Anyway, Tamara and I went there so I could exorcise some of those feelings.  We drove up, I called out to the 50-something guys on the lawn of the far left cabin (call them Dave and Don), introduced myself and showed them the picture above.  They were surprised, but after some talking they told me they remembered my uncle Tom; that when Dave and Don were kids, Tom used to give them cold pops from the old cold drinks machine he had, one from the 50s where the glass bottles would come out with frost on them.  Dave and Don introduced me to the family that owns my grandparents property now (the house is gone) and after some chatting, Tamara and I left.

We drove through the middle of Saskatchewan to get down to the Qu'Appelle Valley east, seeing the back country.  I took this obvious picture of a derelict grain elevator in Dysart.  

Then we went east and spent Sunday night in Brandon, Manitoba.

I'll call it there, finally, though I know I've posted several half-versions of this.  The phone tethering keeps going out and this is now the second time I've written this post.  Until tomorrow.