Work Day in High River

Photo by Kris Moen

On August 1^st, I repented—I paid my penance.

                It was my High River day. In June, I left for Edmonton on the very day the disaster swept into Calgary, the day after it had destroyed High River. Canmore had been the day before, Siksika would be the day after. I recall watching those military vehicles charging south as I drove north and I said to myself, “This is wrong. I should be doing something.” The defining moment for us as Albertans and I was going the wrong way. How many of the kids whose exams I marked that week had lost their house in the time between their writing and my reading?

                Many, I guessed.

                So August 1^st, I tried to make good. Oh sure, my band had raised money on Canada Day, and my family had made donations—money and goods—but I’m a farm boy. I have arms, I have muscles, I have a work ethic. Hell, I’m a teacher and it’s summer. I have time.

                Deliver Good organized the day, and most of the people I worked with on Thursday were employees with Devon Petroleum. But I made a friend before 8am, a fellow Sasky, in this case a fellow named Kris who works for the Roughriders. Love at first sight.

                The bus drive from Calgary to High River was just another bus trip, the vibrancy of excited young people (sure, engineers, but kids to my eyes) all around me. Then suddenly we were reminded of where we were going, when we passed the field with dozens of temporary trailers housing displaced residents. It had been a month and a week, and the worst hit part of town was the east, where they were mostly young families. Now they were confined to a grid life in a block of trailers in a field for who knows how long.

                The bus delivered us to Highwood Golf Course. We were supplied with masks, gloves, safety glasses, and PPE suits. My wife had already provided me four of the good masks—a respiratory therapist is acutely aware of the risks of working around all that mold. It’s not water that went through, but a cool slurry.

                In Strathmore it’s been a wet summer, but still it passes; the only indication of the previous night’s rain was a few stains on the pavement. In High River there are mounds of mud and silt everywhere, dried but in other places still wet. This is a month later. Mud is a way of life here.

                We were briefed and broken into groups. I joined a crew washing and scraping eight inches of silt off a golf green. Sensing some trepidation from a group of volunteers that had come to help people and were now put to work on a summer fancy, Bill, a representative from the irrigation district who showed us how to work fire hoses on the silt, told us that the people of this town needed some symbols that they were moving on. The golf course was one. He likened it to Calgary still rolling Stampede in the wake.

                I accepted this and set to work. I didn’t like it, but I don’t like golf. I resolved to simply do as I was told, not to judge what I worked on. They needed it done, and forty able bodies could do a lot in a morning to wash a symbol.

                Filthy and wiped, we were given a BBQ lunch and then a choice for the afternoon: more golf courses or work some residences. I was in the group of thirty or so that chose the latter.

                We had seen a little of the devastation driving in. We walked past apartments with a high water mark far past the tops of the first floor windows. Dried weed petrified to chain link fences, flotsam, and everywhere the silt.

                The neighborhood they took us to was on the east edge of town, mostly seniors. Yards washed away, sidewalks ruined, foundations damaged.

                One half of the group set to work on a thick silt layer on a corner lot. There was an initial silence as we watched the Haz Mat crew working on the house, likely to prove it condemned. In High River, where everyone is a victim, the Haz Mat house is like the Stage 4 leukemia patient in a cancer ward.

                My own half crew was taken around the block to the yard of an elderly couple who had requested some help with their yard. We removed some damaged brickwork, then tore free some filth-encrusted link fencing that had been felled by the water, dug out the posts. Done, we paused a moment to look at the river that bent just fifty feet from this yard. That little thing, nothing but a trickle flowing lazily through its rock bed, had done this? Had wiped out this town where I had coached basketball, run races, shopped at the UFA?

                We broke into pairs, and began going door to door to offer any help. Kris and I moved some bricks for an old fellow who didn’t “have a damn clue how to start.” The grade of his entire yard had been shifted, he asked us what we thought. He wasn’t angry or evidently hurt. Honestly confused. He told us how the front door had done a surprisingly good job of holding the water back until he and his wife had been forced to evacuate. His power had been restored on the 25^th of July. The flood hit High River on June 19^th.

                Kris and I offered help at about a half dozen other houses. We did what little we could, even if it was just listening. By now, weeks into rebuilding, folks were past shock and numbness. Now they even had a bit of humour. Complete acceptance. Some of those old boys were taking well to having a task, a project. They told us about their evacuation, of coming back to assess the damage. Gutted basements, high water marks, ten foot high piles of garbage on the lawn. But always someone else was worse off.

                “Eighteen of us living on my daughter’s ranch. The well went dry, but we were lucky.”

                Our last task of the day was to rake up a cake of silt and garbage that was the footprint of one of those horrendous garbage piles. Broken drywall, tools, canned food, porcelain, scissors, keys, clothing, and mold. In an hour four of us cleaned one lawn. One.

                That was it, that was our day. We boarded the bus back to the golf course for pizza and beer.

                I felt like my day had been meaningless. What had I done? Cleaned a golf green, moved some bricks, raked a lawn. Lifted some things. Listened.

                As the bus drove through those savaged neighborhoods, as we passed homes that had tarps for garage doors, or had been abandoned altogether, front windows smashed exposing a muddy skeleton of a place that had housed Christmas dinners and family games nights, we passed people as well. Every one of them waved, nodded, gave a thumbs up.

                High River (and Canmore, and Siksika, and Calgary) remains. Its people are finding simple joys. A beer on a clean patio, a golf green. They are surviving the clean-up as they survived the flood. That was what I saw on my way out. Looking at the empty houses, listening to the silence, broken only by bobcats and dump trucks, watching the Haz Mat hearses move about, seeing sheds too heavy to move without a tractor shifted from back to front yards, there was also laughter, stoicism, hope.

                I do not know what I learned that day because I do not understand yet what I saw. I was in the heart of disaster, seeing a broken town, and its people who refused to be the worst story, the worst off. I do not write this to brag. I feel I have done so little, not near enough. And far too late. I write this to show us that there is so much to learn, and so much work to be done.

                High River and Siksika are still desperate for volunteers to aid with the clean-up.

Leaving Home: The Farm and Shaunavon

Shauanavon, Saskatchewan

     It was over a year ago that my dad told us that he was selling the farm. We have all wanted him to retire--his body is showing its fifty years of taxing physical labour--but there was some trepidation and surprise. I had always joked that we would one day pull his corpse from a tractor cab, and was a little stunned at the prospect of my dad being a farmer no more. There has never been a time in known history that someone on his side of the family hasn't farmed.
     Five sections of land, two home farms (one for living and one for working) that have been in my family for 99 years. Depending on who I told over the years, there was anything from mild curiosity to indignant shock over the years in response to hearing that the line ended there: not one of my father's three sons or any of our cousins would take the farm over. Our Norwegian family was flabbergasted that we would let the family farm go. (Those pieces of precious land were the reason my great grandsires had left the Old Country, after all)
     Within a year it was all taken care of, the auction set for July 22, they purchased a gorgeous acreage outside of Medicine Hat ("Where Saskatchewan Farmers Go To Die"), halving the drive required for my family to see them.
     That weekend was the last days of hard labour in 30 degree heat, in dust and dirt and thirst, with your head down and your shoulders hunkered and your hat pulled down low. Those days were spent organizing tools, lining up machinery, fixing wiring. Getting it all just so. Whoring up the farm. The last days of hard farm work were there to end it.
     Serendipitously, that very same weekend was the Centennial of my hometown of Shaunavon. My mother's side has taken to having an informal family reunion (a "Hoo-Ha" in Audette-speak), and this weekend was aptly chosen. Celebrations and emotions.
     I can easily recall the 75th celebrations in 1988. I was just entering Grade 6. It felt like the biggest thing to happen to my life at the time. Back then, I told myself that I would still be here for the big party in 2013 (a number that felt like science fiction then; so did the age of 35, mind), and little did I realize just how significant that celebration would be for me. It was an ending.
     Shaunavon is a wonderful community. A lot of larger centres could benefit from a lesson in its civic pride, in its rare balance of culture with the pervasive religion of hockey (although, yes, the finest building in town is a rink). When Shaunavon has an event it is big, and its Centennial was huge. I was happy to bring my wife and kids to it. Seeing friends from high school, keeping pace with family. Working at the farm.
     Sunday night, when we got back to Alberta, it came to me that that was my last trip home, at least home as I knew it. The farm would be gone soon, and visits to Shaunavon would become quite rare without Mom and Dad living there. It turned out to be a fantastic weekend of celebration but also of farewell.
     In my ten years as an Albertan, I have never not been from Saskatchewan, and that's not ever going to change. It's also always been my goal to find a balance between where I'm from and where I'm at. When we got married, I told my wife that "home" would be wherever she was. But she has always known that whenever I have suggested going "home," I have meant a farm and a small lovely town in southwest Saskatchewan.
     Good-bye, Home.

On the Passing of Mr. Maloney

Recently I learned that Mervin “Ed” Maloney, one of my favorite high school teachers, passed away. He retired when I finished Grade 11, and I hadn’t heard from him in over fifteen years, knowing only that he had left Shauanvon for Mossbank. However, on hearing of his passing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because the man was one of the greatest teachers I ever had, first in a line of the very great who I had at SHS. A teacher of twelve years myself, I was moved by it all the more.

                When I think back to what those of us who had him appreciated about him, it’s easy to dwell on the idiosyncrasies first. The smoking, the same outfit for days on end, the rumour of a bottle hidden in the school’s furnace room. But these are all just touches that add to the overall story, make him that much endearing a figure.

Because Ed Maloney was first thing in life a truly great educator.

His last three years of teaching were my 9^th, 10^th and 11^th of school. I’ve been in this job long enough to know that here are some teachers who retire ten years after they should have. Mr. Maloney, though, remained inspirational up until the end. I had him first for English classes, and I remembered days where we were “forced” to read for pleasure, logging the books and pages as the year went by. In the end I came to treasure those accounts of what I’d read when. Through his classes I began a love affair with grammar and philology, two things that are essential in my daily grind as an ESL and Creative Writing teacher. Also, I recall from him the first ever positive yet constructive criticism—written and verbal—on my creative writing, on a short story I had written in Grade 9 as a sequel to “The Sniper.”

In Grades 10 and 11 he taught me History, and ignited in me a lifelong love for the story of humanity. I recall writing an essay on Napoleon’s march to Moscow, and asking Mr. Maloney what a Cossack was. “Okay,” he said, and sat in the desk next to mine to recall every considerable detail he knew about these mounted Russian warriors, for me and me alone while my classmates sat captivated by his storytelling; I felt like I was being given a private lecture.

It was after studying World War II that he brought in a group of veterans to speak to our class about their service. This included my uncle Len Illebrun and Robbie Norton. Mr. Maloney encouraged those of us he knew that were passionate about the subject to ignore our teenage reticence and ask these guests what we could, and at the end of the afternoon Mr. Norton asked me to chat with him again sometime. A friendship began that day that would see Robbie stand as my best man at my wedding in 2006.

All in Mr. Maloney’s class.

Now, there’s no doubt I’m glossing this. I know many of the girls didn’t like him, saying that he favoured football and hockey players (though I was neither by high school), and more than once he punched me quite hard in the arm for a wrong answer. And, anyone who would be a Leafs fan has to have something off. But the man was a great teacher.

When I was in my second or third year of university, he sent me a Canadian History Quiz he’d copied from a magazine, scrawling atop it in that familiar hand the fourteen year old in me still recognized: “Paul, this is so easy!” I completed it and sent it back. At the King’s one night the following summer, he bought me a beer and told me the two answers I’d got wrong and why. Four years he was retired by then, and there were three or four of us at that table that night, still being taught.

I keep a photo of a man named Samuel Crowther in my classroom. He was an iconic teacher here in Strathmore, a dedicated and self-sacrificing educator. I keep the photo to remind me of what I need to strive for. Mervin “Ed” Maloney was another true teacher, igniting a fire in me that was fanned by other greats at SHS such as Penny Selvig, Tim Miller, John Cazakoff, Audrey Carleton, and Mark Benesh. On the other side of my first decade as an educator and a writer, I have seen what a thing it is to be the right person for the right kid at the right time.

His passing has reminded me why I teach. It is my hope to do half the job he did and be content.