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.