Freedom Over All, Against All Sense

"Y'can take our land . . ."

I was staying on a ranch in the Foothills south of Calgary. The rancher, who I had just met this August weekend, was a jovial and gracious host. In his presence, neither ear nor cup was empty for long. He was opinionated and proud, and never more the latter than when he took me for an afternoon hike in his sprawling back forty.

                I am in love with this region. A Saskatchewan immigrant, I’ve always been awed by the Rockies, but the Foothills have just the right blend of home and away that they tug insistently at me.

                An hour up into the hills and grass, we found a valley with bush on one side and sandstone cliffs on the other. We stopped to drink from a spring, around which he’d build as retaining wall for a pipe.

                “This is the water I use to make my wine,” he said, and handed me the A&W mug he left out here. I drank, and truly I had a short list of comparisons for such purity. Especially given the lingering effects of the wine he used this water to produce, proudly poured out in excess the night before.

                We were far enough away that, turning my back on the construction around the spring, I could see no sign of humanity. No fence, road, telephone pole. This prairie was nearly untouched—ignoring the hundred years of cattle grazing—as pristine a patch as you’ll fine in the West. As it appeared to the buffalo and the hunter, before the white man. Perhaps I was kidding myself, but I wanted to believe it very badly just then.

                He told me of the forthcoming deal that he and seventy-one other ranchers were brokering with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, a deal intended to keep this prairie as prairie. That is, free from development. He was in favour of the idea to an extent, but said, “That is unless Mulcair or Trudeau gets in. Or depending how I’m told to use my own land.”  

                I didn’t comment. First, as someone who traditionally votes for the left-wing federal parties, I’ve learned to pick my battles in ultra-conservative S.A., where people tend to look at political parties like sports teams: always stick to your guns and root for the one you always have. And second, because I was a little shocked at how his personal freedom from the intervention of a government—pending, even—or its offices mattered more to him than the preservation at all costs of the nearest thing we have to the untouched out here.

                Freedom over all, against all sense.

               

                The $40 million deal that the NCC signed with the seventy-two ranchers of the Waldron Grazing Co-op (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-ranchers-to-conserve-huge-tract-of-native-grassland-1.2781482) won’t hang in the news for long. It’s not the sort of news that generally interests most Albertans. That 12 000 hectares was purchased for preservation rather than production, to maintain rather than make money. Lack of development doesn’t make big news out here. Those of us who celebrate a piece of undeveloped, unsullied, undrilled (mostly. Let’s not go nuts, it’s Southern Alberta) prairie want to get up and dance. It reads like a great victory against the scar of urban sprawl that has taken the prairies and made it into a wasteland of industry and suburbia. But you can’t avoid the detractors, no matter how insane their arguments. There’s the matter of freedom to consider.

                The rancher I visited is one, a second on the radio yesterday morning also has reservations. If there are two, there are likely more. They signed on, but with questions. They can graze their cattle, but they can’t parcel their land off to be the next suburb of bloated acreages.

                “By saying there will be no development, they’re limiting our freedom.”

                Freedom, ah yes. We’ve got an over-entitled sense of freedom in this province, and an over-active cynicism in the role authority should play in our lives. There’s a vocal Libertarian minority at work out here, railing against any sort of infringement upon our cowboy autonomy. Must be all the American TV. It smacks of the anti-gun control rallies of the 90s. Freedom.

                How can the government dare to horn in on my self-determination?

                Because freedom can be a very bad thing.

                But you should feel blessed, freedom-advocates. Depending on your municipality, if you live in Alberta, you’re likely governed by three levels of government who all claim to stand for your personal liberty in the face of nasty socialist concepts like equality, free health care, and public broadcasting. That is, unless you want to be free to oppose unchecked development, or get an abortion, or have a sexual orientation. Freedom, as defined.

                This little corner of prairie is being preserved by an office that the Harper Government has hardly supported, tried to run off the rails, tried to muzzle, and the ranchers who have made this great step in the right direction are some of them more concerned about their personal land rights (ie, How much they can make off the land at a later date, at triple the price they got from the NCC) than what they’ve done for the good of us all.

                I have a news flash for the Libertarians and self-righteous Braveheart-screamers: your freedom should be limited because it’s not coming for free. Your liberty is costing us dear, and I for one want to see it reigned right in.

                It’s the freedom of unchecked capitalism that that has led this province to allow oil and gas to putrefy our land and water, sicken our people and animals, for the sake of nothing but dollars and excuses and a little bit of nose-thumbing at the hippies. Freedom has convinced us that living in a rich now is worth ignoring environmental repercussions, post-growth crashes, worth torpedoing Heritage Funds in favour of that now.

                It’s freedom to own weaponry for weaponry’s sake that’s led us to believe that we have a right to own instruments that serve no other purpose—not one—but to kill. As many as we want, and in great variety.

                It’s freedom that has created a disparity between entitled wealth and crippling poverty in this country, seeing the rich buy themselves into doctor’s clinics while the poor work full-time and can’t afford prescriptions.

                It’s freedom to think that race, gender, and financial inequality are the fault of the victim, that somehow mental illness and addiction and not being born into a blue chip Mount Royal family are solved by pulling up one’s bootstraps.

                Freedom is the problem. Too much freedom—or, perhaps, the belief that freedom is owed not earned—has seen this land preservation purchase go under-celebrated. Instead of it being a victory for tomorrow (“tomorrow” is a dirty word in Alberta, like “environmental” and “sustainable"), it’s been drug into the mud of personal liberty.

                Tax me, bind me, disarm me, film me. Do it equally across the board. Use the tax money for infrastructure and social services, keep me to the same laws as you do Imperial Oil execs, take away weaponry I never have and never will need, give me evidence to support me if I’m right, to damn me if I’m wrong.

                Because freedom hasn’t been good for us.

Southern Alberta in 2.5 Days

Last weekend, I let my tendency to overload myself with obligations get a little out of hand. However, it resulted in a pretty magnificent solo tour of Southern Alberta, and though I’m not sure this is the best way to see this province, it certainly drives in the stark contrasts of beauty within short reach of each other.

            I had just finished a week of work in Edmonton. Yes, I know that’s not Southern Alberta, but it’s framework. After a weekend at home in Strathmore, and a Canada Day performance with my band, I rolled down the hill to Drumheller, to a summer school I was starting work at for my ninth consecutive summer. Drumheller is a city that gets a bad rap sometimes. People see the touristy schlock as overwhelming, they find the population too transient, they hate how in the summer it’s five degrees hotter and in winter five degrees colder than the rest of the area on any given day. However, for almost a decade I’ve spent the first three weeks of every summer living there, and there isn’t a city in Canada that can’t show you its best side in that particular time frame, so you’ll excuse me if I have a soft spot for dinosaur-ville.

           

Thursday evening: Drumheller

            My students are part of the cast in the Canadian Badlands Passion Play, so I spent the evening watching rehearsals. The natural amphitheatre is spectacle enough, surrounded by the hoodoos of the Badlands, by the Neapolitan of those bentonite hills. It’s a well-known fact that on the site it’s five to ten degrees hotter than in town, making it sometimes fifteen degrees hotter than home, so I take my Nordic flesh and search for shade—there were no Vikings in first century Judea.

            A summer storm was drawn out by the heat, and for an hour we were pummeled by hail and then soaked by a deluge. Then the sky did what prairie summer skies do in the summer after a storm, and rehearsal resumed. During the last hour, a rainbow formed, complete from end to end. Then, a second rainbow formed above it, complete as well, and from the crowds of mock-Hebrews below came a chorus of YouTube-inspired praise for this spectacle.

The Passion Play post-storm

Friday: The Foothills and Crowsnest Pass

            I tore out of the valley just after my morning classes had finished, taking full advantage of a rare half-day at work. I stopped in Strathmore to make sure my marriage was still in good shape, transitioned my overnight bag, and then ripped out to the Pass.

            Alberta’s Highway 2, the QE2, is one of the worst driving experiences in Canada. I’m no sissy behind the wheel—I can handle heavy traffic and triple lanes. But’s it’s little better than an American freeway, a sad stretch of bumper-to-bumper, the view choked off by never-ending roadside capitalism, or its unappealing bush country if you go north of Panoka. The QE2 exists so that you may discover secondary highways.

            I plunged into the Foothills at Nanton, taking the 533 and 22 route to Blairmore and Coleman.

The Foothills. A lot of places claim to be God’s Country, but when mountains meet prairie, when the land appears to stretch and say it was meant to be occupied by greater things than us, and then you see the best of what this land has to offer. I don’t say this because I want to live there. I’ve no desire to ranch, and I got my fill of hurricane blow driers during the first twenty years of my life in Southwest Saskatchewan. But it’s one of the most heart-aching of landscapes, and despite being on the clock, I found myself stopping frequently to get out and hear the wind speak.

            I arrived in Coleman—just west of Blairmore—for a spaghetti supper and information session. I was a member of one of two teams from Strathmore that were running the Sinister 7 relay the next morning. After we had been properly fed and given some placebo information on what to do if you’re attacked by a bear (just saying “Kiss your ass goodbye” sounds defeatist), Kevin, Mike and the crew took me to the ski lodge we had rented for our teams. Most of them were making a weekend of it, but I only got the one night, so I took a few minutes to watch the sun set on the Pass before heading in for the night.

Sundown in the Pass

Saturday: Sinister 7 to Red Deer

            When you stay in the Pass in July, there’s the temptation to say you would like to move there. It’s inconceivably gorgeous, even for us prairie folk who are born with unshakable suspicion of vertical life. However, before you make any rash real estate decisions, I would suggest—just as with Drumheller and the Foothills—that you see how bearable it is in the winter first. Or, simply spend a night there camping with 1400 other runners, being blasted awake through the night by the horns of passing trains. Yeah, less than a bright side.

            Up just after 5 am, thanks in no small part to the good people of CP, I got ready to race. The Sinister 7 is a 148 km relay across the Pass over two days. I was running Leg 2, a 16km jaunt that would see me done before lunch. Some of the poor bastards on my team would be running in snow after midnight.

            We went down into Blairmore to cheer on our first two runners at the 7 am gun. Jason and Leanne were in one of those rare spots in the sport of running where you get a large crowd to cheer you on. There would be no such fanfare when Jason handed our team’s timing chip off to me, lucky bugger.

            Once we’d seen them off, us Leg 2 folks were piled onto school buses and shuttled up the mountain east of Frank’s Slide. We started at the base of Hasting’s Ridge, waiting on Jason. A few other runners came through before him: the hard-core Leg 1 folks, and even a few of the soloists. Yes, these were the masochistic sunsabitches running the entire 148 km in 25 hours on their own. Holy sweet fuck.

            When I got the chip, it was pretty much straight up for the first hour. Mountain trails up and across the world’s best range, with a view of Crowsnest Mountain and the Seven Sisters. Spectacular, though I admit I didn’t get much chance to admire it because I was too busy watching to see that I didn’t trip over a rock or tree root or cougar or bear—which they’d given us a 50/50 chance of coming upon. Holy sweet fuck.

            It was gorgeous, what I saw, and my eight months of running on a treadmill with full incline paid off, because I was able to run up all but the most stupid sheer climb at the 10k mark, which I had to resort to walking/scrambling. The down slopes were less than inspiring, because you can’t make much time when you’re hammering your feet to pulp on great chunks of broken national symbol, or when you’re mud-skiing slopes, your hands reaching out to grab random trees for balance and speed control. Passed through rocks, fire kill, and dense vegetation.

            There was a lot of good humour and camaraderie on these trails, despite the difficulty the course and the drive of most racers. Despite the fact that most of us were competitive half, full, and ultra-marathoners, after that first savage peak, we stopped worrying about our times and just worried about our feet.

            16.78k, 900+ up, 1100 down later, I was back in Blairmore and passed off to Rob, who was on duty for the even more abusive Leg 3. A quick visit with my friends, some pats on the back and high fives, and I wished them luck as I left for my car. Grabbed a sub and I was four-wheel bound again.

            Perhaps it was the post-race euphoria, but that lunch hour made the Foothills even more spectacular than the previous evening. Again, I stopped many times to take in the view—and to make sure my legs didn’t stiffen up.

On the way out of the Foothills

            I had learned that the QE2 north of Nanton was in full summertime construction mode, so I decided to veer off onto the 547, taking the 24 and 817 route home. From Foothills to purest, rolling Prairie. Canadian Prairie might not make your heart catch in your throat like the Rockies at sunset, but it will always be home. After the elevation run that morning, it was just nice to be looking at something flat.

            I stopped in Strathmore to shower and to shift my overnight bag from race to wedding mode, then out on the #9 and eventually to the goddam QE2 into Red Deer. Yes, I could’ve taken back roads the whole way, but sometimes 130 km per is in order. I made it to Red Deer in time for supper, and to dance the night away with my wife and kids. Still had enough in the tank for waterslides in the morning.

            I don’t recommend seeing hoodoos, foothills, mountains, and prairie in a forty-eight hour period, but I do recommend seeing them all at some time, and close enough together to appreciate the contrast. The beauty of my adoptive province hit me like an assault last weekend, and the easy transition of the topography was countered only by that dramatic disparity. God’s Country? Dunno, but certainly several slices of His favorite counties.