Opal Wildfire Update #24

"How hard it is to escape from places
However carefully one goes they hold you
You leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences
Like rags and shreds of your very life."
                    - Katherine Mansfield

Within Alberta exists a 100 mile storybook.  A book where each chapter represents 1 mile and every page does its part in telling the story of this 100 mile place.

The topography of this place has created the circumstances required to fill the pages of this book with stories both real and exciting. ..
     -features like the big hill, stoney ridge, river crossings, glacial drift sand dunes and everglade-like bogs or

A cow path is all that remains of the
trail that led to the Delorme cabin 

     -the sudden change in the course of a great river that turned south and then back north creating an elbow that brought it within 100 miles of the banks of another great river.

These and other features made their contribution to the story.

As people passed this way, they left bits of themselves behind.  The First Peoples that passed this way left all they had.  They held in place -- they remain.  Their presence has stood the test of time because they never disregarded their environment.

Those that followed soon discovered that if they were to remain in this wild land that they too must first consult with nature.  This they did when the Hudson Bay Co. sent out the First Nations people to widen an ancient game trail -- a place they would call the Athabasca Landing Trail.

Looking through the timbers of
the new bridge.

There are places that possess the power to catch and hold us in place for just a moment.  In that moment in time we are given the opportunity to stop and pay attention .  This desire to stop, look and remember is all that is needed to birth a story.

Where a location possesses the power to hold our attention for a prolonged period, then the names of these places become legend -- Fort Saskatchewan, Fort Augustus, Lamoureux,  Sturgeon Creek, Battenburg, Whiskey Creek, Cannibal Hill, Meanook at the Big Hill and the Landing Where the Reeds Grow Tall.  These are places that possess the power to pick off the shredded bits of rags from our lives.  They test our resolve and imagination.

Within this 100 mile book there are pages in many of the chapters that tell of a different place.  Here the people of the trail stopped to renew themselves and their stock.  Here was water, food and feed.  Here was a quiet, understated beauty.  Since ancient times it welcomed and provided comfort to all that stopped -- so comforting a place that it is remembered in the pages and the chapters of the storybook.

This place is where the Athabasca Landing Trail crosses the Redwater River.

- Robert W. Service (once Canada's Poet Laureate) passed this way in 1912.  In his autobiography Ploughman of the Moon, he tells of the crossing at the Redwater.
- Olive Frederickson's true life account, Silence of the North tells of a pretty camping spot beside the Redwater River that she rested at in 1910.
- Edna Shore mentions the same place in her memoirs of a trip that she made as a young girl in 1910.
- James Oliver Curwood describes the crossing at the Redwater as the step over the threshold that takes you to the adventure of the great white north.

A hundred yards north of the crossing,  an old homestead
marks the site of the ancient First Nations campground

Oral history speaks of this crossing.  The Delorme tragedy is linked to the crossing.  So too is the story of 'Gold Beneath the Floorboards'.  The crossing is pivotal to the legend of the Ghost Horse Hills.  My own grandfather travelled the trail in 1905 and told a story about stopping at a beautiful little place by the River Vermilion (Redwater River).

The old bridge sits in wait

Reaching out into the future, stories will be told of a time back in  2010 when a large amount of sweat and treasure would be expended to ensure that the crossing itself would remain.  It will tell a story of how a beautiful new timber and steel bridge was placed over the Redwater.  A page or two will be dedicated to telling how the old bridge was gently and respectfully placed to the side with the notion that one day it would serve as an interpretive centre.

This place where the Athabasca Landing Trail crosses the Redwater fills many of the pages within the 100 mile storybook.  To put it into the words of one of the world's great philosophers, Curly Howard:  "Well, being as there is no other place around the place,  I reckon that this must be the place, I reckon."  You just can't argue with this logic.  My Dad would collapse in fits of laughter when watching the Three Stooges.

Thanks.
Richard