LINDSAY CRYSLER
REGINA, SASKATCHEWAN | I went back to my old hometown last month for what was the first real visit in fifty years. I did so with some trepidation because I left Battleford when I was twelve, after what I now realize were some of the happiest days of my life. I had been through town briefly twice over the years, but didn't make an effort to meet anyone.
I first went back when I was eighteen, and it was awful: the farm we had lived on north of town for a couple of wartime years was an abandoned shell, our wonderful old two-storey house in town had been cut in half by some renovator, and there weren't many old school friends around.
I reconnoitered the territory again with my wife and stepson about four years ago. That was worse: the nearby farm where I had spent many happy childhood summers was empty - except for the pigeons roosting in my old bedroom.
The "family farm" of our wartime years - the one to which my grandfather brought his large family from Port Arthur in 1915 - was gone. Only a few willows and a small clump of poplars marked the spot where the hip-roofed barn, a chicken house my father built, a granary, a ramshackle machinery shed and a two-storey, unpainted shingle house had once withstood - but barely - the rough winter winds.
I decided then and there: it's true - you can't go home again. I vowed I would never return.
I'm glad I changed my mind.
Now, I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia - about as far as you can get from Battleford and still be in Canada. But in the past year I fell into touch with an old school friend, Ross Innes, who had returned to Battleford after a 30-year career as a historian at various national historic sites in western Canada. By coincidence, I also took up an appointment this semester at the University of Regina's Journalism School.
Also by coincidence, my Regina colleague, former Globe and
Mail columnist Orland French, with whom I worked in Ottawa many
moons ago, wanted to see Battleford. He is researching Sam Steele,
a legendary Mountie and soldier who was once stationed in
Battleford. Sam and three brothers - who grew up in Orillia, about
15 miles from Orland's hometown in Waverly, Ont., -- were in the
North West Mounted Police together, and one brother is buried in
the town cemetery.
So, there I was - heading home again. It was great. The countryside is so much more beautiful than I remembered -- what does a kid know about beautiful? It's home, so you take it as it comes.
The North Saskatchewan River valley is very broad and rolling, and treed, colourful in its autumn robe, and that wide brown river shimmers at the bottom of the trench, here and there impeded by sand bars, with golden poplars and the odd evergreen standing tall beside.
If you stand on the hill at the edge of the valley at North Battleford you see this broad vale sweeping out before, rising steeply at the other side, giving way to a flattish plain for several miles, and then rising up at the edge of the horizon, a bit bluish, even purple, you see in the encroaching dusk the Eagle Hills, shouldering their way to the horizon, and going on beyond the edge of what you can see. The Indians believed their ancestors' spirits wandered those hills, and why not? It touches heaven, such a beautiful, peaceful place for your final rest.
We met two old schoolmates I had not seen for half a century. Ross Innes's father was the man who did the initial work to get Fort Battleford made a national historic site, and I remembered as we talked that I was actually at the initial meeting held in the fort buildings after the first one had been refurbished, in about 1947. I had first cavorted in them when I joined other town boys in catching pigeons in their abandoned shells, about 25 years after the last Mountie left.
Don Light's father was born in the fort near the turn of the century, and became such a collector of local history that he set up his own museum in the town. It tells the tales of settlers and early business people and other trivia not covered in the fort, which is devoted primarily to the North West Mounted Police, who set it up, and the native peoples, particularly as their paths crossed in the 1885 rebellion.
The Fred Light Museum is a fitting tribute to a man whose ancestors began trading on the riverbank just a few miles from what became Battleford in 1795 - that's twenty years before Lord Selkirk's settlers got to Red River, ancient history in this part of the west.
So, we toured the fort, walked around the townsite that was the capital of the Northwest Territories -- they stretched from Portage La Prairie to the Rocky Mountains to the North Pole -- for five years in the 1870s, and admired the still-standing wooden structure that housed the government of the day. We visited the local cemetery, where Orland took some video of old Mounties' graves, and I wandered around checking out the resting places of all those people who were somebody when I was a kid.
There lay the crusty old postmaster, the big lawyer in town who had become a judge, the Indian agent, my music teacher and, one of my favorites -- old Dr. Nunn, an avuncular old soul who was the first person to tell my father he was an alcoholic. (Dad didn't agree, of course. Doc Nunn was a teetotaler - what the hell would he know? But dad figured it out himself four years later when he went on the wagon for a lifetime).
We also visited the gravesite of the six native men who were hanged at Fort Battleford for killings that occurred during the 1885 uprising. A simple frame of lodgepoles, as if a teepee had been pitched there long ago, towers over their grave, which was identified long after I left town. When I was a kid we used to run around that hillside, aping Hollywood's B movies, playing "cowboys and Indians", never knowing that six real warriors of another day slumbered nearby.
The old town - that's what folks called it when I was a kid, "the Old Town," to distinguish it from North Battleford, which came into existence in a typically western Canadian way: the whim of some railway builder, who decided the tracks should cross the river some miles downstream.
There are 4000 people in the old town now rather than 1200, but not near as interesting as it was to a boy of ten, of course. Being next to a city of 14,000, it has fewer services than you would expect for a town its size, although even North Battleford is looking a bit beat up these days. When I drove into the centre of its downtown two weeks before with my 87-year-old mother and my sister, we parked in a big open space where some of the city's most thriving businesses used to be.
"I feel like we've just driven into some town in Montana and I've never seen it before," I said.
"Well," said my sister, "I haven't seen it before."
"Neither have I," said mom, who spent twenty years of her life in the vicinity. It was a strange experience to be so disoriented in a place that was once well known.
After another spin around the old town, my friend and I drove back to Regina through the middle of the province over the flat table land, through the rippling plains, and occasionally over the rolling hills, their lumpy blue-brown crests arranged in echelon along the grey horizon.
It was cloudy, then came fog.
Fog, right there in the middle of the prairie. It just came up; you couldn't see 100 feet up the road. It was a blanket you expect to see on Halifax harbour, but not in the middle of the open prairie on a cool autumn day. We drove through it, stopped briefly in Rosetown, and it caught up to us again. As we progressed, the fog cleared permanently, but it got darker and finally near home, it rained and rained --- as it had all weekend on the flat Regina plains.
Lucky us to be in God's country when the rains came to the south.
The fog prevented us from seeing Biggar and seeing just how big it is. We did see, as we peered through the mists, the sign that proclaims: "New York is big -- but this is Biggar."
We'll never know. Lindsay Crysler is Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan. He is a well-known and highly respected reporter, editor, and teacher.
Copyright © 1998 Lindsay Crysler/Log Cabin Chronicles/11.98 |
