By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

The Church was the community. Small rural farming communities were like that, and in ours, the Church was the authority over spiritual and social matters.

There had been disagreements.

A church member had drifted toward fundamentalism. What with her ‘speaking in tongues’ during a service and holding prayer meetings on the telephone party line, she was just too off mainstream for the younger members of the Council. Our aggressive American pastor argued that “speaking in tongues” was the work of the devil and led the excommunication of the family. Excommunication meant shunning, no church member was to have anything to do with the excluded.

My father, an elder, had advised taking a forgiving attitude. He was against the shunning, let time bring understanding. The progressive Council did not listen. The move to excommunicate his neighbours broke his heart and made him question his faith, and me mine. The excommunication left me bitter toward the church. When my father passed in 1975 from the demon cancer, I insisted he be buried at a site distant from the main community of graves. I ignored the advice of an elder in charge of site selection, was stubborn about it. He said, “Someday you might regret your choice.”

Y and I walk the lanes of the cemetery, remembering many of the people and their families, some from my generation.  At the end of the rows, in a peaceful corner, stands my mother and father’s gravestone. Someone had laid flowers on their graves. Green lichen grew in the recesses of the black granite stone where their names are engraved along with the first line from “The Lord is my Shepherd.”   Y, ever practical and prepared, has a stiff brush and a bit of water, kneels and cleans their names.

The night before our graveside visit, we camped in a vacant Provincial Park overlooking Glennifer Reservoir, a few miles south from Dickson. Gleniffer Reservoir was built in 1983, formed by the construction of the Dickson Dam across the Red Deer River. There was controversy as primary farmland was flooded.

Because the area is under-storied by gravel deposited during the retreat of the last ice age, the ‘lake’ (nobody calls it that), is defined by walls of crumbling banks and a layer of exposed roots and soil. It looks like a gravel pit. Late spring, before runoff, is the worst time to see it. The reservoir impounds this wild east slope mountain river for flood control to protect the downstream city of Red Deer.

The ‘Glennifer’ flooded my favourite spots where I fished for Rocky Mountain Whitefish. Our farm was walking distance from the river and one of my ‘jobs’ was to catch 200 hundred fish over the summer and fall. They were frozen and stored in a large home freezer chest. I drift fished the fast-flowing rocky Red Deer River; grasshoppers were the best bait.

It was a short visit, we were headed for Exshaw, our last campsite before home.

We followed the old Number 2a Highway west from Cochrane. It was in good condition until we entered the Stoney Reserve where the road became a slow, wallowing strip of lumpy pavement. When we left the Reserve and were back in Provincial territory the road dramatically improved!

Exshaw is backyard Calgary. Its community recreation grounds built with intent is overgrown and unkept. The rain swollen Bow River flooded the lower campsites. There was a couple of dry sites vacant, the rest occupied by people living full time in vans or in what were obviously not travel trailers. They made room for us to park and drive through a tight slot campsite.

Across from the campground are a few small miner’s houses covered in dust but occupied. A single pay inside gas pump stands outside a small restaurant where hearty breakfasts and hamburgers and fries are served at the same time by lanky young girls to men in Carhart overalls, either coming off shift at the cement plants or starting.

Back on the TransCanada next morning and heading for Radium I think back on what we had seen: the Dinosaur Park, expansive farmlands, a rain choked festival, the ‘homeplace’. It is all a bit overwhelming, all those memories mixed in with fast-moving traffic.

We enter the sanctuary of the mountains, cross the Divide at Storm Mountain, are relieved to end our Alberta pilgrimage.

Photos by Peter Christensen

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley based writer and poet.

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