A Bad Day's Shooting Is...

Sunrise, Ralph Klein Park

Sometimes just that: a bad day’s shooting.

Huzzah! A chance for a road trip with my cameras. Yay! The light as I left Calgary heading east looked promising. It wasn’t too cold. It was early: the chinook arch was behind me, the sandwiches were packed, and thermos full. Yippee!

I should have stayed in bed and pulled the blankets over my head. Well, not really; something did come out of it as we shall see.

After some desultory phaffing about at the (ironically named) Ralph Klein Nature Preserve and the power plant at  Shepard on the east side of town, I got on a secondary highway and went east: east to Gleichen, east to Bassano, east to Patricia — places where my father-in-law was born, places where he grew up. I don’t know what I was expecting to find. Echoes of the past, of a now forgotten time?

Sunrise, Ralph Klein Park

Cooling Towers

Tower of Power

East past farms asleep waiting for spring to come, east past the feedlots where the steam rises from the backs of the cattle into the arctic air, east into the Siksika Nation. Past relics, both white and First Nations: Roman Catholic chapels and graveyards, tee-pee rings and memories of Crowfoot.

For whatever reason I find it hard to photograph on First Nations’ land. I feel the land grumbling under my tires. I feel unwelcome. I don’t want to be like some anthropologist of old visiting a South Sea archipelago and making images that match my preconceived notions of what is there.

Perhaps, over time, if I can find a way to build a bridge and get permission to photograph – not that it’s required but given the current state of First Nations’ relations with Canada it would probably be the decent thing to do. 

George Webber made so many potent images at Standoff in Southern Alberta: it took him years to build the trust and be able to gain that level of access.

Questions swirl in my head. Why are the Catholic Schools and the residential school still standing? Why after all those decades of abuse at the hands of the clergy are they still there? Is it like the gates at Auschwitz so the attempt a cultural assimilation is never forgotten? Or, in the case of the residential school, putting an existing building to good use as it serves as the High School? Or is it more complicated, beyond the understanding of a white man?

North on SR547, into Gleichen with the CPR right of way resembling a frontier zone between two nations: south and north, red and white, Siksika and Canada. Crossing over the CPR mainline you cross into another world: a world in decay, a world not even able to cling to its past, a world that appears to have given up. No, I’m not talking about the Siksika Nation.

My father-in-law was born in Gleichen. His father, a proud, hardworking Ukrainian immigrant worked for the CPR on a section gang. Archival photos I’ve found show a proud, prosperous and tidy town. I’ve tried to photograph in Gleichen before, each time coming up short; often not even pulling the cameras out. This time, a solitary hard man stood in the entrance of a now boarded and bricked up building. In another time it may have been a store, a bank or judging from the windows a tavern; I don’t know. As I pulled to the side of Railway Avenue, he glared. I sat and made as if to check my phone. Some young people that I’d seen walking along the road from the south side of the tracks walked up. Money and small packets changed hands. I upped stakes and left. Maybe another day.

On to the Trans-Canada Highway now and east to Bassano: “The Best Town by a Dam Site!” I have two tenuous connections to Bassano: my wife’s grandparents lived there, and I worked, for a while, for the company that owned the feed mill and feedlot: XL Foods.

Bassano had, back in the day, a lot going for it. It was a divisional point on the CPR mainline between Medicine Hat and Calgary and a junction between the Bassano and Empress Subdivisions. The Empress Subdivision was also known as the “Royal Line” because the towns along the line had royal names: Empress, Princess, Patricia, Duchess, Countess among others. Originally built in the 1910s, to haul grain and coal. After the switch to natural gas and heating fuel traffic dwindled. Passenger service ended in the 1960s and the line was finally abandoned in 1997. Chris Doering & Connie Biggart have done a lot of work wandering around this corner of Alberta

The town’s booster slogan “The Best Town By A Dam Site” comes from a massive irrigation project started by the CPR in 1910. At a cost of five million dollars (that’s more that 132 million today and I doubt that it could even be built for that sum) it involved building a 720 ft spillway across the Bow River and a 7,000 ft long 45 ft high embankment to contain the south side of the reservoir. If you include all the aqueducts and canals that were associated with this, the bill comes in at around 17 million, a cool 450 million in today’s Canadian Pesos.

Why would a famously parsimonious skin flint of company like the CPR pony up that kind of dosh in the middle of what John Palliser in the 1850s called an uninhabitable semi-arid desert? Well, they were saddled with a sizable amount of this land (30 million acres!) that would not be profitable unless something was done. What to do? Making every section pay wasn’t a problem in Manitoba and southeast Saskatchewan and but down here? Uh, no. No immigrant was going to homestead with the sagebrush, rattlesnakes and pronghorn antelope and very little water. What they needed was Moisture, with a capital “M”. It wasn’t going to come from the sky with any regularity, but by gum, the land was flat with just the right gradient and a stonking big river running through the middle. With irrigation you get settlers, with settlers you get crops and with crops you get freight to haul, grain and cattle east, tractors and consumer goods west. Voila! Profit! The Imperial model writ in sagebrush.

I digress. The story is interesting though. We’ve always been into nice big project out this way: Oil sands, pipelines, railways and irrigation projects.

All the railway infrastructure except for the main line is gone now. The hotels, except for the Hunter Hotel, now called the Imperial Hunter and for now only existing as a tavern, have gone. The elevators where knocked down and consolidated with new elevators west of town. Yet the town goes on. Light industry, the feed mill and yes, new houses being built even though the town itself is considering going under the administration of the County of Newel along with other small communities to save costs. Unlike Gleichen, it seems to survive but perhaps not thrive.

I made these images:

Imperial Hunter Hotel

Enjoy Coca-Cola

Hotel Coffee-Shop

Thursday Wing Night

Rumbling to Calgary

 Nice, I guess but nothing to write home about.

Across the TCH and follow the “Royal Line”: Duchess, Rosemary and then Patricia. Again, a connection: my wife’s grandparents farmed here. My wife remembers swimming in the irrigation ditch and in a commemorative book I made about my father-in-law I restored some pictures of life on that small holding.

This has always been a land of “Well, we’ll give our best shot and see if we can make a go of it.” At the turn-off to Patricia and onward to Dinosaur Provincial Park, a gas station and convenience store long abandoned: broken glass, a phone booth long since forgotten, an ATM machine long since torn apart, Nestle’s ice cream long since melted. An entrepreneur’s dream that didn’t pan out, hopes and memories written on the chalkboard.

Gas, Diesel, Snacks, Ice

Call me, maybe?

Nestle Drumstick and ATM

Corner Gas, Monochrome

Corner Gas, Colour

Bang a Gong

Road Trip Redux

So, what happened and what did I learn, if anything. I would hope that I didn’t spend a whole day driving around the Eastern Irrigation District making mediocre images and not have learned something from the experience.

Let’s see now:

• I was rusty. Making images is like playing piano: you have to do it all the time and I haven’t been.
• I tried too hard to make relevant images rather than just letting it flow. Again.
• I need to have a little more courage to just watch and wait and make that image – even though I don’t feel welcome.
• I need to go through that door and see what was in that Nestle’s freezer.
• Too much driving. All told I spent about 5 hours behind the wheel (yes, Alberta is a big place); the longest stint being about an hour and a half. When you get out of the truck your nerves are jangling, your eyes are focused to a point a mile or two in the distance mesmerized by the road, still thinking in 60 mph time not footstep time. Maybe a base of operation near the target area and choose just a few places rather than “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium”

However, I did get some ideas for projects and re-starting some dormant ones:

• Roadside Attractions – Re-shoot the Dinosaur Country Store and find other similar things and add that to my ongoing project of the same name.
• Railway Hotels – Document the railway hotels all along the CPR mainline and branch lines before they vanish, and, if the bars are still open, photograph the barflies that still call them home.
• The “Royal Line” – It’s probably been done but photograph the towns along the line (or what’s left of them).
• Broken Dreams – All the businesses that died taking a person’s hopes and dreams with it may be learning something from the things that were left behind.

So maybe the trip wasn’t a washout after all. Guess you can’t always get what you want, but, if you try sometimes, you get what you need…