The Great Southern Prairie

Back in the 1990's, two friends and I undertook a short hunting trip to Milk River in Southern Alberta just north of the US border.  Officially, we were hunting the wily pheasant but, unofficially - now being in our fifties - the real goal was simply trekking the prairie, enjoying the crisp, clean air and marvelling at the wonders that water and wind and time had created in the sandstone and clay of the countryside.   

We  had never hunted this area before and had no idea where any good hunting spots might exist.  So the plan was to  simply head east toward the vast mostly-treeless expanse of prairie between Milk River and the Cypress Hills.  Maybe we would surprise ourselves with what we found.  Good company and interesting country were the main ingredients for a rewarding day.  A rooster or two would be a bonus.

The first day's walk brought some surprises.  We were east of the Milk River townsite and north of the Milk River ridge, a nearly 2,000 square-kilometer height of land that extends through much of the southern border region. 

We noticed the farms tended toward the very large, multiple thousand-acre spreads with huge swaths of cultivation next to large grazing tracts, most of which were home to Aberdeen Angus cattle, the beef industry's flavor of the month in the 1990's. 

Many of these immense spreads were Hutterite colonies, many were owned by Mormons.  Their vast agri-business operations had all the latest in farm gadgetry and looked for all the world like sizeable industrial complexes.   Both might have invited criticism for their insularity but they were exceptionally efficient farmers and ranchers

One thing they both did was to eagerly acquire more land and as the small operator had to sell there were ready buyers. Whatever the quality of the land, whatever lax stewardship may have abused it, the land had a buyer. It's difficult to witness the loss of any small farm but if you are that farmer drowning in debt, the Hutterites amd Mormons might be considered saviours. I guess it's all in the perspective.

Anyway, in one afternoon, we saw or visited a dozen deserted farmsteads, some vacated very recently.  We found it difficult to witness these deserted sites, some with elaborate and beautiful windbreaks, arboreal beauty and utility that took as long as 40 years to create. Now they lay abandoned to await the bulldozer as the new owners prepared to put the site under cultivation.

We wondered what was to become of Alberta's long history of family farms and ranches when economies of scale turned so many of them into liabilities that could not be endured.

Two farmsteads were particularly hard to accept.  One featured a small 4-room house heated by steam.  Imagine a small house heated by steam, the water coming from a large cistern buried in a shed outside the kitchen. The northeast corner of the house even boasted a small patio.  A workshop behind the house was superbly outfitted with a furnace, a forge, a mechanics wall and hoists.  This was one very resourceful and capable farmer.   He was obviously a consummate craftsman and we liked to think a neighbour any community would welcome. Surely, he did all he could to make a success of this farm.  That he could not was a particularly discouraging message. 

Yet, this visit left us with two positive takeaways.  One, scaring up a good-sized rooster kept us from being shutout on the bird hunting front.  Two, we could not help being awed by the skill and determination of our early settlers.  This place, for all its evocation of hope and failure, was one we were glad to have had a chance to visit.

The second farmstead was home to an original cabin, a tiny ramshackle affair that remained barely erect.  It's interior was strewn with garbage, rusted tin cans, dusty bottles and a large 2.5 gallon jug of oil. For whatever reason, the owners did not destroy this simple crude abode when they moved to a larger home.  Close by lay the remains of the foundation to this new house.  We could only assume the new house had been towed away or torn down.  Given the damage to the foundation, it was likely moved.  Inside the foundation lay the detritus of a once-functioning home, a stove, several household effects, and a rusting birdcage.  Thoughts of a hard-working beleaguered housewife being soothed by a canary or other songbird had us shaking our heads.  Mixed in with all  the effects were pieces of concrete, too many to just be broken off the foundation.  Where would they come from? 

It was an angry site, visions of a frustrated family ridding itself of so much that made their hard lives more manageable.  The home quarter also boasted beautiful topiary, a prairie emulation of the grand estates of Europe - willows, spruce, poplar, and carigana laid out with geometric precision and grown to maturity, a pleasing oasis in a land of wind, dust, heat, bitter cold, and, always, more wind.  Silos and outbuildings were set in logical fashion leading away into a willow thicket that must have, at one time, been home to a slough.  Drought may have robbed it of its water or maybe the farmer simply got tired of living cheek-by jowl to a mosquito-breeding factory.

We marvelled at the thought and work that went into creating this homestead.  And for what?  In the end the house was placed onto a flatbed and hauled away.  Small wonder the air of rage lingers in the air.  We know all farmers live with the vagaries of the weather but the feeling was this was not weather-related.  Rather, it reeked of skewed economics, of values that undercut the nobility and perspiration and perseverance of a farm family's work.

It's likely the three of us had some idea as to how the prairie economy evolved the way it did just as we may have had some understanding of the ecology of this distinctive prairie. But the real surprise of that first day was just how varied and visceral both of them were.   The deserted farms told a very vivid and sad story of hope and resolve and predatory economics.  The land was simply bigger than we could imagine.

Whenever we entered an area where no farms or power lines appeared  and we were left to scan pure prairie, my thoughts conjured up visions of the historic aboriginal life.  For  centuries, the many plains aboriginal communities roved through this area, following the buffalo or attending some celebration that might be hundreds of miles from their homes.  It was near here that Sitting Bull's Lakota tribe found a short-lived sanctuary after Little Big Horn.  The closer we got to the Cypress Hills the more desolate was the short-grass prairie and it was easy to imagine the vast herds of buffalo wandering and roving tribes traversing the immense open spaces. 

We  knew that for centuries the grassland was home to vast herds of bison.  And, while the bison may be gone, wildlife flourished where one may initially think it could not.  Deer, both whitetail and mule, antelope in good-sized herds, coyotes, foxes, badgers, raccoons, weasels, gophers, squirrels, hawks and owls (including the rare burrowing owl) in some variety, waterfowl, songbirds, shore birds, upland birds, and eagles.  An astounding variety for what at first glance seems a lifeless terrain.  Walking, as opposed to driving, helps reveal this abundance of life.

I keep saying the prairie is full of surprises. Maybe it's because we're expecting tedium, like the passenger train fares who cross the prairie at night and think only of the mountains.  They miss much of what makes North America great.  The familiar images of farmhouses, outbuildings, pastures, and cultivated expanses are all well represented, only not as frequently as they were when we grew up used to quarter-section farms.  Some of the cultivated fields are seemingly endless and we joke that a man could spend his entire career swathing one field.  Yet we also encounter many shallow lakes and sudden valleys cut by small streams and the main watercourses of Southern Alberta - the Bow, the Oldman, and the Milk.  Where we were, Willow Creek meandered eastward carving a  beautiful  valley with impressively sharp cliffs. The valley hosted a variety of willows and stubby thickets of rose bushes.  And it is here that the prairie of history, the one sloshing about in our imagination, continues to exist.  We believe we're seeing the country in its unadulterated state.  Alas, it is not so.  Fences still extend into the valleys, rusting farm equipment lies half hidden by the bushes, and decades of grazing cattle have cut durable paths through the rose thickets. Man's pushy nature continues to alter these wonderful sites but it is not without some pushback - the foxes raid the chicken coop, the deer and antelope ignore fences, geese and cranes eat the crops, coyotes lure dogs away from the homestead.  But mostly the animals accommodate and adapt. 

The surprise comes when the visitor realizes the richness of life on this treeless prairie and rejoices, as the native cultures and settlers might have on a summer night, to be part of such a beautiful and endless world.

One lone pheasant after three days of hunting and walking.  And not one complaint.

Robert Alan Davidson

February, 2017

  

My Life in Politics

 It wasn't much of a life, really.  It mainly deals with the time in the mid-1980's when I volunteered to help a man running for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party, a position that at that time also guaranteed the man (no women were conspicuously  involved at this time) would also be Premier of Alberta (America equivalency is the Governor), while opposition parties were doomed to permanent obscurity and media snubs.

Anyway, it wasn't my first leap into this sordid arena.  My father ran for MLA (the equivalent of a state representative) in 1955 in Wainwright and I helped him hand out brochures and tack posters to telephone poles.  He was a Liberal candidate running in a province dominated by the Social Credit party.  I'm not biased, of course, but dad was a quantum improvement on the straw-chewing rube incumbent but that cut no ice in rural Alberta. Straw-chewing rubes were popular. My father lost decisively. The Social Credit party could have run a garden slug and not even bothered to endorse him.  It was my first exposure to the intellectual vacuum that was Alberta politics.

In 1965, bright-eyed from four years of college training, I agreed to act as campaign manager for a co-worker running for alderman in Edmonton.  My candidate, a Mr. Basset, was a nice man with no real political ambition beyond fighting for some community issue I've long forgotten, maybe a leash law or a plan to remove the slivers from the park slides.  His problem was twofold - no one knew who he was, even many of his neighbors, and this was in the days before the ward system so every aldermanic candidate was a city-wide candidate. The upshot was that no less than 70 candidates were on the ballot to fill 7 positions.  It was chaos.  Imagine trying to select 7 favorites from a list of 70. Many Edmonton voters couldn't count to 70.  My great achievement in this short campaign was listening to some of the most stultifying brain-dead campaign speeches in the history of representative government.  The incumbent aldermen were overwhelming favorites even if their collective brain-power would hit a wall with 8th grade algebra. Modesty prohibits me from touting my campaign slogan "For a civic asset, vote Basset".  He liked it, finished 35th and said he'd had enough. I agreed.  Given his fundamental anonymity, I credit the slogan for the 35th place finish, although it could have "Basset" being near the front of the ballot.

In 1970, i was asked to be campaign manager for a lupine young lawyer trying to latch onto the Lougheed bandwagon.  We didn't get along.  He was a duplicitous piece of shit and an affront, I thought, to whatever fresh new honesty was emanating from Lougheed's young corral of candidates. The smirking creep was a harbinger of the greasy conservatives we find in North American politics today.  We parted company in short order. Fortunately, the electorate found him as distasteful as I did and he quickly lapsed into anonymity.

So now it's 1985 and I volunteer to help a Calgary MLA who I have never met.  Yet, he was a rare honorable man who as a backbencher had sponsored a lot of worthwhile legislation.  He was someone with a vision of a better Alberta.   Unfortunately, he was running a distant third to an ex-football player who parlayed an easy-going manner into  a durable political career, even if he always seemed a tad distracted by his real love in life, betting on the ponies.  In second place was a hotel owner who parlayed a mop of black hair, a mouthful of perfect teeth and a smile that could endure a thumbscrew into a challenge for party leadership.

One Wednesday night in October, I drove the 25 miles out to Stony Plain at attend a election for party delegates for the leadership convention.  This is politics at its rawest, rural folk gathering to recommend which of their neighbors deserved the trip to Calgary in November. These people were - as Gene Wilder so accurately described in "Blazing Saddles" - the 'common clay, you know, morons.'   It was a prescient description.

My job was a) to hand out brochures for my guy in the vain hope the material would sway stolid minds at the last minute and b) help with the vote count or scrutineering.  I felt I was fulfilling my community obligation.     

The handing out of brochures went badly.  This was a well-attended affair and i was busy trying to accost people as they rushed in the door.  Most of them ignored me.  But in two separate incidents, a man, then a lady, reminded me of something I truly did not know and would not have cared had I known.  "You know he's a fucking Jew, eh?"  they both barked.  I stood gaping after the first one but had the presence of mind on the second to remind the lady that at least he didn't fuck the sheep like some I could name.  This was obviously a sensitive subject in the Stony Plain area as she spent most of the night glaring at me and slapping her husband on the arm. I had forgotten anti-semitism lived in Alberta        

Next came the speeches.  The idea was the crowd would vote to see which six people from their community would be selected to attend the leadership convention and, believe it or not, no less than 45 men and 3 women announced their wish to be one of those six.  48 people for 6 spots!  Holy democratic overkill!  It would be fair of you to ask at this point why such a modest political outcome could generate such a huge interest.  Well, I'm afraid the answer has little to do with democratic town hall enthusiasm and more to do with the possibility that getting close to the Premier could be good for one's bank account.  Surely everyone knew there was a zillion publicly-appointed jobs that paid obscenely high wages, fees, and benefits and are landed due to proximity to the Premier.   The zeal was, in truth, plain old avarice.  Help your boy gain the Premier's office and he'll surely reward you.  What can you say about a political system in which the citizen sees the guy at the top as a dollar sign?

Anyway, tradition dictated that each of these 48 hopeful trough feeders got to make a speech telling the crowd what made them worthy of being selected. The prospect of 48 decidedly untrained public speakers stammering for support was nothing if not daunting and could easily become a brain-killing marathon that lasted until sunup. That would not do.  So each candidate was given one minute to make his or her case.  One minute.  

You haven't lived until you hear 48 one-minute speeches by non-public speakers.   They ranged from "Uh, you know me  . . . Clyde Stool .   . uh"  to "I'mFredFrutzandIcanserveyouallrealgood andyouseknowitsovoteformeyahear."  It was pure agony, a display of mass insanity and I have no idea how the crowd actually decided who to vote for other than they were each introduced as someone representing one of the three premier candidates.  The two men and one woman who stood up for my guy were booed.  So much for my brochures.

They voted - it took a while and the cliche, "herding cats' was front and centre.  Eventually, though, I joined six other people in a second-story windowless room to do our duty as scrutineers.  Keep in mind here, I had never done this before.   How hard could it be?

Well, hard enough.  Seems no one had any idea as to what was to be done.  Three boxes full of voting slips sat ominously on the floor, the six scrutineers eying them as if they were props from an Indiana Jones movie about to release some unspeakable scourge.  No one said anything.  They were waiting to be told what to do.  It occurred to me at this point that unless somebody did something, we'd be stuck in this room until those voting slips turned to dust.

Did I mention this room was a tad on the warm side?  Did I mention that all six of my colleagues smoked - aggressively?   If I was going to survive, I needed to move.  So I took over, acted like I knew what I was doing and let common sense run the show.  I paired them off and gave each pair a box and a letter-sized pad of note paper.  After a long time spent instructing each pair with an exact set of steps to record the vote, handle the voting slip, and deal with possible anomalies, they began to count, stopping only to light up another cigarette.   I stepped out of the room for a minute.  The crowd below milled about like cattle twitching at the sound of a thunder storm, most of them chain-smoking and acting like the Vatican freaks watching for a puff of white smoke to announce a new pope.

After what seemed like days, the count was finished.  A lot of work probably for what was a foregone conclusion - the football player with a love for the thoroughbreds won handily.  My guy and Mr. Hair/Smile both finished well up the track.   In the end the football player became Premier of Alberta and I'm guessing the six duly elected bozos from Stony Plain immediately sat down by their phones to await the reward that would surely come.

In the meantime, it took me two laundries and two showers to get rid of the tobacco smell.  My career in politics was over.  And I still quiver when I hear the political cliche, "a smoke-filled room".

Robert Alan Davidson

March, 2018