A Paean to the PNE

Eyesplash Mikul photo: Vintage wooden coaster travels up to 45 mph

On Sunday, we took our annual family trip to the PNE. We bought some tickets on the show home, wandered along the midway and snack booths and lined up for some tasty fish and chips.

To share our hot and fragrant deep-fried dinner, we sat at a rather damp table under a tree that provided some shelter from the drizzle. When we rose, I asked, "Shall we look in on the horse show?"

"No," my daughter replied. "Let's not deviate from our usual routine. We have to get to the barns before they put the animals to bed."

Last year we missed seeing the large animals. This year, we saw a calf that had been born only a few hours earlier, and watched his early efforts at standing. We watched bees making honey, chicks hatching from eggs, and a team of huge brown and white Clydesdale horses being fitted with their glittering harnesses.

We've been coming to the PNE since Yasemin was a baby. We used to live within walking distance. One year, I remember my husband carried our tired girl home, while I carried the stuffed lion he won for her shooting hoops. It was bigger than she was.

When she was little, she enjoyed the kiddie rides. The pink and blue elephants and the small wave swinger were good. But the small coaster was best. "Welcome to the Dragon!" a voice would boom from a tinny speaker, startling the little people just at the moment they were ready to board.

In her teen years, our daughter went to the PNE with her friends, mostly to Playland. In recent years we've been going together as a family again. Our routine always includes the Showmart. There we watch a variety of sales demos. While some sculpt vegetables with ceramic knives, others wash the same bit of floor over and over to demonstrate a new type of mop.

This year we bought the cat brush we saw last year. Last year we bought the steam iron I'd seen a couple of years before that. My husband eyed the high-tech kitchen knives, but resisted the temptation to add to his collection.

A few years back, there was talk of moving the PNE, but it's still in the original location, and attendance is booming. What began as a country fair is a hundred years old. As Shelley Fralic said in yesterday's Vancouver Sun, the PNE is a special treasure, especially nowadays, when many city people have never been to a farm.

Jasper Station part of Canadian railroad history

Jasper Station: Vancouver 534.9 m (miles), Montreal 2408.8 m.

It was the last week of August. When I arrived in Jasper in the late afternoon, the Rocky Mountaineer had just pulled in. This train, which runs from April to October, carries tourists from the VIA station in Vancouver to enjoy spectacular daylight views of the Rockies.

In 1958, my family moved from central Alberta to northern BC, and I glimpsed my first mountains. We changed trains at Jasper. To my eight-year old eyes, that little train station, faced with smooth stones and flanked by views of the Rockies, was a vision of unearthly beauty.

The Athabasca valley was first explored by the great geographer David Thompson in 1810. The Northwest Company (rival of the Bay in fur trading) set up a supply depot. The settlement, known as Jasper House, remained until the fur trade declined.

Jasper Park was created in 1907, and by 1911 the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad (later the CNR) reached Jasper, part of a line that would cross the Yellowhead Pass and link Prince Rupert to the second more northerly trans-Canada rail route.

In the fifties, railroad travel was still the norm. Newfoundland, which had joined Canada only six years earlier, had major highway gaps, and so did mountainous British Columbia. In 1956, Parliament reached a cost-sharing arrangement with the provinces, formulating a plan to complete and pave the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 1) by the nation's Centennial in 1967.

Now, with the expansion of highways and air travel, for most Canadians, long rail journeys are no longer feasible; they are luxuries to be enjoyed by those with money and time.

Though I arrived in Jasper by car this time, I did explore the old station, one of my very special places. Apparently I'm not alone in loving the town. About three million tourists visit every year.

Simon Fraser and then the CPR and CNR

Explorer Simon Fraser's Historic Marker









Supports from original CN railroad bridge (1908) and current bridge over the beginnings of the Fraser River, Yellowhead Highway

The CPR, Canada's first transcontinental railroad through the southern Rockies, was completed with the driving of the last spike in 1885 at Craigellachine. In Port Moody, this event is still commemorated annually.

Afterwards, the Grand Trunk Pacific, (later the CNR), built a second line through a more northerly route, crossing the Rocky Mountains through Yellowhead Pass.

This year is also the 125th anniversary of Banff National Park, which was created the same year the railroad was completed. It was the railroad that brought the first tourists to the Rockies. Canadian Pacific shares the same anniversary and this year Banff's Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies is one of many Canadian museums to receive Legacy gifts from the company.

This past summer,the Empress 2826 Steam train and the Museum Car have been visiting various communities in western Canada to celebrate the nation-building legacy of the railroad.

The Correction Line

Photo: County of Beaver Seed Cleaning Co-op, Holden, Alberta

It's a prairie term, and I hadn't heard it in years before I travelled to Saskatchewan in 2008 and visited a Canadian prairie farm similar to the one where I lived until I was nearly eight. The correction line evoked my early years on the prairies; I heard the words spoken inwardly, in my father's voice.

A correction line is a certain kind of prairie road. Land is laid out on parallels of latitude and longitude in square townships six by six miles, or thirty-six sections. Correction lines are additional east-west roads that correct for the curvature of the earth.

Our farm, a quarter section, was tiny by today's standards. As a veteran of the RCNVR, Dad took up farming after the war when he married and my parents started their family. Though the dirty thirties, Dad had "bummed around," as the saying went. During those years of drought and high unemployment, Dad ride rode the rails, worked in camps, and trapped in the far north.

He probably returned to farming because it was what he knew. His parents had emigrated from Scandinavia and met in the US. His mother, Hilda Haugdahl, was from Bergen, Norway and his Dad, Olaf Johnson, came from Skane, a wheat-growing province of Sweden. Around 1906, the couple and their seven children came to Alberta to homestead near Lindbrook. Following in their footsteps, Dad availed himself of a soldier settlement scheme to buy a farm near Ryley and raise wheat, rye and oats.

This summer in Alberta, re-visiting the area around Viking where the Norse first settled, I heard the words correction line again, and became aware of how it was from my father's voice speaking that I heard those words from my earliest years of language development.

An inner knowing that I can't explain tells me that one day I'm going to write a dynamite short story using that as a title; I can already feel it starting to formulate, beneath the level of my conscious mind.

The Fraser River Grows from Small Beginnings

Photo left: (by dovidende) Rider beside giant cables. The Alex Fraser bridge, suspended from two giant H shaped supports, crosses the Fraser Estuary between New Westminster and North Delta.




Above: This small stream arising in the Northern Rockies becomes the mighty Fraser.
Crossing the broad estuary of the Fraser River on one of the several bridges here near its mouth, we rarely think of how it all began. But seeing the narrow stream in the northern Rockies less than thirty miles from the headwaters really made me think.

When a small force begins, and others join and flow in the same direction, power accumulates. From small beginnings great and wondrous things can grow.

Remembering hay

Photo: Baled hay near Viking, AB. late August

A road trip through the Rockies to Alberta took me through farm lands and badlands, leaving persistent pictures in my head. The prairie sky, with its constantly changing cloud formations moving across the wide horizon. The whisper of blowing grass. Magpies on the road, picking tidbits fallen from grain trucks, saucily waiting till the last minute to raise lazy wings above the oncoming car.

"I see just the one swather," says a farmer in the coffee shop. It's 6:30 AM, and several men in caps and plaid shirts are discussing a neighbour who is haying.

"Yeah, they're only using the one," says another. Long pause.

"We never talked to him last night, so I don't know if he baled on Saturday or not. It was too wet on Friday. Wonder if it's gonna rain."

"It's raining in Medicine Hat." Another long pause.

"We're lucky it hasn't froze yet. If it clears off..."

These leisurely voices, discussing the weather and the crops, were the sound track of my early childhood. The memories are stored deep in my bones.

Out on the land, shadows steal across the golden ripe wheat that waves beneath alternating bands of blue sky and thick gray cloud. And hay. Each bale is as tall as a man, and weighs seventeen hundred pounds. Winter fodder for animals when the prairie is covered by blowing snow.

Familar Roads Also Reflect Change

Photo: The stockyard in Tofield where cattle are auctioned.

It's good to be home after spending the past two days on the road. Driving familiar highways is always interesting; the road is never twice the same. After getting from Viking to Kelowna in a single day, and managing a lunch rendezvous at Tim Horton's in Cochrane with friends travelling in the other direction, I promised myself I'd make the last leg of the journey quick and easy. I would take the Okanagan connector and the Coquahalla Highway.

But after a visit with another friend and good night's sleep , I couldn't resist the temptation to drive along the lake. The sky was gray and rain was threatening, but it didn't fall until Oliver and Osoyoos -- the semi-arid grape-growing places in the far south of the Okanagan.

"Sorry the weather is bad today," apologized the proprietor of the fruit stand where I stopped in Osoyoos.

"Not your fault," I assured her. In truth I was rather taken by the gray skies and wet roads of a place that is almost always sunny and hot. Cool weather is nice for driving too. I kept the windows closed and the car smelled like an orchard.

"Fill the car with Okanagan fruit and vegetables," said my husband, and I took him literally. Peaches, cherries, tomatoes, three kinds of cucumbers, four kinds of peppers, new potatoes. A watermelon, a cantaloupe, four kinds of plums. Elephant plums were new to me. "We only have one tree," the orchard woman said, so of course I had to try some.

After lunch in Osoyoos, with a brilliant view of the lake, I was soon pulling up the long hill out of town. The "Great Wall of Tires" is still there, a few kilometers west, I noted with satisfaction. This is a corral built entirely of discarded tires, except for the gates.

What have I forgotten? I wondered as I drove into Keremeos and started passing fruit stands again. I had everything, and lots of it, but I still got some onions, both red and white, and some Mackintosh and Sunrise apples too. After my last fruit stand stop, I flew on past Bromley Rock on the Similkameen River, a favourite family swimming hole from trips long past.

Driving the Hope Princeton Road is the price I choose to pay for the joy of driving through the South Okanagan to enjoy driving past the fruit on the trees and the grapes on the vines. I always start that journey with a rest and snack in Princeton, followed by lashings of coffee. My old road stop cafe, the Belaire, has had a face lift, including the menu, which now includes a delicious curried chicken soup, perfect for the chilly evening.

The first few miles out of Princeton are steep and full of saddlebacks and S curves. It was mid-afternoon when I drove past the burned skeletons of trees on the hillsides where the forest fire closed the road a couple of years ago. Through Manning Park, the road continued narrow and winding, though it now has wide clear sections and plenty of passing lanes.

All through Manning and Hope and into the Fraser Valley, the road was lashed with a relentless rain that splashed off the pavement in a way that made driving seem like navigating a cloud. So little could be seen; nothing was visible but enough roadway to drive on and some shadowy trees on either side.

The last miles seem the longest on a car trip. But the reward is wonderful: a safe arrival to greet family, cat and home after an absence that makes them all the more dear.