After The Flood

As we bused back north up Highway 2, the military vehicles streamed south. I was with some ATB Financial colleagues who were finishing up the first leg of a province-wide tour to mark the 75th anniversary of the financial institution born in a disaster of too little water. Now, a disaster of too much. 

Heading to Calgary
The camouflaged vehicles presented both a welcome and an eerie prospect. Yes, the uniformed men and women were bringing their engineering skill and sandbagging brawn, but the movement of those same vehicles whispered that this was, maybe, a state of nature (and not of the tourism variety) they were heading toward. 

Back moving through Edmonton on that Friday afternoon, a scheduled drink at Latitude 53 just ahead of me, the scenes through the bus window were jarring. Not because they were hard to see. They weren't. They were the easy images of friends talking on the steps of the Hotel Macdonald. And of a businessman running to get a waiting cab. And of green lights and red lights and traffic and pedestrians and blue sky. Just normal stuff.

And only two hours back down the road lives lost and livelihoods wasted. I asked some questions into that rum and coke.

                                                                      ********

"We will be hosting the greatest show on Earth come hell or high water," Calgary Stampede president
Elbow got the first word
and board chairman Bob Thompson said, the flooded, muddied Stampede grounds behind him.

The "hell or high water" comment stuck. In Calgary, disasters are branded. 

                                                                    ********

Nenshi does not have the sense of a land developer, but he is developing the sense of a land.

                                                                    ********

"Okay, tell me the truth now," my first TV boss, Tim Spelliscy, asked my over beers, pretzels, and devilled eggs at MKT on Thursday. "With all the flood action happening, do you miss being in a newsroom in the middle of it?"

I paused for a couple of seconds before answering: "No, not really. I don't miss having to help do live hits and get stuff for the national and all the affiliates and the web and newsnet and then just having to fall back on the news being what you can see and record." 

I told Speller I did miss sitting around and talking about the news with newspeople, but not the adrenaline factory. I don't miss it yet.

Later, the question got me thinking from a slightly different angle. Is a newsroom really in the middle of it? Here there is another question and that has to do with the status of the observer and recorder, but we kinda need Rousseau as a guide here. 

                                                                  ********

After work on Friday, we talked about the RCMP's decision in High River to go into evacuated homes and seize improperly stored guns. A provocation? An illegal act? Good policing? Or a whisper that the state of nature is closer than people think?

                                                               ********
Me and Amos Garrett in Black Diamond

"And what's your name?" the clerk asked the man holding two of those papery breathing masks in his hands at her till.

The scene was the Rona store in Black Diamond today. I was walking in on a quick mission to buy a trouble light to illuminate a basement cleanup a few blocks away.

The man paused for a couple of seconds before answering: "Amos."

I turned my head. The clerk entered A-m-o-s on her keyboard as she asked, "And what's your last name?"

"Garrett," he said. 

The guitar legend, who I usually see from about a  kilometre up the Edmonton Folk Music Festival hill, was standing there in front of me, wearing a look of deep concern. He thinks the main floor of his home in High River is gone. He will need a crew of helpers.

                                                                     ********

ATB cleanup gang in action
Shelagh and I drove to Calgary Friday night and then to Black Diamond this morning to join others from ATB in erasing the slurry signature scrawled by the angry Sheep River across the property and lives of Shalili and Rob. Shalili works at ATB in Calgary and escaped with her life and her dogs when the water came. 

Today, her workmates came with wheelbarrows, shovels, gloves, mops, bleach and it was good to be there in the middle of things.


                                                                    ********

The two of us





Comments

  1. garage door repair Abbotsford23 September 2013 at 03:16

    I am happy to find this post very useful for me, as it contains lot of information.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more