Aritha Van Herk - Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta

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First published 2001

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Copyright Aritha van Herk, 2001

Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists
94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

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NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Van Herk, Aritha, 1954
Mavericks : an incorrigible history of Alberta

Includes index.
ISBN 0-670-88739-0

1. AlbertaHistory. I. Title

FC3661.V36 2001 971.23 C2001-902679-X
F1076.V36 2001

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for my mother and father,

Marretje van Dam van Herk
and Willem van Herk

Contents

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to the helpful archivists and librarians at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, the Glenbow Archives and Library, and the University of Calgary Library. They were wonderfully patient and generous. Thanks also to the local museums and collections all across Alberta that offer a view of the past, the present, and the future.

Robert Sharp, Robert Kroetsch, Elizabeth Flagler, Carolynn Hoy, Brian Stanko, Joy Fehr, Pamela McCallum, Nicole Markotic, Peter Oliva, Rudy Wiebe, Pat Sharp, Christl Verduyn, and Miriam Grant helped in untold ways.

Special thanks to my sister, Bertha, and to my parents, who dared to immigrate to Alberta.

Thanks for their faith in this book to Cynthia Good, Alison Reid, Maryan Gibson, Shannon Proulx, Cathy MacLean, Sandra Tooze, and particularly Jennifer Barclay and Hilary Stanley.

Introduction

If I have learned anything writing this book, it is how devoted, dedicated, and amazingly perceptive historians of Alberta are. They are each a special kind of visionary, accumulating the details of the past and writing them in the present for the benefit of the future, and I read them with admiration and delight. I have no historical training, and so it was a challenge even to contemplate writing about this province. I knew in advance that I would fail to provide any historical perspective sufficiently rigorous or knowledgeable to compete with the brilliant historians who have worked and who continue to work on Alberta. I had to decide that I would be content to tell the story of this place from my own idiosyncratic and biased point of view. Any mistakes are mine. The omissions, and unfortunately there are many, deserve books of their own. The most frustrating aspect of writing this book was how much I had to leave out. History is about what we keep; its secret story is about what is lost. That story is one we all long to find.

I was born in Alberta, in the middle of one of the wettest, muddiest Mays on record. It had rained so much that my parents could not even manage to get their car up our dirt lane. The day they brought me home from the hospital was bright and warm. They parked the car at the end of the driveway and waded through the mud. I remember that first short journey. I remember the sky slamming its brilliance against my baby eyes.

My parents are Dutch immigrants who arrived in Canada just five years before I was born. In March of 1949 they boarded a boat at Le Havre and set out on the journey that enabled me to write this book. They disembarked at Pier 21 in Halifax and boarded the train, beginning that long, long journey all the way to Wainwright, Alberta. There, they were picked up by the farmer who had served as their sponsor and taken to Fabian, a small town hovering on the edge of the Battle River. From Fabian they moved to Wetaskiwin, where they were living when I was born, in an old farmhouse close to the ancient and mystical Peace Hills, bending their backs to the task of making a living in this challenging country. When I was two, they moved to a farm close to the village of Edberg in the County of Camrose, but still close to the Battle River. The land was better, and my parents wanted to buy a farm of their own, which they eventually did, struggling and saving and working, working and saving and struggling.

We worked beside them, my siblings and I. We were poor, but we enjoyed a childhood that must count as one of the most blessed in the worldrafting on the slough in summer, skating on the slough in winter, roaming free through the bush, picnicking at Dried Meat Lake or Buffalo Lake, and taking a butter-yellow school bus into town every morning. We knew the habits of gophers and coyotes, we milked cows and chased pigs, we drove the tractor and waded in spring ditches catching tadpoles, we were Caesars of our own small world. And Alberta in the fifties and sixties was a marvellous place, full of energy and conviction, endlessly expansionist, crazily unpredictable, seeded with evangelists and dust-driven gravel roads and the wild optimism of oil strikes and growth. There was so much promise in the air that we could tip it out and drink it.

I left Edberg to go to the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and when I graduated I moved first to Calgary, then Vancouver, a wonderful city, but too different for my blood to take. So I moved back to Alberta, to Calgary, and I have lived here ever since, with shorter sojourns in Leeds and Marburg and Kiel and Wollongong and Trier and Wierden and Yellowknife and Oviedo and Vienna and London. I do have some worldly comparisons to draw upon.

They say that writing about home is the hardest task to undertake, for the writer can never see clearly what she is closest to. I can only say to this province, to the people of this province, that I have tried to tell some of its story, tried to show Albertas energy and wit and anger and passion, so often invisible to outsiders, who see only our extremes, our difficult and recalcitrant side.

Alberta is a kingdom that resists description, that defies definition. The truth is, to understand Alberta, you really have to live here. I hope that reading the pages of Mavericks will be the next best thing.