Pop 89: Just Blew In
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Everyone has a history. Everything has a history. Even “history has a history” - as Marilynne Robinson writes in one of her essays. The facts, events, and figures of history are continuously reconstructed and erased. In a talk I gave recently at The Jasper Centre in Maple Creek, I shared a collection of stories about women who lived in the Victorian era and struggled not only to be seen and heard, but to bear witness to the struggles of others. Theirs were the gifts that did not conveniently fit into the roles ascribed to 19th-century women, that did not align with the rules and regulations of social convention and strangling etiquette. Until I started researching the era, I had very little awareness of the context within which these women struggled. I was like a traveller landing in a foreign country. All I had was my history, my memories, my training, education and experiences. Going back in time by absorbing the letters, diaries, newspapers, and other archival material was a humbling experience. It adjusted my attitude and my approach to my writing. Like the women reporters before me, I try to do my research, lean in, listen, and, if need be, approach tentatively, as they did. I can’t know what it was like to be a woman reporter, farmer, lecturer, at a time when to get an education and dare to vote for change was to risk, as the medical and cultural authorities of the Victorian era warned, losing the capacity to pro-create, being reviled and rejected by all men, getting admitted to an insane asylum. I’ve lived in fourteen towns and cities in my life. I try to approach new places in the same way I approach new topics of research: with an open mind. But I realize we urban types often arrive in rural places as bearers of gifts from the New World as if we came from the future and not just the suburbs. (Or, in my case, from the heart of an exciting city, where trams trundled and ambulances blazed by my front door all night long. Where I could run out and grab a falafel, a burger, a nori roll or a latte any time of day or night. Where one Advent evening, feeling sad, I pulled my parka over my pyjamas, sprinted across a parking lot and sank into a cathedral pew as the evening mass opened with soaring, soothing hymns performed by the St. Michael’s Boys Choir.)
Suffice it to say: we come with our own histories. Some of us, like me, came to escape the over-stimulation distractions of the city. Some came because of Grasslands National Park. I also came because my mom was born here. I romanticized the rural world. I never gave my transition from inner city to the outer reaches of human habitation much thought or considered that it might be a bit of a culture shock. I assumed I’d be in love with it all. And I was instantly enamoured with the fact that animals outnumbered people, that the sky was so full of stars I couldn’t find my usual constellations and that sunsets stopped me in my tracks every night.
The longest place I ever stayed in one place was eleven years. I’m about to enter nine years in Val Marie. But I’m still “from away.” Or “a blow-in.” I got no arguments with the moniker, but I forget that my eternal newness means my suggestions, my “big ideas,” might not be of any interest to established “locals.” It’s worth asking: at what point do I get to have an opinion about how things are done around here? Because I’ve been guilty of being an opinionated know-it-all, it’s not restricted to my time in Val Marie; in university, my nickname was “And Another Thing.” it’s genetic. I was born like this.
I live here, but I will never be a “local.” That takes generations. This place is made of years and years and years of a handful of families with their placed stories and memories. And we can’t just roll into town loving the rustic quality of the place only to expect, after the charm wears off, all the amenities of the city. I’m paraphrasing a local motel owner, Don Brown, who two days ago knocked on my door, handed me a couple of pages of notes on his thoughts about newcomers and said: “Here, do what you want with these.”
Don himself is a part-time resident of over twelve years, but he’s financially invested in the village, I suspect more than any other resident - blow-in or old-timer. He’s frustrated with, as he writes: “people who move into small rural communities who want to duplicate the amenities, cultures and customs of their former place of residence with a failure to understand, and are not willing to learn, the history or the norms of their new place of residence.” He wonders “why some people even come here, what they thought they’d find in a rural community.” He’s baffled by “complaints about horse manure, dust from traffic, absence of cable tv and lack of a municipal sewer system.” (Which we now have). I make my living as a writer. I watch and record as much as I can and hopefully bear fair witness. What I see is a place in transition. For so long - and when mom lived here - this was a farming and ranching community on the border of Montana. It still is. But to some, we are “The Gateway to Grasslands National Park.” (Though I doubt locals refer to us as that.” Tourism is now a major industry. But there are still people here who remember when there was no park. People were conflicted, and some still are, as to how they feel about the influx of new people. I think my friend Ervin said it best when he reminded me that when people sold their ranches, some locals were saddened. “We didn’t gain a park,” he explained, “so much as we lost a neighbour.”