Stampede stomping grounds

Tuesday, June 19 and Wednesday, June 20, 2007

COCHRANE, AB — Time with good friends is time well spent, and yesterday and today we did some good spending. David Fox came to our campground yesterday and reminisced with Val over the days of their youth. Just as Dave arrived, Val’s brother John came online, so I wrote back to him to stand by while we set up the web cam.
Moments later, with the small round camera mounted on the laptop, Dave and John looked at each other for the first time in 38 years. When your memory stores the image of a twenty-something kid for that long — smooth-faced, dark-haired and youthfully built — and it encounters the face of a wrinkled, white-haired sixty-year-old, the only thing you can do is laugh. And laugh they did! It was a magical moment to behold!
Later that afternoon, we headed in to Calgary to visit Len and Deb Babin. Len is a retired RCMP member who has always had a keen curiosity about the world, and an avid interest in new-fangled gadgets, so he proudly showed us around their beautiful home, with heated concrete floor downstairs, remote-controlled awning on the deck, and a sound system fed with music from a data stick which he had filled up from the Internet. Deb’s talents were wonderfully demonstrated in a succulent meal; lamb chops in balsamic sauce, lemon-laced asparagus, new potatoes, a beautiful Parmesan-garnished salad, warm, crusty bread and, as a finale, a cloud-light lemon-filled roll.
We talked until very late, and then turned in, as we had been invited to spend the night. In his e-mailed invitation, Len had suggested we do this to avoid collisions with wildlife on the way back to the campground in the dark. Besides, this would allow an early start to the walking history tour of Calgary he had offered to provide for us today.
And so, this morning, after a refreshing sleep and a gourmet breakfast, we headed downtown. Len had researched the history of the area when he arrived five years ago, and armed with some really interesting material, he decided to give walking tours to visitors. He and other volunteers start them just outside the Glenbow Museum every Thursday morning at 10 – or on special arrangement, as we had today.
It was a fascinating tour. He started with a timeline that went back 225 million years ago, when marine creatures lived and eventually provided the material for today’s oil deposits. He went on through the dinosaur age, the wooly mammoth age and the time of the first peoples who migrated across the Behring Strait land bridge. He talked about the whisky traders from Montana and parts south and the North West Mounted Police, who came to lay down the law and ensure the safety of settlers who were drawn to this wide open land. Len showed us a copy of the letter, written on February 29, 1876, by Commissioner Irvine to the department of justice, suggesting that the new fort built by the NWMP at the junction of the Bow and Elbow Rivers be named Fort Calgary.
We saw sandstone buildings stamped with dates from the early 1900s, and strolled through Chinatown, where descendents of the 17,000 labourers from the national railway still live. He took us through the "plus-fifteens" — a network of pedestrian overpasses, 15 feet above the street, and to the Devonian gardens, a huge third-floor section of an office building full of tropical plants and ponds with giant goldfish and turtles. What a haven for the winter-worn! We also saw the beginnings of stampede fever as local artists began painting office windows with cowboy themes. It was a terrific tour and a great visit.
We arrived back at the campground just in time for the serviceman, who came to install the safety kit on our fridge as part of the Dometic factory recall. We can now breathe easier, with the new kit and the assurance of the serviceman that the chance of fire was slim before and non-existent now.
Tomorrow we hit the road again, taking the Cowboy Trail, Highway 22, north to the Hoffarth’s ranch near Breton.