Pop 89: Saved By This Place
By Madonna Hamel
I cut across the village campground behind my place to get to Page's in time for the puck drop. But when I saw the couple with the Maryland plates from a bike ride I had to stop and introduce myself. They've been here once before, they tell me and are surprised how few people know about it. "Yes," I say, leaning and whispering, "and let's keep it that way." "Nonono, they say, people need this…" and they wave their free arms over the wide open view, embracing the open sky, including the Convent Inn and the monster black clouds humping our way.
Oh, I know. I can't really discourage visitors from coming to Grasslands National Park, especially considering that I myself was rescued by this place. "Rescued?" they asked. It sounds like a dramatic word, but it fits exactly the situation I found myself in in 2010 when I first drove through here, a year after my mother died.
Hey, you have a hockey game to get to, I tell myself. THE hockey game of the season. Still, I stay to explain. "See that building across the road? That's the old convent school. My mom went to it as a kid. But that's not the story. The story is that 14 years ago, my youngest sister, Mich, decided to leave Toronto and move back west. She got a job at the Lake Agnes Tea house in Banff National Park and asked if I would caravan with her, leading the drive across the country, via the States, passing under Chicago and then up into Saskatchewan, via Montana. "Sure, I said. "Who doesn't love a road trip!"
I'll never forget crossing at Monchy and driving that little highway up to this very spot. I felt like I was on the moon, or Newfoundland, with no one and nothing except big rocks in open fields. We had been on the road for an exhausting week and were thrilled to see, when we pulled up to the Convent, that our sister Jody from Medicine Hat was already here and had a meal and a bottle of wine laid out for us in our room.
That night, we slept like big rocks. At one point Mich felt someone put a blanket over her and pat her hand. Whoever did that, she said, thanks. I was too tired to get another blanket. "It wasn't me," I laughed. "I was out cold." Me neither, said Jody, "I slept like a log." Of all of us, Mich is the least given to supernatural imaginings, so we agreed we'd believe it was our mother, back home in her birthplace, here to comfort us.
It's ten minutes into the first period now but I have yet to tell the Marylanders what I tell everyone who comes here and walks around their first few days looking stunned and in a bit of a daze. "It's what happens when you enter the quiet zone where the only racket waking you in the morning is birds who have the gall to begin their songs and calls as early as 3:15 am, not garbage trucks or partyers home from the club.
Often, unwitting Canadian travellers "stop" in Val Marie and the Park. They assume, erroneously, that this is simply a sleep station en route to bigger, more impressive hot spots. But then, after a deep sleep and sudden shift in pace and mood, they regret they didn't plan for an extra day or two. Removed from the imposed pace of the city, where we are forced to adapt to rush-hour traffic, timed stop lights, bus and subway schedules, this place changes you in a nuanced but substantial internal rhythmic way, the way it changed me. Saved me, I'd even say.
But am I going to attempt to convince them what I have learned? That the bird calling and the sun setting are far more sustaining benedictions than any bequeathment of power, property or prestige? That success, as measured by mere mortals, doesn't motivate me anymore? That I've lost my edge? I know, as a writer, I'm required to write every day. Which means, to edit, to revise, to find le mot juste. I tell myself this constantly - Hey, this shit doesn't get written by itself. So, daily, I put in a good few hours tweaking and cutting bits, and I end up sneaking back in. But, then, I hear a rumble of thunder, or a meadowlark, or the winnowing of the snipe's feathers, and I am up and out of here. Hey, you're supposed to be writing a book, an inner judge hollers, get back in here. I am drawn to the book of dirt.
"So you stayed?" The Maryland couple ask me, returning to the story. Yes, three years later, after selling the family home where I lived with my dad after my mom died, I phoned the Convent Inn and asked - begged, really - if I could come write. You see, on that first trip, I spied a young girl in the chapel-turned-quiet room sitting at a desk beside the old confessional. (Perfect, for a writer trying to Keep It Real). I asked the owner about her, and she said: "Oh, she's our writer in residence." Then she sealed my fate with: "Call us when you're ready."
Three years later, I was ready. I lived in the Convent for three months. I was smitten by the silence and the sensation that someone was looking over my shoulder as I wrote, egging me on, in the same way Mich was blanketed and reassured with a soft pat on her shoulder. Was it my mother? The Mother Superior? A patron saint of writers and patience? An older ancestor of this territory, child to Motherland? I don't know. But I stayed. The couple smiled, then said: "Welcome home." "Thanks, I laughed," running to catch the game. "Let's hope we can say the same to the Stanley Cup!"