March 24, 2013
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The Roughlands
The “Roughlands” were what we called that part of my Grandfather’s farm located down the hill and along the creek. It was land that couldn’t be farmed. Of course the Roughlands was best part of the place — where we would hike, camp, have cook-outs and even stage treasure hunts.
I don’t remember exactly why I decided an outing to the farm was a good idea that day in 2006. Dad had recently been evac’d from a pretty terrible situation in Argentina and was staying with my sister in Lethbridge while the doctors told us more and more about the state of his health. Eventually the doctors decided that Dad was going to recover from most of the damage he had sustained from years of abuse and neglect.Except for the dementia.
They could slow the disease down but his condition was never going to get any better. Ever. A cruel fate for a scientist — someone who used his mind to make his living and give him a sense of worth.
Maybe I thought a trip to the family farm — where he grew up and where we kids vacationed every year –would take Dad to a place where he could reconnect to his past and maybe get some comfort from the memories that he still had.
Maybe I wanted to try and reconnect with Dad, who had transformed from a gruff eccentric who I thought I knew quite well into a sometimes very strange person indeed.
So one February morning we piled into the car and drove the 30 miles or so from Lethbridge to Magrath, Alberta (population 2,081).We stopped at the local Chinese place for lunch before we went to the farm. This was the most exotic food in town and I felt like we had crossed through some time portal that took us back to the 1950s.
Our server was very nice and polite in spite of Dad and my efforts at being Charming Spencer Men (which is never a pretty thing). She seemed pleased when I told her that I had worked on some museums in her home town of Hong Kong.
One giant plate of Pineapple Chicken later and then on to the farm…
My Dad’s brother took control of the farm after Grandfather died and over the years he tore down the old house and cottage and just about any structure that suggested this might have been a place where a family had once lived. I hated that but to be fair most of these changes were very sensible steps toward much needed modernization — it was an old fashioned farm and I suspect that Grandfather made more money writing the local history column for the Lethbridge Herald than he ever did growing sugar beats.
Eventually Uncle Geoff decided to lease the farm to his neighbours and they used it as pasture land for their cattle. Economically rational but not the stuff that memories are made of.
What was strange was that even though most of the farm that we had know had been flattened — there were still echoes of the old place around. The landscape was completely transformed…but not really.
The main road that lead to Grandfather’s place, a road that I saw several times a year for over 25 years, was gone but it was still sort of there. It was just that there were giant streamlined windmills in the distance beyond. (And probably, late at night Moorlocks came out from inside the windmills and ate the children of local farmers…)
The little forested area where we celebrated Dominion Day with hot dogs and burgers and fireworks was now a parking lot for equipment. But you still had a sense that this was a place where children had played for generations and done clever things like pouring Kool-Aid onto beehives. (It’s a long story. Ask my brother and my cousin Kevin.)
The Roughland, the place that got to go wild and be filled with fish and frogs and bugs and thousands of critters — that was all grassland now. And full of somebody else’s cows.
Later I wondered if the stripped down and totally functional nature of the farm — as well as the disappearance of our Roughlands was analogous to the condition of my Dad’s mind. There was enough working to get through the day but it was getting increasingly hollowed out and rapidly loosing all meaning and memory.
Dad once told me that it was a dream of his to retire to the family farm with his second wife Dorothy.They were both biologists and Dad thought the two of them would be able to spend their days collecting specimens and doing research projects on the wildlife and habitats that populated the Roughlands.
It didn’t work out that way.
Dorothy went before Dad and now they, and the Roughlands, are gone.
