I’ve been wanting to take a trip to Wainwright Alberta for a number of years. Our family lived there from 1964 to 1967. It is a military training base, one of the largest in the world. It’s east, and slightly south of Edmonton. It haunts my psyche, lives in my dreams, and populates my nightmares.

Wainwright is the first place I became conscious of “me” – I was born in Barrie, Ontario, but Wainwright is the first place I can remember conversations, things I did, things that were done to me, schoolteachers, friends, even the first death I experienced.

It’s been 49 years since I’ve seen Wainwright, and I was able to drive right to our house! The rocky ledge that I fell down as a child and scrapped all the skin off my left hand is still there, no doubt catching other clumsy kids. I can distinctly remember the pain of having my hand cleaned with iodine, the old school cut cleaner – no polysporin in those days!

I stood in our back yard and turned and could see the ghosts of us running across the yard. If you wanted to recreate that picture, you could. The view is identical. All the elements are there – the “ole ski hill” in the background, the cable for the clothes line is even still there.

The hockey rink still figures prominently just below the ski hill. There seem to be a few more lights, but it’s mostly unchanged. The Canex is still there, so was the infamous round-about where Mom lost a hubcap driving a car full of hockey players to a game in the middle of a snowy day (“Don’t tell your Father!”), the swimming hole, the golf course – everything was there – except the school and the baseball diamond. They’ve been torn down and a cluster of new PMQs cover the area.

The town has the feel of a lot of prairie towns – a big long strip of hotels along the highway, and then the main town runs off down Main Street. You can see the same town structure all over Canada and the US. It’s awfully generic, with each town having something to which they cling for fame. Wainwright was the original shelter for the buffalo. The town essentially sprung up to protect the buffalo, when in 1907, the original Buffalo National Park was created.

Although the park no longer exists, it was eliminated in 1939, Wainwright still takes immense pride in their role in preserving the magnificent plains beast. In 1967, during Canada’s Centennial celebrations, the town decided that a life size sculpture of the great bison should adorn the entrance to Main Street. My Dad took a great series of four pictures as the statue is unveiled.

I could talk a long time about the using a Navigation System to get to a small town like Wainwright, but I’m not sure my heart could take the strain… suffice to say that there are an awful lot of unpaved roads in Alberta, and our tires have driven over far too many miles of them.

We had lunch in Stettler, a small town where my maternal grandfather was born. There were no plaques to him – most unfortunate!