Life North of the 54th

Transcript Chapters

• 00:00 - North vs South
• 04:20 - Fairview, AB
• 09:58 - Finding Adulthood
• 15:23 - Making a Living
• 20:58 - More Dam Work
• 28:22 - Astronomical and Climate Tangent
• 40:07 - A Sense of Place

00:00 - North vs South

Opening Theme Music:
[bass guitar riff]

Garett:
Welcome back to Life North of the 54th. I'm Garett Brown.

Preston:
And I'm Preston Brown. And we're fortunate to have with us today, Jonathan Ockey, and we'll have him introduce himself for us.

Jonathan:
Hey, I'm Jonathan Ockey. I grew up in Fairview for most of my early, until I was about 23. And yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Garett:
Yeah, thanks for joining us. We are happy to have you with us and happy to have another listener on the show with us to talk about life in the Peace Country. Thanks for listening and thanks for coming.

Jonathan:
Yeah, happy to be here.

Preston:
Now, my first question is always good to start at the beginning. Jonathan, is how did you or you and your family end up in the Fairview area?

Jonathan:
I ended up there without any choice.

All:
[chuckle]

Jonathan:
So when my parents were married, they were down here in Cardston. And there's only so much work in Cardston. And so mom and dad were looking for better paying jobs and more of a future. And I think dad found a job first in Grande Prairie. And so we were there for, I think, a year or so. Then they found a job with a gravel company in Fairview. And I think the plan was we were only supposed to be there for five years. But as other people have told you, those five year plans turned out to be 20 year plans, or lifetime plans. And the farthest south my parents have made it now is Fox Creek. But they still haven't escaped the clutches of the North.

Garett:
[chuckles] Yeah, you're right. That is a really common experience of moving to the North for work and staying there for a long time. So in a lot of ways, we're glad. It's always great to know you, John, to hang out with you and see you around. We didn't get to see you that often because Fairview is not that close to Grande Prairie, but it was always great to see you.

Jonathan:
Yeah, I don't think I just got older and had more mobility. I had my driver's license and I could go. It was more so like when there was like turn to be those youth activities or even more so like YSA activities and family home evenings, I was able to zip down the quick hour and 15 minute drive and go and have a lot of fun. And one thing I remember thinking about was like within the church, at least, while we all lived so far apart, crazy distances and lots of cases, everyone was still so close to people of their age group and demographic. In the southern Alberta or even any other farther away where things are a lot closer, you know, just part of the fathom. Like I hardly know anyone from Magrath which is closer than anything to Fairview. But I knew tons of people from Valley View or Grande Prairie, Peace River, Fort St. John, new families worth of people where, you know, down here you hear of them, but you don't know them like you do up there.

Garett:
Yeah, I haven't spent an incredible amount of time down in southern Alberta in the Cardston area, but the church is pretty big down there. But it does seem like the families sort of are the networks that connect the people together. There's a lot of people that moved to the Peace Country, don't have a lot of family there. And so the support network that they get are from the people that they meet at church or through work. And so I think the network seems to be larger geographically as you meet people from different places instead of just knowing your family and your extended family from the area. That's my suspicion. I could be wrong. I'm not a native Southerner.

Jonathan:
No, I would say that's fairly accurate, like in Fairview where the church was very small, with the exception of when we were first there, which I don't really remember much of. But when I was growing up, a large attendance at church was 30 people. That was a big Sunday.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
But the potlucks and all those things were quite intimate and you knew everybody. You could joke around with everybody. You knew who would take a joke badly and things are so tight-knit.

04:20 - Fairview, AB

Preston:
I've always really liked Fairview. I visited many times. I did my carpentry program at the college there. I'd never lived there though. Like you, Jonathan, I commuted every day, sometimes eight weeks at a time at 120 kilometers. But I've always liked visiting Fairview. I like how big the sky is up there. I like crossing the Dunvegan Bridge and seeing the Peace River Valley. It's probably one of the prettiest parts of the valley, I think, that I've seen.

Jonathan:
I find talking about life up there is like one of my first vehicles I ever owned. I think it was a 1989 GMC Sonoma, two-wheel drive, four-cylinder, five-speed manual. And so it did not have a lot of power at all.

All:
[chuckle]

Jonathan:
And so going up to the north side of the Dunvegan Hill was, if you didn't drop it into fourth at just the right spot at the bottom, I think I made it up to the top of the hill at about 100 once or twice in the year and a half or two years that I owned that vehicle. Just because that hill was so long and so steep that it just was like, not happening. I ain't doing that for you. Well, that Dunvegan area was always so much fun.

Garett:
I don't want to belabor too many old car stories, but in a similar way, I had a Jetta that was a manual, like stick shift. And at the time, I did not know that the two cooling fans on the car were broken. I didn't know that had two and both of them were broken. And I didn't know this at the time. And I drove through Death Valley in August. And I was trying to go up the hill and my car was just overheating. And so I had to turn on the heat and go up the hill at like 20 kilometers an hour because I just couldn't push it because it was too much. Anyway, the Jetta had a lot of power when the turbo was working. But I understand the flight when you're trying to go up the hill and you just don't have the power to do it.

Preston:
I did some research years ago about when the railway first went into the Peace River and Fairview areas that they were allowed by the government to charge a mountain fare for the railway passengers because of the grade was so extreme for the construction of the railway in the Peace River area.

Jonathan:
And those slopes are so unstable.

Preston:
They move. [chuckles]

Jonathan:
How many times have you guys driven the Fairview and the road on the south side of the bridge is slightly different or there's construction every summer?

Preston:
Yep. Every summer.

Garett:
Yeah, the Peace River Valley is not like the Rockies. No, it's a big dip. It's pretty big, but it's not bedrock being pushed up from the bottom.

Preston:
No, it's clay that's worn out. [chuckles]

Garett:
It's been cut down, not built up.

Jonathan:
For that valley, when you're coming in, you're driving north from Rycroft and you're coming in down that spot, especially when you come in the fall and the leaves have all turned and they haven't fallen off. I guess it's not Southern Alberta where you get one wind and they're gone.

All:
[chuckle]

Jonathan:
But coming down there, it's just absolutely stunning. Just views for endless days of like, you know, from that vantage point of coming up north, it just looks like natural rugged terrain. You don't really see the fields or I don't know, it's one of my favourite views that I haven't seen in a long time.

Garett:
I feel like the Peace River Valley also holds the summer heat a little longer than the rest of the natural prairies up there. So I feel like the leaves change color at a different time of year, maybe delayed a week or two,

Preston:
Not a month or two. [chuckles]

Jonathan:
Yeah, I guess that's all the extra humidity and moisture. Like with my job, I'm working water resources. So down south Alberta here, so it's like canals and irrigation and stuff. And so there's a website that rivers.alberta.da or where you can go on there and see the different river flows and canal flows throughout the province. You can even see like the snow pillows and see how much water is stored up in the mountains. And one of the crazy things that just blows my mind, especially every spring, is just how much water flows down that Peace River. Like the river in Lethbridge, at peak flow is maybe 100 cubic meters a second, where the Peace River can do 4000 cubic meters a second. And just the amount of water, no wonder they keep building dams on it.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
There's just so much potential energy on it. It's ridiculous. And I'm just like, why can't they divert some of that south?

Preston:
There's a continental divide in the way.

Garett:
Yeah. [chuckles]

Jonathan:
Pish posh.

All:
[laugh]

Preston:
Small potatoes.

Jonathan:
As a human race, we've engineered crazier things.

Garett:
Then cutting the continental divide, that's a pretty big one. But yeah.

Jonathan:
It's just money.

Garett:
I guess, yeah.

Preston:
All it takes is money.

Jonathan:
You probably know that, Preston, in construction.

Garett:
Yep.

Preston:
You could get anything done if you put enough capital to it. Most of the technology is there. If it can get approved and you can finance it, you probably could do it.

Jonathan:
That's true.

Garett:
It stops dead when you lose the capital.

Jonathan:
It stops dead when the government doesn't let you.

Garett:
That too.

Preston:
It's just business.

Jonathan:
Rules are the hardest, the most annoying part of any construction project.

09:58 - Finding Adulthood

Garett:
Jonathan, you want to tell us a bit about your story going from Fairview to, I guess, where you ended up now as a fully fledged adult?

Jonathan:
Fully fledged? That's a joke.

Garett:
It's always a joke. That's why I ask.

All:
[chuckle]

Jonathan:
So, it was February of 2014. My dad had got a new job, which was going to take him down to Fox Creek. And I didn't want to move with him to Fox Creek and I was returning 21. So I didn't really need to live at home anymore. So I left and then I moved back, but I never really, like, you know, moved out on my own, my own. And I guess I never really did until much later. So I didn't want to move to Fox Creek, but I thought, hey, let's try out Cardston. I got family there. There's church stuff there, so there's a support system for me. And I'm not going to be on my own, my own completely. And so contact my grandma. I was like, hey, what do you think about if I come live with you guys for a bit? And she's like, sure, that'd be great. And I'm like, so also, I'm gonna need to find a job. So if you can ask around anything, that'd be great. So she did, and my cousin at the time was running the Home Hardware down here. And so up north, I was working at Home Hardware. And so my cousin, since the Home Hardware has some interconnection, but found the number to the store and called my boss, the owner of the store up there, and was like, hey, how's Jonathan? How's he doing? Is he a good worker? Like, you know, tell me about him. So we did that without me knowing. And then all of a sudden, I get a call from my cousin, tells me, grandma was telling me that you're thinking about moving down, you know, great timing. One of the ladies that we have here working has just moved. So we're looking for somebody. Would you like to come work for me? So I'm like, sure, go talk to my boss. He's like, yeah, I knew about that. And I was like, that's the go. But, you know, have to perform you to do something for myself. So I came down here until about January of the 2015 when I went on my mission to Mexico, to northern Mexico, where the cartel roams free and the army and the marines and every form of police service, except for local police, abide and are busy.

Garett:
Was that in Tijuana or like?

Jonathan:
The other side in Reynosa, south of McAallen in Texas, Brownsville. Right on the border there.

Garett:
Yeah. So I've been to Tijuana and it didn't seem that bad.

Jonathan:
Well, my first area, I got there in I think March and about a week before the cartel or whoever the bad guys were, I had been fighting with the military and they'd taken a helicopter down about a block away from my house. So it wasn't great at the time, but I learned a lot. And so yeah, that was two years, came back 2017, back to Cardston and shortly after being back, met my wife. And we were married really quickly by May. And then we stuck around Cardston for a bit. We lived in town and then we lived in our mom's basement to save up and pay down some debt. And she encouraged me to get an education. Because at that point I had been out of school for six or seven years and I hadn't really done anything. Tried out a couple of things. Yeah, I tried out working at a tin basher for a little bit in Lethbridge and didn't enjoy it. Only did that for six weeks. And went back to the hardware store and then ended up going back to school, to the college, to take a two year program for civil engineer technology.

Garett:
In Lethbridge?

Jonathan:
In Lethbridge, yeah. Which was really great. It's been really good work for us. Been able to do a lot of things out of school. I went and I was working up north in Fort Mac, doing the week on, week off. The week off was great, the week on sucked. Did that for six months until I found a position down here in Lethbridge, working for MPE Engineering. I don't know what they do up in Edmonton. I think probably a lot of municipal jobs. So sewers and stuff like that. But I got mine, as I said, in the water resources, working in canals and irrigation jobs mainly, which has been really cool. I've got to go to a lot of places all over Southern Alberta here, places I never would have been to if it wasn't for that, because a lot of times the irrigation things are a little off the beaten path, because they got to get the water to do the farmer. And I've been doing that since November 2020 and haven't looked back. And then I don't know if you guys have talked to your dad on the side. I mow grass. So I've did that for your dad once, that is Cardston House. And then on top of that, I have another part-time job working for the Card Support Services. So they support people with special needs and disabilities. And so they have a bunch of houses in Cardston. And so I work in one of those two weekends a month to support the guys and help them have a successful, fulfilling life. And so I don't have much time for myself, but when I do, I'm a typical guy where I like to mow my lawn and make sure it's perfect, straight stripes.

Garett:
Nice. We greatly appreciate you taking time to talk with us then.

Jonathan:
Yeah. When you asked, and you said this weekend, I'm like, perfect. It's the one weekend this month that I don't work. An extra shift at the end of the month.

15:23 - Making a Living

Garett:
As another quick aside, when I graduated from BYU, I was looking for summer jobs, and I applied to work for the Bureau of Land Management and Water Resources in Utah. They were looking for, it was the strangest job title. They were looking for an IT guy who had experience doing plumbing and carpentry stuff. I was like, wow, what a job. You want somebody who is good with computers and can go and fix a broken pipe in the middle of the desert? I went and interviewed with them and they were like, oh, this is great. We'd like to hire you. I was like, oh, by the way, I'm moving to Canada at the end of the summer. We don't want to invest our whole summer in you and then just lose you. It was too bad. I was really excited for the job.

Jonathan:
That was weird. But yeah, I guess I'm going to be versatile. That kind of thing.

Garett:
I picture a similar type of job that you might be doing, like, where you got to know your stuff, but you also have to go out and get really dirty in the ditches sometimes.

Jonathan:
Well, so with mine, since I work with an engineering consulting firm, I don't get dirty unless something really hit the fan.

Garett:
[chuckles]

Jonathan:
Something would have to be really bad or I'd have to slip and fall, which has also happened.

All:
[laugh]

Jonathan:
80% of my job currently, even 90% is in the office, working with Autodesk products, with Autodesk Civil 3D and AutoCAD.

Garett:
Oh, that's pretty cool.

Jonathan:
Doing drafting and design work. But my favourite part, the other 10 or 20% is fieldwork. But most of the fieldwork that I do is just like site residenting. So just supervising the contractor to make sure, you know, they're following the plans and every contractor's favourite person on site.

Preston:
You just got to be on top of their RFIs. It's what you got to do.

Jonathan:
Sure, sure, sure.

Preston:
If you know what those are.

Jonathan:
Request for something.

Preston:
Request for information.

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Preston:
It's like a structure term. It's like they've hit something like, okay, we're uncertain about this. There's rather conflicted information or no information. So you send the RFI to the consultants, typically the owner engineers or architects.

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Preston:
And then they have to get back to you.

Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, that happens all the time. But yeah, the idea is that I've got to do that. I've got to go this past summer. I got to go to the job site all summer and check things out. And it was great because at the beginning of the summer, it was twice a day. So I'd head out there first thing in the morning and then go to the office until two and then leave again. And so I was only in the office for three or four hours a day because I was out in the field. And then even when it came down to one time a day, you know, I'd leave early. If I did in the afternoon, I would get to leave work early, be out of the office, get to go enjoy the beautiful weather. Or I get to show up late in the morning to the office because I'd gone to the site and it was always so refreshing.

Garett:
You had to wear the nice high-vis vests too that are untouched by the dirt and unsoiled. A nice white hard hat.

Jonathan:
You make sure that thing bounces around your trunk or your back seat. They respect you more. You don't show up with a clean vest. You look like you don't know anything.

Preston:
Yep, it is true.

Jonathan:
No, the vest I use, also it doesn't say MPE on it, but I got it when I was working up north. But it's a lot nicer. It's a nice vest. It has nice snaps and really nice big pockets that are well made and well done. Because when I was working up north, I was doing geotechnical monitoring. So like there's things called piezometers, which measure the pore pressure in the soil. And if that pore pressure changes, they can tell that something like if the soil is shifting or moving, or maybe there's more water in there and something's going on. Or another one we would do called inclinometer. So it's just a pipe, maybe basically a three or four inch ABS pipe that has slots built into it. And then you just run this probe down and you pull it up half a meter out of time, twice, you pull it up and then you flip it around and run it down again. And it can tell if the ground underneath has shifted at all from the previous, when the data is processed. And that's so much fun when it's 100 meters or longer, half a meter out of time, you get your shoulders and your arms and your upper body don't feel so great, especially when you get a couple of them in a day.

Garett:
Is this on a drilling rig?

Jonathan:
No, just around the oil sands site. Yeah, so that one I did get dirty.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
But it was also a lot more fun driving because there was a lot of off-road driving.

Garett:
Yeah, my experience on the rigs as a roughneck, the well-educated people would come in with all of their measuring machines that you would put on the, like you'd put the drill bit there and then you'd have like 10 or 20 meters of instruments and then you'd put the rest of the stuff up top. You know, sometimes they would make us do things that nobody else understood what was going on. It's like up, down, up, down, down, that's okay. Okay, it's like, are we drilling? Are we not drilling?

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Garett:
Something's stuck. Are you measuring something? We don't know what's going on. They know what's going on or at least they want to know what's going on.

Jonathan:
They pretend they know what's going on, or they have guesses of what's going on.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
From other different drillings and stuff that I've understood. I guess that's one way they can know how hard the material is and what the crap you're drilling through because probably a lot of stuff.

Garett:
Yep. Yeah, that's really cool stuff though, Jonathan. I think the world is such a fascinating place and it's basically impossible to explore it all. So, yeah, thanks for sharing some small piece of it.

20:58 - More Dam Work

Garett:
As a related question, does your work end up having any emergency hour things or like things that you have to do on call quickly or is it mostly the stuff that you deal with is pretty sort of standard nine to five weekdays type of job?

Jonathan:
It's fairly standard nine to five stuff. Like the thing I was doing all summer, that wasn't standard. There had been issues in construction that just needed to be monitored all summer before it could be repaired. And so there was some emergency to that, but unless something catastrophic is happening, it's nine to five, work with a deadline. Sometimes it's longer. But a normal day for me is I do 7:30am to 4:30pm because I want to be home as soon as possible in the day. I'd rather sacrifice a little sleep. But yeah, on a normal day, go in, do my thing. And if something's really pressing or there's a crazy deadline, I'll put a couple more hours in. And if not, I get out of there and go home.

Preston:
Yeah. Sound like you're an engineer. Yeah.

Jonathan:
Except when I'm on site. I'm there when you're there. My contractors there, which I find eight hours sitting at your desk is longer than 10 or 12 hours in the field working or just being outside is a heck of a lot longer.

Garett:
Yep. I agree.

Preston:
That's why I like my job to play in the dirt all day sometimes.

Garett:
The pencil pushing doesn't go by very quickly, sometimes.

Jonathan:
Yeah. When you get a new project and it's really exciting still, it goes by really quick.

Garett:
Or if you have a deadline looming.

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Garett:
And it's like, I need a few more hours, man. I just need a few more hours where has the time gone.

Jonathan:
Yeah. I always like those days when all of a sudden you're like, break time? At lunch time? Home time? Where did that time go?

Garett:
Do you also have experience with dams and like other sorts of things? I mean, that's a much bigger scale than irrigation. But I guess what I mean to say is after Preston and I released the episode on the WAC Bennett Dam, you reached out to us saying that was pretty interesting. I now better understand why you found it so interesting.

Jonathan:
Yeah. So one of my projects that we have going on south of Taber, there's a reservoir called the Chin Reservoir. And right now, currently in construction, is a spillway structure that I was a part of, which is like the first part of the construction of this Chin Reservoir. It's an existing reservoir, but yeah, that old spillway structure wasn't big enough, couldn't handle an emergency flood flow or of the canal. It just was, it was under designed. It was built in the 50s and just wasn't quite big enough for what we're seeing today. And so on that job is where the reservoir right now holds 280,000-ish dam cubes of water, which is a very large amount. And we're set to once we are done with the project, which includes raising one of the dams by about four meters in height and then building a new one on the other side of the reservoir because it's in southern Alberta. They had to build dams on either side to hold the water in. On the other end, about 10 kilometers downstream, down the Cooley from the existing one. And so it's going to about double the capacity of the reservoir. And so on the one side, the one that's being raised, I had the fun task of trying to model it and see what it looks like and to be able to get quantities and to think about how they might build it. And then we've got a bunch of other reservoirs that we're working on that it's just crazy the dollar values when you start adding them up, the projects and how much things are. It's like hundreds of millions of dollars, everything, like when it's all said and done. But it's really cool the scale of some of these. There's one dam like we have that I think is about eight kilometers long. And at the highest point, that's 30 meters tall. This is all completely off my memory, which could be serving me completely wrong. But it's really cool to see the expansion and the progression of the irrigation in Southern Alberta. As we had a year like winter, like last winter and the summer, where there's not a lot of water in the reservoirs right now for winter storage. And to see that they're actively thinking about it, to see that the irrigation districts and the government bodies have to prepare so that we always have enough water for farmers to produce the food we need and to make sure that society can keep moving. Yeah. That's why the damn one was so cool. Because I'm like, hey, to learn about, I think for me, what was so cool about the Bennett was I'd never really known about the First Nation tribe that was displaced. I didn't really know about that. The most I'd known about was when we thought the dam was going to fail. So many years, I think people still think that that was like what I knew about that dam and not so much about all the displacement it did. Because that one's monster compared to what I deal with and mine are still huge.

Garett:
Yeah, things were sharing. Yeah, the Bennett Dam is a world record size dam. So yeah, it's a pretty big thing.

Jonathan:
Yeah, make my way up one day.

Garett:
Yeah, and speaking of things that were built, like you're saying this spillway is built in the 50s. 60s is not terribly different in technology from 50s construction stuff.

Jonathan:
No.

Garett:
It's impressive work. And yeah, thanks for sharing. I think it's really fascinating to know where things come from. In our last conversation with William, he was talking about the way that growing up in the Peace teaches you how you learn about sort of where things come from. And knowing where water comes from is really not obvious, but it's vital. It's like vital for life.

Jonathan:
Yeah, that strain when you have a bad winter up there where you don't get much snow, unlike like Southern Alberta, where irrigation is so prevalent. When you don't get snow up in the Peace Country, the farmers suffer immensely, even though they have these monster rivers and stuff flowing all near them. But when there's no snow, they can't farm.

Preston:
I always did find it interesting when I learned more about agriculture, that the whole Peace Country area, nobody irrigates. It just doesn't happen. But also in like 100 plus years, they've had an agriculture there. They've never recorded any serious drought either. There's been dry years, but there's been no drought years, depending on how you're measuring the drought.

Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, I even just think back to growing up, and I don't remember up north. I always remember, at least in my years where I could handle a snowmobile, any year where there wasn't enough snow that I couldn't go out into a field and be playing around in the field and not see the stubble. There was always two, three feet or so of snow out there, and the ditches were always full and were, you know, full of snowmobiles. And I think that was the number, or even this year up there from what I understand. It's pretty brown. Yep. Or it was before this cold patch hit.

28:22 - Astronomical and Climate Tangent

Garett:
Jonathan, do you want to expand a little bit more about how you feel when you reminisce about the Peace Country? How do you feel like it's influenced your life and like your outlook on life?

Jonathan:
I think when I was moving out, I was trying to get out of the Peace Country because it was so far away from everything. And as I've grown up, I'm like, being so far away from everything wouldn't be so bad anymore. And thought about, you know, how, you know, I never, I'm like, I'm never moving back north, but it still is the case. We're in the process of buying the house that we're in right now. But, you know, things absolutely were critical. Now at my stage in life, I wouldn't ever be opposed to it because there's always a sense of community and sense of family that you get up there because the communities are so small and are so tight-knit. Even for me to think back to where I worked through high school and after, was that tight-knit community and like, still I can message them and be like, hey, how's it going? And they're so happy to see me, to talk to me. And I was going to try to meet up with them a couple of years ago or earlier this year, but things just didn't work out. But they were just so happy and so excited to see me. And so that kind of thing makes the Peace Country such a good place. The people up there, they tell you how it is. They're not afraid to hurt feelings if that's what's needed. And there's just that sense of family that's, you know, always wondered why people always ended up moving back. And it's for that same reason where that sense of family, that sense of belonging, that's so prevalent there. I think one lesson is like in this past weekend here where it's been so cold that it taught me to deal with cold.

Garett:
Yeah, I think as a quick note on that, my experience of the Peace Country and it being cold is understanding that when it's cold and you dress up to go outside, it's okay to feel cold. You know that you're probably not going to feel warm, and so you realize that it's okay to feel cold just as long as that feeling of cold doesn't turn into it's not feeling cold anymore because then you've got a problem. [chuckles] You know, you dress up correctly and you realize that when the wind blows and hits your face, it's probably going to hurt, but as long as you do it right, you'll be okay.

Jonathan:
Yeah, on that vein there, Garett I was thinking back, and I don't know why the ski hill was open, but the Fairview ski hill, it was open and it was low 20s, maybe even minus 30 plus a little wind, and the ski hill was still open. And I don't know why, but I was out there. The ride down was so much fun, and the ride back up on the tow, because they don't do chairlifts up there very often.

Garett:
That's right.

Jonathan:
It was so cold, and of course it was night skiing, so there's no sun to warm your face, but it was so much fun.

Preston:
[chuckles]

Jonathan:
Where now that I've been acclimatized to Southern Alberta winter, minus 10 is bone chilling, and I wouldn't do that ever again.

Garett:
[laughs]

Preston:
I don't know, sometimes I like it. I just want to dress up warm, and I just feel the 30 below, run past my face, and go for a walk, breathe it in. The air is dense, there's lots of oxygen.

Garett:
The snot in your nostrils freeze.

Preston:
The icicles in my mustache.

Jonathan:
But there is something about that, you know, that cold. I don't know, everything's just quieter. Everything is more peaceful. And if it's sunny that day when it's way too cold, there's just something about that piece of ridiculous cold.

Garett:
One of the things that I didn't fully grasp, I'd never thought about it, like growing up in the Peace Country, I really enjoyed just astronomy things. Like I enjoyed how the seasons would change the sky so much. And you would see how the sun would hardly rise in the winter and be a very high rise in the summer. And so it was clear to me that being so far north made such a big difference on the climate. But it wasn't until I was in Utah and also at like a higher elevation that in the wintertime, when the sun is out in the south, even if the air temperature is like minus 10 Celsius, if the sun is out, you get so much more infrared energy from the sun. That you feel actually so much warmer in the sunlight. But in the north, it's such a glancing blow, like you're so far on the globe that when the sun shines on you in the north, you don't feel it. You picture it in your mind like, oh, I'm happy because the sun is shining and I haven't seen it in like three days, but it's different.

Preston:
The UV index is zero for at least two months.

Garett:
Yeah.

Preston:
Even if it's shining, it's still zero.

Garett:
Yeah, similar thing like as experienced as a redhead where I burn very easily. Since I left the Peace Country, I basically always have to keep an eye on the UV index. But in the Peace Country, I basically never kept an eye on the UV index because the UV index never got high because the sun's, the intensity of the sun is just so much less at that latitude. Yeah.

Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, to that whole day night cycle, it's just weird being down here and then just remembering growing up just how different we're not that far away. We are, but we're not. That's how it gets dark at night down here, like 9:30pm-10pm. It starts to get dark. And that's in June. We're up north in June. Tell the story often of where my dad went to go mow the lawn and didn't realize, started the mower up and everything. And then he looked at his watch and realized, maybe I shouldn't, as it was 11 p.m. And it was, thought it was a lot earlier.

Garett:
Don't want to wake up the children. [chuckles]

Jonathan:
You know, that summer sun was so magical up there.

Preston:
So nice. Love it.

Jonathan:
Annoying if you're trying to sleep. I don't know you guys, but we always did tinfoil on our windows to be able to manage a sleep.

Preston:
I think we just suffered, didn't we, Garett?

Garett:
Yeah, I think we did. I like suffered in the sense that you just had to learn to fall asleep when it was light outside. And if you didn't, then you suffered in sleep. And at least if you stayed awake until it was dark enough to fall asleep, then you had to learn to stay asleep when the sun was up. I think directly, especially when you go camping in the north, in the summertime you go camping, you're in a tent and the sun lights up the tent at four o'clock in the morning. And you're like, I am not ready to get up and, you know, do another 10 kilometer hike in this thing. So I'm going to sleep until the tent is too hot to sleep in.

Preston:
Too hot.

Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, I think it's different when you grow up there. You know, you get used to that cycle where like my aunt, they moved up there and she was living in Manning for a while. I think she did achieve the five year cycle.

Garett:
Five years and then actually left?

Jonathan:
Yeah, pretty close to it. But where she grew up down here, had never been up there, really, you know, more than a visit. And that was so hard on her to get a normal sleep cycle because even Manning is even worse than Grande Prairie or Fairview because it's even farther north. And just remember, always talking about that, how it was just the worst thing to get used to, but also the best thing ever in the same breath.

Garett:
Yeah, certainly not the Peace Country, but I would really love to visit Scotland because like in terms of latitude on the globe...

Preston:
Pretty close.

Garett:
Yeah, Manchester is as far north as Grande Prairie is at 55 degrees north. And Scotland is much farther north than Manchester for the UK. But it's warmer because they got that North Atlantic current that brings up all that Caribbean heat. So it's not so miserable. But the seasonal depression in the UK is real because they got basically just as much light in the winter as the Peace Country.

Preston:
But it's cloudy.

Garett:
A lot more rain. A lot more rain, though.

Jonathan:
Yeah.

Garett:
At least in the Peace Country, you get the sunshine.

Jonathan:
I remember many sunny, sunny evenings or Saturdays and being able to just hop on the snowmobile because we lived on the edge of town and just be able to just give 'er and ride from Fairview to halfway to Hines Creek, which was a 20-minute drive, but on a snowmobile because there was nothing there to stop you. And the weather was just absolutely crisp and peaceful.

Preston:
It is a peaceful place.

Garett:
And then you turn to drive south, and the sun is only three degrees above the horizon...

Preston:
And everything's white.

Garett:
Reflecting straight off the ice on the road. It's impossible to see.

Jonathan:
The worst is when your windshield gets sandblasted after a while, and then I usually get pretty lucky with my commute in, but there's a couple a month or two of the year where the sunrise is just right in my eyes, and with all the pitting on the windshield, it just makes it so much fun to drive east. Yeah, it just reflects just perfectly.

Preston:
I started to study it when I was an adult, about the daylight change between summer and winter, and I specifically remember looking at Grande Prairie because the sun starts to rise in the northeast, and then in the winter in the southeast. But at the Equinox, it still rises in the east and sits in the west. But since it has to go from the north to the south throughout the year, around the Equinox, the daylight time can change up to seven minutes a day in Grande Prairie from one day to the next, around the Equinox. Which is like, oh, if the sun's in your eyes, next week it will not be in your eyes because it's moved a half hour.

Garett:
Yep.

Jonathan:
Yeah, it's just crazy how much different it is. Like even when I was in Mexico for my mission, the daylight and sunlight was completely different. Like in winter, we were fairly close to the equator where I was, but like summertime, it was dark by eight or nine every day. But that same time up north, it was still light all night.

Garett:
Yeah, I remember as a kid, there was a news story about some tragedy that happened in Mexico City, and they were showing last night in Mexico City at 7 p.m. and then they have like the camera showing what it looked like in Mexico City at 7 p.m. and it was like dark.

Preston:
Streetlights are on.

Garett:
Yeah, it was like, wait, it's dark? Like, why is it dark? Isn't it summertime? Like, doesn't it mean that the sunlight is out and that it's going to be bright? And the summer means sunlight, right? Doesn't that what it means? There's no darkness in the summertime. I was so naive at the time. I mean, I can't say I'm much more educated, but you learn, yeah.

Jonathan:
You're just a PhD person. You're not much more educated at all.

Garett:
I don't have it yet, so.

Preston:
Candidate.

Jonathan:
Still way more than I have. I've got a diploma. [chuckles]

Preston:
I got a certificate on my wall. [chuckles]

Garett:
Out of the three of us. There's one of us who's not actually contributing to society, so.

Jonathan:
Who is it? [chuckles]

Garett:
[laughs]

Jonathan:
Is that a dig at your brother or is that a dig at me?

Garett:
It's definitely Preston. It's definitely Preston. Yes, definitely Preston. I'm pretty sure that people's quality of life will not be significantly changed by understanding how long it's going to take for Mercury to crash into Venus.

Jonathan:
How long is it?

Garett:
Like three billion years, five billion years.

Jonathan:
Just a couple.

Garett:
Yeah, just a couple.

Jonathan:
Didn't even realize that was a thing.

Preston:
Which is it? Is it three or five?

All:
[laugh]

40:07 - A Sense of Place

Garett:
Yeah, Jonathan, I don't know how much time you want to keep going, but I think to continue on this discussion, I think in a slightly different shift, would you be willing to talk a little bit about this idea of a sense of place? I guess what I mean is my experience of growing up in the Peace Country. Sometimes I can't untangle the nostalgia for the Peace Country as a place, like the land and the features and the beauty of the Peace Country. And the nostalgia of my youth, of like, that's where I lived, so I recognize it. It's familiar to me because that was my home. And I think a sense of place and like feeling like you're a part of the land, not necessarily, you know, I'm not a tree in the land, but like, you know, I belong here, or like this place is special to me. Do you have any thoughts or feelings about this sort of thing?

Jonathan:
Yeah, like I would say, since my parents have moved, it's not like I'm going home. I've never, you know, since they moved there, I'm going to my parents' house. That's not home. It is for my sister, because, you know, she did all most of her, I think her junior high and high school there, so she's got roots, she's got friends, she knows the area. But if my parents were to still live up in Fairview, even Grande Prairie, it would still feel more like home. When I got back from my mission, I went to, went for, I was at my parents' for a couple of weeks, and so one day I went for a drive up there to, you know, go visit and say hi, and I just still felt the, yeah, this is home. This is where I grew up. This is what I know. People are still happy to see me and drive around the areas that you used to frequent. They still bring good memories, and you're just like, hey, here I had fun, here I did this. Yeah, I think there's a sense of place, and I think that also kind of evolves as you grow out, too. You know, you get a sense of places.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
Put a plural on that is like now where I'm at, one thing that like my coworkers don't understand why I live in Karst and I commute, but there's a sense of community, a sense of place here that reminds me of growing up in that community. There's a small community where you know people. Even the house which I'm at really brings me back to my good memories of my childhood. I don't know if you guys remember, but the house that we grew up in in Fairview, behind it, there was a lot owned by the town and some trees and stuff that the town didn't maintain, but we ended up maintaining. And so the house I live in now, we're in the process of buying part of the house. There's just two more lots behind my house because we're kind of on the hillside. And so it kind of feels like growing up where I could go back into that place, into that lot, in my sense of place, but with my adult toys, my chainsaw and my mowers. So I'd say kind of, yeah, for me it's evolved and changed as I've grown and understood. Because when I was going to school, we were living in Lethbridge, and neither my wife, Ali, or I never really felt that there. Sure, we loved the convenience, and Skip the Dishes was way too popular in our household. [chuckles] But we didn't have that same sense of place. And since I was a student within the church, it was a lot harder to feel that sense of home and that sense of place, because they knew most students are moving on after. And so it was not until we moved back here to Cardston, you know, did we really rekindle that, where, you know, now I talk to my neighbors, I've made good friends with some of them. Like after Christmas, my one neighbor and I went to Lethbridge for a quick trip together. I think to that sense of place, it's like those relationships that you develop, like you say, kind of develop you into that ecosystem of that area. And when you are able to develop that and have that relationship and have those people that you can trust, and they will be there to help you, that sense of place is just possible.

Garett:
Yeah. Do you feel like it's a lot to do with the people then and the community? Or do you feel like in part it is actually like the geographical features and like the location itself? It's just something that's really fascinating. Most of our conversation in this has been about the land, the features and the things like that. So I feel like there is something deep, inherently Homo sapien. Humanity is just connected to land in some way. And so sometimes it's hard to figure out. So it's nice to talk to you about this.

Jonathan:
I think in the Peace Country, I think in my case, I think that was a lot of it was just because growing up, I had friends at school, but I wasn't the person, you know, to go out and do things just because they're out partying and drinking and whatever. And I just didn't want to be a part of that. And so I ended up on the snowmobiles, on the quads, on the mountain bike, exploring the area. I explored a lot around Dunvegan and went quading and mountain biking back there and even around Fairview. And just kind of that connection to that beauty in that area. I just feel like there's more accessible Crown land up here.

Garett:
Yeah, that's right.

Jonathan:
Where, south in Alberta, there's a lot more private land. You don't go trespassing unless you know the person. And even if you do know the person, sometimes you don't go. And so I think my connection to the land here is a lot smaller compared to the family farm where my dad grew up, his dad grew up, and his dad grew up since the late 1800s where they homestead.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
Where out there, you know, it was Dunvegan and the Sandhills, west of Fairview, even snowmobiling up northwest of Hines Creek, or even heading out to Leonard Bigam's house and going for sleigh rides. Even the ski hills that we had everywhere up there, there was just that connection there where you could go enjoy nature. I'm never going to be able to go skiing down here. Unless I drive to Castle Mountain, which is, you know, an hour and a half, two hours, or whatever it is.

Garett:
Jonathan, are you saying that cross-country skiing is not real skiing? [laughs]

Jonathan:
I'm saying I don't have enough snow down here and yes.

All:
[laugh]

Jonathan:
It's too much work.

Garett:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
Too much cardio to get going. I'm not saying downhill skiing is any easier.

Garett:
No, I know what you mean.

Preston:
Just different.

Garett:
Preston, do you have any thoughts you want to share about it too?

Preston:
I think no matter where somebody grows up, they reminisce about the land specifically. I've met people from mountainous areas. I don't think they would ever live in the flats or the prairies. But having lived in the prairies a lot of my life, I do love the big sky, watching the sunrise for hours and set for hours. And then the stars at night, you can just see a whole lot more. But seeing the mountains in the distance is also nice. I've learned to recognize all the beauty of the earth, but I don't really like the sound of the ocean. I just couldn't fall asleep to it. It's just, you know, that's not really my thing. I don't feel any attachment to it. I don't trust it. It smells funny. It sounds funny. [chuckles] Yeah, but it looks beautiful. But like seeing the forests and the prairies and the grand rivers, I really do feel like I love and enjoy those types of geographical features.

Jonathan:
Yeah, that's one of my favourite things of down here with my drive is coming back to Cardston. After McGrath to Cardston, you just get this unadultered wide open view — waving my hands for the people in the podcast know.

All:
[chuckle]

Jonathan:
— of the mountains, which I just absolutely love, which growing up in Fairview, never got to see the mountain because you don't see them from there, which I never really realized until much older that on a clear day from not far west of Grande Prairie, right? You can start to see them, right?

Preston:
Yeah.

Jonathan:
But I never knew that because I was in Fairview where it was too many hills and trees in the way.

Garett:
Yeah, I think one of the features of the Gartston area that I'm always jealous of is just kind of the lack of foothills before you get to the mountains. Like they seem there.

Jonathan:
It's like boom, boom.

Garett:
Yes, like I can see it. And so I feel like I could just be there. Like I just ready to be there. And as far as driving goes, Waterton is not that far of a drive from Gartston. But yeah, in so many other places, you don't really go from flatlands to mountains quite like that. I think as well of JRR. Tolkien writing about Rohan and the landscape of that. And he talks about in his very descriptive way that Rohan also doesn't really have foothills. Like it just sort of goes from the plains for the horsemen to just like the White Mountains. And yeah, I don't think there's a lot of places like that on Earth. And the Peace Country is not like that. The Peace Country is —

Preston:
Very rolly.

Garett:
— very rolly.

Jonathan:
Oh yeah.

Garett:
Even Grande Prairie is pretty rolly.

Jonathan:
How many hills and valleys do you have to go to just to get to Fairview from Grande Prairie?

Garett:
Yeah.

Preston:
A few.

Garett:
And you know, if your truck only has four cylinders, you got to go up to Dunvegan one, right?

Jonathan:
Yeah, you got to give her some help.

Garett:
Yeah, thanks for indulging me there, Jonathan. It related to what you brought up too about the WAC Bennett Dam, I think. When you have generations of people living on the land, you've really become attached to land itself. The community that's there supporting you is obviously very important, vital to life, but land is strange. Like, it's there. Yeah, like you go back to some place and you're like, I remember hanging out there or like I remember going for a walk there. I remember this is where I crashed into the ditch or, you know, something like that.

Jonathan:
Drove my care into a canal.

Garett:
Yeah, the place reminds you of it in this sense of space. I think it's a great reminder to myself that humans, as much as humans create the most impressive architectural wonders, we're not aliens.

Jonathan:
No.

Garett:
We come from this place. We just figured out how to change it. But it hasn't fundamentally changed who we are.

Jonathan:
No. Even like the memories that are tied to it. You may not remember, like you say, what you did, but you remember like my family ranch that's been in my family forever. We used to do family reunions there every couple of years. And so all those good memories are good feelings, I think is kind of what they've more evolved into is like remember going there and just feeling that sense of family and community. Or up north, that sense of joy and peace and connection to the raw beauty.

Garett:
Thank you so much, Jonathan. It's been so great to talk with you. So great to catch up with you. As usual, it's been an age since I've seen you or spoken with you. So thank you.

Jonathan:
Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's been a long time. And yeah, it's been fun chatting with you guys and listening to other people's stories. Thanks for having me.

Preston:
Yeah, we really appreciate you on the show. We got you all recorded now so we can listen to it all again.

Garett:
Over and over forever.

Preston:
[chuckles]

Jonathan:
I'll let other people listen to this one. I don't want to do a walker to listen to myself.

Garett:
Yeah, for those who do listen, we're really grateful. And if you found something that we spoke about interesting, you can let us know. You can email us at LifeNorthofthe54th@gmail.com or you can send us feedback at our website, peacecountrylife.ca/feedback. So, Jonathan, we hope to see you around. Take care of yourself.

Jonathan:
You guys too.

Preston:
Until our next meeting, Jonathan.

All:
Bye.

Ending Theme Music:
[bass guitar riff with drumbeat]