COLUMN: Tales from the Gravel Ridge – Memories of mountains

We had mountains in our community. In the conventional sense of the word they were not really mountains, but when the snowplough first made its way down the gravel ridge in Rosengard many decades ago, it looked for all the world as if they were mountains. The snowfall must have been exceptionally heavy that year, back in the 1950s, and to the eyes of Rosengard’s children those enormous mounds of snow must surely have taken on the features of mountains.

If truth be told we all knew that longer hours of spring sunshine would, in due time cause our imaginary mountains to vanish, leaving us instead with our wonderful natural gravel ridge formed so long ago by the receding waters of ancient Lake Agassiz.

Even then however, we could claim something akin to a small mountain. We called it “the hill” formed by the slight incline of the roadway now known as Blatz Road where it approached the gravel ridge. All that, of course, is in the distant past, and much as all of us have changed during those many decades since my childhood, so too has the lay of the land in our community of Rosengard.

In the meantime, I have had occasion to experience mountainous landscapes in various guises and locations. In due time several members of my family decided to make their homes in British Columbia. So too our widowed mother, Katarina Falk when she married Henry Enns, formerly also a Rosengarder, and now a widower himself.

Over the years our family has taken numerous road trips, including camping in numerous locations in Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba. The park itself was an island in Lake Agassiz, with beach ridges left by the receding lake remaining in the Park to this day.

The mountainous terrain of British Columbia also beckoned us, but more to the point, it was my mother, and my siblings who had relocated to the west coast that prompted us to make numerous road trips to the west coast. In more recent years such trips have been to visit our own children in Alberta and British Columbia, although now flying over those beautiful mountains has become our mode of transportation.

I used to be slightly melancholy as we left the Rockies behind us when we were homeward bound. However such thoughts soon vanished as we set our sights on our beckoning prairie home. What has remained however is a fascination for the mysteries of mountains, and it is always their abiding magnificence that holds me spellbound.

In 2014 my husband Bernie and I took two trips to Kathmandu in Nepal to visit one of our sons, where he taught for a year in a newly opened medical college. It was during those visits that we had opportunities to trek in the mountainous terrain of the Himalayas, that led us to new heights both literally and figuratively. It was breathtakingly exhilarating. Those memories remain firmly fixed in my mind.

During our second trip to Nepal in Fall, 2014, we trekked to Langtang Village in the mountains. While the parents spent time trekking to higher elevations, we looked after our young grandchild. The parents were reluctant to take the infant with them to higher altitudes, due to concerns about altitude sickness affecting their child, …and we were happy to walk around the village being in charge of the baby.

In due course in our walks throughout the village, we came across several of the older Langtang Village matriarchs sitting on the ground in front of their home, shelling legumes. They were thoroughly intrigued by our grandchild being transported by backpack by grandparents.

The people of Nepal were fully aware of the likelihood of an earthquake striking their earthquake prone country, the most recent one in living memory having been in 1934. Life and its various activities of course continued on. Such is the nature of being accustomed to the respective environments in which all of us live.

On April 25, 2015 a large ice-rock avalanche, triggered by the earthquake that struck central Nepal, completely buried Langtang Village. We had been there in Fall of 2014, and had such beautiful memories of the people in that village. Our son, having completed his teaching assignment in Kathmandu in January, 2015, had left to return to Canada, together with his family, a scant three months before the earthquake struck. Nepal’s 2015 earthquake claimed approximately 9,000 fatalities, and another 22,000 people were injured.