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Banff

Powell River writer and singer-songwriter Pat Buckna began his music career in Calgary in the 1970's, spent a number of years in the Arctic including a stint as a photographer-reporter for a community newspaper, and was responsible for bringing over 750 performers to the NWT pavilion at Expo '86. In 2019, he wrote and published Only Children - A Family Memoir - and runs a small recording studio on Texada Island. He lives in a small Canadian coastal community two ferries north of Vancouver, BC. 
 
In the early stage of drafting my family memoir, I found an old picture taken in Banff. I'm cradled in my father's arms, a mountain in the background. The more I study the picture, the more I realize my attraction to Banff may have less to do with geography than biology.

Each time I arrive in Banff, I'm feel like I've come home, even though I never lived there. As a child, I passed through the townsite a few times with my parents on summer vacations, but stopped only for gas or snacks before Dad dashed off again on our annual pilgrimage to the coast.

I remember spotting bison in the Buffalo Paddock. Dad slowed long enough for us to glimpse the hairy beasts far off in the distance, but wouldn't sacrifice half an hour of driving time to cruise through the paddock and admire the mighty animals up close. Was there ever a time Dad wasn't in a rush to be somewhere else?

In my early teens, I spent a long-weekend at what they then called The Banff School of Fine Arts. We stayed in one of the original two buildings. I was part of a church group and felt at ease, captivated by the mountains, the pine and tamarack forest, elk foraging outside our windows, and the unimaginable depth of the snow.

In 1970, two years after she convinced me to leave Northern Quebec and return to Calgary, Charley calls me up unexpectedly. She's in town for a while and wonders if I want to see her. I do. I met her on my first bus-trip across Canada when I was fifteen. Certain I was in love, I boarded a bus to Northern Quebec to be with her.

I stayed until I ran out of money, and in a desperate attempt to stay with her I almost quit school to work in the gold mines. She convinced me to return to Calgary, but then sent a Dear John letter soon after I was home. In Quebec, she wouldn't sleep with me because she still had feelings for the father of her unborn child, a biker from her hometown. She hadn't had her child yet, but thought it was only fair to tell me the truth so I wouldn't wait for her.

I jumped at the chance to see her again and rekindle our relationship. Charley gave birth to her child then gave her up for adoption. She moved back to Trail to live with the baby's father. He's been in and out of jail, but she left him after he got busted for dealing drugs.

"I've thought a lot about you," she says.

She suggests we hitch hike to Banff. I agree right away, bring my guitar to impress her. We arrive late on a Sunday afternoon with nowhere to stay. We're hungry, so we pop into the Grizzly House, a popular restaurant on Banff Avenue.

I sign up to perform at an open mic, take my place on stage with the others, a song I'm certain will convince Charley how wrong she'd been about me. Leaning back in my chair, I smile at her, then fall over backwards off the stage. Everyone laughs and applauds, Charley loudest of all. I get up, embarrassed and leave. Charley stays behind.

 


 

I wait outside. When she comes out, she's with the manager of the A & W. "I found us a place to crash," she says.

The manager has a spare room. We walk along Banff Avenue the few blocks to his house. Even though we share the same bed, she won't let me get close to her. The next morning she tells me it's time I leave. The last I heard, Charley had hooked up with the manager.

After my disastrous trip with Charley, I didn't visit again until 1983, the year after I released an album called Flint & Steel with poet Jim Green. Jim and I performed at the Whyte Gallery. He knew the town well and took me to one of his favorite bookshops. Again, I felt a great sense of belonging and wished I could live here.

In 2003, I enrolled in several writing workshops at what's now known at The Banff Centre. All involved residencies on campus. The Centre had grown so much in the intervening decades, I had a hard time recognizing the building I'd stayed in thirty years earlier. Again, I had an overpowering sense of being home.

A number of times our cohort of writers trekked down the hill from Lloyd Hall into town, stopped for drinks, attended literary readings, and strolled through town. Banff Avenue looked the same, the Grizzly Bar and the Mount Royal in the same places they had always been. Once you were off the main drag—on Muskrat, Grizzly or Otter Streets—you were in an unchanged Banff, free from tourists.

I visited places I had never been before: the Rundle Lounge in the Banff Springs Hotel, the Cave and Basin, the Gondola to the top of Sulphur Mountain, the Vista Trail, and Vermilion Lakes with their iconic mountain view. The magic of the place filled me with joy and elevated my writing. Banff is one of those remarkable places on the planet where forces converge in the finest way, a sentiment shared by many.

In the early stage of drafting my family memoir, I found an old picture taken in Banff. I'm cradled in my father's arms, a mountain in the background. The more I study the picture, the more I realize my attraction to Banff may have less to do with geography than biology.

My parents met during or just following the war, and married in 1950, after Dad's divorce. They left Vancouver, moved to Calgary. Banff is on the way. I was born at the General Hospital in Calgary in mid-April 1951, making my date of conception late in July or early August.

What better time to be in Banff with summer in full bloom? Banff would have been the perfect place for newlyweds like my parents to start their family.

~ Pat Buckna, author of: Only Children: A Family Memoir — available as a Kindle e-book and in paperback.

 

 

 

 

 
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