Sometimes my sense of community surprises me. It humbles me when I’m in a hall with generations of ranchers paying tribute and farewell to one of their own. It bemuses me as busy mothers on acreages stake out some ”me time” and gather in our community centre to do zumba twice a week. But what really engages me is when I feel my sense of community threatened. Then you’ve got my interest.
Whether you’ve lived here for generations or are “living the dream,” of a place in the country, there’s always a place where people mingle.
The Bottrel General Store is a case in point. It’s “the kitchen.” We’ve even got the chrome-legged table and chairs to prove it.
The Municipal District of Rocky View is suggesting changes to the relationship of the Bottrel General Store and adjacent Rocky View campground. The park and the store are two sides of the same coin. The success of the park is the success of the store. A simple symbiotic relationship whose summer surplus sustains the store during the offseason.
This truly was a general store where merchandise on the high shelves was clasped with a improvised device and the store keeper behind the counter fetched your items. Now those high shelves house memorabilia of that earlier era. Two-gallon cream cans, Medalta crockery, Graniteware coffee pots, vintage cameras. Below are wood-trimmed all-glass cabinets that once displayed fireworks and now offer souvenir travel mugs and T-shirts that ask “Where the H*** is Bottrel, Alberta?” It’s 22 kilometres north of Cochrane on Highway 22. At Township Road 284, just turn west for half a kilometre and you will find Bottrel, nestled in the crook of a hill with DogPound Creek running through it.
Sure, it’s the place where you top up your tank, remember the basic groceries that slipped your mind on the commute home, or that “spur of the moment wine pairing” to take the leftovers up a notch. Bottrel is a place where you can get and give DVD movie reviews. If you do it often enough you can even just ask Duane Needham (proprietor) “What would I think of this one?” And he’ll be spot on.
How to describe Bottrel? Of course there is the store, well qualified to be a historic site; one might mention the hitching post for the occasional summer horseback rider; next to it is the bank of green postal boxes that comprises Site 1 Rural Route 1.
A laminated beam stands as a sentinel where local ranchers placed their brands during the store’s centenary celebrations in 2001.
Little did we know then that DogPound Creek would, during the Flood of the Century (2005), submerge the campground and fill Bottrel basements (all three of them). It saturated the soil and caused the store’s earthen foundation to crumble unto itself. The floor boards buckling made closing the door an effort of brawn and will.
Eleven years later there is another groundswell. It is threatening the survival of the symbiotic enterprise. Not so clear cut is the relationship between our small business and municipal district planners.
It is one that has brought out the surveyor’s tape and a myriad of bureaucratic hoops for solution seekers to jump through.
Their proposal has a few obstacles. The nonrefundable application fees alone, are exorbitant. Each of the three land parcels must be applied for separately. The survey shows that the park’s road access is no longer even in the park. What is being suggested is a day-use park – a picnic area that you have to walk into and where possibly even a fire pit wouldn’t be permitted.
Is this about the $100,000 of park reclamation work? How much less would it cost for reclamation work on the proposed day use area?
How likely is it that people will want just an afternoon in the park?
How many supplies will picnickers purchase at the general store during an afternoon? The unspoken question is “ How will either survive without the other?”
More importantly, a park experience is memory-making, a regained innocence, a quiet, close-to-home reprieve. When you camp over, you get the whole package and that can only adequately be described as time. Preferably lots of it, not just an afternoon.
So as a member of this community I’d like to add my voice and speak for those who don’t even suspect that their well-kept secret camping spot and the general store that sustains it and our community, is in jeopardy.
If the Fathers of Confederation had only thought to add something extra to our constitution; it likely would have been our right to light a campfire and look at the stars.
M.F. Johnson
