Time in okotoks Cont...

   I'm always marveling at the speed at which things change. Sometimes slow, sometimes change occurs in the blink of an eye. The town of Okotoks was a little bit of both. When I moved there in 1977, things seemed to move much slower than they do today. I guess you could say that is true of most places. The town of my youth, didn't have traffic lights, nor a Walmart. Banks were not only closed on weekends, but if you didn't physically go into the banks beforehand and withdraw money, you had to rely on writing cheques. In those days there were only two banks; Royal Bank of Canada and The Alberta Treasury. We had one hotel, which you only stayed at if you really needed to as it was frequented by the Grim Reapers; a former outlaw bike gang now run by the Hell's Angels. As if that wasn't reason enough, the restaurant had a great place to get pizza as long as you didn't insult the cook in anyway. One man found out the hard way in the early 80's and was stabbed repeatedly by the pizza cook. We've had our share of other dark crimes in our town. My walk to school from home during my time in Junior High made it so that I had to walk past the R.C.M.P. station. One winter I found a large patch of blood in front of the station. Turns out a man in his 30s couldn't take his wife leaving him and the loss of his job so he promptly drove to the station, parked in the middle of the street and shot himself. If that were to happen today, grief councilors and all sort of people who deal with trauma would have been crawling all over the place. But not then. Nobody said anything, to anyone and it was ignored as if it never happened. The young Patch kid who stabbed his girlfriend to death in her own home over not wanting her to see other guys. She was 14. The town has many more dark days. Too many to go into here.

   Outwardly the town has an amazing history and a culture all its own, well it did at one point in time. To me the town seems to be nothing more than a satellite community of Calgary today. When I first came to Okotoks, the past was gone but the echos of its hay-days were all around. The train station, which used to pick up and drop off commuters from Calgary and surrounding areas until it closed in 1972. I remember the building sitting empty and open. I'd walk around there on weekends till they closed it off and renovated it. I believe i'ts a museum now. A worthy transition.

The main street was lined with these beautiful old abandoned turn of the century homes. Marvelous abandonment. Wonderful for adventurous youth to walk around in. We had an airport. It was owned by the Roland family. Orville Roland I believe. I went to school with his son Kevin. Good people, lots of money.

I recall a sign as you approached the single bridge in town from the north. It said "welcome to Okotoks: Population 1700." The population in now over 12,000 at night, and probably 3000 during the day.

As I said, plenty of changes. Some came quickly, others took a few years. They call it progress but I'm not so convinced. Who knows what the town will look like in another 30 years.

In Saecula Saeculorum