Waterton Lakes Nation Park

I'm not sure of the year but some time when I was about ten or eleven Dad decided to go into the motel business. He sold the Esso dealership took out a big loan and bought some land in Waterton Park. He also bought this tiny little motel called the "Alpine Motel". The Alpine was next door to the Shell Station owned by the Sloans. We lived in the Alpine while we built the new Motel that we named the "Windflower". It was on Windflower Avenue and if anyone has been to Waterton (or southern Alberta for that matter) you would know that the name was appropriate. I was hired on as the general "gopher" and I helped out with everyone. I'm not sure if I quite earned my wages but I like to think that I helped more than I hurt. I carefully followed every step of the construction business. I remember when they dug the crawl space, when they built the floor, put up the brick walls. The walls were built of this new brick that was about the size of the cinder block but the material was some sort of expanded ceramic foam. The brick would actually float in water. I was quite skeptical if it could actually hold up a building but then one day a truck was trying to tow something (don't remember what) when the rope snapped. The truck crashed headlong into the wall. It crumpled the front end of the truck but the wall had no more than a dent in the block. I was a believer after that.

I was looking over the shoulders of the plumbers and I made sure I understood the purpose of the circulating pump they put in. We had a massive water heater plus a storage tank. I shadowed the electricians and I was on the roof with the roofers when they poured the tar on the roof. The Windflower was directly across the back alley from the another service station that I can't remember the name of. It's been a long time. One particularly windy day I was keeping an eye on the electrician's and Dad was on the top of a very tall ladder (reached from the ground to the roof on the second story) checking the tar paper on the roof that had been recently tarred. A stronger than normal gust of wind came up and Dad noticed that the roof was starting to lift up. His first reaction was to try and hold the roof down with his arm. Keep in mind that this wing of the motel was at least a hundred feet long and 25 feet wide. Built with around a hundred 2x6's, dozens of rolls of tar paper and barrels of tar the roof must have weigh several tons. My Dad was not a big guy probably weighing in at 175 pounds and he thought he could hold the roof down. As you can imagine, Dad had no effect on the roof and succeeded in losing a lot of skin on the inside of his arm. The roof rose into the air and flew away landing in the back alley between the motel and the service station. I was inside the other wing of the motel on the ground floor so I saw none of this but me and the electricians heard people yelling. We all ran out into the parking lot and it was the strangest thing to look up at the second floor and looking through the windows we could see blue sky; there was no roof on the motel. We all ran around back and there was the roof upside down in the back alley. There was a boat parked behind the service station and it was damaged by the roof but I don't think there was much more damage than that. There was a man standing behind the service station and the roof must have missed him by mere feet. Our hearts all stopped when we heard him yell, "there's a man underneath the roof".

I don't know if you've ever seen adrenaline in action but I saw it that day. There were perhaps four or five electricians and they all lined up on one edge of the roof and lifted. They actually snapped at least a dozen of the 2x6's across the long edge as they lifted the roof. It was amazing. As the roof lifted I saw the man underneath, his body twitched and I actually thought he was alive but it was only the roof being lifted that made him move. He had been killed instantly. The man had been in the back installing our propane tank.

It was a very depressing summer after that. I remember Dad was very despondent and he felt very guilty for the man who had been killed. He knew him personally and his family. You can imagine all of the red tape and an investigation was made so it cost us a season. Everything was insured so we were OK that way but it is always so sad to see a young family lose their father.

As it turned out blame was finally laid on the architect. In any normal location you could rely on gravity to hold such a heavy roof onto the walls but in Waterton where gusts of wind over a hundred miles an hour are routine it is necessary to actually tie the roof down to the walls. Even still, we probably would have gotten away with out tieing the roof down except that during construction while there were no windows installed a strange phenomenon occured. The motel was "L" shaped and when a gust would blow a whirl wind would form in the center of the "L". As I'm sure you all know, with a fast blowing whirl wind you experience a dramatic drop in air pressure and this drop in pressure sucked all the air out of the rooms through the open windows. When the wind gust stopped abruptly the air all rushed back into the rooms and they figure that the in rush of air was what popped the roof off. If we'd been able to get the windows in before we lost the roof this tragedy may have never happened.

We did finish the motel and for the rest of my time growing up we lived in Cardston during the winter and Waterton during the summer. We move to Waterton during the long weekend in May (Victoria Day) and we moved back to Cardston usually late in September or early in October. I had some very wonderful times in Waterton and I will devote several posts to my life in Waterton. Out of respect to my sisters, I will refrain from describing in too great of detail everything that I remember.