Roadtripping: On the Move with the Buffalo Gals

By Conni Massing

Roadtripping documents a decade of road trips through the fiefdom of Alberta. The men and women who make up the Buffalo Gals first set out in July 1999 to experience the unusual and charming roadside attractions of south-central Alberta. Never dreaming that this one-off adventure would turn into an annual event, it’s ten years later and they continue their escapades. Each year a new destination is chosen and the weekend-long travel begins. Traditions have evolved including elaborate scrapbooking, eating in gourmet dining rooms (when available) and excessive snacking (without fail). Beyond the joys and challenges of being on the road and a deepening bond of friendship, this book is a love poem to Alberta, a province often misunderstood and mislabelled as being the right-wing cowboy haunt of Canada.

With trip route maps, hilarious photos, and appendices including checklists and recipes, Roadtripping explores the bizarre and wonderful attractions of wild rose country, stuffed gophers, political fanaticism, mad cows and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brindle & Glass
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781926972152

Conni Massing

Conni Massing is an award-winning writer working in theatre, film, and television. Stage credits include The Myth of Summer (Alberta Theatre Projects), Oh! Christmas Tree (Lunchbox Theatre), and her stage adaptations of W.O. Mitchell’s Jake and the Kid (Theatre Calgary) and Bruce Allen Powe’s The Aberhart Summer (Citadel Theatre). She has several publications to her credit, including five of her plays and a comic memoir, Roadtripping: On the Move with the Buffalo Gals, published by Brindle and Glass Publishing. Her writing has been recognized by Alberta Media Production Industries Association, the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, the Betty Mitchell Awards, the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, and the Elizabeth Sterling Haynes Awards.

Book preview

by Connie Massing

Brindle and Glass Logo

For my beloved Buffalo Gals.

Contents

Alberta Map

Prologue

One: Dead Gophers

1999 Tour Map

Two: The Torrington Eight

Three: Weighing In on an International Controversy

2000 Tour Map

Four: The Preamble

Five: Where the Beef Is...

2001 Tour Map

Six: Kicking It Up on the Pyrogy Trail

Seven: The World's Biggest

Eight: On The Road

2002 Tour Map

Nine: Your Roots Are Showing

Ten: Worst Fears Realized

Eleven: Apocolypse Cow

2003 Tour Map

Twelve: On the Edge of Destruction

2004 Tour Map

Thirteen: The (Nearly) Lost Weekend

2005 Tour Map

Fourteen: The Intolerance Tour

Fifteen: Happier Culinary Events

Sixteen: Tracing the Fur Trader's Route

2006 Tour Map

Seventeen: Preparing the Pelt

Eighteen: Pelt!

Nineteen: Whither Goest Gals?

2007 Tour Map

Twenty: An Inconvenient Tour

2008 Tour Map

Twenty-One: A Jerky of Buffalo

Twenty-Two: A Deca-dence of Buffalo

Twenty-Three: Buffalo Gals-The Way Ahead

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Appendix Three

Appendix Four

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PROLOGUE

There’s a group of us, mostly theatre people, who have been going on a road trip together for ten years running. We call ourselves the Buffalo Gals, and every year we travel to a different region of the province of Alberta. It’s such insanely good fun that I was moved to share the experience.

I grew up in a little town called Ponoka in central Alberta but have lived in Edmonton for many years. I’m a playwright and, as such, sort of the self-appointed chronicler of our adventures. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about just a few little things . . .

The Ooga-Booga Factor

One of the best ghost stories I ever heard was about a documentary film producer trying to finish a film she’d shot of native elders sharing some secret creation myths. The images and audio just plain disappeared during a late-night editing session. Three times. The stories obviously weren’t meant for public consumption.

So here’s my fear. What if the YouTube video of our group scaling the giant pyrogy in Glendon, Alberta mysteriously vaporizes after this book is published? Who wants something like that on her conscience?

Will the truth actually set us free?

With that in mind, maybe I’m better off being a little flexible with the facts so as not to incite any bad karma. I’ve always been a firm believer that you shouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. I mean, really—who ever tells a story the same way twice? (And trust me, I always tell a story at least twice.) But these road trips are co-created and co-owned by several people. I guess I could have asked them all to chip in on every single memory of the nine years we’ve been doing this trip, but I can tell you right now that would lead to tears. Of course I’ve consulted them religiously. (Okay, we exchanged a coupla emails.) But in the end, if my pals wanna go public and say I’m a big fat liar, well then so be it. Of course I’d be a little miffed, but far better that I’m miffed than them. You see the thing is . . . 

You don’t want these guys mad at you. First there’d be the tongue-lashing, then the beating with raw steaks. (Then they’d cook the steaks and eat them in front of me.) Plus, between the nine of them, they could make sure I never worked in this or any other town, ever again. What if my own husband got mad at me, even though I say how handsome he is about every third paragraph?

Bottom line, just because I decided to go public about the road trips doesn’t mean everyone else should be exposed. (What happens in the van stays in the van, etc.) I thought I’d totally solved this by identifying the gang as characters from Gilligan’s Island instead of using their real names. Even that was nothing but trouble—I should have known everyone would want to be Ginger, the gorgeous but shallow movie starlet on the show.

The Gophers

Maybe it really boils down to one thing: dead gophers. To be more exact, a museum featuring dead, stuffed gophers. Now you either find this funny or you don’t. If you do kind of, sort of, possibly think it’s a concept at least worth investigating because you might find it amusing or strange or memorably quirky . . . then you’re going straight to hell along with us. If you find this concept (the dead gopher thing) kind of appalling—and that’s your perfect right—then there may be other, er, uh, elements of this book that you, uh . . . 

Oh never mind. Thank you for your time. Enjoy.

I’m a beautician, not a magician.

PHOTO: BOB ERKAMP

ONE

DEAD GOPHERS

I suppose my mother is to blame, really, for my gourmet appetite, my sentimental streak, and the genesis of the annual road trip that has become an all-consuming passion for me and my friends. The fateful moment occurred sometime during the summer of 1998; Mom casually dropped into a conversation that she planned to go on a senior’s bus trip to the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum. What?

Torrington is a hamlet in east central Alberta. I had never been there before, though I’d visited the British counterpart close to a friend’s home in north Devon. And while I have more than a passing familiarity with gophers, I’d never been to a museum starring the little fellas or any other kind of rodent.

I try to imagine what might be in a gopher museum. Displays depicting the illustrious past of gophers? Gophers and their role as collaborators during World War II? Gophers during the Inquisition? A little research yields the fact that whatever else may be going on, the gopher museum is full of dead rodents: stuffed, costumed, and displayed in dioramas. My friend in England reports the outrage amongst the animal-loving British public about the opening of this museum. Wow. Our colonial masters are offended—I must see the place for myself. Many a medieval pilgrimage has been trumped up with less justification.

News of Torrington inspires several rounds of jokes about exotic road trips amongst a group of like-minded theatre colleagues. (Not for us the first arrondissement of Paris; we’d rather go to small-town Alberta.) The dark rumours about the museum’s imminent closure, due to continuing protests from animal rights activists, lend urgency to the proceedings. (Okay, probably only in my mind.) But the new year dawns and we still don’t have a plan. My obsession deepens; I even include a reference to Torrington in a play I’m writing at the time.

Perhaps I felt instinctually that we could ward off the dark portents of the next millennium by fondling a stuffed gopher. (It was 1999, remember, and other folks were planning on crossing the International Date Line in a Learjet, or holing up in bomb shelters with canned beans and champagne.) Or maybe the desire to see the dead, stuffed gophers runs even deeper than that. Ahhh . . . the magnetic pull of the grotesque.

The road trip plan finally coalesces in March 1999. There’s no rigorous selection process for seats in the van; we’re just a casually thrown-together gaggle of pals, drawn from both Calgary and Edmonton, several of whom happen to be working together at the same theatre company that winter. While Alberta’s two major cities are arch rivals in sporting matters and polar opposites in terms of political leanings, our noble little group shall rise above such petty differences.

From Edmonton, there are me, Stephen (a theatre director), his partner Tyler (a bookseller/arts administrator), and Norma, another arts administrator type. The Calgary contingent is composed of Bob (an artistic director), his partner Kevin, (a composer/musical director), John Paul (another artistic director), and Patti, yet another arts administrator.

Although our group originally hails from various areas of the country and beyond, we’re all here—now—in Alberta. We’re all suitably adventurous, and we’re all what my Grandma Saunders would have described in glowing terms as good eaters. What else do you need for a raucously good time?

The itinerary evolves throughout the dog days of a particularly mushy spring. Someone in the group wants to go to the Passion Play in Drumheller. Someone else has heard about a cook-your-own-steak cowboy bar out by Patricia. (All of these locales are roughly in the same south central—southeast quadrant of the province.) And of course we have our cornerstone event: the Gopher Hole Museum. The general insanity of life being what it is, no one can manage getting away for more than a weekend, and in the end it turns out we can’t really get started till Saturday morning. It’s a lot of itinerary to stuff into thirty-six hours but we’re optimistic. (Oblivious? Ill-informed?) The flurry of planning emails reaches a hysterical pitch as the July weekend draws near. I’m excited and happy that it’s actually happening, but secretly worried that we’ll drive each other crazy in the van. These are great people—all of them—but it’s a whole lot of personality to coop up in a clammy, claustrophobic little space for thirty-six hours. I’m not envisioning food fights or fisticuffs, just disturbing alterations in our delicate social structure, forever more, and . . . tense silence, simmering with subtext. (I’m a playwright=subtext is my life.)

At any rate, my eagerness to give this grand social experiment a shot overrides my horrified imaginings about imploding friendships. Baggage packed, with social anxieties tucked into the side pocket, itinerary chewed over, cooler stocked . . . we’re off.

Kevin makes the ultimate sacrifice, donning the gopher head.

PHOTO: PATTI PON

TWO

THE TORRINGTON EIGHT

July 9, 1999

The Edmontonians agree to meet the Calgarians in a parking lot in front of the Capri Hotel in Red Deer, a little city roughly equidistant from Edmonton and Calgary. We’re not yet referring to ourselves as the Buffalo Gals. That first year we refer to the trip, somewhat erroneously, as The Stomp. As in Stomp Around Alberta. ("Stamp Around Alberta was a tourist travel campaign from the late seventies, capitalizing on the fame of the Calgary Stamp-ede. The Stamp Around Alberta kit came with a passport to be stamped at various locations. If you had enough locations stamped in your passport you could even win a simulated bronze medallion.) Vestiges of this conception of the road trip as a stomp" turn up in planning emails for several years thereafter.

Patti has asked her friend Leonard, who lives in Red Deer, if he’ll give us a tour. We’re all bemused and amused by the notion of getting a tour of good old Red Deer. (I grew up about a half-hour away.) Leonard, it turns out, takes his job very seriously. He arrives in the parking lot wearing a crisply pressed red and white striped shirt and carrying a box of Timbits. We’ve all been eating bread products and mainlining coffee for two hours prior to the rendezvous but that doesn’t stop us from digging in.

There’s something kind of bizarre about getting a tour of a place you’ve been to eight million times. But there’s also something kind of great about seeing a place through new eyes. In case you’ve never had the pleasure, here are the basics:

Red Deer is a city of about eighty thousand people in the heart of Alberta’s Parkland region, providing services to surrounding farming communities as well as to several large institutions. The Michener Centre, which houses mentally handicapped adults, was also the scene of the great Alberta eugenics project (sterilizing mentally handicapped and badly-behaved individuals) that finally ended in 1972, thanks to the newly-minted premier Peter Lougheed. Leonard gives us a drive-by tour of the Centre. We’re a little bewildered but gracious. Then the van whirls through the grounds of Red Deer College, where I did my first year of post-secondary education. (And where I met Brian, who participated enthusiastically in the planning for year one but didn’t actually manage to join us on the stomp/the roam/the hootenanny holler until 2001.)

Leonard gives us some interesting background on the architecture of Red Deer College. (The arts centre is built in the shape of a train.) We’re wildly appreciative of the informational tidbits (and the Timbits) but very anxious to get to the main event, a beautiful monument to that modern-day hero: FRANCIS THE PIG.

Francis, a two hundred and forty-pound white hog, was at the abattoir being herded toward that final encounter one fine summer day in July 1990 when he decided to change the course of history.

(Remember the movie Babe? One of my favourite flicks EVER. And right at the beginning all the pigs are being shipped off somewhere and there are rumours about what happens once you go in the big truck, but no one’s quite exactly sure what it means. Boooaahhhew!)

Francis must have had some kind of third sense about what was about to happen. There were probably a coupla shifty-eyed fellows trying to goad him onto a ramp or through a gate. And probably no one was being nice about it. (Oh, it’s all very palsy-walsy when they’re trying to fatten you up, but then suddenly the humans get ominously business-like.) Maybe Francis waited until the loader guys were preoccupied, or maybe he landed a painful kick and made a run for it. Or maybe Francis was actually a flying pig. Hang on, sister! But the newspaper accounts of the day are only slightly less fanciful.

After scrambling over a metre-high fence and tip-toeing through a sausage-making room, he nosed open a back door and turned his curly tail on local butcher Fred Huizing forever. (Tom Barrett, Edmonton Journal)

Francis escaped into the bushes surrounding the farm, and then further into the wooded area by the Red Deer River. He evaded capture—and being eaten by predators—for five months! The press had a field day. (Oh, to have some good news for once.) Francis instantly became a cause celebre, referred to variously in the news as a frisky swine, a freedom-loving hog, the elusive or plucky porker, and my personal favourite, also from the Edmonton Journal, a porcine Papillion.

His heroic flight from death and back bacon also inspired artists and musicians. Nancy White wrote a song called Saving Francis’s Bacon. The indie comedy troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie wrote that stirring anthem—Piggy Piggy Run Piggy Run Piggy Run, which inspired many a happy sing-a-long in our van. Francis is the first thing in Red Deer that’s caught the nation’s attention for some time, said Craig Curtis, the city’s director of community services. Well, no kidding.

After a few weeks of this glorious escape made good, even the most hardened pork producers wanted to give this heroic hog a break. In fact, everyone seemed to be pretty delighted about Francis’ sstory except for Dick Huizing the butcher (and owner of the abattoir Francis escaped from). Harassed by hog-lovers, including an Edmonton woman, (Antje Espinaco-Virseda, who sent Huizing two hundred bucks with the suggestion that the pig be named after Francis of Assisi), and pursued by an insurance company wanting him to pay damages on a car that collided with Francis, Huizing was soon sick of the unwelcome publicity. Regarding Francis: I hope it’s gone, I hope it left the country. I tell you, I just want it all to end.

And finally it did. Francis was captured late that fall; I like to think he chose to return, finally tired of raiding farm gardens and oinking at coyotes. Anyway, once he finally reappeared, he was allowed to live out the rest of his days in bucolic peace and splendour.

At least that’s what it claims on the inscription at the base of the sculpture of Francis . . . 

The sculpture, created by Danek Mozdzenski, is a beautiful bronze likeness of Francis, captured in a graceful leap, much as we imagine he might have cleared a fence or two in his heroic quest for freedom. There are some flowers planted around the monument. Which is on a little sort of island right smack in the middle of two very busy downtown streets. Nice. We take a LOT of photos. Then Leonard, our fabulous tour guide, tells us the horrible truth. Francis didn’t live out his days on acres of rolling green, rubbing his pink tummy up against white picket fences or lifting his cute little snout up to the heavens to sniff for dinner.

Remember Babe singing Jingle Bells in the farmyard while the powers-that-be are plotting his demise?

The real story? Shortly after Francis was finally captured by pig tracker Al Marshal, he was indeed retired to an Innisfail farm, where farmer Doug Smith was given the job of taming Francis after his months in the wild. The city of Red Deer had plans to put Francis out to pasture in Waskasoo Park but presumably didn’t want him gulping down kittens or ravaging curious children. Alas, Francis never got to demonstrate his people skills—he died from an infection (peritonitis) caused by one of the tranquilizer darts he was shot with when he was captured. Isn’t that the most hopelessly unjust thing you’ve ever heard? So the inscription at the base of the sculpture is a LIE and plus—the other thing etched at the base of the beautiful bronze pig is: Francis reminds us of the importance of hog production and processing to the economy of Red Deer.

NO, that’s NOT what Francis reminds us of. Francis reminds us of freedom! And raging against the machine! Of seeing your destiny differently than others see it. He inspires balls-out courage and musical genius! Francis, WE LOVE YOU! We vow to have bacon the very next day for breakfast. That’ll show ’em. That’ll . . . pay tribute. Or something. But I soon discover that it’s hard to get this group lined up behind an initiative . . . 

Scene: A Red Deer Diner, The Gals Peruse Menus

Me: Wow, I’m still a bit shook up about Francis.

Bob: Who?

Me: Francis the pig. You know . . . the way he died and—

Tyler: Oh look—they have Canadian back bacon!

Bob: Yum—count me in. Where the hell’s the waitress?

Me: Guys! I was thinking maybe I’d write a play about Francis.

Kevin: Will it be dinner theatre?

(Guffaws around the table.)

Stephen: How about breakfast theatre?

(More giggling.)

Me: Hey—come on! I was thinking maybe a children’s play. A serious piece using the abattoir as a sort of allegory for . . . sort of like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. You know, talking animals and—

Patti: I don’t know about that but the bacon is sure talking to me!

(Applause and hoots of laughter from other unfeeling, oafish Gals.)

Norma: I’m having pork sausage!

(Stephen high-fives Norma—right on!)

Me: You guys are so—insensitive!

John Paul: (mockingly ) Oh shush now—Conni wants to talk about her drama.

(A pause as I marshal my arguments.)

Kevin: (VERY excited ) Look—you can get bacon in your omelet AND bacon on the side.

Me: Really? Wow! (with commanding presence ) Hey, could we get some service over here?

Sigh. It’s probably not too soon to emphasize that the road trip is about eating. And sometimes that means dealing with certain contradictions. Like Francis and the bacon we insist on having at our road trip diner breakfasts. Like the cute, wobbly calves admired in fields we’ve passed on the way to the steak restaurant. Or the frolicking lambs at the PaSu sheep farm and our five-course dinner there. (More about that later.) Mind you, we never would have visited PaSu if it weren’t for the persistent lobbying