So, how has your summer gone?
All I have to do is look at the calendar to realize summer is in short supply. This year in particular, it sure feels like we haven’t had much of an opportunity to enjoy it.
I can tell you where my summer has gone – down the river, because of this awful Husky oil spill into the North Saskatchewan.
For a lot of people, this spill has been a major inconvenience – having to cut back on watering the grass, having to cut back on the car washing and washing your clothes.
For civic officials, they’ve had to work around the clock to solve the issue of how to replace all of that water supply from out of the river. And for provincial officials, they’ve had to answer a barrage of questions about whether pipelines are safe and whether enough inspections are being done.
For the newsroom, we’ve had no shortage of news to cover this summer, and that’s unusual.
Usually, but not always, the July-August period and the period from Christmas until mid-January – the bone-chilling pit of winter – are slow times for news. Meeting schedules and media events are sharply curtailed during those times, mainly so everyone can get the heck out of here.
Anyway, when I decided to take time off for the latter half of July, I thought the coast was clear. Apart from one council meeting, my calendar was remarkably clear, for a change.
I headed off to Kelowna, B.C., to see my family.
I was hoping that respite would get me away from the news business, and that maybe I’d be able to finally focus my mind on the real things I cared about.
That didn’t work out so well because I was bored out of my skull in Kelowna.
You may think it’s beautiful with the mountains and so on, and maybe compared to Saskatchewan it is. But the place was nothing special.
Personally, I think Kelowna has gone downhill. It was far more fun back when the water slide park was there, and back when the “Flintstones Bedrock City” attraction was open. Our family loved going to those places in the old days.
Unfortunately, the water slides and “Bedrock City” are both long gone. “Bedrock City” is now a strip mall, with a big parking lot. Today, Kelowna is chock full of the same boring chain stores and the same boring criminality we have here in Saskatchewan.
No wonder so many Saskatchewan folks have moved out there! It feels just like home.
You can guess what I ended up doing to break the monotony. That’s right: I fired up the iPad to catch up with the news! It figures.
So what was the top news story in Canada? It was this Husky oil spill that happened not far from good old North Battleford, a.k.a. the News Capital of Canada.
I remember watching video of Andrew Bell of Business News Network interviewing Mayor Ian Hamilton on their website. I was kicking myself. Here it was, the biggest news story of my entire tenure at the Battlefords News-Optimist, and it was erupting while I was in B.C. trying to be on vacation.
And yet I was kind of glad this was somebody else’s story at the News-Optimist. I knew what kind of reaction people back in the Battlefords would have to this news. They would be hopping mad.
The other thing was that I know very little about pipelines or oil spills, and any questions I would have had for officials would have been far dumber than the questions I usually ask.
That wasn’t the only big story to come out of the Battlefords. I read on our own News-Optimist website that Kevin Hasselberg had left the Battlefords North Stars to go and coach in the Southern Professional Hockey League!
He’s going to the Pensacola Ice Flyers, in Florida. That place is located closer to Cuba than it is to anywhere in Canada. In fact, I probably flew over the place on the way to Varadero last winter. Think about that.
Just recently, I stumbled on a podcast online from ESPN Pensacola in which the local sports host was interviewing Hasselberg on his appointment. That just blew my mind. I was listening to it going “ESPN is interviewing Kevin Hasselberg!”
I was proud of the Battlefords. Our head coach was interviewed by ESPN! We had made the big time!
Then it hit me. Kevin Hasselberg doesn’t belong to the Battlefords anymore. He now belongs to Pensacola and the Southern Professional Hockey League. As proud as North Stars fans must be of him, that reality has to make them jealous.
So, in the matter of a few days, North Battleford (a) lost its junior-hockey head coach, and (b) lost the water supply in the North Saskatchewan River.
Meanwhile, there was news about severe thunderstorms and golfball-sized hail in Saskatchewan during that time. I worried that once I flew back to Saskatchewan I might find my car’s windshield would look like it had just been in a war zone. It turned out the bad weather was eastern Saskatchewan’s problem, not ours.
When I finally returned to the Battlefords, I was called in back to work a couple of days ahead of schedule to deal with the still-developing oil spill story.
I returned to find all heck had broken loose in North Battleford, with booms set up and people hard at work trying to get oil out of the water. And there were water restrictions all over the city.
In previous days, city officials had been working frantically to do a deal to get water from Battleford and from other sources. When I saw them, they looked exhausted.
This all goes to show you cannot count on the news to cooperate with summer vacations, no matter how hard you plan for it.
And the news just keeps on making news. Once the weekend arrived and I was back to having days off again, guess what else happened?
All this Don McMorris impaired-driving nonsense happened.
Did I mention a municipal election is coming soon? So much for my plans to relax.
