I arrived in High Level, 500 km north of Edmonton, just in time to see Santa Claus being pulled down main street in a red wooden box by a snowmobile. It was a Friday night in mid- December and incredibly cold. Main street was lined with cars filled with children, their faces pressed close to glass, hoping to see Santa as he passed.
I spent Saturday with Abe Janzen and his family then checked into the local motel on Sunday morning to try and get some writing done and prepare for the interviews I would be doing the upcoming week. Daylight didn't last long; by mid-afternoon it was dark again. The "T" on the neon sign outside my window was burned out leaving the word "MO-EL" to blink on and off like a Christmas wish.
When KLAUS GABRIEL, the literacy coordinator for the Ft. Vermilion/La Crete area, knocked on my door at 9:00 on Monday morning, I was ready to go. Klaus is a quiet and gentle man with a quick sense of humour whom I had met at The Literacy Conference 2 months earlier. He and Abe had worked out an itinerary for the day for me starting with an interview in La Crete.
It was still unbelievably cold but the cab of Klaus's beat up old College truck was warm when I climbed inside. During the 140 km drive to La Crete Klaus described the history of the area to me. I learned that La Crete is the centre of a Mennonite community of about 5000 residents. The Mennonites are private people who are opposed to secular authority. They enjoy being able to live by their own rules in remote agricultural areas where they can farm the land and live in peace. Northern Alberta has served their chosen lifestyle well.
It was still dark when we left High Level. I had a sense only of snow and cold as we drove to La Crete. Once in the town itself I could see buildings and houses, but little activity. We stopped at the Basic Education Centre where Klaus showed me his office and introduced me to EVA KRAHN, one of the paid tutors in his program.
I recognized Eva right away. We had ridden together on a school bus to a literacy conference in Medicine Hat in the spring of 1987. She and her group from the North had driven 400 km south to Slave Lake to board a bus there with delegates from AVC. Two hours further south the bus stopped in Leduc where I and a number of others climbed on for the last 6 hour leg of the trip.
The weather in Medicine Hat had been warm and spring-like and after a 2 day whirlwind conference we were back on the bus together heading home. Eva told me at one of our stops that it was hard to go home because there was still a lot of snow in the North and it would be some time yet before spring would arrive. I remember thinking how serene Eva looked with the traditional Mennonite head shawl tied around her hair, like a woman from a Rembrandt painting.
Eva, now 38, has lived in Northern Alberta all her life. She and her husband and teen-age daughter live on a farm outside of La Crete. In the summer Eva tends her big garden and helps her husband farm three sections of land. In the winter Eva works as a tutor with the literacy program.