Parks and Wrecks

The space between the canopy and the forest floor is made up of shadows and “awkward tangles,” where “shy flowers” hide. “There is light in the understory,” Kevin Van Tighem writes, “but darkness too.” The former superintendent of Banff National Park turns to this hidden place to explore the grief and the “love, joy, and brilliant moments” that have marked his life.

In Understory, Van Tighem grapples with the environmental loss that can lead him to despair. He describes his father’s death as “the end of remembered things,” but he mourns too the idyllic wild places of his childhood, growing up near the Bow River in Calgary. As he reflects from his autumn years on a lifetime spent learning from nature, he laments the legacy of “a culture that feels entitled to destroy and devour the best things about itself.” In search of meaning and hope, he follows his own “back-trail” through decades dedicated to conservation and activism, all the way to when his ancestors first came to the lands that are now Alberta.

In 1874, Van Tighem’s great-great-uncle Leonard left Belgium, aged twenty-four, to follow Bishop Vital Grandin on a Roman Catholic mission “to bring civilized order to the forests, waters, and wildlife.” Travelling by boat and on foot, they arrived at Fort Edmonton a year later, only to learn that “Catholics were no longer wanted there.” Leonard continued south, first to the Highwood River, then to the settler communities at Fort Macleod and Lethbridge, where he became a parish priest.

Van Tighem imagines how bare the prairie landscape must have seemed to his great-great-uncle: “as devoid of civilization and meaning as it was godless.” Leonard carried a jewelled container with a consecrated host inside, to bring to the places where they would build chapels and save souls. But for the Niitsítapi, whose home he was traversing, the land itself was sacred: “This was not scenery; it was their holy sacrament.”

The late 1800s “were horrible years for the Indigenous Peoples of the plains, foothills, and northern forests.” Smallpox and tuberculosis devastated communities, while firearms changed the nature of hunting and warfare. South of the invisible Medicine Line, Americans embarked on a scorched-earth policy to exterminate the bison. To the north, John A. Macdonald tried to accelerate agricultural settlement by forcing plains peoples onto reserves. Leonard was shocked by these actions. He became a “passionate advocate” for his Blackfoot neighbours, writing letters to Ottawa to plead for relief. His efforts were ignored.

Leonard never returned to Belgium, but when his brother’s children were orphaned, he adopted the oldest boy, Joseph, who travelled halfway across the world to join his uncle in Calgary. Joseph later married and had a son. This was the start of the family into which Van Tighem was born, in 1952.

Growing up with a “stern, distant, judging” father and a devoutly Irish Catholic mother, Van Tighem had a secure but chaotic home life. Raised alongside nine brothers and sisters, he developed an introvert’s desire for quiet and privacy. His passion for birdwatching kept him exploring the “perfect foothills paradise” beyond their old neighbourhood. Their street was lined with towering poplar trees, whose roots had found their way into the sewer pipes. More than once, he and his brother awoke to find the floor outside their basement rooms flooded with a small lake filled with “wads of toilet paper, partially dissolved brown lumps, and ugly yellow bubbles.”

Some of Van Tighem’s happiest childhood memories are of camping expeditions spent trout fishing and hunting pheasants with his dad and brothers. Seeing movement in some trees, he stood still “until a perfect little male Wilson’s warbler emerged, picking unseen bugs off the branches, its yellow breast brilliant in the spring sunshine.” The bird was a “living jewel” among the forest shadows.

Although he did not know it then, ecological loss haunted those early excursions. Invasive fish, such as rainbow and brook trout, introduced for anglers, quickly overwhelmed native species. Natural waterways were diverted away from the prairies and wetlands to support industrial agriculture, destroying habitats of “more exotic” transplants such as the pheasants. “There was a time,” Van Tighem writes, “when I was unreservedly nostalgic for what I remembered as an idealized childhood.”

Dark realizations were part of family life too. His uncle Frank, a Catholic priest and “cold and controlling” man, tormented Van Tighem and his siblings, especially his younger sister Margaret. The abuse, as they found out later, went much deeper than bullying. Regret marks this period: “Frank could have been stopped, if anyone had cared enough, and dared enough, to look into the shadows.” Instead, the family’s traditional deference to religious and patriarchal authority was upheld. One evening, as a teenage “rebel hippie,” Van Tighem finally exploded: “Why don’t you just leave her alone?” The outburst brought on a disconcerting, if satisfying, silence but had little lasting effect.

Through difficult moments at home and unhappy school years — when the wild places along the river or in the hills beckoned — nature proved a constant fascination. Having dropped out of university, more interested in “bridge and chess” than in class, he spent a month with friends in Arizona, “birding, botanizing, and exploring.” Upon their return, these friends helped secure Van Tighem a summer job with Alberta Provincial Parks. This time in the field proved as educational as any lecture. It changed the course of his life.

After eventually graduating with a degree in botany, he travelled around western Canada’s parks, giving educational talks, surveying remote backcountry, enjoying encounters with wolves, and studying decreasing caribou numbers. He witnessed a grizzly bear charging after elk calves and held his breath at the sight: “The air fairly quivered with something that felt like magic.”

Conservation work was not all spectacular outdoor encounters. His three decades at Parks Canada involved “mind-numbing and ultimately useless strategic planning meetings,” as well as endless bureaucracy. He battled tirelessly to protect sensitive ecosystems, negotiating with enthusiastic off-road cyclists who had been carving out unauthorized paths through the brush near Jasper. He struggled less successfully against government and businesses in the resource industries that called for “monitoring” and “more study” of critical ecological questions to avoid urgently needed environmental action.

When he became superintendent of Banff, he had to contend with more than the five million annual visitors — and their cars. For the oldest and most complicated park in Canada, every decision was “loaded with symbolic importance.” Van Tighem met with Sykes Powderface, an Iyarhe Nakoda elder, who explained that he had “no love for the national park.” In the early 1900s, his people had been barred from entering their ancestral homelands because they were accused of overhunting. A century later, Van Tighem helped bring about a memorandum of understanding, affirmed through ceremony, which finally brought an end to the exclusion: “They belonged here, after all. These mountains had formed their bones, their language, and their people’s songs.” The plan also committed to restoring plains bison to the area.

Although Van Tighem retired, in 2011, on a determinedly hopeful note, as the Stoney people and the bison returned home, he can still be laid low by despair. “So much of what I loved is gone,” he writes. Some losses were inevitable: his youth, his parents. But “the free-flowing streams and quiet places,” the caribou, curlews, and the cutthroat trout, “the burrowing owls that once nested in a much-smaller Calgary” were all losses that “penetrate to the soul.”

For Van Tighem, a single dynamic informs the abuse of the earth and other devastating harms: a patriarchal assertion of ownership. Although Uncle Frank was jailed for three years for pedophilia —“a much shorter sentence than what he had inflicted on his victims”— Van Tighem’s sister Margaret struggled for a time with alcoholism to cope with the pain of her childhood. Frank pleaded guilty to abusing seven girls, but he later admitted there were countless others.

There has been too much “churching, cold science, expertise,” Van Tighem writes toward the end of Understory, and not enough humility and respect. We must listen “not just to people who live in different ways, but to the world itself.” Hope can be found, he insists, in a “fierce determination” to act. Beyond hubris, beyond greed, there are lessons in “the sounds of rain and rivers” and “the golden light that spills out at evening,” if only we pay attention.