Okotoks: A Town Named for a Stranger

Okotoks is named for a stranger.

The stranger is a rock, an enormous, fractured mass of pale quartzite lying incongruously in a field a few minutes west of town.

It has travelled a very long way to be here.

Once it was part of a mountain in what is now Jasper National Park; then a landslide sent it tumbling into the Athabasca valley, where it landed on a glacier and was carried south until the ice, having done its work, abandoned it on the prairie.

The Blackfoot called it okatok, meaning rock, and used it as a landmark on the way to their crossing of the Sheep River. A settlement grew nearby, and the settlement took the rock’s name. Thus a mountain, or at least a substantial piece of one, became the namesake of a town far from its birthplace.

There is something rather appealing about this arrangement. Towns usually name themselves for their founders, their sovereigns or some hopeful quality of the landscape. Okotoks named itself for a visitor who never intended to stay.

To the motorist hurtling down Highway 2, the town can appear to be one more prosperous appendage of Calgary, a place of subdivisions and commuter traffic on the city’s southern flank. My vintage MGB, which has a certain modest dignity on quieter roads, is dwarfed by the F-150s and double-cab Rams, though I am consoled by the number of vintage muscle cars passing in the opposite direction. There is evidently an appetite here for machines with a past.

But I have come to think that the rock tells us more about Okotoks than the highway does.

It is a magnificent object, weighing some 16,500 tonnes and rising to the proportions of a three-storey apartment building. It is the largest and best-known member of the Foothills Erratics Train, a scattered procession of such geological exiles extending along the eastern slopes of the Rockies. It is also split neatly in two, and the Blackfoot have an explanation for this that seems to me at least as satisfying as the science.

Napi, the trickster, was resting on the rock one hot day when he lent it his robe. Later, when the weather turned cold, he returned to reclaim it. The rock, understandably aggrieved, pursued him across the prairie, flattening deer, bison and pronghorn in its path. At last the bats intervened, swooping down to split the great stone where it lay. Their reward, or perhaps their punishment, was to have their faces flattened in the process.

Geology offers its own account of the rock’s arrival and fracture. But the two explanations coexist quite happily here, as they should. One tells us how the world was made; the other tells us how to inhabit it.

Faint pictographs suggest that the erratic has been a landmark for thousands of years. It remains sacred to the Blackfoot, and in 1978 Alberta designated it the province’s first natural feature to become a Provincial Historic Site. Visitors are forbidden to climb it, a sensible restriction. One does not need to stand on a thing to appreciate its importance.

Back in town, on Elma Street, another sort of traveller has left a mark. This is the prettiest stretch of old Okotoks, a little ensemble of historic buildings and independent businesses that seems to have escaped the more hurried ambitions of modern development.

Here, in a house dating from 1910, is French 50 Bakery. Its owners, Marie-Luce Denis and Brad Labrenz, returned from Europe with an inconvenient attachment to good bread. They began baking one day a week, and the experiment became a vocation. Their loaves rise on a handmade levain; brunch is ordered at the counter; by evening, the place turns to pizza. French-immersion students come in to practise ordering in French.

It is a modest enterprise, but one with a pleasingly large idea behind it: that a prairie town need not be culturally provincial simply because it is geographically distant from the places that have shaped its tastes. The bread has travelled, in spirit if not in person, and the result is among the most civilized pleasures Okotoks has to offer.

The Sheep River, meanwhile, has been travelling much longer than any of us. Rising in the Rockies near Mount Rae, it winds for some 107 kilometres across the prairie. Indigenous peoples fished its shallows for centuries before there was a town to observe them. Trout and whitefish still move through its waters, and the river remains the most persuasive reason to linger.

Okotoks has had the good sense to make room for it. Rather than treating the river as an obstacle to be crossed and forgotten, the town has built a modest life around its banks. There is a campground in the middle of town, and a riverside path that links the campsites to the ballpark. One can pitch a tent, cast a line and then cycle or e-scoot to a baseball game without starting a car. Bird scooters are plentiful, and the whole arrangement suggests a place that has discovered the pleasure of getting somewhere without making a production of the journey.

The ballpark is the town’s summer cathedral.

The Okotoks Dawgs draw collegiate players from across North America, young men who come for the summer to keep their skills sharp. They, too, are strangers, although in their case the welcome is temporary and the accommodation presumably more comfortable than a glacier. For a season, the town adopts them.

Seaman Stadium and its fieldhouse were built by brothers Don and Doc Seaman at a cost of $20 million, an impressive act of faith in a game that asks its spectators to sit outdoors for hours in the uncertain Alberta climate. On Canada Day this year, 6,498 people filled the stands to watch the home team defeat Brooks 15–4. Ballpark Digest has praised the stadium as the best in its league class, and at least one former Dawg, Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson, has since been called up to the San Francisco Giants.

The beer, appropriately enough, is Big Rock.

There is merchandise to be had in the stadium shop and another outlet immediately behind the ballpark, for those who wish to take home evidence of their allegiance. Baseball has always been a game of souvenirs, memories and borrowed loyalties. In Okotoks, it is also an excellent excuse to spend an evening outdoors.

On the north side of town, another import has established itself in a converted shipping container. Covet Sips + Sweets serves what is known as the dirty soda, a concoction that arrived from Utah and has made itself at home on the Canadian prairie.

The principle is disarmingly simple. Take an ordinary fizzy drink, add syrups, fruit purées and cream, and transform it into something that occupies the curious territory between refreshment and confectionery. The cookies are enormous. The drinks are exuberant. The whole enterprise seems to belong to a country that has never quite accepted the proposition that a beverage should know its place.

Utah has contributed many things to the world, but few of them can have been greeted with such uncomplicated pleasure in Alberta. Okotoks has embraced the dirty soda without embarrassment, which is perhaps the most revealing thing about it.

Then there is Big Sky BBQ, where the local appetite takes a more substantial turn. The method is Texan, the meat Albertan, and the smoking is done over real wood. There are no fryers or grills; the food is made from scratch, and the place smells as a barbecue restaurant ought to smell, of smoke, patience and considerable quantities of meat. The Hungry Man and a Caesar salad will comfortably feed two, provided one approaches the undertaking without undue ambition.

It is a generous, noisy place in which to finish a day, and a reminder that sophistication need not always arrive wearing a French accent. Sometimes it comes on a tray.

What stays with me about Okotoks is the number of things that have come from elsewhere and become entirely at home. The rock from Jasper. The bread inspired by Europe. The soda from Utah. The ballplayers from half a continent away. Even the barbecue speaks with a Texan accent.

None of these arrivals has diminished the place. They have given it character.

Napi, who tried to reclaim what he had once freely given, was chased across the prairie for his trouble. Okotoks seems to have learned a different lesson. It welcomes its strangers, finds a use for them, and, in time, makes them its own.