The blast caught me totally unprepared. Moments earlier the countryside was calm, quiet and ever so peaceful. I was spinning with happiness. I possessed all I’d ever hoped and dreamed to some day enjoy. My two small daughters were away visiting and my toddler son was occupied building a corral with Lego for his imaginary cattle. Gently I was moulding him to become a farmer. Looking out to the far South Quarter, I saw the dust rolling over the tractor as my husband turned the corner in the freshly cultivated summerfallow field. All this and more put me in a contented mood on this warm sunny morning.
The gas-powered wash machine motor worked well. Hurriedly I put the last load of laundry in my wicker basket to hang on the line to dry. I bent over the basket to pick up a pillow case to pin on the line….when suddenly our Collie Dog was running and yelping as if some unseen creature was chasing him. Uninvited, he ran into the house. A split second later, a horrendous explosion that slammed the door shut. The ground beneath me trembled and the earth rocked.
Terrified, I looked to the west from whence the sound came, a high hissing sound. I was unable to move, frozen in fear. Suddenly the weirdest noises and activity erupted all around me as the panic-stricken animals ran in fear for their lives. The six milk cows didn’t stop to see what it was, they stampeded, running wildly into the dam that was below the knoll of our farmyard. Feathered animals found shelter beneath the raised granaries. My perception warned me, there was more to come.
As I clung to the washline, a loud crack deafened my ears; high-pitched vibrations surrounded me. I recognized amongst it the voice of my small son. My heart leaped to my throat, “The pain he must be suffering. He’s never screamed this hard before.” I followed the sound to find him huddling behind the maroon chesterfield. As I held him close to me to assure him I was there to protect him, I felt his heart pound as furiously as my own.
By now a humungous mushroom had formed on the west horizon, at first red and fiery, rising higher and higher, a breathless sight to observe. I knew it would never be erased from my memory. But as proof, I decided to snap the whole maddening scene with my small box camera. As I stood there crying on the porch of our house, a light breeze ushered in a strange sulphuric odour. Dark grey ash particles began to scatter over the landscape, giving the plants, trees and grass a gloomy appearance.
Slowly the farmyard came back to life as my husband and I checked the shed to bring out the frightened animals, lifted shivering pail calves from the mangers and coaxed our black Collie dog out from under the bed. He whimpered as he came crawling out fearing the unknown. Squawking hens were cautiously coming from their hiding places, tiptoeing, afraid to come into the open. The ducks were still hiding under the Milkweed patch, reluctant to go back into the water; the cows kept mooing repeatedly calling to make sure their families were unhurt.
Suffield became a frightening and unwelcome neighbor. We were kept in the dark about this big event on August 18th, 1960. Military vehicles had earlier entered the Suffield area to set up sophisticated gauges, but no information was ever offered us. Unbeknown to us, some nine miles west, mass preparations were finalized for the blast of 40,000 pounds of TNT. Some of the greatest scientists had gathered to witness this phenomenon. More than a hundred observers stood on a hilltop, 7,000 feet back, guests that had been invited from UK, USA and Canada. The test was classed as top secret. The Suffield observers had all the information relayed to them by a public address system, while our only communication was a small radio on top of the fridge.
The radio played the usual popular western music. The disc jockey became annoying as his voice droned on and on; we were anxiously waiting to hear about the horrifying experience. But for a whole hour it was music and idle monotonous conversation. Suddenly a news report was released assuring us that all had gone according to plan. They said no one had felt the tremor. We had no idea what ‘the plan’ was. Didn’t they feel the earth quake?
All the dignitary names were released, people that had come to witness the scene, people from: Royal Aircraft Establishment, Armament Research, Vehicle Research Ministry of Defence, Ballistics Research Laboratories, Space Technology, the US Army, Navy and Air Force, the names went on. And we, their neighbors, who knew nothing and were frightened beyond words.
Time did mellow the fear of our neighbor to the west of us. The long winter months had again dumped tons of snow upon our countryside making travel with the small children impossible. Spring, with all its glory finally came and removed the winter doldrums as the sun warmed the earth and new life thrived all around us. The sight of the circles of purple-headed crocuses again warmed my lonely soul. Today Suffield was the furthest thing from my mind as my little girls, with their toothless grins, greeted me at the door with stiff yellow buffalo beans that were by now sprinkled everywhere on the prairie. All this brought so much happiness and renewed hope. It was spring, and in the air, the sweet scent of rebirth.
Close to the yard my young farmer husband was preparing the soil that was to be seeded in a few weeks. Working around the edge of this field, he decided to follow a deep washout that had become a natural drain to the South Saskatchewan River. Then he saw it. The melting snow now revealed a strange colorful foreign object fluttering in the fork of the valley. Immediately he suspected it had arrived from the British Block, Suffield.
“The army base,” I exclaimed breathless. “Not them again” as a shiver ran through me, recalling our last ordeal. I had no clue how I would go about calling our neighbor. Finally I found what I assumed to be the right number in the telephone book. I heard a click on the line.
“Hello”, I said. “Is this the Suffield Experimental Station?”
“Madam,” came the reply. “You have the wrong Station. Call….” Nervously I dialed this number and a pleasant voice came on the line with a thick British accent. If I was excited before, now my jittering was uncontrolled.
“Can I help you?” He sounded kind.
“Sir,” I rattled on. “We found this thing or maybe a foreign object …”
“One moment,” he rudely interrupted me. “You must call this number. They look after objects.”
“But,” I sputtered, trying to come up with a name for the ‘thing’. He had hung up.
Again I carefully dialed the given number. I could hardly decipher his English accent, one I had never encountered before. “Madam, where are you calling from?”
“Well sir, I’m calling from our farm.”
“And just where is this farm of yours?”
“Well,” I sighed, “we are approximately nines miles east of the Experimental Station, as the crow flies, so to speak.”
The British fellow gulped and gasped and I distinctly heard him repeat my words, the ones I had just spoken, to some other person. “One moment, would you please repeat those directions for the Lieutenant.”
“Wow, I get to talk to a Lieutentant,” I said thought quietly to myself. “Yes sir, we live nine miles from the base, as the crow flies.”
Laughingly he mocked my voice, “Madam, and in what direction does the crow fly?”
“East”, my voice came out sounding shrilly, “straight east, across the river and over several leases and there you’ll find our farm nestled in the valley.
“Straight east?” his voice sounded sarcastic.
“Hmm,” is all I could hear, and then some mysterious garble on the other end of the line. Suddenly a gruff, authoritative voice blasted orders in my ear, “MADAM, stay clear of that area.”
“We can’t,” I interrupted, “We live next to this thing.”
“Are there any animals out there?”
“Sure have. We run a mixed farm”
“Mixed with what,” he ignorantly asked me.
“We have seven cows, feed two pigs and have close to a hundred chickens.” Then I proudly added, “I hatch my own ducks and geese. Had a good year so far.”
“Clear the animals from the dangerous area. A squad will be on its way.”
I was so excited. Silently I begged him to hurry. Imagine me meeting some British official in person and maybe they’ll bring along a news reporter. I jumped into the beat-up old farm truck, revved it into second gear and roared down the soft cultivated soil to where my husband and the tractor were rolling along, oblivious of the danger that lay in the field.
“Quick!” I shouted over the roaring motors, “Come home! We’ve gotta clear this area, get our animals out. The British are coming to retrieve their property.”
“They’re too late,” Edwin replied sheepishly. “After I took a closer look at the thing, I recognized it as an army weather station.”
“Where is it now?” I asked trembling in fear as I recalled the man telling me not to go near it. “Did he touch it? Could it be laced with chemicals?” I thought to myself.
“I rolled it up into a ball and chucked it as far as I could into the lease…”
“Come home with me,” I pleaded. “The British are coming and I promised we’d move all the animals from this area. It’s dangerous!”
“Nah,” my cool husband replied. “Phone again and tell them I know what is is. We used them in the infantry.”
There lay the nameless object, yards of nylon cord. The orange cloth that was flapping in the wind resembled a parachute and attached to all this was an oversized camera.
Just as I was carrying my sleeping son into the bedroom, the phone ring frantically. “Yes, Hello. Who’s calling?” knowing all along that it was the Base again.
“Madam we need better directions to this danger zone.”
“Well sir,” I interrupted feeling a flash of embarrassment wave over me for causing so much excitement. “It’s no longer lying in the area I told you. My husband recognized it as a weather reading thing and threw it over into the lease land and…”
“Where did he put it? I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
Slowly I repeated my statement and volunteered a description of what it looked like.
“My God yes,” he yelped. “I do believe what you found is an innocent weather station. Sometimes they come undone and flap away in the wind. Keep it for a souvenir.”
“Really?” said I-Alice. It amazed me to no end that we’d be allowed to keep such an interesting piece of army equipment.
No army ever made it out to our isolated farm. No newspaper reporter begged me for the news story I so childishly had imagined.
However we did have a colourful conversation piece hanging from our ceiling. Neighbours came from far and wide to catch a glimpse of and examine our intruder, the harmless weather recorder that landed nine miles East –as the crow flies.