Mr. Fish Creek: Former park ranger explores relationship with urban wilderness in new book

It’s a fall morning at the Fish Creek Provincial Park. The creek, clear as glass, gleams as Calgary’s blinding sun chases away the night’s lingering cold.

Dew beads dot poplar leaves, which wear a golden shade before they carpet the ground. Black-capped chickadees fill the silence with bird song. Runners flit by on pathways. And Wayne Meikle watches, reflecting on his relationship with the park.

He saw it in its cradle, more than five decades ago, when it was strewn with equipment, turning from the fortress of a ranching empire into an expansive conservation site. He became the park’s ranger and defended its borders from urban encroachment. He has seen the park battered by floods and brought it back to life. As his own loved ones passed, he carved their memorials into the very sanctuary he restored.

“Fish Creek to me was special because of diversity,” he says. “Like every day, I walked in the office and never knew what would come.”

To him, what more than a million Calgarians see as a fixture of the city — a solace from the urban bustle — is, in fact, the result of a series of deliberate choices that have kept alive one of the world’s largest continuous public park systems at more than 2,500 acres.

“Every decision we made was for the park and the protection of its wildlife, the fauna… that was always number one,” Meikle said. “Once you lose that, then it’s gone.”

That meant immersing himself not only in park operations but in various proposals — including roadways, power lines, and any nearby development — and pushing back on any encroachment by authorities. As he grew in his role, it also meant planning how to rebuild its sections from scratch when calamities struck.

That and much more is in his new book, Mr. Fish Creek, where he details the park’s history and how it was shaped over the years.

“I wrote the book because I was doing tours with people, and they said, ‘Wayne, what happens when you go?’ … Well, the stories disappear, and the history disappears,” he said. “You can only have so many plaques with text written on it.”

Meikle’s first encounter with the park was in 1973 during his honeymoon with his wife Sheena, following the invitation of a park ranger. Meikle had been managing a campground in Fort McMurray, and the experience was “very interesting,” since the park was a conservation site in the city.

“I think the one thing that really intrigued me was the number of pathways, and how well they were being used,” he says.

Twenty years later, he was handed the keys to the park and was made responsible for its operations.

By then, the area — once a ranching empire that switched hands between several families beginning in the late 19th century until 1973, when Peter Lougheed’s administration established it as a park — had matured into sprawling urban wilderness.

The park has always been a centre of competing claims, Meikle writes in his book. To him and his staff, it had to be protected as a continuous natural valley. For others, however, it was viewed as a practical corridor for a “road, utility line, a transit route, or access to new development.”

The park, he says, was “often in the way” of a major proposal.

“Behind what the visitor saw were roads, buildings, washrooms, concessions, bridges, leases utilities, wildlife issues, public complaints, emergencies, maintenance, enforcement, budgets, and political attention,” he writes.

“At times, the park operated like a small town stretched along a river valley. The difference was that most visitors never had to think about what kept the town running. Staff did.”

A culmination of such conflicts was a debate in the mid-1990s about rebuilding 37th Street, one of only three major transportation corridors cutting through the park. The street, which connected northern and southern communities, was a rural road with an old single steel truss bridge that became a site of several accidents.

While the redevelopment of the rest was moved smoothly, 37th Street garnered public scrutiny.

“The public debate was intense,” he writes. Residents in the north were worried that new roads would create traffic, while those to the south wanted relief from congestion.

“People were angry, worried and tired. I learned to direct attention toward parts of the project that could still be shaped: landscaping, noise walls, screening, pathways, drainage, and wildlife movement. Some elements, such as the number of lanes, were unlikely to change. Other protections were worth fighting for.”

His passion for the park even earned him the nickname Mr. Fish Creek from Alderman Diane Colley-Urquhart.

“She called me at all time,” he said. “‘Oh, Mr. Fish Creek here. Let’s talk to him.'”

One of the most poignant moments in Meikle’s time as park ranger was the 2005 floods. The deluge drowned entire flats, destroyed every bridge, and erased almost every pathway.

“I was down at the west end of the park, and I saw a bridge go down the stream,” he said. “I actually sat down on a rock and cried. I saw 10 to 15 years of my work go down the creek that same night. It was very emotional.”

But there was also a silver lining: a chance to recreate the park.

Several bridges were rebuilt, he explains in the book, while other crossings were entirely removed. Learning from past mistakes, the park’ staff redesigned new bridges to withstand the kind of flooding that had taken out their predecessors. It meant certain areas were now also inaccessible, which, he writes, allowed vegetation to “regenerate and wildlife to return undisturbed.”

“It was very emotional, but very satisfying because it’s not every chance you get to redo a park and look at the mistakes that were made in the past and try to solve them in the future,” he said.

“As you develop the park and get to know the park, you build these things, and you can still come back and see them years and years later, which is very unique. You get very proud of it and very attached to the park and what’s going on in it. It’s hard to describe, but you do get that attachment.

More than a decade later, in 2016, after retiring as a park ranger and then as an urban park planner, he returned to the park, this time to commemorate his wife, Sheena, by dedicating a tree in the Burnsmead area.

“She was the kindest, most generous person,” he told the Calgary Herald in a 2016 interview. “She was amazing as a nurse, with her patients. She would always go that extra mile. For the kids, she would always bring them stickers, little toys, candy. She was so giving.”

From the moment they met, he said, they shared a deep love of the forest. Sometimes, Sheena would keep an eye on Meikle’s park region, calling him back if he was travelling and crews reported problems in the area.

“I have four trees that are dedicated to members of my family,” he said. “You get attachments as you go through your life.”

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