THAT SMALL TOWN FEELING

 Friday night, April 6, just before bedtime, I took a scroll through my Facebook feed to see what was going on in the world.  It was meant to be a weather check, or an update on family members' holiday in Hawaii, but that's not what greeted me at the top of my page.  Instead there was the notice from the RCMP that there had been a serious accident involving a semi truck and the Humboldt Broncos team bus on their way to a playoff game in Nipawin.  Although the accident had happened almost three hours before there was no other news to be had.  The radio silence gave it the feeling of very, very, very bad.

As I prepared for bed I tried to whittle down my foreboding.  Arbitrarily I picked the number 4 and decided that would be bad enough - a loss of 4 lives would be bad enough.

My first waking thoughts at dawn took me right back to the news story and the people involved.  I've walked a mile in those shoes.  I've been delivered that exact kind of news.  I know all those grueling stages of grief ... starting with the glaring surrealism of the morning after a fatal accident.  My heart went out to everyone having to deal with that.

As I made coffee my sense of foreboding nudged me to pick a more realistic number.  A big truck, a loaded bus ... I adjusted my number upwards to 7, thinking that would allow for relief when it didn't turn out to be that bad. 

I reached for my iPad, keyed in my password, brought up my newsfeed, and my heart sunk.  14.  Double my 'grasping at straws' number.  I, and every other person in Saskatchewan (on the prairies? in Canada?), felt like we'd been gut-punched.

The News Channel played all day.  News trickled out.  There was a photo of the crash site with a jumble of metal impossible to make sense of.  There was a post from one of the trauma doctors in Saskatoon praising everyone for their work in such horrific circumstances.  A father of one of the players posted a picture of his son and two team mates all holding hands across their emergency room gurneys - powerful evidence of team spirit and solidarity no hockey game had ever asked of them.

And there were all kinds of messages of support from all levels of the hockey world, from all levels of Canadian government, and from around the world.  Sheldon Kennedy spoke of his experience in the Swift Current Broncos bus accident 30 years ago.  The New Brunswick basketball team accident story surfaced again.  It's not like accidents don't happen all the time, but when they take kids bound for games, there's something that just takes your breath away.

Listening to the National News was an opportunity to view our province through outside eyes.  One announcer's opinion stood out to me as he seemed unable to fathom how, with the vast open space of Saskatchewan, how could it be that these two vehicles could come to be in the same place at the same time?  Good question, Fate.  Care to let us in on the answer?

The other comment that stood out to me was from our new Premier, Scott Moe, who in his remarks referred to Saskatchewan as "one small town".  My first reaction was one of defensiveness - we are a vibrant and industrious people - but then I realized he wasn't saying we lacked sophistication, he was commending us for our empathy.  He is bang-on right about that.

This province has huge land mass.  We have more miles of road per capita than most other places on the planet; small towns dotting the map, population scattered across our farming landscape.  There is much physical distance between us but our experience of living with these demographics also unites us.  One such example of common ground is that our communities all have hockey rinks and home teams we cheer on.  Players, parents, and fans all travel between towns for games; it's part of the fabric of our lives.  In this way, there is no one who doesn't feel connected to this catastrophic accident on a lonely intersection 15 minutes from the arena this team was supposed to play their next game in.  But for the grace of God, it could have been any one of us.

And despite the low population numbers spread across such distances, there are no six degrees of separation.  Personally I knew no one on that bus, but a friend of mine regularly played golf with the driver and another lives in the area and is closely associated with it's hockey community.  A few of our local boys have played on these teams in the past and would know the billet families and team staff, at the very least. 

That's one degree of separation, multiple times.  In this 'one small town' atmosphere you can multiply it by about a million, and if such a photo were possible you would see every one of us holding the hands of those boys, and all who love them, across the gurneys, and the miles, as we all begin the journey toward healing.