Home Free by Marni Jackson Page A

surround it. During the summers I worked there as a university student and then years later, when other assignments brought me back to Banff, I would go up Tunnel Mountain regularly. Shaped like a sleeping buffalo (its original name), Tunnel sits just above the town and the way up is nothing more than a 40-minute switchback that rises not quite 1,000 feet—a bracing jog with the dog. But at the top, it doesn’t feel so domesticated. One must pay attention. The wind can suddenly pick up, and in the fall, when the path ices over it’s possible to make the final hairpin turn, and slide right off the back of the mountain, plummeting down into the valley. Many have, especially the new arrivals in town, who like to drink five beers and then climb Tunnel in the dark.
    On mountains and in families, the sunny safe plateau can change between one sentence and the next to something mortal. My father’s death was like that—a quick, lucky fall that arrived at the end of a satisfactory day.

The Saskatchewan River
    T HE LANDSCAPE underneath a big bridge tends to feature graffiti,debris, and used condoms. I had forgotten that. This wasn’t the most appealing place for my father’s ashes to end up.
    Before he died, I had made a plan to drive through the prairies and see the bridge he had helped build in 1930. It was one of seven bridges that span the river that runs through the city of Saskatoon. My father graduated from the University of Saskatchewan as a civil engineer just as the Depression began. But the dean of engineering, C. J. Mackenzie, initiated a “relief project” that would employ as many men as possible and build something the city could use—a “bold, simple” bridge made of cement with nine graceful spans. My father was one of the team of engineers who worked on the bridge, which took 11 months of 24-hour labour, sometimes in the 40-below winter weather, to complete. It was a job he often talked about, with undisguised affection for “Dean Mackenzie,” as he always called him. He was a paternal figure in his life, after losing his own father at the age of 12.
    The completed bridge was more lovely than anyone could have predicted and it became the postcard icon of Saskatoon, its horizontal Eiffel Tower. I still have a photo of my dad in a dapper news cap, smiling with pride as he walks beside the tall, patrician Dean Mackenzie. I knew I had to make a trip back to the bridge and walk over it.
    I flew to Saskatoon, where it was clear that the Broadway St. Bridge is the grandest thing about the pragmatic, farm-circled city. Close by was the Bessborough, a CPR hotel built in the days when they still resembled Scottish castles. I prowled through the grand, empty corridors of the Bessborough and then walked by the river to the base of the bridge. I had originally planned to scatter the ashes off the bridge itself, but it was high above the water, and that day the wind was too strong. The ashes might simply waft over to the forlorn parkette on the other side and coat the single park bench there.
    Down by the pathway that wound along the riverbank, I found a bronze plaque almost overgrown by shrubbery that paid tribute to the engineering triumph of the structure. If I could scramble down the banks and surreptitiously pour the ashes into the river, this could be the official spot. Eyeing the current, I calculated that they would be carried under the bridge.
    I had left behind the vase, thinking that a woman with a full urn on a bridge might draw attention. Public scattering tends to be illegal. The ashes, in a plastic bag with two garbage ties twisted around the top, were as heavy and big as two bricks. I had decanted the ashes from their original bag, which kept springing open, into a bigger one, a task I did as quickly and unthinkingly as possible. The ash was light grey, very fine, and clinging, except for the larger bits, which were honeycombed like bone marrow. Not like, but