‘TODAY SEEMED LIKE THE DAY TO STOP’
Roadside memorial place of contemplation for people still stunned by Broncos crash
It’s a restless corner.
Cars drive past, passenger necks craned. Kids peek out the window as a school bus makes its daily pass. People stop, exit, wander through paths carved out beside piled hockey sticks, flowers, brightly spinning pinwheels.
A big Manitoulin Transport semi rolls up to this place at the Saskatchewan junction of Highways 35 and 335. Darwin McLeod steps out, and walks quietly. He looks and thinks about the Humboldt Broncos and those lost lives — about the bus crash that happened in this exact spot, at this exact time, four Fridays ago. At one point, his eyes mist up.
McLeod drives by the site often, including on that fateful Friday, three hours before the collision. He learned about the crash while having a coffee after getting home to Melfort.
The first few times he drove past the scene in its aftermath, he couldn’t look — he’d lock his eyes on the road ahead. “I just couldn’t …” he says, trailing off.
But on this day, he stops, and gets out of his truck.
“There’s a time and a place for everything,” McLeod said. “And today, it just felt like this was the time for me to stop. I’ve slowed down before, like people do, and just kept on driving. But today seemed like the day to stop.”
The crash — a tractor-trailer unit hauling peat moss collided with the Broncos’ bus around 5 p.m. on April 6 — killed 16 people.
A makeshift tribute has sprung up in that ditch where everything landed in the seconds after the collision.
Crosses, toy buses, sticks, notes, magazines, flowers. A framed team photo, colours washing out from exposure to the weather, shows long-haired hockey players from long ago.
“Prayers from the 1970-71 Humboldt Broncos,” reads the inscription.
Roger Wallin, who lives near Tisdale, is making his fourth trip to the site. He takes friends — in this case, an out-of-town teacher who counts among his students deceased Bronco Logan Boulet.
Wallin is a fan of the Nipawin Hawks, who the Broncos were supposed to play that night. He’d planned to be at the game.
He’s watched the memorial spread as days turned into weeks. He points out what’s new, and what’s old. Saskatchewan weather, wind and rain, lend a rough edge to some of those memorials, and the wear and tear is a shame, he says — but it’s also life.
“Every time I come by here, there’s somebody here, people stopped, semi-trucks pulled over,” he says. “The first time I was here, a semi-truck was parked on the road, did his Catholic thing on bended knee, and hopped back in his truck again. It touches a lot of people, and it touches them hard.”
We all have personal landmarks — that place where you proposed, where you hit that deer with your car, where that guy you know did that funny thing one night.
There’s a place for those other landmarks — places we might not have experienced directly, but that still impact us like a kick to the gut.
So this meeting of two highways on flat Saskatchewan prairie has become a national landmark, embedded in the minds of people who have never been there. They’ve seen the aerial shots — skid marks, obliterated bus, widespread wreckage, peat moss bundles scattered across the snow.
They’ve wrestled with this spot, whether they’re the next town over, or thousands of kilometres away: Those trees in the corner, the stop sign, the position of the sun, and how we might remake the place to make it safer.
“It’s a dangerous intersection,” Wallin says. “When I come up here, there’s those six crosses there (from a 1997 crash), and my vision goes from tunnel to wideangle, because I know how bad that can be.”
In the summer of 1997, six people — all members of the Fiddler family — died at this intersection when their vehicle missed the stop sign and collided with a grain truck.
Terri Fiddler was a teacher in Dawson Creek, B.C., on maternity leave, making a trip with her husband and three daughters through Saskatchewan to introduce one-month-old Kassandre to family members.
Their Saskatoon relative, Wendy Fiddler, a single mother of five, also died in the crash.
Before that day, she taught a song to her children, one she’d learned in Sunday school as a child.
“Away over Jordan, we’ll meet in that beautiful land. If you get there before I do, look out for me, for I’m coming, too. Away far over Jordan, we’ll meet in that beautiful land. Won’t that be grand.”
Then came the parting, and two decades later, another parting. Twenty-two people have perished at this microscopic dot on Saskatchewan’s map.
Six white-painted crosses, three small ones in front, three bigger ones in back, make up a memorial for the Fiddlers, kittycorner from that fresh assortment of crosses across the way.
The snow that covered both ditches in early March is gone. Grass is trampled and discoloured. It’s all cleaned up, but you can still find shards of glass, broken bits of plastic, chunks of foam.
Bits of green grass, new life, peek up and slowly turn the place a different colour.
It was good, McLeod said, to stop.
“A month ago,” he says, “these kids were doing things, and they didn’t realize this was their last day on earth. Life changes like that, in a split second.”
So there he was.
“Out of respect for the people,” he says. “For everyone who was involved.”