I am in Calgary now.
A night spent in the front seat of a bus that, for much of the ride, was bathed in moonlight that lit up the prairie around.
But before I left Swift Current, I walked the 101-year-old halls of the Lyric Theatre.
It was built with the expectation that the city would continue to see a mighty boom, and that the people, with their full pockets, would need entertainment.
As the turn of the 1900s, the Canadian government was trying to populate the west and Swift Current was marked as a future hub.
The theatre itself became a showcase of our distractions in the decades since — Vaudeville, plays, motion pictures, nightclubs and now an arts venue as it undergoes a major renovation.
It also saw some of Canada’s worst times. It housed patients as an isolation hospital during the flu epidemic in 1918 and, upstairs in the apartments, was home to war widows.
Those old rooms are now torn apart, and ready to – when there’s investment – take on new rolls.
It’s hard not to see the many room doors, and wonder what lives were like behind them right up to recent decades. Were they any happier than we are today, or more hopeful about the future?
But it’s also this idea that the Lyric was there during a past boom time, and is still around to see another in the province, that I find compelling. And I’m not alone.
“I do like the parallel between the growth and optimism of Swift Current when the theatre was built, and the growth of optimism of Swift Current today,” says local historian Rachel Wormsbecher.
“There was a brochure that came out around 1911 to 1912, and it had images of major buildings being built, and the architectural drawing of the Lyric, before it was even built…and the cover of the brochure says ‘The Coming Centre City of Saskatchewan’, and it was used to attract more settlers during these years.”
Today, when you walk around Swift Current, signs are hung out, looking for workers and people to train.
The area is seeing another boom.
I suspect, in many ways, it’s not much different in expectation than one a hundred years ago. Though they were fairly sure that one would never end.
