In this excerpt from the new memoir, the former supervisor of Banff National Park examines the loss that surrounds us — but still offers reasons for hope.

In 1993, when my career took our family to Waterton Lakes National Park, in the very southwestern corner of Alberta, Gail and I sold our home in Okotoks and had to decide what to do with the money that remained after the mortgage was paid off. We would be renting park accommodation in Waterton, so we decided to look for land. We wound up buying 56 acres at the mouth of a canyon, on the Oldman River. Two years later we built a small cabin there. Wolf Willow has been the center of our family’s existence ever since. That’s where I wrote most ofUnderstory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope* (an excerpt from which follows). Its wild prairie, cottonwoods, wind and river remain the center of my personal universe. This is where I finally began to come to terms with the abuses and flawed thinking that have taken away so many of our possibilities — and to learn how to know the world in a better way.*

Glaciers vanished from the headwaters of the Oldman River hundreds of years ago. I try to picture those northern rivers running as low and clear as the Oldman does each summer and I can’t make the picture work. That’s not how I know them. But that’s what my grandson will see when he reaches my age.

Even without glaciers, the Oldman is becoming a different river. As snowpacks in the high country dwindle, the summer flows diminish as well. Upstream from the Oldman reservoir the stream has grown wider and shallower, so the summer sun penetrates to the riverbed and heats the water faster.

I used to sit beside the river during summer’s long, calm evenings and watch the valley breathe. Lately, I put my lawn chair in the middle of the river instead and feel warm water caressing my legs.

I no longer fish the river in summer, not because the fish aren’t there — so far, trout have been able to survive in spite of near-lethal water temperatures — but because those fish don’t need added stress when their water world has become so nearly intolerable. I’m content to watch them rise for caddis flies while shadows work their way out from the cliffs and the cooling evening breeze comes snuffling through the cottonwoods to send me back inside and give the fish a few hours’ reprieve until the sun returns.

There are fewer birds in the cottonwood forest now than there used to be. Back in 1970 I turned my back on birds for a while and tried out being a hippie. It didn’t work. I should have paid more attention instead, because Breeding Bird Survey data analyzed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology show that there are at least three billion fewer songbirds in North America now compared to when the Canadian Wildlife Service first hired me to count them.

Prairie songbird numbers have declined by two-thirds. I thought those longspurs, kingbirds, sparrows, and others would always be as much a part of the world as they still are a part of me, but I was wrong. The long quiet pauses during the evening birdsong chorus weren’t there before; they announce to me that I am a diminished person in a diminished world.

There is more than one way to lose one’s hearing. When the sounds of life vanish on their own, that’s the worst. Gordon Ruddy, a Jasper friend, wrote me a note one day: “I’m getting old enough to see that there are a lot of birds just missing. That some birds were plentiful, but are rare now. I try very hard not to get down. It’s hard.”

I know that grief. It’s how I felt as I watched my mother’s final breaths; the same sorrow washes over me sometimes even now when fishing one of Dad’s old streams. The difference is this: we expected them to go, but we expected the world that made them to carry on.

Now we grieve a far greater loss.

© Kevin Van Tighem, used with permission. Still, there is that yellow warbler who feeds busily in the sandbar willows across from my evening chair. He breaks into song from time to time, taking me back to the first time I heard that cheerful tune in the backyard of a long-ago Calgary home. Cedar waxwings perch on tilted trees at the edge of the river cliff and dart out over the water to pluck mayflies out of the breeze. Their soft voices offer a promise of continuity that I hope will be kept. Robins sing lustily; they seem more abundant than before.

And the river still flows. For all that it’s a living thing, it’s also a metaphor. If one’s life experiences are lived stories about the meaning of things, a river is more than running water. It’s where the stories and spirits in the land come together and find their voice. Especially, perhaps, this river: the Old Man’s river — Napi’s river.

From where I sit, the water comes into sight up by the big midstream rock, swamper of canoes. It tumbles out of a long, boulder strewn riffle, piles up in a big eddy near a sandstone cliff, and then sorts itself out before coursing down a long run to where I watch. It’s constantly arriving, bringing stories from farther upstream where some of its waters rested in beaver ponds or spilled off mountain walls while other tributary streams carved slot-like shadows into conglomerate cliffs or wide, curving sinuousities through green fen meadows. It arrives confident in its knowledge of where it’s been and busy with purpose, carrying those gathered waters, stories, and spirits down from the mountains where, even now, its waters are still in the process of being born.

Passing my chair, chuckling and whispering in the way that rivers do, the water pushes against the near bank before spilling into a downstream riffle and, a few dozen meters further, sweeping in against another sandstone cliff. The evening sun is golden there, unlike the shadows that enfold me. At the last, only the sparkling tops of waves show briefly through willows before the river is gone.

That river must have endless faith, because those waters have no knowledge of where they are going, yet they flow unquestioningly towards that unknown destiny. The river is always arriving and always departing, yet it’s always there. We sit together each warm evening, and become part of the same moment, for all that we both have different ways of being. It’s a relationship that only one of us thinks about.

Perhaps I should think less, but that’s my contribution. The river’s contribution is faith.

© 2025 Kevin Van Tighem. All rights reserved.

Previously in The Revelator:

Feeling Anxiety About Climate Change and Other Environmental Threats? These Five New Books Can Help

Kevin Van Tighem

is the former superintendent of Banff National Park and Alberta NDP’s 2022 candidate for the provincial riding of Livingstone-Macleod. He is the author of the memoir Understory: An Ecologist’s Memoir of Loss and Hope.