By ERNIE NEUFELD
Visiting an old school friend at his cottage at Wanasing Beach, one hundred and a few miles north of Winnipeg, I mentioned the famous occasion seven or eight years ago when my brand new car was in collision with a deer not far from Kenora, Ontario. It was costly for the vehicle and the deer did not survive the unhappy encounter
My old buddy admitted this had never happened to him, but countered that once he had been forced to come to a stop when a bear blocked his progress on the highway near his cottage. Unwilling to be trumped, I told him of the dozens of bears on Winnipeg's Broadway Avenue that a few days earlier stopped me and hundreds of others up sharp with their unexpected emanation just one day earlier.
Himself a long-time resident of the city of my birth, Al's skepticism was so obvious that I was forced to reveal the whole story - quite true - of which he was surprisingly unaware.
Setting out for an evening walk from our Broadway Avenue hotel, we were struck by the sight of a white bear in multi-coloured garnish commanding the attention of a number of pedestrians on the thoroughfare's 30-foot pleasantly treed boulevard.
Looking around, we discovered this bear was not alone by any means, but had scores of brightly and imaginatively decorated companions.
Nowadays even the best of charities must rely on imagination to attract money needed to carry on their good works. In this case, CancerCare Manitoba had devised an unusual gimmick. The six or seven-foot high, four-ton bears cast in concrete were the work of one local artist, and others were inspired to compete in the imaginative decoration of the beasts.
According to Where magazine's Winnipeg edition, on May 26 over 60 "four-ton bears appeared overnight, each creatively painted by renowned local artists." The choice of this animal as the subject was particularly appropriate, as Manitoba considers itself the polar bear capital of the world.
The bears were enticingly placed along the entire boulevard, beginning at Main Street and continuing 10 or 12 blocks westward to the provincial legislative grounds. Local businesses sponsored individual replicas at thousands of dollars apiece. An "angel bear" invited signatures at $75 each to be given inscriptions on this winged version, which is to receive a permanent setting at Polo Park.
Artists' originality and whimsy extended to the naming of each likeness, and they now "bear" names such as "Fore the Bears", "A Beary Cold Night", "Ha-bear-tat", "Bear to Dream", "Abeariginal", "Aurora Bearealis" and "Amelia Bearhart".
Further evidence that even a routine trip can bring surprises when one is open to them came in the form of a pleasant visit to the museum in Brandon honouring lawyer Thomas Mayne Daly, the first Manitoba citizen elevated to the federal cabinet in the late 1800s, and a stop at a lunchtime sandwich smorg at Grenfell. Far from humourous or pleasant was the spectacle of seas of water where grain ought to be growing (the result of unprecedented Manitoba rains) and the horror tales of individuals whose homes had been flooded by up to two feet of raw sewage from the same extended inundation.
Box 400, 904 East Avenue
Weyburn, SK
S4H 2K4
Phone: (306) 842-7487
Fax: (306) 842-0282
E-mail: production@weyburnreview.com
This web page and its contents are copyright of the Weyburn
Review
A Division of Boundary Publishers Ltd.
