Calgarians sure love beaches a lot for a people deprived of the natural presence of any. Think about it: there is simply no distance we will not drive or fly if there is even a remote promise of a beach holiday at the other end. We travel because we must. When it comes to local swimming holes, Calgary definitely lost the lottery. For most of its life, the city was 90 minutes from the nearest swimmable public beach at Sylvan Lake. Sure, there was Chestermere, the slightly fattened irrigation ditch where as a kid I learned to dive off an old wooden raft on those three hot days a year when my parents would take us there. By 1970, however, Chestermere had gotten too weedy even for the desperate, which Calgarians definitely qualify as when it comes to aquatic refreshment. Yet desperate swim times call for desperate measures. In 1967, the Keith Construction Company sweetened its new-home offer by gouging out a lake in the middle of what was formerly nothing but flat prairie. Lake Bonavista thus became Canada’s first residential development to be centred around an artificial lake, and it set the terms for all of the others to come in one significant way: they were fenced, gated, fully private facilities for the exclusive use of community members. The rest of us could only look enviously through the chain link. Yes, in mushrooming 1970s Calgary, if the great unwashed wanted to get wet, they had to do it in their bathtubs. Fish Creek Provincial Park was, and remains, a bizarre anomaly: an urban park—now fully surrounded by city lands—managed not by its host city, but by an Alberta government considerably removed. Calgary planners first thought about turning the area into parkland in the 1960s. In 1973, former alderman and future Alberta Solicitor-General Roy Farran introduced a private resolution in the legislature to give the province the mandate to create and fund parks within cities. To secure all the land for what would be one of the world’s largest urban parks, the government had to expropriate prime ranchlands formerly occupied by area pioneers Pat Burns and William Roper Hull. When Premier Peter Lougheed opened Fish Creek Provincial Park (FCPP) 38 years ago, there were but a few picnic tables and 100 parking spaces, and there were still landowner holdouts. (One can only presume that the wealthy Mannix and Shaw families eventually did okay.) Community groups had urged leaders, unsuccessfully, to name the park with a local designation used by the Blackfoot, who have a long history in the valley: “Siokame,” meaning “black fish.” In response to a questionnaire asking them what they wanted in the park, enough Calgarians responded “someplace to swim outdoors” that the government actually listened, and plans were launched for Calgary’s first purpose-built, public swimming beach. (As the Herald reported, one of the suggestions was from a little girl who requested that the park allow “no hippies, snowmobilers or Liberals,” and she appears to have gotten her wish.)

It couldn’t have come at a more urgent time. Not long before, Calgary’s municipal brain trust had decreed that no more outdoor pools would be built. That was also when the City began curtailing the operational period of the dwindling few we did have, which, when I was a kid, used to open on Victoria Day. The City had also been considering developing lagoons along our occasionally benign rivers—which wouldn’t have taken much given that, historically, there were numerous popular swimming holes along both the Bow and Elbow rivers. But what was anglicized to become Sikome Lake derailed that. In August of 1978, sundry officials, including Mayor Ross Alger, gathered and, once a torrential rainstorm had concluded, cut the ribbon on a little over four football fields’ worth of family fun just waiting to be dove into. Lougheed declared that Fish Creek would be a “park for all people.” Little could he have known that on many sunny days to come, that’s exactly how many of them it seemed had already showed up at Sikome by the time you got there. Jim Stomp, a 37-year veteran of Alberta Parks, is the guy who’s been in charge of FCPP and, by extension, Sikome Lake for the past 16 years. He is as aware as anyone of the amount of science and effort that it takes to operate a safe, clean public facility like Sikome. “On a hot day in summer—and it doesn’t have to be a weekend, it can be a Tuesday—we’ll see 20,000 users,” he says. There may be a lot of kids wearing Huggies out in that water, but Stomp is proud to say that there hasn’t been a negative water-quality reading for at least five seasons. In the early years, however, Sikome was plagued by periodic closures due to either a bacteria called pseudomonas, or else schistosome—swimmer’s itch—a parasitic flatworm usually attached to waterfowl. Fecal coliform has only rarely triggered a closure, and then it was said to be primarily related to gull droppings. At one point, leeches had somehow invaded, though authorities were quick to specify that they were of the “non-bloodsucking variety.” In 1988 the facility closed so that a new water plant could be built and a plastic membrane installed under the sand to mitigate these problems. When Sikome relaunched the following summer, reporters praised the “high-tech swimming hole.” The water still came from wells, but an upgraded treatment plant now refreshed the full volume of water every eight days instead of 20. “You have to understand,” says Stomp, “that Sikome has a water-treatment plant big enough for a community the size of Airdrie. The water is chlorinated and copper sulfate is added as an algaecide.” None of the private lakes goes to all of those lengths, says Stomp, and he knows of only two other public swim facilities with similar technology: one at Echo Dale Regional Park in Medicine Hat and the other at Birds Hill Provincial Park near Winnipeg. Not all of Sikome’s challenges—and there have been many—involved technology. Disruptions have included the usual suspects, says Stomp: “Domestic disputes, drugs and alcohol.” Conservation officers are the front line of security—screening bags for alcohol and glass, for instance—though city police regularly attend as necessary. In 2008 the province decided to build a fence around the lake, citing crowd control, late-night drinking and strangers taking photos of children. That season, too, a hot economy made it difficult to find lifeguards—aquatic safety personnel, they’d prefer you to call them—a process that is still not easy since shift scheduling is entirely weather-dependent. Adverse weather events like wind-fallen trees occasionally interrupt the park’s scheduled 80-day season. Sikome lost several weeks of operation due to the “flood” of 2005. (Has any catastrophe been downgraded to mild irritation any more abruptly?) As for the human toll, there has only been one drowning, a seven-year-old in 1996, and a man once became paralyzed when he dove into shallow water.

Otherwise, Sikome’s greatest irritant is those five or six times a season when it must turn away hot, cranky crowds due to parking reaching its capacity. Never mind that this is exactly when the lake is not at its best; when the time and temperature align, it’s as if a lifeguard has blown a whistle that can be heard citywide, and shouted, “Okay! Everybody into the pool!” Although I seldom discuss this with anyone, I have a long, personal relationship with Sikome. I used to go all the time, maybe 20 visits a summer, almost always by myself. I’m not going to lie to you: sometimes it felt weird to be the only goggles-and-Speedo guy in the water. Check that, it always felt weird. Where, I often wondered, were all the other Calgarians who were looking for a break from the chlorine and crowds of indoor lane swimming? I could only conclude that I was considerably more sanguine than others about the water quality. Still, I found it an interesting Zen exercise. You merely had to strap on your goggles, thrust your face into the water, and direct your concentration to both breathing and not thinking about what a coliform is. In truth, the experience was mostly rather pleasant. Given that the three source wells probably emerge from the ground at around 10 degrees, the lake heats up fast due to the fact that it’s barely over two metres at its deepest point. I used to check it with a thermometer. It got as high as 23 degrees, but more typically it was around 18—chilly, at first, but the ideal temperature for the rare sort of invigoration you only get by building up a head of steam in cold water. Not that it’s easy to do so at Sikome, what with kids floating randomly all over the place. I eventually learned to pick my times, like days cool enough to deter the hordes but warm enough so that the facility would remain open. My best swims came when I timed my arrival for the first half-hour after a thunderstorm, knowing that crowds would have temporarily fled and that the sun was about to reappear. But there was one frustrating element that I just could not overcome: never being sure if the lake would be fully open. Sikome is bisected by a rope separating the shallower, child-friendly eastern half from the more swimmable side in the west. When usage is light, aquatic safety personnel will simply close the good half. Since I felt creepy enough as the only adult in relatively open water, I definitely lacked the will to attempt the crawl through the child soup of the main beach. Once, having driven across the city only to be stymied, I got into a heated discussion with the shift supervisor about why, in the Internet age, they could not somehow post their opening status before I struck out on the Deerfoot. That went about as well as the time when I naively asked if it would be okay to prepare for a surfing vacation by paddling my board, you know, way off to the side, out of everyone’s way. Yeah, right.