Just a sparrow

“Just a sparrow”. Wanderings and writings from Champion, AB. Writing and photography by Em Medland-Marchen. April 25, 2024.

Champion Inn

The Champion Inn, formerly known as the Savoy Hotel, was built in 1911.

Champion Public Pool

Champion’s only public swimming pool is open annually from June to August. In the off season, it is filled with pools of sea green rainwater.

Flew that city coop

Local villagers in Champion, AB are avid birders. Surrounded by ecologically diverse prairie grassland and wetlands, villagers look to attract songbirds with this pillar of stacked birdhouses. One bears a sign, “flew that city coop”.

Play ends

Many of the streets in the village of Champion are unpaved, dirt roads.

The planter

A frugal local has filled an empty toilet with soil as a makeshift garden planter.

Over a hundred years ago, the village of Champion was founded by wanderers.

Today, it is a lonely place, a solemn place. The drone of the highway and the whisper of wind caught on a snag of rusted metal are the only sounds that accompany the town’s empty dirt roads and wide open sky.

The land here is so flat that you can see distant mountains poke up above yellow canola, cut to the wick. The Rockies tower a hundred kilometres away, yet their presence can be felt hitched to the wind that blows about two-story storefronts and prairie houses.

Near the centre of town, a mural depicts the songbirds that make their home in the surrounding grasslands. Their illustrated beaks and feathers have faded with time, just as the painted shingles of crumbling houses have bleached from endless days of unrelenting weather.

A stray tomcat crosses the dirt road, his orange paws kicking up dust that disappears into a cumulus sky. Despite the lack of people, their presence can be felt throughout the town. Nailed to a wooden pole are a collection of stacked birdhouses. One, boasting a sign that reads, “flew that city coop”.

The town of Champion looks to attract songbirds now that coal mining has dried up in the region. A farmer takes long strides past a boarded up hotel that once housed solitary miners, ranchers and cattlemen. Today, nothing but ghosts roam its halls. Outside, three scraggly trees endure. 

I walk through the town and take a look around with my friend and fellow photographer, Ron Sparrow. When we arrive at the mural, he studies it carefully. I watch as he brushes calloused fingertips over the many birds on the wall, then shakes his head slowly.

“Never any sparrows,” he mutters.