The Toronto Star had commissioned me to write a story about the camp, take photographs, a human interest piece for the Life section. I remembered coming in off the trail that morning and seeing the camp for the first time. It wasn’t going to win any authenticity awards. The tipis were new, unbleached canvas, fresh out of the box. Someone had strung a clothesline between two cottonwoods. The line was so loaded that the jeans in the centre were touching the ground. There was a beat-to-shit gas generator off to one side and a crude firepit made out of river stones.

Even if you squinted and suspended your disbelief, it wasn’t a nineteenth-century diorama.

I did interviews, took pictures of the adults in front of the tipis, followed the kids when they went to the river in search of bugs and minnows. I helped with the chores, ate with the group, listened to their stories. I had expected that these would be sad narratives of alcohol and drug abuse, of poverty and desperation, but for the most part, the people in the camp were ordinary, working class, from offices and factories.

They weren’t looking to change the world, Littlechild told me that first night. They were just trying to make sense of their lives and how such lives could be lived.

I was more skeptical than I needed to be. How were they going to manage basic water and sanitation? Where would they get their food? What would they do when winter arrived and turned the land to ice?

I had asked much the same questions when I covered the occupation of Alcatraz years before. There had been a lot of bravado on the Rock, clenched fists and drums, political speeches and visits from celebrities. Press coverage and the prison’s proximity to the amenities of San Francisco had turned the protest into a media romance that helped to hold the occupation together long after it had fallen apart.

Here on the Alberta prairies, out of sight of television cameras, movie stars, and sound bites, the Writing-on-Stone camp looked to have as much a chance of surviving as a picnic in a thunderstorm.

I DON’T SEE Oz until it’s too late. The little man appears in the doorway and is across the room in a flash.

“Hello,” he says. “You are here.”

“I am.”

“You are not here yesterday.”

I don’t feel like talking, but that is not going to stop Oz. “We went to Budapest.”

“Budapest?”

“Early in the morning,” I tell him. “Then we came back.”

“The same day?”

“Yes.”

Oz rubs the side of his nose. “What good luck.”

“Luck?”

“Today, there are no trains.” Oz arranges his knife and fork so they are parallel to each other. “They have closed the station in Budapest.”

“The refugees closed the station?”

“No, no,” says Oz. “The government closed the station. There are too many refugees, and there are too many angry people.”