I went on a deep dive this past weekend.
No, I didn't go scuba diving. It's too "deep freezey" out there to try anything like that.
I went on a deep dive on YouTube. Specifically, I looked up a horde of old video clips that I'd shot over the past seven or eight years and uploaded to the YouTube page for this very newspaper.
There are 35 videos in total, with the oldest seeming to come from as far back as 2017. Please, I highly recommend checking it out for yourself by punching in youtube.com/@theoutlooknews7140, and you'll see some very cool content that tells a story about life in this part of the province.
There are all kinds of clips on there that help tell the stories that I'd written at that time.
There's plenty of footage from several editions of the annual Winter Wonderland drive-thru displays down in the Outlook Regional Park. I can remember shooting those on some rather brisk nights, but dangit, anything for the story! Although now that I think about it, perhaps I shouldn't have been so detailed in those particular clips because I was essentially providing the whole kit and caboodle for free without anyone having to actually go out and see it all for themselves. Oh well, that event is a surefire success every year regardless of how much one "gives away" with photos and video.
There are also performances from Outlook's very own Bad Influence, a rock group that I've come to really enjoy; 'Give It To Me', 'Cool Fever' and 'Hellwings' are go-to favorite tracks of mine. I can remember cruising up to Saskatoon a handful of times in the spring of 2023 because the group was taking part in a battle of the bands competition, and it was fun documenting their progress because they kept advancing through the ranks. First they made it through Round One, then they breezed by Round Two, and suddenly there they were for Round Three. In the end, the judges awarded them 2nd Place, but if you saw their reaction as I did that night, you would've thought they took the whole shebang. I loved capturing moments like that.
When I'm not capturing live music onstage or cool Christmas displays, then it's so many other things. Canada Day events are always a blast, and special events like the grand opening of Veterans Memorial Park in Outlook are in fact video evidence of local history unfolding before our very eyes.
Footage of LCBI students performing onstage; footage of OHS students attempting a Guinness World Record for a fun gym game; refinery workers from Co-op picketing outside of town; an appreciation banquet being held for Outlook firefighters; the spillway down at Gardiner Dam being opened up for what felt like the first time in forever; Grade 6 students holding an anti-gun violence walk in downtown Outlook; a 'Bells of Peace' ceremony being performed on Remembrance Day; and a wartime aircraft performing a special flyby over the community of Lucky Lake in honour of World War II veteran Donald Couch.
It's all there on YouTube, ready to be enjoyed and perhaps lived through all over again, if you happened to be there.
There's even footage of lawnmower races from the 2017 Harvest Festival, which only begs me to ask the question: Can we bring those back, maybe for this year's Prairie Festival or Canada Day? Because those look like an absolute blast.
But you want to know something that I was reminded of when I was watching all that footage and reliving some of those events? I was reminded of some interesting times we all lived in when COVID-19 became an annoying part of our daily lives, and the end result was a different, heartbreaking, and yet uniquely uplifting part of our human history.
You see, I covered things like community parades in Outlook, Dinsmore and Kenaston, where graduating high school students were the focal point of the day as vehicles drove past waving and saluting them, and then the students were paraded around town on the back of a truck. Or it was a cavalcade of people hopping in their vehicles and deciding to go say hi to seniors living in the Pioneer Home and downtown on Mother's Day. Taking a look at such footage was looking back at a time when the world was telling us, 'Whoa, slow it down. Go home, stay inside, keep a safe distance', and in response, through careful planning and smart work, we collectively told the world to kiss our asses.
We didn't let a pandemic stop us from living our lives. We just retooled things and made changes here and there. It was quite a time to look back on.
Hard to believe it's been five years since COVID made its unwanted 'premiere' in our world.
There were also the events of the summer of 2021, when the town of Outlook looked at the laundry list of communities that were canceling their Canada Day celebrations in the wake of mass graves of residential children found out in BC. Essentially, the town responded with, 'We're not hopping on that bandwagon', and pushed through with their planned July 1 events, which included a First Nations dancer who brought the house down with not only his performance, but his message.
Things like all of these events happening make me glad to do what I do, capturing local history as it unfolds before all of us. When people say that small towns are boring and nothing interesting happens, these are the kind of stories that I believe say otherwise.
I'm also looking forward to this coming spring and summer to see what happens next, and I'm excited to debut a new way of capturing all of those historic events. Stay tuned.
For this week, that's been the Ruttle Report.
