Al Thompson with a trailer full of old curling rocks at his facility a few kilometers east of Winnipeg Thursday May 19, 2011. Thompson finds old curling rocks from rural prairie towns and resells them, mainly to the US where the sport is taking off.David Lipnowski for The Globe and Mail
The ladder to the attic of the rickety old rink led to a nearly forgotten treasure, its precise value unknown.
The polished granite boulders didn't take long to find buried under abandoned folding chairs, wood scraps, broken hockey sticks and a dozen lost pucks. For at least 40 years, the dusty and chipped curling stones sat among the rafters above the hockey dressing rooms of Bellegarde's rink.
The hamlet, clinging to existence like so many other Prairie villages, was about to cash out its most valuable remaining movable asset. The curling rocks would bring in money to help keep the hockey rink going a few more years.
For a century, the curling rink has been the winter social hub for hundreds of small and disappearing Prairie villages like Bellegarde, bringing together young and old for sport and fellowship.
Saskatchewan now has about 200 curling clubs, far from the 600 of the 1960s, but laments for a fading sport in dying villages will come later. For now, Donald George, one of Bellegarde's volunteers, is sorting out how to get 32 curling rocks down from the rafters. A buyer is on his way from Winnipeg, 355 kilometres to the east. The rocks have broken handles and weigh about 18 kilograms each, so carrying them down the ladder was out.
Mr. George suggested ropes. "How about we fling 'em," I said. Bellegarde is my hometown and Mr. George a lifelong friend.
The first rock landed with a flump into the skating rink's floor, the sand soft and sopping wet from melted hockey ice. The other rocks flew in quick succession.
Outside, a pickup truck pulled up, flatbed trailer in tow. Al Thompson, a granite artisan from Winnipeg, cruises the Prairies like a curling undertaker, administering last rites to abandoned small-town rinks.
Mr. Thompson offered $75 to $125 each for Bellegarde's ancient rocks, along with 32 others that were last used around 2005. Price depended on condition and type of granite. Common Ailsa Craig, from the Scottish Isle of the same name, runs more smoothly along the ice but is vulnerable to cracking in wet conditions. Trevor stones, from Wales, are more robust, but slide more roughly.
Bellegarde had both types, some nearly pristine, others cracked. Mr. Thompson cut a cheque to the community for $6,620 - enough to fix a few leaks in the skating rink roof.
Thousands of rocks, some dating back to the early 1900s, have passed through Mr. Thompson's shop in Winnipeg. Sometimes he cuts them up to create new rocks. Often he fixes chips, polishes them and sells them. Many end up in new curling clubs in the United States, where popularity of the sport is growing rapidly in places as seemingly unlikely as Arkansas and California.
A set of new rocks starts at about $10,000. Mr. Thompson's refurbished rocks can be bought for about one-quarter the price. They're perfect for beginners curling on southern skating ice.
After several decades of decline in Canada, curling has had a resurgence, mainly in urban areas, after it became an Olympic sport in 1998. About 312,000 Canadians were frequent curlers that year, compared to 450,000 about 10 years later.
But rural Canada tells a different story. On this day's run, Mr. Thompson would pick up rocks from two nearly extinct Manitoba towns named Lauder and Grande-Clairière.
Bellegarde and Grand-Clairière share more history than the end of curling. French and Belgian pioneers led by a Catholic missionary named Jean-Isidore Gaire created the settlements in the late 1800s. Only Bellegarde could be described as barely surviving. With only 35 residents (plus a couple of hundred more who live on nearby farms), Bellegarde struggles to keep a school, post office, church, community hall and hockey rink.
Grande-Clairière once had 600 people. It is now a church and a cemetery and the ghostly outline of a town's foundations traced in a farmer's field.
"It's kind of sad. At the rink in Lauder, you could see the raccoons had ripped the walls out," Mr. Thompson said. In Bellegarde, a dead blackbird fell from the rafters as Mr. George and his young son, Coldon, loaded the last rocks.
As recently as the 2000s, Bellegarde's curling rink hosted one of the social events of the winter. The annual bonspiel combined sport, food and booze and broke up the hard winter with a week of warm socializing.
A new generation of people like Mr. George, married to a teacher and with three busy school-aged children, doesn't have time for the sport or the organizing.
Heather Mair, a professor at the University of Waterloo, embarked on an ethnographic study of small-town curling clubs in 2005. She found they were often the beating heart of small communities. Long after the last coffee shop, bar or other gathering spot was gone, people flocked to the curling rink for a drink and a visit and, sometimes, to play.
"These are just joyful family inter-generational places for activity and socializing," said Prof. Mair. "There's something special about curling because it is so accessible. There's no other sport where entire families with three generations can play together. But as these small communities go, so goes the curling club."
Prof. Mair said economic pressures killing small towns are mostly to blame for curling's rural decline, but other factors have changed since the heyday of the 1960s.
Vehicles and highways are better, so rural people travel much greater distances for everything from work to recreation. The Internet and satellite TV have created easier distractions on cold winter nights.
Mr. George, who keeps cattle and drives a fuel truck for a living, didn't spend much time looking back. The family was about to head 60 kilometres west, to Carlyle, for a barbecue hosted by a fuel supplier.
"It's the end of an era, I guess," Mr. George said. "But if we ever decide to have another bonspiel, we'll just rent rocks."