PINE LAKE, Alta. - In the dead stillness of the summer afternoon, when heat waves shimmer, purple clouds gather and echoing thunder heralds the deluge to come, Jamie Holtom is pulled back to the awful day 10 years ago when a tornado wrenched his two-year-old son from his arms and took his boy's life.
On Wednesday, it will be exactly 10 years since the powerful twister crested the bluff overlooking the Green Acres campground at Pine Lake in central Alberta and swooped in, killing 12 people and injuring more than 100.
One victim was two-year-old Lucas Holtom, a red-headed heartbreaker and the firstborn of Jamie and Katrina.
"Hitting the 10th does bring it back a little bit. You cannot believe 10 years has flown by," said Jamie in an interview from Brampton, Ont., where he works as a United Church minister.
"It also marks another chapter in life that makes us more distant from him. An anniversary like this will be a little more challenging for us.
"I'll wish again it didn't turn out the way it did."
Lucas was the youngest to perish when the category F3 tornado carved a 20-kilometre path of destruction through the rolling green hills and water of Pine Lake, a 14-kilometre finger-shaped body of water.
The tornado was a freak of nature, a roiling mass of moist air and heat that came in contact with a rare stream of superheated air near the ground that acted like a centrifuge, pushing its winds to cyclonic speed, a floating bomb that drifted over a fuse.
The destruction tossed trucks and trailers like toys, shredded trees and homes and ripped families apart.
The Holtoms, including five-week-old daughter Leah, were with friends Bill and Lisa Gourley and their one-year-old son Jarrod in a cabin. Jamie had performed the ceremony when Lisa, 30, and Bill were married on a sunny day in Banff almost eight years earlier and the families were still tight.
They played volleyball, the kids played on the swings. They had dinner outside, but when the rain began they moved indoors.
Then came the hail, nuggets the size of golf balls. The trailers began rocking and groaning and lifting off their supports. Then the tornado was on them, roaring like a freight train.
Instantly the campground was chaos and disaster. Dozens of vehicles, boats, boat trailers, campers and cars were thrown into air, some landing in the lake. Frantic campers had to swim to shore.
Charles Boutin, 72, stepped out of his trailer to fix a wind-damaged awning when the winds grabbed and took his life. Thomas Prior, 68, was flung around inside his trailer, sustaining a fatal blow to the head.
Phyllis Galleberg, who was then 73, had returned to pick up a few items from her trailer when the storm tossed her with such brute force a rescue worker later simply threw a sheet over her, leaving her for dead. Her daughter, Patty McNaughton, would later find her mother's lipstick case and bank card down at the water's edge.
At the Gourley cabin, the families dove for cover between the beds, adults shielding children, when the storm landed right on top and exploded the structure in a whirl of shattered glass and broken wood. Jamie had Lucas in his arms when the boy literally flew out of his hands as the storm sent everyone flying.
On the tornado went, carving through the lake itself, launching geysers of spray, a reverse waterfall, sending fish flip-flopping through the air to land on the beach like some surreal demonstration of evolution.
Bill Gourley landed with a thump near the cabin and held on for dear life onto a car as the howling winds rushed past. He found Jarrod nearby, OK, but Lisa was face down in a puddle 30 metres from where the cabin had been. Her injuries were too grievous and she died in hospital two days later. His last memory, Bill told reporters, was Lisa on top of Jarrod, shielding him from the tornado's fury.
Jamie and Katrina located Lucas some distance away. They believe they arrived in time to hear him draw his final breath.
It had taken the storm less than a minute to rip through Green Acres. When it reached the far side of the lake it chewed up more farmhouses, then continued east and, at the end of its 20-kilometre stretch, disappeared as quickly as it had formed.
The storm left campground roads and walkways impassable. Golf carts were commandeered from a nearby course to navigate stretcher cases up and out of the debris field.
Helicopters ferried out the critically hurt. Other than some two-way radio chatter, communications and cell service was overloaded and shut down. Generators were hauled in to light the scene as night fell.
The house of the Fisher family, who operated the campground, was battered and torn but the garage was intact. It became the makeshift morgue, a black tarp thrown over it.
The medial response was immediate and overwhelming. Too much so. A report in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine said ambulances raced in from as far away as Calgary, but many sat idle in a snaking lineup along an access road while surrounding areas had no ambulance service at all.
"In a nearby town, a critically ill patient had to be ventilated by bag-valve-mask overnight until an ambulance was available to transport the patient to Calgary," said the report.
Poor communication, it added, led hospitals to overreact by fully activating disaster plans, diverting ambulances, clearing bed space and calling in doctors and nurses.
"There were times during the night when each trauma bay had three doctors and three nurses waiting for casualties who never came," said the report.
Dennis Dudley, a meteorologist with Environment Canada in Kelowna, B.C., was working in the Calgary office at the time and headed to the scene with a colleague to assess whether it was a tornado or a windstorm.
When they arrived they had to park a kilometre away and walk in past doctors, emergency workers and survivors until they came over the same crest as the tornado and looked down in the fading twilight.
"We saw complete devastation," he said. "It went from chaos to silence. There were very few people left combing through the wreckage.
"You never forget. Even 10 years later it's right there."
The sheet was eventually removed from Galleberg when a rescue worker heard someone crying underneath it. Her ordeal was just beginning. She slipped into a coma that lasted for weeks. She was in hospital for two years. Her leg had to be amputated and her left elbow removed.
About 100 people were injured. But hundreds more were untouched.
In the days that followed, the scene was a welter of artificial sounds: buzzsaws, cranes, cherry pickers, and planes flying overhead. Teams probed the wreckage and divers checked the lake for survivors. The lake was closed for awhile after the septic tanks and vehicle oils turned into a fecal-chemical soup.
A teary Danny Fisher said he wasn't sure they had it in them to rebuild their campground. But they did. Ten years later, Green Acres has been transformed. There are new trees, the registration building is bigger than before, and a swimming pool has been installed.
Galleberg, now 83, lives at a care facility in nearby Stettler. Her family had vacationed at Pine Lake for 15 years before the disaster. She still goes back for the odd boat ride around the lake.
She struggles with her memory now, and the words come out haltingly when she's asked to remember that day.
"I'll always remember. I'll never forget it," she said. "The danger of everything. People going around screaming and hollering. Once in a while I dig out the books and look at them."
And then she recalls the little boy who didn't make it, and her words come out of the blue.
"I do feel guilty."
Back in Brampton, Jamie Holtom's family has grown. Leah now has two younger brothers, one seven, the other four.
Jamie and Katrina have written a book about Lucas, titled "The Gift of a Child" to chronicle their experiences with him and to remind others of the joys that can be taken away in an instant.
"It really was more for our own healing and journey," said Jamie. "It came out of death, but it's really a story about life."
As a man of God, Holtom said the tragedy shook his faith, but didn't shatter it.
"It was never about 'Is this something God did to punish us or test us?' It's a reminder there's a mystery to life you just cannot explain, but in the midst of that our faith was strengthened."
Lucas's memory lives on. Every summer the church holds a carnival for kids. Free pony rides, games and food. It's not a fundraiser. It's there to remember Lucas.
'You don't get over something like this," said Jamie. "You always wish it hadn't happened, but we've still got a great life. We have three other wonderful, beautiful kids who also remember Lucas. In some ways, he's still a part of our family."
Lucas is buried in cemetery in Brampton on a hill surrounded by trees, where the family goes to visit once or twice a year. On Mother's Day or maybe his birthday.
It's nice, said Jamie. The kids play and they talk about Lucas. "They run up and down the hill."
They hear the stories, he said.
And they remember.
