3:13

The temple was made of concrete. One supposes that the reason it had such a long existence in the town without being torn down was that it probably would cost more than it was worth to do so. The sheer challenge of the tearing down the building might have tempted one or two of the young men about town as each generation passed, but each and every aspirant to wrecking crew chief ran up up against one unassailable fact: the building was made almost completely of concrete and took up 90 percent of the lot it sat on. That meant that the temple’s neighbors — the hotel with the town’s only real bar, and the old Magrath place, a big ranch house built early in the 1900s by a duke or earl from England who had been a big investor in the CPR — were less than 10 feet from the temple’s walls. While many of the would-be demolition ’experts’ would be willing to sacrifice the Magrath place, no one wanted to risk the bar. After all, there was nowhere else to get off sales, and Lethbridge was over a half hour away.

Still, the temple had provided a lot of late-night scheming in that very bar over the years, and one or two late-night raids had resulted. But the massive edifice survived the only real test and still held after all those boys had moved on, raised families and become the oldtimers that sat shaking their heads at the young fools wasting their time on shenanigans and muttering to themselves that they could’ve done a better job if only they’d put their minds to it.

It also must be noted that the various bar owners had a vested interest in their near-indestructible neighbour. Not only did it provide a relief valve for the Saturday night hotheads, but it also guaranteed that the zoning wasn’t about to change and the 80-year-old hotel wasn’t in danger of a case of modernization. The last thing the owners needed was someone trying to clean up the town and insisting they get that ancient pile of bricks and rotten wood up to code. The last owner but one used to insist, as he sat in the coffee shop with his cronies, that if he were ever forced to actually clean the tavern, once they removed all the layers of cigarette smoke and spilled beer, the place would likely collapse due to a lack of structural support.

Not so the temple, though. The founding family had wanted to build a stone church of imposing dimensions but had quickly found out that while the prairie of southern Alberta had a lot of random stones strew about by centuries of passing glaciers and hopeful farmers, there wasn’t a decent building block to be found and a field-stone structure would be possible only if they could convince someone to collect the stones. The farmers were more than happy to be rid of them but they had more than enough work just working the stones out of the soil year after year. No one had time or energy to start up a rock-collecting business for the sole purpose of pandering to some weird religious folk.

Concrete construction had been making news in the east, and a relative had started a concrete business in Lethbridge, and that was soon that. It took a year and a few false starts, but by the end of the second summer of construction, a gleaming white reinforced concrete structure dominated the Magrath mainstreet. And, while a dingier grey colour now, it still stands out as the most recognizable feature in an otherwise colourless town.