In 2010, Greg Barrows was an insurance broker who wanted to be an oilman.
His home in Melita, known across rural Manitoba as the home of the giant banana, sat right in the middle of the province’s oil country. His boss at the time owned a few low-producing wells.
Barrows’ late-night internet research turned up a long-forgotten report and a probable patch of oil somehow untapped by the big players.
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“The story of oil for me is uncovering scraps that large entities overlook or don’t take the time to research,” said Barrows.
And in some way, it’s also the story of “Don’t Fence Me In: True Stories about Rural Manitoba,” a book of short, non-fiction tales about rural life, written by long-time rural reporter Bill Redekop.
The book launched Oct. 1. The Barrows story is in it.
Bill Redekop’s latest book encapsulates life in rural Manitoba and some of the entertaining hijinks that happen here.
This is Redekop’s sixth book. He has more coming, including “The Princess Auto Story,” due in 2024, according to a news release.
For 14 years, Redekop drove around the province as a rural reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, digging up the issues and stories of country life. Someone once told him he’d run out of stories in two years.
But when the paper phased out his job, Redekop was left with a list of stories yet to be told and seemingly no one who wanted them. He likened it to being told he couldn’t tell those stories, which only made him more eager to write them.
Later, Barrows would tell Redekop how he started Melita Resources; how he was told “you can’t do that,” and how he replied, “You don’t tell me that, because I’ll work twice as hard.”
“I kind of realized that’s some really big impetus for me writing this book too, I guess. I didn’t really understand it until he said that,” Redekop said in an interview with the Co-operator.
The book includes the story of a community cemetery where volunteers hand-dig graves for family members. There’s some history of Jesse James in Manitoba. There’s the longest-running polka radio show in Canada and the story of two cross-country paddlers from Toronto who landed on the shore of Hollow Water First Nation – and never left.
It features a collection of people Redekop termed the “remainers,” or people who have resisted urban migration, and “returners,” those who’ve left the city for country life. As he sees it, these are the people who make up what some academics call “post-rural” life.
The book is a selection of oddball stories that Redekop describes as a “tribute album” to the Manitoba countryside, and “a bit of a thank you” to the people who made his life as a reporter so enjoyable.
