Toil and trouble brewing at witch’s hut

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This article was published 22/07/2015 (4113 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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That witch in Kildonan Park should be brewing up a spell to make Jim Zacharkiw’s arthritis and bad back a whole lot better.

She owes it to him.

For the past decade, the 64-year-old retired parks worker has put in more than 3,000 hours tending to the witch, to the entrapped Hansel and Gretel, to the giant spider and all the other creepy and colourful denizens of the witch’s hut.

This summer, Zacharkiw is doing it all by himself.

“I love when the kids walk in,” Zacharkiw said Monday. “I enjoy it — I like the kids. I get 10 to 15,000 visitors a summer. I try to keep it open until mid-October.”

Zacharkiw is a volunteer and gets nary a penny for all those hours.

Until this year, he said, the city hired post-secondary students as Kildonan Park ambassadors, and they were able to help him operate the witch’s hut for 56 hours a week. It was open every day for eight hours.

“That got cut from the budget,” he said. “They would walk around and meet and greet people. It started at 20 students years ago, then down to 14, then 10, and last year, eight.”

Alas, none this year.

So Zacharkiw has had to cut the hut’s hours to 20 hours a week, from 1 to 5 p.m., Thursday through Monday.

He hopes to keep on doing it for a long time yet: “It’s all health. If my health is good, and they (the city) don’t have anyone else, I’ll volunteer.”

A city spokeswoman said no one should worry about the hut’s future.

“There are no plans to close the witch’s hut at Kildonan Park. If the volunteer that currently works there can no longer volunteer, we would look for new sources of volunteers,” the city official said.

The hut was a gift from the province’s German community to mark Manitoba’s centennial in 1970, said Zacharkiw, who has performed maintenance, painted, fixed the fence and encouraged the kids to feed corn to the ducks in the adjacent Lord Selkirk Creek.

He can talk about the artists, architects and sculptors who had a hand in the intricate design, including a diorama that tells the story of Hansel and Gretel’s fateful encounter with the witch — pay attention, kids, it’s a cautionary tale.

Peter Langes, John Nelson and Elfriede Berger are among the people with skills who saw the hut as a labour of love. “Technically, it’s the Fairy Tale Cottage,” Zacharkiw confided, though, it’s universally called the witch’s hut.

(As if anyone would argue with the witch.)

Upstairs, where lurk the witch and her evil-looking cauldron amid critters boding ill for those who come too near, look up, look way up, and you’ll see something really, really scary.

“That spider is famous,” laughed Zacharkiw. “People will come in and say, ‘Do you still have that giant spider?’ “

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca