A City of Fragments

Below are a number (fifty in all; but I will dd them piecemeal) of short ruminations on the city of Calgary, Alberta. I wrote these some years ago intending to put together a book with my friend, Laurent Chabin. The project never came to completion. Here are the fruits of my endeavour.

    1.  Saddle Dome. Oxymoron.  A city unsure of whether it is up or down.  The great monument to Calgary’s arrival among the great cities is a hockey arena called The Saddledome.  This is the holy shrine of western Canada, neither rock nor leather.  Like the city it adorns it is both elevated and sagging, between the low-lying prairie and the rising foothills.  Cowboy fantasy combines with the mythic pleasure dome of Khubla Khan just a few scant kilometers from the meandering Bow, the sacred river running down to sunny wide sections of sea-like prairie. We know of the Superdome, the Astrodome, and the Dome of the Rock, but nowhere else can you find a Saddledome. Yippee-kai-yo-kai-ye

2.  Picture a cold winter evening in downtown Calgary.  It is Sunday, just about dusk and the streets and avenues are all but empty.  The temperature is –24 with a wind chill that lowers this to flesh-freezing cold.  A single pedestrian approaches the corner of 8^th Avenue and 3^rd Street just as the light changes from green to red.  The red warning hand signals “Don’t Walk.” The pedestrian stands at the sidewalk’s edge, stiff and patient.  He (or is it she?) waits the sixty seconds or so in the numbing cold for the light to change and the stylized person indicating that it is all right to cross the intersection to appear on the light standard across the street, waits silently without a passing vehicle to rustle the cold, waits until finally the red warning hand flicks out and the green appears.  Now the person enters the cross walk. This is Calgary.  The person at the light is a Calgarian, someone assimilated to this city’s ways.  Need I say more?

 3. 1988.  The Winter Olympics come to Calgary in February and the temperature welcomes guests and athletes with a warm embrace.  The streets and hillsides are brown, and no snow comes.  The University sports security turrets in which armed men scan the surrounding streets.  Helicopters clack overhead.  The city is dressed for a party, and small white bears smile from signs and flags and people’s coats and hats.  McMahon Stadium contains marchers and torches and the Olympic Flame. Paskapoo morphs into COP – Canada Olympic Park – with luge and bobsled runs, and ski jumps to scare the novice and thrill the accomplished. Signs along major roads into Calgary inform visitors that this is the Olympic City. The University gets 18 new squash and racket ball courts, although these sports are not among the Olympic events; the Olympic Oval speed skating dome becomes a centrepiece for the University’s forward-looking reputation. As far as anyone can see in the city to the east or the west the ground is bare. This is a Winter Olympics without winter.  This is Calgary. Nothing could better signal the city of simulations than this Olympic year.

 4. And a river runs through it. From the river the city appears to rise from amidst the trees and bushes that line much of the shoreline. It is as if you can trace the evolution from primitive shore to modern concrete, from beaver and other wildlife to two-legged creatures oblivious to their origins. Once a year, the river bobs with a colourful variety of makeshift rafts that take part in an annual raft race. At other times, the river is quiet or white with ice. Take a raft down the Bow from the Bear’s Paw Dam to the Zoo.  You can’t go much farther unless you portage since below the zoo the river has a dangerous weir.  So direct your raft to shore just south of the zoo, and find yourself ankle deep in goose shit as you drag your craft to a sheltered beach.  The goose shit slides easily over your skin as your feet sink into the primeval ooze with each step.  You feel as if you are going to sink into the slime forever, sink back into the beginning of time.  Once on shore, be sure to avert your eyes from the nearby bushes from which the occasional moan and sigh will emerge. Just haul your raft on shore, pull or unscrew (did I say that?) the plugs, press down the sides to make sure all the air hisses out, fold the thing nicely, lift it into the trunk of your car, and drive away with the relief that a shower is only minutes away. The weather changes rapidly in Calgary.