City of Fragments: Part 6

    22. The Petroleum Club: a bastion of male privilege and evidence of the city’s wealth. The Petroleum Club opened on June 28, 1949 – nearly 70 years ago. I have never been inside this testament to fossil fuels and the money they dredge up in all that gooey sand, but I suspect it is suitably tawdry. I suspect too that these past several years have put a frown on the faces inside seeking a break from the pressures of hard times. 

    23. Sunsets. Someone once told me that Alberta does not have sunsets. This city is impoverished in the sunset department. The sky just dims to a dishwater grey before the sun disappears into dark behind the long line of mountains to the west. I think this description is supposed to be metonymic. The city has no colour; it just darkens down as evening comes. What many cities offer – a vibrant bustling and even weird collection of night people gathered in the city center – is missing here. As darkness slowly passes over the city, the downtown empties; its streets quickly lose any sense of activity beyond the sinister sort that sees shadows along walls but nothing material to cast these shadows. The city becomes naked. The streets should be wet from rain. The center cannot hold; it loses its life and finds a half-life. This account of a hollow city center is accurate but unfair. Calgary does have sunsets, spectacular light shows that scurry in turmoil on the western horizon. At times orange and vermillion and purple and lavender line the spaces behind between or before heaven-wracked clouds angry in granite grey and stormy swirls. Calgary’s sunsets can be as dramatic, even as histrionic, as any anywhere. What remains to see is whether the vibrant and energetic evening sky is metonymic of the city itself. Does this city run and whirl and dance with colour and weirdness and spirit and community and good will?

 24. Calaway Park opened in 1981. Like so much of the city’s visible space, this entertainment center for the whole family expresses a wannabe sensibility. This gaudy carnival just west of the city limits, occupying what once was fertile land growing grain and feeding cattle, aspires to the condition of Disney. Its haunted house and log ride and other whipsnade rides and attractions emulate the more famous theme parks to the extreme south in coastal Los Angeles. One would not be surprised to see the shortest giant in the world standing shoulder to shoulder with the tallest dwarf in the world, or to find swirling teacups just outside Main Street Canada. A haunted house of sorts is one feature of the Park, and the log ride has its intertext in Anaheim. The Park does not have a Main Street, for the simple reason, perhaps, that Main Street Canada does not exist, just as so much else that is Calgary does not exist. Had this country a Main Street, it would most likely be in Dog River, Saskatchewan, not in Calgary or in Calaway Park. And what does ‘Calaway”mean? Out here we know what “thataway” means, but what about Calaway? Creators of this park tell us that Calaway signifies “away from Calgary,” I guess this means away from the big city with its hustle and bustle and consumerist barking from block to block and from billboard to billboard. And so it is most appropriate that adjacent to Calaway Park we have a large RV dealership, a pasture of highway homes eager for the open road, and next to this the Great Albertan Barbecue, a backyard away from the backyard. All of this – Calaway, the RV dealership, the Great Albertan Barbecue occupy what once, and a once not long ago, just a few short years, was fertile field, growing wheat for the nation or fattening beef on the hoof for the real backyard barbecues. Now on this land that once provided food for the masses, we have a retreat from the city for the masses, a retreat that simulates the very city that it seeks to provide a retreat from. Calaway is, in other words, just another way of saying Calgary – Calgary away from Calgary. There must be someway out of here, the joker says to the thief, but we know that neither of them can find relief.

       25.  City playgrounds are everywhere scattered about the city, even in the downtown core. The speed limit is 30 kilometers an hour through playground zones, and high wire fences shield the playground and its small denizens from passing cars. Small children cannot leap these fences, but then again small children are rarely in the playgrounds. These special places for the city’s children more often than not are empty, providing yet another metonymy for the city as a whole. This is a city with land aplenty for its citizens, and yet it somehow remains strangely vacant. City fathers decided to take one of its former citizens seriously and build it, assuming that having built it, they would come. Vain belief. Instead of children and young parents, the playgrounds are host to vistas of waving dandelions. We have here a prognostication. Empty playgrounds portend empty lives. This is a city empty in its fullness. Its children are marshalled into leisure centers and museums and theater venues, or they are left to find their way on the streets and alleys emptied of feeling. All play is organized as is all freedom in a city that sleeps most of the time and dreams of things beyond desire’s reach.

       26.  Driving in Calgary is, they say, reminiscent of the old west, the old west of our mythic memory. It is a Remmington depiction of the end of the trail. It is a constant stampede, a race to get anywhere but here. Drivers whoop it up like cowboys home from the cattle drive; they shift lanes, dodge in and out, slide round curves and corners with reckless aplomb. Roads slide into one another without warning, with no merges, and fewer verges. Roads lie on the solid ground and fly over the river on extended girders. The city moves over for roads. The city is a labyrinth of roads taken and taken again by the crazed driver who cannot find a destination. The huge IKEA Store in the southwest, just off Deerfoot Trail sits in full view, tantalizing drivers who circle and circle but cannot reach their destination. Roads define the city, and the city retreats for roads. Take for example, 16^th Avenue where for 10 or more blocks houses and businesses established for years gave way to the insistence of concrete and white lines. Who remembers the old Rosedale Cleaners on the southeast corner of 16^th Avenue and 4^th Street, N. W., setting for a Corey Hart video? Long gone, although this venerable landmark existed for some 60 years and more. This is a city that caters to cars, and yet has roads made for the simulated driving of the video game. Many in the city have an alternate name for Deerfoot Trail: Suicide Alley. The infamous ring road has been years and years in the making. Canada’s Number 1 Highway moves through prime real estate. Even the old Highlander had to go. Cars, cars everywhere and yet not a parking spot in sight. So many cars; so few parking spaces. But in a land rich with oil, the car is king. From cattle king to car king. King of the road. King Car is the monster we cherish.