City of Fragments: Part 7

    27.  River life. They tell me the city intends to reduce the number of beaver along the river way. The same with the geese. I’m not sure why the numbers of these creatures is too large. The river gives the city not only a central focus, but also a belt of green and blue valuable for our air quality. It might remind us of the ecosystem, the interconnectedness of life forms, the organic pulse of all life. But no, the river has a less grand purpose for most of the city people. It is the location of entertainment, what we now call recreational activity, as if such activity recreated anything other than the repetitive round of harm to an already bruised ecosystem. The river is an artery, a means of renewal, and a means of purifying. It carries life with it, inside and out. And it has no objection to carrying a boat now and then, or entertaining a few swimmers, or providing a fish for a fisherman, or even carrying a bit of sludge from a sewer. The boats, the swimmers, the fishermen, the sludge multiply until the river no longer runs freely, no longer purifies, no longer, provides a healthy draught of nature for those it used to sustain along its shores. Life along the river continues, but for how long, and in what shape?

     28. Prince’s Island, home of a helicopter pad, fire pits, public washrooms, concession stand, and venue for festivals celebrating Caribbean culture, folk music, international children’s music and dance, and other indicators of multicultural health. The Island is also home to species of ducks and geese, and presumably to other small creatures that hide from public view.  On any given summer day, the island is active with kids on bikes, babies in prams, groups kicking soccer balls, picnic baskets and barbecues, boom boxes and even baseball. Some people simply sun themselves and watch others exercise. On the paths around the island people propel themselves on bikes and roller blades. Some people feed the ducks and geese or watch their children chase these same creatures.

     29. Hospitals: once upon a time, the city had a hospital just south of the city center called the Holy Cross, and another just north of the city center called The General. Both were products of the public health system Canadians enjoyed for some forty years. Both are now defunct, one gone completely, bulldozed off the face of the earth, and the other serving the needs of those who can afford to pay for private health care. Gone too is the Grace Hospital, the only women’s hospital in the city, and its premises now harbour private health care clinics. The Colonel Belcher down on 12^th Avenue S.W. still stands, but its status as a public facility is a mystery to me. Then further south on 17^th Avenue where it crosses Crowchild Trail, is the Children’s Hospital, or was the Children’s Hospital. This facility moved in 2006 to the west campus of the University of Calgary, across 16^th Avenue from the Foothills Hospital, largest hospital in the city and perhaps in western Canada. Now Calgarians have four large hospitals, two in the north west, one in the north east, and one in the south west. Those in the south east are out of luck; they can reply on Stars Air Ambulance. Or perhaps they will have a private clinic for their necessary or even unnecessary procedures. This city can afford, it seems, luxuries the health care system cannot begin to imagine.

     30. 40 years and more have I been in this city. I’ve seen changes as the roadways have filled and the concrete has spread. At one time the city ended to the north west just about at Dalhousie, and to the west just about at Bowness, and to the south west just about at Signal Hill, and to the south just about at Anderson, and to the south east just about at Bonaventure, and to the east just about at Forest Lawn, and to the north east just about at Barlow Trail and McKnight. No more. The same is true of the downtown. When I arrived, the International Hotel was the tallest building, a circular structure of perhaps twenty stories. The tallest structure was the Husky Tower. Today the downtown has been transformed into a sky-scape of tall buildings announcing far and wide that Calgary is a modern, no, a postmodern city wealthy and progressive and strong and proud. From a distance no one would know of the empty buildings in the tall downtown or of the streets empty after 6:00 p.m. except for those huddled in doorways and back alleys or of the scraps of this and that flapping along in the breeze, wrapping around ankles or sibilantly sliding into corners to rest for a while. In over 30 years the city has grown, more than doubled its population and spread like concrete kudzu in all four directions. Like kudzu, it holds the soil down; unlike kudzu, it does not provide nitrates to the soil. Calgary, the kudzu city, taking possession of the prairie and the mountain, greedily covering whatever open land in its progress. Calgary has been and continues to be a city of one face. It wants nothing more than to attract the bright and progressive and prosperous to build the head offices of the future. The future is in this city’s eye – not the past.

    31.  Natural disasters naturally avoid Calgary. Oh, the city receives a continuous buffet from west winds, and once in a blue moon (Spring 2005, for example) the Bow and Elbow rivers might rise precariously. People from away often think Calgary winters are severe, not understanding the Chinook phenomenon and the effect of the mountains to the west. To the north the wind can wind itself into a funnels now and then, mimicking the tornadoes that crash through the American mid west, but these funnels rarely travel south to Calgary. Nope, this city experiences neither earthquake nor hurricane. The nearest active volcano is eight or nine hundred kilometers away. Drought is a possibility; Calgary does not get a lot of precipitation. And so the city’s supply of water is a concern. As the snow pack melts and the glaciers recede, the result of global warming, the future for the city’s supply of water looks risky. But for the moment, this hardly qualifies as a natural disaster. And besides, the jury is out on whether global warming is natural or the result of human activity and negligence. In any case, Calgary is a pretty darn good place to live. No ice storms here, and of course the tsunami is impossible in this foothills town. About the only naturally occurring unpleasantness comes from the sky a few times during the summer. Hail stones as large as golf balls can fall from the sky, dimpling cars and maybe even breaking windows and cracking heads. In recent years, however, we see less of this, perhaps because of the seeding of clouds prevents the worst of the hailstorms from gathering full force. Calgary is naturally without disaster. Caveat: flooding does occur at irregular intervals, most recently in 2013 when the Bow and inundated much of the low-lying areas of the city causing people to leave their homes for several days.