City of Fragments: Part 3

 9.            Within and without. This is a city that, with the exception of the downtown core, grows out rather than up.  From Douglas Dale to Rocky Ridge the city stretches over 40 kilometers. This is a city that thinks, and it thinks that world enough and time are within its reach, and it reaches and reaches and reaches. From the air, you can see the city stretch like some inexorable lava flow in all four directions, spreading concrete arteries and veins across a land at prairie’s edge. To the east it is as if the houses and other buildings tumble down from the foothills and sprawl like some collection of toy buildings.  To the west the structures struggle to climb the land rising to enter the mountains. To the north and south houses, roadways, and strip malls spread without hindrance. The ground, what ground you can see from two miles high, is brown with spots of glistening grey and silver water. Once in a while vermillion strikes the consciousness. Towards the middle of the sprawl is a collection of tall buildings to signal this as a modern metropolis, a city of refuge. And through the middle threads the line of a river moving inexorably east toward the rising sun, toward the level prairie and then to the states below the border and eventually to some sea that moves girdle-like around the globe.

    10.            City of Refuge. The city is a throwback. At one time cities were like nations states, governing and gathering and garnering themselves, places for the lost and abandoned and the weary and the disenfranchised. A cosmo politico. A world body nurturing its citizenry. A place of hospitality. A sanctuary. A designated area that reminded its people that the earth was round and finite and that its surface was open to everyone equally. And now Calgary is one of the two largest ports of entry into this country. Calgary moves more and more in the direction of cosmopolitanism, providing spaces for its huddled masses. It may disperse people in four directions, but it also collects people from those same four directions. And some of those people it collects are refugees from capital. The Mustard Seed, the Salvation Army, the Food Bank, Community Services remind us that the city cares for those unfortunate enough to require care and shelter. The city’s population consists of far more people who have come from away than of those who were born here. And few, if any, can claim original landed status. Still and all, as the years advance toward some glorious future cosmopolitan utopia, the population seeks and finds those of many faiths and many colours and many dimensions. The strange thing is how disparate peoples continue to form one vast voting block of blue. An irony lurks here. Difference must be differance; the change that difference might accomplish finds deferral in these days of wealth and privilege and abundance. And so the city of refuge, refuge for the acquisitive and the successful, must be vigilant or transform from refuge to refuse. Already the great refusal is in motion and the only refugees welcome are not the creeps and bums from eastern Canada, but those from anyplace where they teach you to work and to work for less.

    11.            The King Edward Hotel occupies the corner of 9^th Avenue and 4^th Street South East, and it has done so since 1906. It was the oldest operating hotel in the city until it closed in August 2004. The Eddy closed after municipal health inspectors found mould, insects, and water damage. They deemed the venerable Eddy a health hazard and so the doors closed on Calgary’s most renowned blues venue. In the old, moldering Eddy, you could hear the likes of Eddie Clearwater, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, ‘Pinetop’ Perkins, Amos Garrett, Jeff Healey, Paul James, and Buddy Guy. The music blended seamlessly with the smells of urine, beer, grease, smoke, and human life in states of sickness and health. The floor often slowed movement with its shellac of various kinds, including spilt beer, fallen food, and less savory emissions predictably oozing from the tribe of humanity seeking an ineluctable pleasure in the gloom of the Eddy’s parlor. But the music conquered. Like the city itself, the Eddy seethed with life – vagrant, degenerate, decrepit, vibrant, youthful, aged, alert, boozy, tired, and frantic life, lived on edges and lived for the body. The Eddy brought together young and old, the down and out and the upwardly mobile, street people and high rollers. Bluesman Eddie Clearwater would wear an “Indian headdress” accentuating the blending as well as the ironies of the city and its aspirations. Its emphasis on the blues housed a contradiction: the wasted heart at the center of a raw and young and talented city. Everything begins and ends in the Eddy. May it achieve a life without end, amen.

    12.            Fort Calgary is perhaps the most significant sign of the city. It does not exist. As far as I know, no fort ever did exist on this piece of land where the Elbow flows into the Bow River. Or if a fort did stand here, nothing remains but some decaying document indicating the location of a Fort Calgary. Now we have a Visitor’s center complete with display cases and theater seating some 150 persons. The displays sport the red tunics of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, artifacts from the end of the 19^th century, photographs from the same era and the early days of Calgary. The visitor can sign a guest book and choose to purchase a variety of books outlining the history of the city and the region. Outside the Visitor’s Center, to the west, stands a replica of a nineteenth century fort, the kind we used to see in countless Hollywood westerns. Edmonton has its Fort along the Saskatchewan River, and Calgary is certainly not going to be outdone. This is, after all, a city that has not existed and does not exist. It is a city of simulations. Fort Calgary serves the city’s emphasis on the old west, and it serves to proclaim this place as rich in heritage as that other city to the north. The heritage is an ersatz combination of history and fiction worthy of Sam Goldwyn.