“I just want to enter my house justified.” RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY

Sam Peckinpah came to television work with the help of Don Siegal (Invasion of the Body Snatchers). In the 1950s, Peckinpah wrote scripts for the famous television western, Gunsmoke, and he also worked on several other western TV series (e.g. Tales of Well’s Fargo, The Rifleman, and Broken Arrow). On the strength of his TV work, he got the job of directing the feature film, The Deadly Companions (1961). His second feature is Ride the High Country (1962), and it leaps far ahead of Peckinpah’s first feature effort.

From TV to feature film: Peckinpah began to gather his stock company while working in TV. Like many directors, he gathered about him a group of actors with whom he felt comfortable – unlike the actors associated with Ford and Hawks or Mann and Boetticher, Peckinpah’s actors tended to occupy secondary roles in his films. The actors include: Strother Martin, Warren Oates, L. Q. Jones, and R. G. Armstrong. All but the first of these actors appear in Ride the High Country. Oates and Jones are two of the Hammond brothers, and Armstrong is Joshua Knudson, Elsa’s Bible-quoting father.

One of the noteworthy things about the TV western and Gunsmoke in particular is the meanness of the characters. Unlike the fairly neat bad guys we see in a film like Rio Bravo, the bad guys in Gunsmoke were distinguished by their scruffiness and edginess. These were people we might associate with a film such as John Boorman’s Deliverance – hill people in the sense of the Hatfields and McCoys. The villains in Gunsmokewere as often as not ugly, dirty, unshaven, salacious, and violent. They were precursors of the Hammond brothers in Ride the High Country. These guys are immoral and lustful. They are without honour – almost completely. (At the end, Billy asks Elder, “Ain’t you got no sense of family honour,” just before the final shootout. About the only claim to honour they might have is a perverse sense of their own family solidarity.) I am speaking of the men here. These guys will even share one woman – suggesting a theme muted but nevertheless there I think: incest. These guys are, in the words of Steve Judd, “red neck peckerwoods.”

The good guys and the bad guys and the camera: the camera shoots the bad guys and the good guys differently. Much of the time we see Steve Judd, Gil Westrum, and Heck Longtree photographed from below eye level so that we are looking up at them. This is especially true of Judd (Joel McCrea). We look up to Judd for two reasons: first, he is heroic, and second, he is the kind of man one looks up to, a man of his word, honourable and straight as a poker. In the final shootout scene, the camera looks straight at the Hammonds, but it looks up at Gil and Steve as they advance toward their adversaries.

Ride the High Country

-for this film, Peckinpah had two of the genre’s most enduring stars, Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. This is Scott’s final film and it might as well be McCrea’s since he went into retirement after this film and only appeared on film a couple more times and only once in a major role. In other words, this film is very much about endings – the end of two fine actors’ careers, the end of the west, the end of life itself. Part of the effect of the film depends on the viewer knowing who Scott and McCrea are. 

Elegy

-like many westerns, Ride the High Countryis an elegy for the passing of an era (and one might add – a form). This is 1962 (when the film appears), and the decline of the western has commenced. The film carries the title, Guns in the Afternoon, in England, and this title makes the elegiac point clearly. The title, Ride the High Country also makes the point, but perhaps more obliquely; here the reference is to another country (i.e. death). Note the autumnal colours, the wintry feel of the landscape around the mining camp. This is a film about the end of the west, and it laments this ending. Something is lost when the virtues and values associated with a Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) can find no better place than a squalid mining town to exhibit themselves. This is a film about old age, obsolescence, changing times; it is also about honour and self-respect. As in traditional elegy, even nature itself mourns the passing of the hero. The final shot of the film indicates that the dying hero (he dies in an act of sacrifice) becomes one with the land itself.

The shot of Steve Judd's death is beautifully conceived. We see Judd in close-up as he fills the bottom and right of the screen. As this shot moves, Judd first looks away from the camera, taking one last look at the high country he has inhabited, and then he turns toward us and slowly disappears below the frame of the picture, leaving us with a long shot. We transition from close-up to long shot in one visual moment. What we see are the nearly leafless trees that signal the dying of the year, and then the vista of sky and mountains that signal the heavens, the sublime territory of death. Judd slips down below the visual field to become absorbed into nature itself. He becomes one with the land. Both the hero and the land are large, sublime, uncontainable, and beyond reach.

Landscape and Setting:

-we have three locations in the film: the town, the homestead, and the mining settlement. These places work in a complex fashion. The first and third – Hornitos and Coarsegold – function horizontally as one place, Hornitos being the ostensibly refined part of town and Coarsegold being the dark side of town. Both Hornitos and Coarsegold are real places in California, and both are associated with the California gold rush. In Spanish, hornitos means “little oven” and refers to above ground graves where the ground is too hard for a person to dig. We might structure the locations as follows:

a. Hornitos: this is the town Steve Judd enters at the beginning of the film. He arrives just as a festival is going on, and he is distinctly out of place. The automobile informs us that this is a town with progress on its mind. The camel race indicates just how degenerate the old west has become, as does Gil Westrum’s rigged shooting game. Hornitos is a place of banks and hucksterism. Westrum wears false Buffalo Bill hair and beard and pretends to be the Oregon Kid. He is a cheat and a fabricator. What he represents is the cheapening and fictionalization of the west. The west now exists only as entertainment, and as market hype. Steve says he does not recall the Omaha Gang or that Gil worked with the Earps in Witchita or Dodge City.

         The point is not only that Steve Judd is out of place, but also that he is old. When we first see him, he mistakenly and rather stupidly thinks the cheering people are cheering him. His awkwardness here will be contrasted with his ability out on the trail. He fits the high country, but not the town.

         We have one shot of a couple of kids peeking at what looks like a girlie show. A woman comes along and takes the boys by their ears and marches them away. This moment illustrates how efficiently Peckinpah works. What we see is not simply humourous and a throwaway. Hornitos is a respectable town where boys should not look at women who are in suggestive costumes. This veneer of respectability in the bourgeois town will later come off in the proletariat mining camp at Kate’s Place. We might also remember this when we see The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah will extend his use of children in that film, both in the beginning and at the end.

         And not only is Steve old, but he is also down on his luck. In the bank we have a close-up of his shirt cuff, and we see the bank manager’s son look with disapproval at the worn cuff. The bank manager and his son – they look nearly the same suggesting the uniformity of town life – represent the new age, money and entrepreneurship. “The days of the forty-niners are gone,” the manager says, adding that these are the days of the steady businessman. Judd has come to work for the bank, understanding that he will be transporting $250,000.00, but he now learns that the sum will be a mere $20,000.00. In actuality, he brings back from Coarsegold only about $11,000.00. The town promises much, but delivers little.

b. Coarsegold: as the name suggests, this place is rough (coarse) and primitive. It is a place devoted to the senses. Here people grub for gold and carouse in Kate’s saloon/whorehouse. This is a place that parodies conventional life. Here men live together in primitive conditions. The Hammond Brothers are a parodic family; one of them (Sylvus) even wears an apron. Here a drunken old judge represents the law; he dries out enough to give a speech at a wedding ceremony. He reminds those in attendance that this is a civil and not a religious ceremony. He also reminds everyone, including bride and groom, that a good marriage is as hard to find as a rare animal and just as hard to keep. The whole marriage ritual is parodic, an inversion of conventional and proper marriage. The ride to Kate’s place, with Elsa in her wedding dress followed by the Hammond brothers who are loudly singing “When the roll is called up yonder,” parodies John Ford and his penchant for having men sing robustly as an indication of their civilized behaviour. The wedding itself is also parodic of Ford’s penchant for ritual. Once the wedding is about to begin, we have another anomalous song; instead of “Here Comes the Bride,” we have “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” And very quickly Elsa comprehends that she is not just marrying one Hammond brother. Coarsegold is a place of excess and sin. This frontier is far coarser than the frontier we see in Ford’s films. And yes, Peckinpah has assimilated Ford so intimately, that we have a similar interest in mythic resonance.

         In Coarsegold, moral certainties are upset. Up to now we have known Steve Judd as upholder of what is right – even here, he tells Elsa, “The problem is that you were legally married.” But when it comes right down to it, he is willing to break this legality to get Elsa away. He tells Gil that they will wait for the court’s decision, but if the court decides that Elsa should stay with Billy Hammond, he will take her away anyway. His remark: “We’ll be a little short-handed,” indicates he is willing to shoot their way out. The court decision we do not see, but we know what happens because of the scene in which Gil, who has up to now given every indication that he did not care about the girl, forces Judge Tolliver to say that he does not have a license to perform marriages in California. Gil fixes it so that they can ride out of Coarsegold without incident.

         Whereas Hornitos is a place for controlled desires, Coarsegold is a place where desire has free rein. The one place might be the ego and the other place the id. Disjunction between appearance and reality is not the case in either Hornitos or Coarsegold, but it is the case at the ranch. Note the finale when Steve’s failing eyesight lets him down. He thinks he sees Elsa’s father praying, but he is mistaken.

c. the Homestead: between Hornitos and Coarsegold is the homestead, the Knudson ranch. This place works on more than one level. We first see this place from the inside – inside the barn where Elsa and her father are at work. The ranch is nestled in a beautiful valley, a pastoral land of beauty. But the Knudsons work inside, and their very expansive yard is bare and brown. Father and daughter appear oblivious to the beauty around them – or at least Joshua Knudson is. He is the patriarch, always spouting verses from the Bible. We learn, through reading the epitaph Joshua has written for his former wife, that he has driven one woman from this place in the past. He will drive one more away shortly after we meet him. Joshua is a bitter, fearful man. He engages Steve in a battle of biblical verses, and he finishes with: “into the land of trouble and anguish from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and fiery flying serpent, they will carry their riches upon the shoulders of young asses, and the treasures upon the bunches of camels, to a people that shall not profit them” (Isaiah 30:6). 

Despite all the beautiful scenery outside the house and barn, Joshua Knudson lives an insular, interior life. Much of our time here is in the dark, just as Knudson is really in the dark as to the character of these visitors. The farm appears pastoral and inviting, but it is bleak and puritanical – a place without joy.

         As middle ground, between town and mining camp, the ranch is morally testing. Here the young man begins to become something more than callow. Here Steve Judd measures well against the moral stiffness and inflexibility of Joshua Knudson. Joshua and Steve are doubles; however, Steve is a person with feeling and compassion and Joshua is a person without human kindness and compassion.

         On the return trip, the ranch takes on another dimension. Here it becomes a ritual space, the ground for heroic action. The final gunfight in which the bad guys and good guys face off against each other in the open – “just like always,” Steve says – takes place in a barren open space. The brown ground becomes ritual space in which the characters play out their mythic roles; it is an arena where warriors do battle. This is epic confrontation, shot in a manner we will see developed to the extreme in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). The western has always been a ritualistic form – rituals of confrontation in saloons, rituals of the gunfight, rituals associated with behaviour and speech, rituals of dance or of weddings. In its ritual repetitions, it echoes the traditional epic. In the final moments of Ride the High Country, the heroes’ journey comes to an end. They have rescued the girl and carried out their quest – here the quest is for regained self-respect. The treasure at the end of the quest turns out not to be gold, but to be Elsa. We might recall that early in the film, Gil Westrum remarks that it takes a lot of drinks to let him sleep at night (“It takes all the free drinks I can get just to put me to sleep at night.”), and we know that Steve Judd has lost self-respect by taking on a succession of demeaning jobs in places like Kate’s Place – bartender, stickman, bouncer, and so on. Both men come to understand that what is important in life is not money.

Three places and in-between: and so the three places, Hornitos, the ranch, and Coarsegold, serve as proving ground for moral choice. The measure of a man is available in how he navigates each place. Steve Judd just manages to survive the town. We see how anxious he is negotiating with his employers in the bank. He goes into the bathroom, pulls out his glasses, wipes his brow, and flushes before he leaves. But he pulls through. Gil Westrum survives the town by prostituting himself, by donning a costume and pretending to be what he is not. Heck survives by living aggressively. “He’ll do,” Judd says after Heck has been knocked flying in the restaurant fight. He will do because he is willing to take a beating and to stand up to one.

         Three places and three protagonists. Young Heck is between 

Gil and Steve, the one who wears red long johns and the one who wears white long johns. “The Lord’s bounty may not be for sale,” Gil says to Heck, “but the devil’s is, if you are willing to pay the price.” Then shortly after he says this, we see him in his red long johns. Heck is between devil and angel. The devil’s price, it turns out, is loss of self-respect and trust. And so on the trail, young Heck comes to see the strength and nobility of Steve Judd and the weakness of Gil Westrum. The film is about changing times and the passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Heck’s willingness to go to jail testifies to his change of heart, his learning what is important. As Elsa and Heck wait for Steve to return from checking out the ranch, Heck pulls a revolver from the pack horse’s burden and says that the “old man is taking quite a chance.” “I don’t think so,” Elsa replies, “and neither does he.” 

         Much of the interaction between the characters takes place on the trail and in evening camp. At one point, Steve tells Heck to pick up his waste – an early example of the eco-theme. Then later we see Gil tear up the marriage license and toss the pieces behind him on the trail.

Friendship:

-one recurring theme in the western is friendship. The two old guys are and have been friends for many years, and the two young people are embarking on a different kind of friendship. The two young people are the future (coming up from behind), and the two old guys are the past (on the front lines).

-Gil Westrum and Steve Judd have worked together as lawmen many times over the years. But the years have passed and now Steve is an anachronism in a changing world, while Gil has become a cynic. What matters to Steve are the old verities; what matters to Gil is money. Gil feels he is owed something for all the years he worked for various communities, putting his life on the line as a lawman. Steve feels he is owed just the $20.00 a day stipulated in his contract.

Steve: It all pointed this way, all that talk about old Doc Franklin, ungrateful citizens, what we had coming but never got paid. I knew in my bones what you were aiming for but I wouldn’t believe it. I kept telling myself you were a good man, you were my friend.

Gil: This is bank money, not yours.

Steve: And what they don't know won’t hurt them. Not them, only me!

This is the confrontation between two friends, followed by Steve challenging Gil to draw: “Draw, you damn tinhorn!” The insult, “tinhorn” (a petty braggart who pretends to be rich and famous or important – as Gil pretended to be the Oregon Kid), gets to Gil, and he drops his gun belt. Later, Steve tells Elsa that he will speak up for Heck at the trial, but not for Gil. He won't speak for Gil because he feels betrayed by his friend. He is hurt, and he reacts by being spiteful.

For his part, Gil proves his friendship when the chips are down. He rides back to the aid of Steve and the young people. Then when Steve is dying, Gil tells him that he will finish the job just as Steve would have. Steve replies: “Hell, I know that. I always did. You just forgot it for a while, that’s all.” We have here the strength of forgiveness and the trust in a friend.

Peckinpah has said that this film is all about “salvation and loneliness.” What is more lonely than the experience of death? “I’ll go it alone,” Steve says at the end. Loneliness is the condition of the trail, without a good pardner. It is also the condition of a woman such as Elsa. As for salvation, this is what characters like Elsa and Gil find. Salvation often comes at the price of sacrifice, and the one sacrificed here is Steve. The biblical quotations and resonances throughout the film not only reflect on character (Steve and Joshua Knudson), but also on the tone of the film. This is a film about last things; it is almost eschatological. To put this another way, I might return to the notion of the epic. This is a modest film with epic implications. It is about redemption, heroism, death, and loyalty – big themes. In some way, these characters must lose their lives to save their lives. Their journey, as epic journeys always do, takes them to hell and back. In the end, the hero find apotheosis.

The western and old age:

-the western is a form interested in old age. We saw this in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. But after 1960, the theme of age becomes nearly obsessive. Here is a list of film off the top of my head that deal with age:

Ride the High Country

The Wild Bunch

Monte Walsh

Will Penny

True Grit

The Shootist

A Gunfight

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys

El Dorado

Unforgiven

The Spikes Gang

My Name is Nobody

Junior Bonner

This interest in old age may explain or help explain the western’s fall from popularity. When youth becomes front and center culturally, as we see during the 1960s, then age recedes in importance. Coupled with this, other genres – especially Science Fiction and Fantasy and Horror – take up the slack left by the western. The western begins to look old fashioned, its historical contexts dated and irrelevant. Tant pis.

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.

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.

City of Fragments: Part 5

    17. The Plaza Cinema was, at one time, the town’s only art house and revival cinema. Down on Kensington, just west of 10^th Street. At one time you could go down for a midnight showing of the 3D version of Jack Arnold’s The Creature From the Black Lagoon, or you could take in Linda Lovelace at another late night showing. The early evening belonged to Bogart or Hepburn or Wayne, or to films with subtitles to indicate their artistic pedigree. Seats were wonky, and the floor was suitably tacky from long years of use and abuse. From the walls stared Chaplin, Monroe, and Brando. The small intense hall belonged to the cinema until video and DVD changed the art and revival house repertoire, and ceded the task of championing the Hollywood that baby boomers grew up with to the specialist video outlet, Casablanca, way down there in the Marda Loop. Yes, we’ll always have the Plaza. We didn’t, but then came Bride and Prejudice and A Very Long Engagement and the World’s Best TV Commercials and the cinema returned – after a fashion. The serious cinema viewer can also turn to the old Uptown and the Globe, both on 8^th Avenue. But like the other arts, the cinema finds only a tenuous foothold in this city of glass and iron. Each year, for the past few years, Calgary has mounted a Film Festival, and each year since its inception it comes and goes with little or no fanfare.

    18.  Crowchild Trail, Shaganapi Trail, Sarcee Trail, Deerfoot Trail, Barlow Trail, Blackfoot Trail – these are names that evoke the land’s past and its first peoples. Somehow trails flattened with asphalt fittingly cements the relationship between the first peoples and those who came and blithely assumed they could appropriate this land for whatever exploitative reason they might have. I daresay few Calgarians now know to whom or to what these names refer to.

    19.  Stephen Avenue Mall and echoes of Texas. I was once in Waco, and I had the experience of taking the bus into the center of town at about 7:30 in the morning. Besides the driver, I was the only other person on the bus. At rush hour. I wondered where all the people were. The driver explained that some years ago a fire devastated down town Waco. As they were rebuilding the center of town, great shopping malls sprang up like mushrooms around the periphery of the city. And so once the center was ready for reoccupation, no one bothered to reoccupy; the center remained empty. The center, in other words, did not hold. The city built a pedestrian mall to encourage the people to return, but they refused. And so when I saw the beautiful Waco down town pedestrian mall, I saw automobiles swinging to avoid pots of flowers and sculptures of various kinds. Now Calgary is not Waco in that you will find packed buses and C-trains carrying employees to work down town each business day. But come 6 o’clock in the evening or Saturday and Sunday, and the people disappear, replaced by cars that occupy the Stephen Avenue Mall. Nothing could better signify the car’s hegemony in North America than pedestrian malls made for cars.

     20. Inglewood Bird Sanctuary offers the city dweller a little taste of nature, a path that circles through forest and wetlands where small creatures flit and a variety of birds fly and nest. Ducks and geese, Red Winged Blackbirds, the ubiquitous sparrow, perhaps even a chickadee or nuthatch. The watchful eye can catch a glimpse of nature’s beauty passing by on the airways or in the tall grasses or high tree limbs. Inglewood lies between the rail line and the Bow River, a small sanctuary for human families and their feathered friends. You can drive here in your automobile or take the more leisurely route along the bike path. This small area of protected wilderness serves to remind city folk that once upon a time nature was not confined between concrete barriers of one kind or another. While walking the paths here you might almost forget that this place, like every place, is not natural; it is a garden tended by the humans who continue to think that every city needs room for trees and animals, an untended variety of flora and fauna. The catch is that this patch of nature needs a sort of negative tending; it needs vigilant protecting from the very people it is meant to serve. Nature in the service of wellness. Humans watch over this heterotopic space as if it were some precious and delicate resource in danger of disappearing. And it is.

    21.  Memorial Park and the Green Room: I guess the Green Room is gone now, but some of its patrons no doubt continue to haunt Memorial Park, and I don’t mean the library. Yes, Calgary has its counter cultures, and not all of it lies beneath the Center Street Bridge or in deep night doorways on 8^th Avenue or in abandoned buildings or dank alleyways or dark parkades. The pride of Alberta is its wealth, its health, its fit-to-be-tied normalcy. No deviants allowed. No creeps and bums, thank you. We have a patrol to check the border and keep the rats from entering this place where the good life has found a place to rest. Within the heterotopic city lies another small heterotopia, the Memorial Park. That this park with its denizens of the dark should enfold the city’s oldest library seems somehow fitting. Books and assignations among the bushes. The simulated city has, at its center, the reality of the mind and body in all its variety. Now if only the Green Room would return, bringing with it the full force of a space opened by its very enclosure. A world in a grain of sand, as it were. True friendship is the opposition this city wants to eradicate. Without opposition life continues level and bland and unheeding and quiet and smooth and unruffled and white and clear and unstained. No need for bifocals here. No need for binoculars here. One day Memorial Park will go the way of the Green Room, and with each disappearance the city is the poorer.

 City of Fragments: Part 4

     13.            Willow Park, Rocky Ridge, Scenic Acres, Mount Pleasant, Forest Lawn, Rosedale, Edgewood, Royal Oak, Parkdale, Mount Royal, Silver Springs, Lake Bonaventure, Inglewood, Sunnyside, Valley Ridge, Briar Hill, Meadowlark Park, Cougar Ridge, – these are the names of some of Calgary’s communities. The names are reminders of the city’s desire to maintain a connection to nature that either no longer exists or never existed in the first place. Where in these communities can we find forest lawns, dales, silver springs, natural lakes, oak trees, rocky outcrops, a pleasant mountain, a place on the edge of woods, briars, and so on? True, we can find slews, man-made ponds called “lakes,” small parks equipped for children, and suburbs provided with sidewalks that have no one on them. The names of communities simulate elsewhere as in the community called Tuscany. Tuscany is a reminder of this city’s aspirations to art and beauty as well as to nature. Parks simulate dales and forests and lawns and so on. Simulation is the order of the day. Simulated pastoral. The modern city replaces natural space with queer space, a space neither one thing nor the other, neither real nor artificial, neither forest nor lawn. In fact, the city claims that a forest may be a lawn and vice versa. Nifty trick. The city is all things and nothing. It has queerly named Communities to simulate the intimacy of small centers, and runs these communities like large corporations that serve no one’s interest except the corporate interest. And so we have corporate scenic acres. We find our royalty in the King’s gardens – Royal Oak or Mount Royal. We might find more honesty in the bluntly named community – Rutland Park. “Rutland” – somehow the name captures the modern city where citizens daily find themselves recipients of the shaft. Or should I say, with the short end of the stick?

   14.            Airport architecture flies through the city. Take a look at any one of the city’s many Malls. The eye detects the same pale green and simulated cedar exterior, with those little gables placed over entrances. The sense is openness and light, a sort of as-you-like-it space in which exchange is the order of the day. But the open girder, glass, and open space architecture is visible just about everywhere. Take the ubiquitous city structures known as “plus-15s.” What are they but simulations of terminal walkways, taking pedestrians from one terminal to another in an interminable round of sameness? Even the University gets into the act. The Student Union Building looks precisely like an airport waiting lounge, with that same characterless colour scheme and the geometric and lifeless benches and seats. You can find something similar in just about any foyer in the city. Check out doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, lawyers’ offices. Hospitals get into the act. Check out the foyer in the ‘new’ City Hall. Even the Olympic Plaza carries something of the standard airport geometry. And then we have the Devonian Gardens, that city center high rise forest of as-you-like-it fun that disguises its airport look with fronds and fish. The Airport Look is de rigueur for Calgary, the city on the move, the city of high fliers, the city filled with jet-setters, city of the B-52, supersonic city, airport of the future city. Calgary announces its fast-paced arrival at the future by turning itself into one grand airport terminal, complete with the malls and hygienic spaces and food courts and plastic décor and runways – everything to make things comfortable for the weary but happy traveler.

     15.            What do Bowness and Midnapore have in common? What do Airdrie and Cochrane have in common?  And what do these four places have in common? The answer is, of course, obvious. At one time, not too long ago, before the earth had lost most of its oil and stretched its sinews in the squeeze for more, each of these places was separate from Calgary, communities we might almost call rural. Midnapore had its grain elevators, landmarks distinct from anything in the nearby city a few kilometers to the north. Bowness had its main street with the Hotel that served local clientele, and the crew who owned the choppers lined up outside.  The disappearance of these communities as separate entities is metonymic of the postmodern phenomenon of disappearance generally. As the city spreads more disappearance takes place. Midnapore and Bowness once stood beside Calgary; now they are inside the belly of the beast. They occupy vacant space, space that effects an emptying of that which was once full. The same is not precisely true of Cochrane and Airdrie, but the writing is on the wall, as they say. Calgary gobbles up nearby places voraciously. And sadly, places such as Cochrane and Airdrie rush to accept the embrace of the city. As the city moves towards them, they too move toward the city gobbling up pasture and field like little Pac Men out to win a mug’s game. Look out Okotoks and maybe even High River, and – Heaven forbid – Balzac and Crossfield. Concrete floods the plains as surely as the oil seeps from the ground in this country of high rollers and fancy urban cowboys.

    16.            The arts in Calgary have a pretty good time. The Jack Singer Concert Hall and the Epcor Center and the Martha Cohen Theater provide a home for the arts, but the city also boasts the Jubilee, the old Garry Theatre, the Pumphouse, One Yellow Rabbit, Loose Moose, the various University theatres, plus theater and concert space in such places as Fort Calgary, the Planetarium, the Glenbow Museum, Mount Royal College, and the Bow Valley Center. The city has dinner theater, children’s theater, modern theater, experimental theater, musical theater, and theater sports – all sorts of theater. But theater is not the only art in town. The city has private art galleries, and of course the impressive Glenbow Museum and the less visited Nickle Art Museum. And then there are the festivals – the Children’s Festival, the Folk Festival, the Jazz Festival (now defunct), and various ethnic festivals celebrating the city’s multicultural community. The city has a philharmonic orchestra, an opera company, and ballet. Every so often the Saddledome hosts the likes of the Rolling Stones or Rod Stewart. The Eagles once played McMahon Stadium. And of course some of us remember the Festival Express! A number of cafes and bars provide musical entertainment of a variety of kinds, from blues to jazz  to world beat. Ravi Shankar and his daughter came to town, and so did Roger Whittaker. Various community halls play host to local artists such as Oscar Lopez or Tim Williams. Movies are sometimes made in or near the city. Recently a well-known celebrity couple conceived their first child here. This is a city to reckon with when it comes to the arts. This is a city sure to raise a successful Canadian Idol or two. And I haven’t even mentioned the Stampede or the several impressive sculptures placed strategically in or near the down town core. Nor have I stated the obvious: cowboy music is easy to hear in this city. Bookstores such as McNally Robinson (now no more), Top Shelf, and Pages have readings by local and national authors. Even international authors come to town now and then. The University, through the Markin Flanagan Programme, brings in well-known writers such as Alberto Manguel, Rudy Wiebe, and Timothy Findlay. The city is abuzz with artistic activity of one kind and another.

   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.

A City of Fragments: Part 2

     5.            Jaffe’s Books, Golden West, Bob’s Books. Fair’s Fair, Hillhurst Used Books, Author, Author, Twice Sold Tales, Well Read Books, Aquila Books, Annie’s Book Company, Aaron’s Books, The Wee Book Inn, The Book Shoppe, The Owl’s Nest, Wordsworth’s Books.  The city has always had an abundance of second hand bookstores.  The people who run these shops smile and argue and haggle and talk endlessly about the likes of Barbara Cartland, James Michener, Max Brand, Tom Clancy, James Herriott, and the Oprah Book Club.  Some of the stores have evening readings by local authors and would-be authors. They have frequent buyer cards to encourage the purchasing of good books. They sell books at nearly half price. They shelve their books with a view to helping the prospective reader find Romance novels, Horror fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Westerns, Classic Literature, Thrillers, Travel Books, Cook Books, Self Help or New Age books, Art books, Humour, Children’s Books, Literature and so on.  Some even offer a beverage and biscuit to make the book experience relaxing and inviting. I can think of one of these stores that harbours a fluffy cat that purrs for the customers. A good book deserves a comfortable setting. Calgary, no doubt, has a well-read citizenry.

     6.            Heritage Park: Calgary is a city with a past.  What city isn’t?  The past here includes a replica of a paddle-wheel steamer from British Columbia, the Moyie, a small carnival ground with rickety rides such as the merry-go-round and the ferris wheel, a prairie sod house that may have come from Saskatchewan, trains that passed this way a century and more ago, perhaps even carrying royalty, chairs and tables made from dead animals, an oil derrick reminding us of the gusher days, an Opera House removed to this city park from Canmore, Alberta, and the wooden walls of a fort than never existed on this site or any other for that matter.  The various houses and stores, the blacksmith shed and newspaper office, the church and hotel, and the school and Mounted Police post come from various places about this province. The past here is a regional past. Calgary’s past is something of a fantasy, a made-up history that serves now and then for mise en scene in a Hollywood film.  The visitor can enjoy ice cream from another historic town, Cochrane. The heritage celebrated here is the heritage a visitor can buy for a few bucks. This return to the past is yet another simulation among myriad simulations. Even the grand steam engine no longer runs on the energy from burned coal or wood; the majestic train with its chugging engine is nothing other than a huge toy simulating a former grandeur. Tickets please, and all aboard to a past that never existed.

     7.            Skyline: Calgary has big sky and from one of the city’s several hills – Signal Hill or Nose Hill, for example – you can see the city in panorama, a great vista of sky above, sometimes wild with cloud, sometimes intensely clear and blue, a conglomeration of tall buildings centering a huge sprawl of roadways and smaller buildings and houses as far as the eye can see.  To the east the horizon just keeps receding until it disappears somewhere on the faraway prairie; to the west the line of Rocky Mountains marches from north to south beckoning weekend revelers. This is Calgary. It could be Houston or Dallas or perhaps some other Midwestern American city, Denver perhaps.  It could not be Winnipeg or Halifax or even Edmonton. Maybe the dramatic arch that signals the Chinook every so often, especially in winter, is the distinguishing feature. What might this tell us? The Chinook brings change, blowing away one barometric reading and replacing it with another, for a few moments. Then comes the return. The wind in Calgary signals not so much change as recurrence. Fair stands the wind for stability, stolidity, and standardization in Calgary. Let the four winds blow, let them blow, let them blow. Plus ca change, as they say. The only thing we know for certain about Calgary is that it will remain staunchly conservative amid the winds of change. The skyline announces nothing tumescent this way comes.

    8.            Hot Air and Balloons: in the later 1980s and early 1990s, Calgary went hot-air-balloon mad.  On any given day the sky above the city sported familiar-shaped and colourful hot-air balloons, some advertising local Real Estate companies or other businesses, some in a variety of shapes from ice-cream cones to houses, to cars to dragons. The phone book Yellow Pages rode the sky as did water coolers and gasoline pumps. If my memory does not misfire, then I think one was in the shape of a Maurice Sendak Wild Thing.  Some days the sky was filled with these flying baskets, and when they came low you could hear the sound of the gas as it warmed the air and caused the balloons with their dangling cargo to rise slowly and gracefully into higher regions.  The sky was a carnival where, by day, the dance and drift of balloons gave salute to a city dry with money and high on economic success. The balloons were a reflection of the city’s spirit, buoyant, colourful, lightsome, creative, and high-flying. For three or four years these dandy flags of freedom floated above the city’s skyline, and then they were gone. Their disappearance signaled not a downturn in metropolitan fortunes, but rather the mercurial vagaries of fashion.