Sept 3… the modern and prehistoric
You’ll notice the blog will play a bit with chronology, a virtue of the fact that there is much to reflect on but not always time in the day (or access to WiFi).
So, one week ago today we left Banff, drove through Canmore (I like Canmore… all the beauty of Banff without taffy and tour buses) and out of the Rockies.
Anyone that’s driven that stretch of highway knows how magnificent it is, jagged outlines of mountain and sky giving way to longer meandering ridges of softer stuff and finally relaxing into rolling hills. I felt quite proud of myself that I only drifted into the rumble strips once or twice (or three times) along the way! Shauna of course felt quite differently. The kids thought it felt neat. “Do that again Dad!”
Some 30 minutes out of Canmore, just I’m contemplating just what a lovely place the world is, and how much I like Alberta I see the welcome sign for Calgary with this tag line, ‘Heart of the New West”. Now, I like Calgary, been the the stampede and everything and considering awe inspiring quality of the terrain about us I was just about ready to grudgingly agree (generally I’m opposed to such bold claims - I think the new BC license plate “The Most Beautiful Place on Earth” is just presumptuous and ignorant and most BCers I know agree…anyone want to start a petition to bring back ‘Beautiful British Columbia’?) and then I saw IT. The Sprawl.
The Sprawl stained the ridges and valleys the whole of the horizen, just as I imagine plaque encrusts and blackens the interior walls of a perfectly lovely aortic artery. It seemed to stretch out from Calgary like long groping fingers stretching with lust toward the beauty of the mountains, but failing to capture it and settling down to regain strength wherever they happened to fall. I’m talking of course about the suburban sprawl lurching out of Calgary, and it is really, I mean really ugly. It was cookie cutter sameness, without any of the sweet reward. Why do we design things like this? Why do we sell land to people who design things like this? Did a group of people in Calgary wake up one day eight years ago and think, “Wouldn’t it be great if we mass produced sameness without character or design or beauty or attention to landscape and filled in the whole plain from downtown to the Rockies?”
If this is ‘The Heart of the New West’ then the new west is in some serious need of cholestoral meds, cause this sucker just ain’t healthy.
So, we’re pushing right through Calgary and heading for Dinosaur Provincial Park in hopes of seeing some beauty caught in the mud of eons old marshes.
