"New Calgarian"
Rough scripts for a series of CBC Radio segments.
Copyright 2003 Scott Anderson.1. Intro/Housing
My name is Scott Anderson. I moved to Calgary last summer when my wife landed a job at the university. We hail from Vancouver but came here from Toronto, where we spent six short months after a two-and-half year stint living and working in Berlin. I've never lived in Alberta but I do have a family connection - my father was born in Scandia, a bleak, windswept little outpost of tough, taciturn Swedes, and grew up in Brooks.
I'm very ambivalent about our move to Calgary. Not everyone who comes to Calgary is making a pilgrimage on their knees to the Kingdom of Ralph, you know. Some of us move here for jobs. Some of us move here because our spouses have jobs. Some of us are not entirely happy about it. And there are more of us than you'd think. You should hear us when we get together over a beer.
Calgary is not a bad place to live, necessarily. It has its good points. There are certainly worse places. But it's not exactly paradise. And there are certainly things worth complaining about. The way I see it, these diatribes are a necessary counter to the mindless civic boosterism that so poisons public discourse in this town.
I'm not going to whine about the weather ("it's a dry cold…" I hear you say) or the lack of green-coloured vegetation or having to wear a cowboy hat during Stampede - I expected all that. And to be fair, a percentage of my complaints aren't really about Calgary, but rather the whole North American model of suburban living, though it's taken to ludicrous extremes here. Frankly, I'd rather have stayed in Germany for a few more years. I enjoy density and chaos.
Calgary doesn't feel like a city to me. It feels like a small town surrounded by huge suburbs. Huge, featureless, "new communities" with strangely meaningless, generic names, metastasizing uncontrollably across the prairie. And Calgary appears to be filled with great numbers of wholesome, polite, decent, pleasant, earnest, law-abiding, hard-working, family-raising, civic-minded small-town folk, which probably explains my recurrent Pod People nightmares. I'm still accustomed to the coarse incivility of the Berliner.
There is of course downtown, which I've visited a few times now. It is a strange land of large unattractive concrete buildings where people talk of nothing but money and oil.
When we arrived last summer we began looking for a house anywhere that could vaguely be described as urban. (I would have preferred an apartment but the condo fees are outrageous and we have this little problem called a two-year-old daughter.) What's my definition of a hip, trendy, "inner-city" neighbourhood in Calgary? Any place where you can plausibly walk to more than one coffee shop. More than one. Which districts fit the bill? Kensington, Mission, and maybe Inglewood depending on how you define coffee shop.
We were lucky to have found an affordable house in Hillhurst. (It was only affordable because it's tiny and sits on a corner so every time it snows I have to shovel about 300 feet of sidewalk, but I digress.) We can walk to more than one coffee shop. I would have gone insane anywhere else.
I kill myself laughing whenever I hear someone describe our neighbourhood as "inner city". We've lived on the south side of Chicago and in Washington DC. This is not my understanding of "inner city". There's no gunfire and you have to get in your car and drive several miles when you run out of crack.
Enough about the inner city. What is with all the horrible suburbs? I simply do not understand the average Calgarian's belief that you need at least one bathroom and a thousand square feet per person, plus a godforsaken SUV, to meet the minimum standards for living properly.
Lucky for us, I suppose. If everyone wanted to live in a small house close to downtown we'd be paying Vancouver prices. We three are perfectly happy in our 750 square foot wartime bungalow. It feels delightfully snug. It's actually smaller than our last apartment in Berlin, if you don't count the basement that we're slowly finishing. And we can walk to everything.
Every Saturday I buy the Calgary Herald and read it in a coffee shop - that I walk to - while my daughter sleeps in the jogger. When I'm finished I leave it in the coffee shop because I don't want an Asper-owned paper soiling my home - like any good liberal expatriate, I get the Globe & Mail. Ostensibly I buy the Herald for my increasingly fruitless weekly scan of the job ads, but I also derive a particularly sick thrill from the New Homes section. Mostly it's just propaganda for the corporate genero-home industry, but every so often they run these fabulous profiles of first time buyers. Inevitably, it's a young heterosexual couple who've bought a brand-spanking-new garage-in-front number in some just-add-water subdivision sprouting up from the treeless plain.
One profile had me actually gagging and spitting Americano down my shirt front: 22 and 26 years old, they bought because they didn't want to waste money renting. 1500 square feet plus a "bonus room" above the garage was maybe a bit tight for two, they said, but enough for a "starter home". And their new neighbourhood, somewhere west of the ski jump towers at COP, was "really central". Central? It's not central. It's only central if your points of reference are B.C. and Saskatchewan. Oh my god. I couldn't believe my eyes. At 22 I was thinking about (a) why couldn't I get laid more often and (b) what other cities around the world could I travel to and live in. I was still thinking about (b) at 26. These two are buying a cookie-cutter house on some barren moonscape and will spend the next decade slowly filling it with higher-end Ikea furnishings and housewares.
I was almost thirty-eight when we bought our first and only house - right here in Calgary - and I'm still appalled by the commitment.
2. Driving
Talk to anyone who's moved to Calgary recently, and sure enough, they will soon begin complaining about the driving. I'm not going to bitch about all the SUVs because that's just too easy, and everyone else is complaining about them anyway.
I have three main points:
i) For the first month or two, you giggle every time you see a "Trail." But then you sort of get used to it. If you're familiar with British English, however, you'll need at least a year to stop laughing at Shaganappi Trail - the literal translation of "Shag-a-nappi" is "Screw-a-Diaper". Actually "Screw-a-Diaper Street" isn't the literal translation, but it's the closest thing to it that I can say on the radio.
ii) What is the deal with school zones? People ACTUALLY SLOW DOWN TO 30 KM/H EVERY TIME THEY COME TO A SCHOOL OR PLAYGROUND. And the schools and playgrounds all seem to be located on major arteries, at the rate of one per block, so driving anywhere in the city involves constant acceleration and deceleration and endless near-miss rear-end collisions.
The first month I was here I gave up trying to figure out where all the school and playgrounds where and drove at a constant 30 km/h. Everywhere. Even crossing the Crowchild bridge, 30 km/h, just in case there was a playground down there on the river bank somewhere.
Near where I live there is this incredibly desolate, miserable, exposed, wind-blasted, shadeless playground. In six months, passing it twice daily, I have seen exactly one child playing there. But every damn car religiously lays on the brakes and crawls along at 30.
You'd think that as the parent of a highly mobile and extremely disobedient two-year-old, I'd be thrilled by the blind obedience of Calgary drivers. But I'm not. I can't stand it. This is not how you drive in a city. Where is the aggression, the disregard for the welfare of others? In any other place I've lived, school zones just mean there's a slightly higher probability of hitting a kid, and a slightly higher fine if you do. If my child grows up believing that cars stop automatically, she won't last a minute in Montreal, New York, Paris or, god forbid, Rome.
iii) Which of course segues to the subject of those sweet, trusting Calgary pedestrians who CROSS THE STREET WITHOUT ACTUALLY LOOKING FOR CARS. Do they think the Hand of God is going to protect them? Look down for one second to change the radio station or fiddle with the defroster, and the next thing you know the BACK of someone's head is swimming across your windshield. Or possibly coming through your windshield. The BACK of someone's head. It's unbelievable.
The worst part of town for this is 4th Street in Mission. There are so many blinking-light crosswalks in your field of view that you can't tell which one is blinking, and the pedestrians just smack the button and launch themselves off the curb without any interest in the possible presence of onrushing metal. I had two near-misses on that street in my first two weeks here.
Now you'd think that natural selection would have ensured the extinction of the Calgary Pedestrian many years ago, but no, they have endured thanks to the absurdly respectful Calgary Driver, and continue to flourish in this exotic, unnatural hothouse environment of road-going hypercaution and hypercourtesy. It's true, Calgary drivers not only stop for pedestrians crossing the street, they stop for pedestrians potentially considering the possibility of possibly crossing the street. Walking down a sidewalk, if your foot creeps to within twelve inches of the curb, you'll hear squealing tires within a second. You turn back, startled, and the good-natured citizen who's just engaged his anti-lock brakes and nearly deployed his airbag in the panic stop is cheerfully waving you across the street that you had no intention of ever crossing.
Calgary is an awful city for jaywalking. You stand ready, waiting for a gap, then time your run so that you'll cross behind the bumper of the passing car. But no, the driver clamps on the binders and skids to a halt directly in your path. It's too late, you've got your momentum up, and the next thing you know you're cartwheeling across the hood, glaring through the windshield as they cheerfully wave you past.
In theory, Calgary Pedestrians and Calgary Drivers could live forever in happy symbiosis, hidden away in their little evolutionary backwater, but of course the world is a big, porous place. Not every driver in Calgary is a Calgary Driver. Some are tourists. Some are New Calgarians. Some will probably hit you if you leap out at them without warning.
Now I both assert pedestrian rights when on foot and respect pedestrian rights when behind the wheel, but I do not step in front of a vehicle before making eye contact with the driver. Ever. That said, Calgary is a refreshing change from Europe, where you take your life in your hands every time you set foot in a crosswalk.
I also have three minor points:
i) Merge lane paralysis. It's an acceleration lane, not a creep-along-nervously-until-you-run-out-of-room-and-then-stop-and-wait-twelve-minutes-for-a-big-enough-gap-to-open lane, for god's sake.
ii) There's a very weird attitude towards cyclists here, a peculiar combination of dorky politeness and redneck hostility. Once I was out with a couple of others, riding two abreast on a quiet back road near Springbank. The driver of a passing SUV, doubtless returning to her 8,000 square foot estate home, rolled down the window and yelled "That's irresponsible!" at us. Irresponsible? She actually said "irresponsible" and did not make an obscene hand gesture. I did not know how to react - normally the driver shakes his mullet, gives you the finger and screams "Get off the road you goddamn faggot!" You yell back "Breeder!" or "Have a nice day!" depending on whether or not the gun rack is loaded, and that's that. I was speechless.
iii) And I simply die laughing every time I hear those stories about the fatalistic driving of rural Albertans, of whom at least 7,000 are killed in traffic accidents every year, hurtling down ribbons of ice at 200 km/h in their ancient pick-up trucks, without seatbelts, never stopping at stop signs because in twenty years on these roads they've never seen another car coming this way, just waiting for their grim Lutheran deity to reach down and swat them across the frozen prairie like a gigantic four-wheel-drive tumbleweed. It's Calvinist predestination, pure and simple: either God means for me to die in a flaming wreck, or he don't. Ain't no reason to change my drivin' habits.
3. Shopping
If you've come here from a proper city, you don't want to run into any of your fellow exile friends at Safeway, because you'll spend the next half hour whining about how you have to do all your shopping there.
It's true, there is a serious lack of decent little neighbourhood grocers and delis and fruit and vegetable stores in Calgary. Every other city I've lived in has them by the score. Instead of picking up something for dinner while walking home from work, you drive several miles to a huge grocery store, stuff your minivan or SUV full with 800 lbs of frozen food and drive home again. Then you load it all into a basement freezer, which every Calgarian owns.
Want a little variety? Try Co-op instead of Safeway, or Safeway instead of Co-op. If you're tired of white-bread ranch cookin', head on over to Superstore for some ethnic diversity.
And OH MY GOD are there any bakeries here? Other than the German bakery in Bridgeland and a couple of boutique bakeries near 17th Avenue, what is there? Just rack upon rack of Wonder Bread and stale baguettes in your local giant grocery store.
I need to say something more about freezers, the appliance without which you apparently cannot live in Calgary.
We lasted six months, but then we finally broke down and bought a small freezer and parked it downstairs. A week later, in Safeway, I was cheerfully and helpfully directed to a "buy one get one free" special on double packs of whole fresh chickens. Who could resist four whole chickens for fourteen dollars? (Apparently this is not the same thing as a two-for-one special - you couldn't just get one at half-price.) So I bought them, albeit ironically. Hey, I feel like a real Albertan now - I've got four dead animals frozen in my basement!
A brief digression here: we didn't know what to do with the things. Our generation thinks of chicken as little gelatinous, rectangular blobs of boneless skinless protein, to be chopped up for pasta, stir fries or curries. We are completely dumbfounded by the prospect of roasting an actual whole chicken, which looks disturbingly like a dead, gutted, plucked, headless bird, which of course it is. I had to consult The Joy of Cooking before touching the things.
Anyway, back to freezers. A few months earlier, growing weary of our ancient, chronically frosted refrigerator, we made a half-hearted attempt to buy a freezer and stopped by a certain home-improvement mega-store. We began poking around the appliance section. The sales guy approached and launched into his spiel. We wanted the smallest, cheapest freezer possible, even as small as the tiny 3 cubic foot chest model that would hold no more than a litre of ice cream, six cans of orange juice, eight boxes of microwave pasta and one bag of shrimp. What more could one possibly need to freeze? Oh no, he said, you can't have too much freezer, and those new vertical doors are great because things don't get buried and forgotten. We need to set the scene for a moment: the alienating expanse of a big-box store, and a salesman who is not a small man. I don't want to be cruel about it, but he looked disturbingly like "Fat Bastard" from the Austin Powers films. Why, he said, at home he has a five, a ten and a twenty-five cubic foot freezer. Forty cubic feet of freezer space! Last year his wife cleaned out the ten footer and found an entire frozen moose he'd shot five years before and completely forgotten to eat. Forty cubic feet of dead, frozen wildlife! At this point my wife is backing away in fright, her mouth locked in a silent scream. Me, I'm rooted to the spot, held in sick fascination, wondering just how much meat this guy eats in a day, and just how much waste he produces. Since we were close to the plumbing section I wanted to ask if he'd installed an oversized sewer pipe to handle the load.
4. Looking for work
One of the least enjoyable aspects of moving to a new city is finding a new job. I've done this a few times now, in Chicago, Vancouver and Berlin. Now I'm trying to do it in Calgary, and it's not fun.
Alas, I have the great misfortune of having worked the quintessential late 90s job - web designer. I am now about as useful and employable as a Cape Breton coal miner, except that I am probably not eligible for a federally funded retraining scheme. There must be at least 8,000 of us living in cardboard boxes in downtown alleys, hanging out little signs, "Will HTML for Food."
The IT market is hopeless, but there's a cash flow crunch looming on the home front and I don't have time to retrain as a rail conductor - 1,000 new jobs in the next 5 years says the SAIT ad! - or diesel mechanic, so I've been applying for anything and everything, no matter how over-, under- or mis-qualified I might be: general assistant at a self-storage joint, parts counter guy for an auto dealer, call-centre drone, etc. After a few demoralizing months of this, the phone company called back.
So on a bitterly cold January morning I found myself pedaling to the Telus Tower, where I'd been summoned to appear for a "pre-employment testing session" intended to determine if I was "likely to be successful" working in a call centre. (Before this I was all set to sign on as a bike courier, a job I'd had once in Vancouver, but the experience of riding downtown at twenty-five below left me feeling physically ill.) Past the asinine corporate motivational slogans in the lobby - spirit... teamwork... innovation... pride... - I chattered, pressing my numb, bloodless hands to my frostbitten earlobes.
It was predictably humiliating. The thirty-odd people in the room were divided evenly between pimply community college graduates and lumpy middle-aged losers wearing Jeff Gordon NASCAR jackets, save for the guy sitting next to me who, by virtue of his goatee and black turtleneck, I took to be a similarly out-of-work former web designer.
To begin we did the usual pointless IQ test stuff and a rather fun bit where you had to decide as quickly as possible whether pairs of numbers or letters were identical or slightly different. That's a useful skill for a telephone operator, I suppose. After some really odd word-association exercises where intelligence and literacy were probably handicaps, we were asked to play manager and scribble down "ideas" as if we were in a "brainstorming" session. The sample question was something along the lines of how would one reduce workplace accidents. "We're interested in the quantity of ideas, not the quality," said the human resources apparatchik running the test. "Or morality," I whispered to the down-on-his-luck web dude, and wrote "hire illegal aliens and stop reporting accidents" under the sample answers (which were, I believe, "safety posters" and "closer supervision of workers"). The actual question concerned ideas for improving productivity. I managed four or five platitudes before I felt a black, self-destructive urge and wrote down "weed out the riff-raff." In retrospect, I'm a little upset I didn't think of "offer week's holiday at Black Sea resort as gift of Soviet people for worker who most exceeds production quota at Red November Tractor Axle Factory, Dnepropetrovsk."
Then after a pee break we endured that trusty old personality profile quiz, 434 questions to which one answers true or false. This is the same test I did at least once in high school and once as part of the psychological assessment for a certain government intelligence agency (I passed, surprisingly). They must have written this thing in the fifties, the language is so wonderfully archaic. "I greatly enjoy parties and dinner dances." True or false? Most of the questions are sane enough: "I am often nervous talking to strangers." "I think that most questions have definite answers." "I would enjoy the work of a race car driver." But about one question in ten is clearly designed to catch obvious homicidal psychopaths: "I am terribly afraid of wind." "Sometimes I feel as though I am going all to pieces." I was so bored I began inventing new questions: "I think I would like the work of a sniper." "Sometimes I kill prostitutes and bury their body parts at my pig farm."
Amazingly enough, I landed an interview a few weeks later, at which I learned that I can type 75 words per minute, after corrections. Who knew? The interview went smoothly enough, save for a few hiccups here and there: "Have you ever gone the extra mile for a customer?" I was asked. "Define 'extra mile'. I object to the premise of the question, actually." I replied. It was even pleasant - we talked about toddlers. They weren't too shocked by my resume. It turns out I fit a very common demographic: embittered ex-web designers resigned to working in call centres. It's pretty much all they hire nowadays. Fortunately my unwillingness to pull unlimited evening and weekend shifts at the cost of ever seeing my daughter led them to favour otherly qualified candidates. Safe!
Now that spring is approaching, I'll either go back to my old student job, working as a bike mechanic, or try auctioning a kidney on eBay. I was planning to auction my daughter if things really got desperate but the Alberta government took down their adoption web site. What was it called again? www.kid-bid.ab.ca
5. Miscellaneous
i. Fantasy Luge Camp
Time to say something positive for a change! Without question, the best thing about Calgary is the bobsled track at COP. Everyone should try "Discover Skeleton." For thirty bucks they send you down the track head-first at 85 km/h, your chin an inch above the ice. Twice! Skeleton is the perfect recreational sliding sport for middle-aged idiots. After a 3-day "skeleton school" you can go off from the top and you hit 125 km/m by the bottom, assuming you make it out of Turn 8 in one piece. All you need is a helmet, track spikes, a full-length lycra cat suit and a rental sled, then you're good to go.
Skeleton is safe and fun. There are little bumpers on the sled that take all the impact when you ricochet off the walls. This is a huge improvement over luge. After trying a luge sled I found little holes sanded in my gloves, knuckles, socks and ankles.
Also highly recommended is the tourist bobsled, The Bullet. This is the most fun you can ever have in one minute, without question. It's a much better deal than bungee-jumping.
ii. The cat by-law
When we arrived in Calgary we learned to our dismay that cats found off their owner's property could be ticketed and fined. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. This is completely against the nature of the cat. You might as well make them illegal. Why not? They banned rats in Alberta.
There was only one thing to do: fake ID! We simply left the cat's old tag on her collar, with a Toronto phone number. The by-law cops would never know what to do. The cat went one better, returning from a nocturnal prowl without the collar and tag, and she's gone incognito ever since.
Of course the reality is somewhat different. Our streets are crawling with cats. Nobody cares. They come and go as they please. But all it takes is one cranky old fart who thinks someone is crapping in his rose garden (the same personality type that grasses on neighbours who don't shovel their walks religiously) to ruin it for everyone.
I know this happens, because a friend's cat Simon was ticketed and fined $55 - $55! - a few years ago. The ticket said "cat at large", which was pretty funny considering that Simon is a foul-tempered thirty pound lard-ball who once dislocated his shoulder jumping down from the bed, and had to have a ramp built so that he could slurp his fat ass on and off the couch. Then again, maybe that's not the sort of beast you want shitting on your roses.
iii. Other, edgier things that probably should never be aired
The first time I took my daughter to a busy playground in Calgary all I could see were endless ranks of little blond, blue-eyed children. For a second I thought we'd landed in a Nazi breeding farm. Hey, Alberta is multicultural: it has Swedes AND Norwegians! Angles AND Saxons!
Reactionary politics. I actually saw a real, live Alberta Separatist on the weekend, displaying literature at the flea market. Unfortunately he didn't have any bumper stickers for sale that I could send to friends back in Ontario. My feeling on this question is fine, do whatever you want, just give me six months' notice so that I can sell my house and hightail it out of here.
What is with the constant, paranoid loathing of Ottawa? People who weren't even alive in the 1970s talk about the National Energy Program as if it were the Holocaust. Worse than the Holocaust, given the prevailing view around some parts of the province is that it's all a pack of lies anyway.