First stop in Calgary, of course, is my hostel, which is fairly conveniently located, by hostel standards, much more convenient than the hotel I originally booked in fact. They’re a mixed bag, by definition, but this one seems to be redefining a thing or two on its own. It’s a party hostel. Those exist elsewhere also, of course, London UK and Tallinn, Estonia, come easily to mind, but if some hostels have a problem of over-active partiers being tossed into an otherwise sober mix, here the party seems to be the main mission. The staff are the main imbibers, and the frat party metaphor seems appropriate.
All of this may just sound like sour grapes from the vineyard of a fifty-something self-styled intellectual who is slightly sober and irrevocably balding, but still the fact is that such a display is well out of the norm of the world standard for hostels, and worth noting if you have an early morning flight to catch. Still it’s all just good clean fun until some a**hole kicks a football into your laptop or some drunken yob wakes you up at four in the morning. You’re at the mercy of the random forces of humanity here. Many are left over from the Calgary Stampede, so that probably explains something, but I’m not sure what.
So I go check out the Calgary Folk Festival and related ticketing websites the night before opening day and it doesn’t look good for finding a ticket. It’s definitely a seller’s market. I respond to a seller’s offer within the hour of posting and by then it’s long gone. Buyers’ posts outnumber sellers, by far. So I guess I’ll show up at the site itself around opening time and see if it’s any different. Meanwhile I buy a day pass on the LRT and see whatever that gets me… which is not much. I DO go to a major mall down on the south side, but it’s nothing compared to Edmonton’s famous one, the one with artificial surf and beach inside. That’s a trip, maybe the furthest extent of the ‘mall culture’ that once defined us, best parodied in Kevin Smith’s ‘Mall Rats’. But malls don’t define us anymore, do they? Internet does.
Other than that, Calgary is fairly predictable, a city in the mold of Denver maybe, sprawled out along the plains with mountains rising along the horizon. I’m tempted to compare Calgary and Edmonton with Denver and Dallas or one of the other western cities, but I know the analogy would quickly fall apart without adding much to the discussion, though there must be some continuity to be found along the east slope, cowboys and Indians, mostly, I suppose. What do you expect from a city known for its rodeo?
The Calgary Folk Festival offers no quick thrill, nor solution. The only buyer/sellers are the pro scalpers, doing both simultaneously. They’re charging about double, standard retail markup. I assume they have paid and are willing to pay face value. I hang out for an hour to see if anybody else is selling, but no luck. Opening day is hardly the artistic highlight of the show anyway, but I definitely don’t want to do this every day… so I enact Plan B, rent a car and head to the outback.
The only question is: which outback? There’s nearby southern Alberta, with its hoodoo badlands on one hand and towering peaks on the other, or there’s Banff again and maybe on to Jasper National Park, for extended mountain excursions and sublime views. Or there’s Montana, a bit farther away, but only an extra day, and hey, it’s Montana! That’s the USA! Or if I really get a wild hair, I could drive hard and fast up to Fort McMurray, home of the infamous oil sands and the part of northern Alberta that I haven’t seen yet, ugliness in all its glory. Decisions decisions…
The day dawns bleak and gray and blustery. That rules out the last option. And Budget R-a-C will charge extra for Montana, so I take the logical safe option, the southern Alberta badlands tour. That starts in Drumheller, aka Dinosaur City USA… oops! I mean Canada. You could be forgiven for thinking you’ve landed in Bedrock, Flintstone Country. Everything is dinosaur-themed, but the town itself is fairly nice, with a traditional downtown still intact. The museum out on the edge of town is the main attraction, and it is quite vast and comprehensive, with many dinosaur bones and reconstructions on display… for a price. Dinosaurs are long gone, of course, and field work doesn’t mean much to the uninitiated, so this is about as good as you can do. The funny thing, of course, is that dinosaurs DID leave descendants, though hardly recognizable as such, in the form of birds. If that particular path of evolution is hard to believe, it’s almost even harder to believe that there was ever a non-aviary world that preceded it.
Not far from Drumheller, there’s a so-called ‘hoodoo trail’, so I decide to tentatively venture into that, for closure if nothing else. The world’s premier hoodoos- soft eroded rock capped by hard rock ‘hats’- are in Cappadocia, Turkey, around Goreme, and the last time (only time in fact) I was there, my computer- the same one that’s with me now- took a dive during the night and hasn’t been the same since, despite several surgeries and some major TLC. I haven’t slept with a computer since. So I’m hoping for a little closure and sympathetic magic in the sense of putting all that behind us and starting a new era of cybernetic cooperation. I’m not sure these hoodoos count, though. The ones I see are babies in comparison to the ones in Cappadocia where Christians lived for centuries in hiding. Since it’s starting to drizzle pretty heavily I don’t even bother to get out of the car. I think I’ve seen enough. I could swear I heard a little giggle coming out of my laptop.
So I decide to head south toward Brooks. That’s the closest major town to the ‘Provincial Dinosaur Park’, which sounds interesting. But first I’ll do a little backtrack at Hwy. 1, to go see the First Nations homeland of Siksika, literally ‘Blackfoot’, no explanation necessary. Unfortunately the rain’s starting to come down heavily, which requires me to slow down some in the process. It finally lets up, though, making an already beautiful landscape even more so. Most impressive are the vast fields of yellow flowers, which I think is canola. It looks surreal, as do cows sharing pastures with oil wells and pumpers, a landscape similar to the one I grew up with in Texas and Mississippi.
I make the detour to Siksika, but by the time I get to the museum/cultural center it’s almost closing time. It’s almost the same price as the dinosaur museum, too, so I blow it off. I’m starting to feel nickeled-and-dimed to death. I DO stop at the rez’s one real town, though, Cluny, at a little store/bakery/liquor store, just to get my sweet tooth juiced. It’s interesting that Native lands here do not proscribe liquor, as do most in the States. They didn’t get to vote until the ‘60’s, either, remember. Since most Natives, except for the Pueblos, were not really town dwellers, it’s just not easy to get an easy grasp of the culture… but I keep trying. Mostly I try to imagine Indian life in 1750, NOT 1850, and that’s not easy. That was the era BEFORE horses. The coming of the Spaniards was something of a cultural golden age for them, really, and good preparation for the battle with Anglos to come. But it wasn’t enough, of course.
By the time I get to Brooks I’m getting pretty tired, so pull into a motel for the night when I see one advertised for $60. That’s cheap for Canada, a fact worth advertising, especially when it’s half-way decent and includes WiFi and cable TV. So I get domestic and start washing enough clothes to last me the remaining few days of this trip. This is the first fully equipped private room I’ve had the entire two week trip so far, so take full advantage. It seems more like two years by now, though, doesn’t it? Whitehorse seems so long ago and far away. TV here sucks, though. ‘Cable’ means that and no more, no HBO or anything fancy like that, so nothing really to miss… so 70’s…
I fall asleep with piles of papers and clothes and books on the bed as usual, so next day when I get up early it’s all on the floor in a heap… but not my computer. The Acer is sitting wide open where I left it running beside the bed, ready to perk up and compute at a moment’s notice. I swear the thing’s smiling. So I eat a quick continental breakfast, gather up my things, and head out to the Badlands, socks drying on the dashboard. It’s pretty nice, and I’ve never been to the Dakotas, but these badlands don’t seem all THAT bad. I guess that sums up Canada in general for me, very very nice, but not spectacular. From there I have to backtrack to Brooks then start heading south. I had intended to go to Medicine Hat, but decide to blow it off, just to save time and gasoline. It IS the day of the big chili cook-off, but I doubt they have vegetarian options. I get the impression that that might be a good area to see Native culture if you show up during a festival, but that’s not today.
So next stop is Taber, where I pick up Hwy. 3, but the town itself looks pretty desolate, windows boarded up and storefronts vacant. There IS a Mexican/Mennonite restaurant there, though, so that sounds bizarre and interesting, maybe some decent cheese, something in which they specialize in the country of Mexico itself. I forego it, though, and start heading down highway 3 in the general direction of the mountains, the continental divide I assume, where the US Rockies and Cascades reunite. Lethbridge is the next major town, but I almost blow it off because I really need to piss. Then I see a tourist info stop on the western edge, so give it a look. Turns out it’s perched right above the dubiously named ‘Fort Whoop-up’ whose name goes largely unexplained, though speculations run rampant. In Canada fort/trading posts were frequently known as ‘whiskey posts’, so go figure. The terrain is starting to get hilly, though, so it’s the edge of a different region.
Lethbridge is actually one of the larger towns in the province after Calgary and Edmonton, and serves as a transportation crossroads in the south, being the intersection of highways 2, 3, 4, and 5, if I counted correctly. Highway 4 is the one that continues on to the US border at Montana and there becomes I-15, which will pass through Great Falls and Butte before heading on down to Salt Lake City and then finally dumping its human cargo somewhere down in the great sea known as Greater Los Angeles, the area that I somewhat tentatively now call ‘home’. I guess that means that somewhere down at the other end of that highway, someone is waiting for me, little by little, knowing that one day soon I’ll show up again and life will resume its familiar rhythm. That’s not today, though, and I won’t be using I-15 either, couldn’t even if I wanted to. No Greyhound bus crosses that border. Buses from Calgary to Missoula go through Vancouver and Seattle, the long way around. You might be able to go TO the border and pick up another onward bus there, but I didn’t investigate that far.
Fort McLeod is next down the road, and is maybe the nicest yet for a well-preserved traditional city center. I consider spending the night but the cheapest place at $65 is not pretty, so I decide to continue on, prepared to ‘car camp’ if need be. I want to press on to the high country at Crow’s Nest Pass, but decide to veer north on Hwy. 22 with hopes of getting into the high country farther north. Those connecting roads are all gravel, though, so I forego it, since I’m in a rental car. I need to make sleep arrangements, too. The only park with campsites I come to wants $25, so I figure the bed back at the hostel at $35 is a better deal than that. I don’t really want two more nights there, but figure I can handle it. I finally pull in at 6pm. It may be the hostel from Hell, but it’s MY hostel from Hell. There isn’t much choice for budget accommodations in Calgary either, just the one other hostel. Budget ‘transient’ hotels don’t exist here any more, like they do in Edmonton, at least as recently as five years ago.
Scalpers are still at the Folk Festival site, so that’s that, but I attend a Latino ‘Fiestaval’ for free, better than nothing, even quite nice hearing northern Mexican corridas coming off the north country stage. Still it’s been a good trip, even without the major music festival. As much as I love the aspects of culture, I love the Earth even more, like my lover in fact, every fold of her skin dear to my touch. The fact that ‘stuff’ even exists never ceases to amaze me in a world where light is the main player. The fact that that ‘stuff’ gets evolved into multi-celled life and intelligence to boot is almost too much to even imagine, the foundation of all religion. Yes, it’s been a good- if short- trip. There’s nothing left to do now but catch the plane, go home, and start planning the next one. C U then.