Maxwell Bates's Far-Away Flags

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Maxwell Bates in his studio (Photo: University of Victoria)

Maxwell Bates, one of Canada’s preeminent modernist painters, was also a poet. Born in Calgary in 1906, he grew up in a cultivated English home across from the Lougheed mansion on Thirteenth Avenue West. Like his paintings, Bates’s poetry shows a preoccupation with human presence in the landscape. In an early poem, the fifteen-year-old Bates listens to Calgary through his bedroom window. “The city murmurs” not only with the sound of bird song and barking dog, but with the “faint sound of hammer.” In a poem written his early twenties, Bates explores the city’s industrial landscape of “moulder and decay”: workers’ shacks and brick kilns, railway tracks and smoke stacks that “smudged the sky.” In a later poem, he considers “the great, human stain of the city.” He see himself as separate, but connected: “I belong to those streets.” In “Intimations,” a poem written in mid-life, he finds not only inspiration but transcendence in the city where he grew up and later returned to live.

Upon the houses

Black and beautiful,

Light of the moon

Shadowed dim silver;

And in my soul,

Feelings of some scarcely perceptible

Great beauty,

Some words of God,

Not quite invisible.

Maxwell Bates, “Intimations,” Far-Away Flags (1964)

Robert Kroetsch's Alibi

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary's Mount Royal, in the early 20th century (Photo: Peel Library, University of Alberta)

William William Dorfen travels the world looking for artefacts for his oilman boss, a man with a “barbarian fortune.” Jack Deemer is “the richest of the many rich men spawned in the Alberta oil patch, like so many hatched salamanders.” A recluse, he hides in his mansion on Mount Royal’s Prospect Avenue behind a “guardian row of spruce.” Like Eric Harvie, the renowned Calgary collector Kroetsch used as inspiration, Deemer stores his collections in warehouses around the city, one “in each of the four quadrants of that mathematical city.” His agent Dorf imagines the wealthy oilman prowling his warehouses while the city sleeps, poking through crates and cases. “Perhaps he is appalled, each night, by what he hasn’t got, by all that has escaped him, a calving iceberg, an eclipse of the sun, a single pained or singing or loving voice from the Middle Ages.” Near the end of the novel, Dorf returns to his Calgary apartment to continue his quest on Deemer’s behalf.

I got up early in the morning when the city too was asleep. When the city was, in its ritual way, dead. The sun comes up early and strong on the horizon; the sleepers of the city writhe in their sweaty beds, grope, one last time, or reach, or recoil. And I was their watcher. That booming city, in the quiet of the first-dawn light, that sunburnt city has its nightmares too.

Robert Kroetsch, Alibi (Stoddart, 1983)

Noah Richler's Literary Atlas of Canada

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Northwest LRT extension, Rocky Ridge/Tuscany, 2012 (Photo: City of Calgary)

Toronto writer, Noah Richler is touring the country, talking to writers about place. He arrives in Calgary but doesn’t linger. His sights are set on the foothills, that landscape west of the city that author Fred Stenson brings to life in his historical novel, The Trade. Calgary gets only a passing glance in Richler’s literary atlas of Canada: a slice of the northwest suburbs seen from the passenger window of an SUV heading out of town.

Fred Stenson and I drove past Royal Oak and then Tuscany on our way to the nineteenth century… The houses appeared as flimsy as stacked playing cards on the grassy hide of prairie ruptured here and there where the rocky ground, the sleeping leviathan, obstinately pushed through.

Noah Richler, This is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)

Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

"Calgary, Alberta," (1955) by Edward John Hughes. A different view than that in Alistair MacLeod's novel, but one that captures the same Calgary light. (Photo: Calgary Herald)

A middle-aged orthodontist, Alexander MacDonald is pulled into the past. He travels from southwestern Ontario to visit his twin sister in Calgary. On a sunny afternoon, they sit in her living room “high upon one of the more prestigious ridges of the new and hopeful Calgary.” They talk of family: their childhood, their parents and grandparents, their ancestral homeland in Scotland. The Calgary sunlight infuses the conversation, sharpening memory, clarifying the past. Perched above the city, Alexander MacDonald looks out his sister’s picture window at the sweep of landscape: to the west, the Trans-Canada Highway heading into the Rockies; to the north and east and south, the burgeoning city. Even here in this new place, the past is present. 

 “Did you know,” his sister says, “that Calgary gets its name from a place located on the Isle of Mull?”

“No,” he says. “Well, I’m not sure. I guess I haven’t thought about it very much.”

In the modernistic house in Calgary, we held hands across the table the way we used to do as children. Held hands the way we used to do on the Sunday afternoons after we had finished tracing our wistful fingers over the faces of our vanished parents: the faces looking up towards us from the photograph album spread out upon the table… The Alberta sun came through the window, infusing the amber liquid and the heavy crystal glasses with particles of light.

Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (McClelland & Stewart, 1999)

Sir Cecil Denny's The Law Marches West

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Fort Calgary, 1878, three years after Cecil Denny arrived at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers. You can spot Denny sitting in the chair, mid-frame. This is said to be the first photograph of Calgary. (Photo: Ernest Brown)

Cecil Denny was in Calgary at the very beginning. A personable English remittance man with a gift of the gab, he joined the North West Mounted Police in early 1874, in time to join its historic March West into the lawless whiskey frontier. The following September, he set out with Inspector Brisebois and F Troop to select the site for a new fort on the Bow River. Later, he was known to joke with his superior officer, Colonel James Macleod about the meaning of the name “Calgary.” It wasn’t “clear running water,” the Gaelic for Macleod’s ancestral homeland on the Isle of Mull, but, Denny teased, the more pedestrian “cabbage patch.” In his fifties, his life and reputation in tatters, Denny still had the gift of story. In his memoir, he remembers he city on that early September day in 1875, capturing the moment of its conception.

We crossed the Bow River a little above the mouth of the Elbow, finding a good ford at this place. The view from the hill on the north side of the Bow, when we reached it at the beginning of September 1875, amazed us. Before us lay a lovely valley, flanked on the south by rolling hills. Thick woods bordered the banks of both streams; to the west towered mountains with their snowy peaks; beyond the Elbow, farther west along the Bow, stretched another wide, heavily timbered valley. Buffalo in large bands grazed in the valleys, but of man we saw no sign…Our first sight of this enchanting spot was one never to be forgotten, one to which only a poet could do justice. It was by far the most beautiful we had seen since our arrival in the West.

 Sir Cecil Denny, The Law Marches West (Dent, 1939) 

Excerpted in Denny’s Trek: A Mountie’s Memoir of the March West (Heritage House, 2004) 

Rae Spoon's First Spring Grass Fire

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Like many Calgary kids, Rae watches the Stampede parade in a straw cowboy hat and cheers the Flames at the Saddledome. In elementary school, when the city is bright with Olympic fever in 1988, she takes her turn running around the school field with a replica torch and marvels at the real gas flame glowing on top of the Calgary Tower. At nine, Rae attends a Billy Graham rally at the Saddledome with her Pentecostal family and senses the first inklings of doubt and difference. By the time she’s fifteen, Rae knows she’s neither Christian nor straight. To survive in her turbulent, abusive family, she takes “the most alive parts” of herself and hides “like a sea snake trying to stay out of view.” She thinks about running away from Calgary, but gives up before trying. “You could run for half an hour and not even get to the end of your own neighbourhood, and all of the neighbourhoods looked the same, so it didn’t really feel like escaping at all.” By the time she’s in high school, Rae has discovered grunge music and decides to risk standing out. She quickly finds out she is not the only kid who doesn’t fit in.

The thing about Calgary was that boys didn’t really need to be gay to get called “faggot.” You only had to do something a little out of the ordinary, like grow your hair long or play the acoustic guitar. And if you were a girl, all you had to do was cut your hair short or stand up to boys and you would be called a dyke… There was danger in being different and there was safety in numbers. That’s why the straight kids who were grunge were treated the same as the gay kids. We were all fags in the eyes of our school.

Rae Spoon, First Spring Grass Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012)

P.K. Page's "The First Part"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Elbow River looking west from Weaselhead Flats, toward the old Sarcee Camp (Photo: City of Calgary website)

The poet P.K. Page spent childhood summers along the banks of the Elbow River, a few miles southwest of the city centre. In the 1920s, her father served as an officer in the Lord Strathcona’s Horse. In the summer, the Pages would move from their Calgary home to Sarcee Camp, on the perimeter of the Tsuu T’ina Reserve, where her father participated in military exercises. Page’s time in this landscape, her biographer writes, provided some of the poet’s most vivid childhood memories. Decades later, when Page was living in Australia, she gave a talk about Canadian cities. When she spoke of Calgary, she recalled its “glass air” and its “limitless grassland wrapped in light as clear as cellophane.” In a late autobiographical poem, she reflects on the role this landscape at the edge of the city played in shaping her artistic sensibility.

Backdrop: the cordillera of the Rockies.

Infinity – slowly spinning in the air –

invisibly entered through the holes of gophers,

visibly, in a wigwam’s amethyst smoke.

Eternity implicit on the prairie.

One’s self the centre of a boundless dome

so balanced in its horizontal plane

 …

 It was a landscape in which things could grow

enormous.

P. K. Page, “The First Part,” The Hidden Room: Volume 1 (Porcupine’s Quill, 1997)

Robert Kroetsch's Alberta

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Husky Tower under construction, 1968 (Photo: Calgary Tower website)

“What does it look like to you?”

“What’s it really for?”

“What does it make you think of?”

It's 1968 and the brand new Husky Tower rises twice as high as the city’s tallest building. To celebrate Canada's centennial, Marathon Realty and Husky Oil have commissioned a concrete and steel observation tower that transforms the city's skyline. Author Robert Kroetsch, then a university professor in upstate New York, has returned to Alberta to write a centennial travelogue about his native province. In Calgary, he contemplates the tower.

They gather at its base and tilt their heads up and back, their mouths opening, their gaze following the slender bone-white curve to where its high point swells against the sky. They watch it from old verandas and new patios, and from the balconies of glittering high-rise apartments. They see it from far out on the prairie and marvel at what they behold.

Calgarians have invented for themselves a new Rorschach test. It is no ink spot on a folded page, but a smooth tower of concrete with a revolving restaurant on top.

To a child, it is a turret that makes his home a castle. To a preacher outside the gate of the Calgary zoo, it is a beacon that draws the innocent to this new Babylon. To a young man who soars six hundred feet above his high city to be served and pampered, it is proof to his date that he deserves her pampering too. To a student at the university, it is an embarrassing symbol of his city’s materialism and raw taste. To the oilmen, it is higher than the Rockies on the horizon far to the west; it is the axle-tree of God’s universe, and they, by God, built it.

And as the sun sets on the chatter and speculation, the Husky Tower burns splendid and tall in the warm soft night, in the caressing Chinooks that blow down over the Rockies. This is the city’s long, hard, and enduring dream.

Robert Kroetsch, Alberta (NeWest Press, 1993, 2nd edition)

Barb Howard's Whipstock

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

"Looking Ahead to Work in Alberta Oil Patch" (Photo: Khalid Calgary, Wikimedia Commons)

The oil patch is in Nellie Mannville’s blood. Her grandmother, an industry pioneer, used her cramping uterus to find oil, and Nellie’s mother is a cheeky, chain-smoking landman. Nellie works at an oil company cafeteria in downtown Calgary for a woman called Sauerkraut. She signs up for a new-employee rig tour. Her mother guffaws at her daughter’s sudden interest in the oil business and offers her own quick-and-dirty primer. (“Think of a dick. That’s the derrick.”) But Nellie is intent on going on the tour. She heads to the meeting place outside the company office tower downtown, past a large bronze statue in the lobby: a cowboy riding a bucking oil barrel. The sculpture hints at what’s to come. On the bus ride to the rig site, the landscape is the familiar parade of gas stations, car dealerships and lube shops. But soon after Nellie arrives at the rig, the terrain turns strange, and Nellie finds herself surrendering to the derrick.

The group photo of the rig tour participants appears in the July 1998 issue of the company newsletter. Nellie, thickish and sweaty, stands at the end of the middle row. Her jean shirt and jeans protrude from her open coveralls. Her big silver belt buckle catches the sun, twinkles like a magic egg on her belly. Sauerkraut cuts the photo out of the newsletter and pins it on the kitchen bulletin board, beside the safety chart.

“Did you enjoy yourself on that rig tour last month?” Sauerkraut asks Nellie.

“It was orgasmic.”

Barb Howard, Whipstock (2001)

Ophira Eisenberg's Screw Everyone

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Western Canada High School (Photo: Michael Denning, Wikimedia Commons)

Ophira Eisenberg’s memoir begins in 1980s suburban Calgary: “a nice, safe place – it was like the walls were made of soft sponges. You had to work really hard to get in trouble.” At Western Canada High, Eisenberg is, like her role model Ferris Bueller, “the ultimate self-assured outsider.” Unlike some of her serious-minded classmates, she’s intent on losing “the new-car smell” of her adolescence, including her virginity. She and her friend Cheryl hatch a plan in Cheryl’s wood-panelled basement: they will try to lose their virginity on the same night. They zero in on two boys in a high school U2 cover band. At a house party, the girls put their plan in motion.

When the set ended, as a treat I passed around a bottle of Schnapps I’d found in my mom’s liquor cabinet. Judging by the layer of dust on the label, it had probably been sitting there since the first Star Wars movie came out in theaters. After sharing a swig with Cameron, I led him into the “makeout room” – my mother’s sewing room – where we necked and dry humped in between quilt squares and sprigs of crinoline from my ballet costumes. We were both such novices, our groping ended up being too licky and fast paced. Occasionally our teeth would collide. At the end of the night when I puked, it was from the combination of worry, wine coolers, and a dash of melon Schnapps. Cameron biked home on his beat-up ten-speed, and I scrubbed the house and my mouth for two days. It was a near-perfect teenage evening.

Ophira Eisenberg, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press, 2013)

Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Union Cemetery (Photo: City of Calgary)

“A place,” Aritha van Herk writes in Places Far From Ellesmere, “is counted for the people buried there.” She wanders the cemeteries of Calgary, her chosen place, a city with a turnstile history of arrivals and departures. But Calgary’s cemeteries are crowded with the people who stayed. “Graves elbowing each other awake, saying ‘move over.’” Why leave, she asks herself, "when everything is here?"

To dare to stay here to die, to dare to stay after death, to implant yourself firmly and say, “Here I stay, let those who would look for a record come here.” You want a death more exotic than it is, would choose repose in the arms of foreign grass, odd moles rather than gophers. But the lengths of darkness measured metre for metre are shorter here and the pinhole photography of death as immobilizing as east or west. The graveyards of Calgary are your grottos, and even ashes scattered and unburied settle here with the mosquitoes and the rippled gusts of wind off the foothills.

Aritha van Herk, Places Far From Ellesmere, (Red Deer College Press, 1990)

Kris Demeanor's "On Being A Lifer"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

“I’m a Lifer,” Kris Demeanor, Calgary’s inaugural poet laureate writes in his introduction to The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual. He presents his city CV: a list of landmarks, neighbourhoods and schools (“Nellie McClung Elementary/Louis Riel Junior High/Henry Wise Wood High”). A Calgary pedigree. He has travelled, but “always came back” to the “city of infuriating possibility” he calls home.

But somewhere during the city’s transitions

and transformations, the outlook of the Lifer changes too.

It’s not only about what has been covered up and plowed under,

it’s not only about what the city gives you – a job,

entertainment, proximity to the mountains.

Once a Lifer makes the commitment, decides

‘This is My Home,’ there’s no joy in complaining

about a city’s shortcomings.

The natural evolution is to ask ‘What am I adding?’

'What’s my place?’

Kris Demeanor, “On Being a Lifer,” The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual (Frontenac House, 2014)

Lori Hahnel's Love Minus Zero

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

The National Hotel, 1042 - 10th Ave, SE (Photo: Alberta Culture)

Kate Brandt is forty-something, divorced and working part-time at the Mount Royal College library. A lifetime ago, she haunted Calgary’s punk rock scene, playing guitar in an all-girl band called Misclairol. The seedy downtown bars of the early 1980s where she performed are history. The National Hotel is shuttered; the Calgarian Hotel has burned down; and the Long Bar on Eighth Avenue is long gone. At a friend’s wedding, Kate reconnects with her old flame and fellow punk rocker, Niall. When they dance, she feels the familiar heat. They take their drinks outside the Hillhurst-Sunnyside community hall and catch up on the years. Niall, a lawyer's kid who grew up in the posh part of town, is still drifting.  As the sun goes down, Kate tells him that, after a lifetime in Calgary, she’s decided to move on.

I used to defend Calgary when people would put it down. But a few years ago, I don’t know if it’s the city or me or what, I realized I couldn’t stand it anymore… It’s all about the money. It’s about driving your SUV for an hour from your half-million dollar 5000-square foot house in the suburbs to pay $25 to park downtown every day. People are stressed, rushed, grim. The place is like Toronto but without the arts scene. So why would an old lefty punk rocker stay here?

Lori Hahnel, Love Minus Zero (Oberon Press, 2008)

Chris Turner's "Calgary Reconsidered"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

“I was never going to live in Calgary,” journalist and author Chris Turner says. And he certainly wasn’t going to write about it. But life had other things in store. A dozen years ago, he and his family moved to Calgary. In 2012, he wrote an essay for The Walrus about the changes he has observed in his adopted hometown. Turner considers six old truths about the city that still hold true, including this one: “Calgary is (still) Cowtown.”

If Stampede was just Stampede, a ten-day summer festival with calf roping and fireworks and those addictive mini-doughnuts, a free pancake breakfast in the parking lot of the nearest mall, and some overzealous boozing with co-workers – if that’s all it was, it wouldn’t inspire such spite. But it isn’t just that. It won’t just stay there on the flat land below Scotsman’s Hill, won’t keep quiet after the last explosion in the Grandstand fireworks show. You can’t just take it or leave it while the carnival is up and running. It insists on being everything to everyone everywhere, Calgary by proxy, the default iconographic setting for any discussion of the city and the province and the Canadian West in general. And to question its value, to argue that Calgary is a much more interesting city than its monomyth, is tantamount to blasphemy.

Chris Turner, “Calgary Reconsidered,” How to Breath Underwater (Biblioasis, 2014)

Cecelia Frey's "Ode to Fireworks During Stampede"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Fireworks over Calgary (Photo: Calgary Public Library, Postcards from the Past)

The poet sits atop Nose Hill watching the Stampede fireworks. She surrenders to the “electric air,” sees in the darkness “night flowers/blossoming/gone.”

I imagine the trillions of human beings

that exist, have existed, will exist

marching through pre-history

history, post-history

imagine them as spurts of colour

jetting into the sky

flowering, facing

disappearing

as black takes them

absorbs them

but there is always another

another

and another flower opening with such intensity

Cecelia Frey, “Ode To Fireworks During Stampede,” Under Nose Hill (Bayeux Arts, 2009)

Will Ferguson's 419

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary Stampede midway (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

In the wake of her father’s apparent suicide, Calgarian Laura Curtis is “cataloguing memories, compiling an inventory of loss.” Who was this flawed, beloved man who got tangled in the deadly web of a Nigerian 419 scam? She remembers a childhood trip to the Stampede: the rough-and-tumble of the chuckwagon races, the clang and noise of midway rides, carneys touting games of chance. “Throw a ball, win a prize! It’s just that easy.” In her memory, Laura finds traces of the man her father was.

While waiting in line for mini-doughnuts – moist and warm and dusted with cinnamon, the highlight of any Stampede midway visit – Laura had walked ahead, down the line, while her dad held their spot. She’d peered seriously at the menu-board options, decided after great deliberation to get the Big Bag, and was hurrying back when she kicked something underfoot. A twenty-dollar bill.

She ran, breathless, back to her dad. “Look what I found!”

Her elation didn’t last, though. “Sweetie,” he said. “It’s not ours to keep.”

Will Ferguson, 419 (Penguin, 2012)

Dymphny Dronyk's "What Beer Can Do"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Stampede square dancers, 1982 (Photo: Rainer Halama, Wikimedia Commons)

Nashville North. The air is thick with the “sweaty cologne of drugstore cowboys/with undertones of puke,” and she’s dancing.

Shine my buckle, baby, he yells in my ear,

pulls me tight against him,

and two-steps me around backwards,

sloooooooow, sloooooooooow, quick-quick

one body with too many feet

we stumble, no gliding here

Dymphny Dronyk, “What Beer Can Do,” The Calgary Project: A City Map in Verse and Visual (Frontenac House, 2014).

Jackie Flanagan's Grass Castles

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Game of chance, Calgary Stampede midway (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

Maureen’s family is barely making ends meet. It’s the 1950s and they’re living in a new house at the edge of Bowness, a small town beyond the western edge of Calgary. In the evenings, Maureen’s mother pores over her budget book. With five children to raise, there is never enough money. Her father squanders his pay on booze and loses his job. When her mother goes to work, Maureen and her father set out in his old green Pontiac. Wilf Carter croons the bluebird song on the radio as they drive into Calgary. They make the rounds, visiting her father’s friends, letting the summer day play out as it will.

It was about closing time so we all head down to the Stampede.

Marcel and Dad worked the nickel slot machines – Gold Diggers. Dad won some money. They played the Roulette Wheel. I made patterns in the sawdust at my feet. When it was very dark Dad bought me a corn-on-the-cob.

At midnight he put me on his shoulders above the noise and smells of the Midway and I looked up at the clear clean sky, so calm, and fireworks exploded breaking its smooth blue skin.

Dad lifted me out of the car cradling me in his arms like a baby.

“This beats everything, John,” Mom hissed. “You’ve pulled some real stunts in your time but this beats them all.”

Jackie Flanagan, Grass Castles (Bayeux Arts, 1998)

Catherine Moss's "Ruby Wedding Anniversary"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Heavy horses at the Calgary Stampede (Photo: Shelagh McHugh Cherak)

At the gates, the young woman waves them in – free Stampede passes for the couple in their fortieth year of marriage. They make their way through “a clamour of fried onions” toward the Big Top and the “sweet hay-sweat/of Percherons dappled and black.” When the heavy-horse show is over, her husband jumps from the bleachers.

I watch him drop

stumble

on a cardboard box

lurch backward

two inch bolt

slices

scalp

wound flows

into a bystander’s pack of tissues

my hand

sticky and scarlet

his shirt soaked

blood

dropping on straw and the upturned brim

of my new white

cowboy hat

Catherine Moss, “Ruby Wedding Anniversary,” Swallowing My Mother (Frontenac House, 2001)

Aritha van Herk's Mavericks

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary Stampede bull rider (Photo: Chuck Szmurlo, Wikimedia Commons)

On the first page of her popular history of Alberta, Aritha van Herk shows her cards: she is no historian. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta will be idiosyncratic, a story born out of her life in Alberta and her life-long impatience with Central Canada’s clichéd notions about her home province. There are multiple lightning rods for the liberal Torontonians she is trying to educate; near the end of the book, she gets to the Calgary Stampede. There is no tiptoeing into the subject. Best to begin in the centre of things. Feel the heat of a July afternoon, taste the dirt in your mouth, watch a man riding a bull.

On a sweltering July afternoon, the grandstand at the Calgary Stampede groans under the weight of thousands of tourists and locals, intent and sweating in their costumes of blue jeans and cowboy hats. I’m there, bent toward the dust of the infield where a Brahma bull churns and fishhooks, horns swiping a parabola in the air, the man fastened to his back like a burr exercising some insane ritual that believes this ton of moving muscle can be subdued.

Aritha van Herk, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Penguin Canada, 2001)