L. R. Wright's Among Friends

Calgary through the eyes of writers

The Bow River near Calgary's Inglewood, January 1, 2016 (Photo: Shaun Hunter)

Leona is home after spending the Christmas holidays with her parents in BC’s Lower Mainland. Usually, she’s anxious to get back to her job as a senior editor at one of Calgary’s newspapers. This year, she is reluctant to resume her daily life. The holidays were happily uneventful: no sign of the panic attacks that plagued her in the fall. From the warmth of her apartment, she pauses to consider the Calgary weather. She has no choice but to go out into it: her friend Marion is moving into an old house across the Bow River, and Leona has offered to help.

The day in January that Marion moved was very cold but clear, except that ice fog breathed from the earth, obscuring the outlines of things, filling the air with white; the sun, struggling to penetrate it, had lost much of its light and all of its warmth by the time it got down to ground level. Leona, gazing from her apartment window, thought it looked like another planet out there. The coldness was a thing of unquestionable malevolence. It would strike skin numb, and make breathing painful. She thought there was a lot to be said for the colorless rain which had fallen on southwestern British Columbia at Christmas.

L. R. Wright, Among Friends (Doubleday, 1984)

Anita Rau Badami's Tamarind Mem

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Detail from "Qol/Voice, 1987," by Calgary artist John Brocke (1953-2009). The painting depicts a street in Crescent Heights. 

When Kamini told her mother she was moving from India to Calgary to pursue her studies as an engineer, her mother was incredulous. “Calgary?...Where is this place? Has anybody ever heard of it? What is so special there that you have to go, hanh?” Her mother is right. This is the North Pole, and Kamini is cold and homesick. On their regular Sunday phone calls, there is no point in complaining. Her mother, abrupt and critical, speaks with a tamarind tongue. For comfort, Kamini turns to her memories, family photographs and stories. The phone calls stop. Her mother, free for the first time in a lifetime, is on the move, making a solo pilgrimage around India. As the Calgary snow obscures the narrow windows of Kamini’s basement apartment, she pores over her mother's postcards, feeling the complex tug of home.

I felt like a mole tunnelled into its lair of darkness, weary of the never-ending night that had descended on the city. When I left home in the morning the stars were still scattered in the sky, the moon a pale aureole. And at five in the evening when I trudged home laden with coat and sweater and muffler and mitts, barely able to turn my head for the padding around my neck, it was still night. I held Ma’s card against my face and breathed in deeply. Opened my eyes and I could see, against the implacable white of the snow outside my window, dark leaves and the bright colour of fruit ripening in the sun. My mouth filled with the tart juice of a burst orange.

Anita Rau Badami, Tamarind Mem (Penguin Books, 1996)

Don Gillmor's Long Change

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Downtown Calgary in 1972, at the beginning of what novelist Don Gillmor has called the city's "decade of collective madness" (Photo: via BuzzBuzzHome News)

“Nineteen seventy-nine had been a glorious year, a drunken march into the future, staggering under the weight of new riches.” The price of oil had skyrocketed and Calgary oilman Ritt Devlin was one of the many who had made a fortune. On New Year’s Eve, Ritt stands at the window of his office high above downtown Calgary and considers the city.

Behold the New Rome. Twenty-nine construction cranes were poised like carrion birds along the skyline. Every month, thousands moved here: welders, labourers from the East, professionals, criminals, women with tight jeans and damaged blonde hair who bought cowboy boots and drank shooters and hoped the city would shower them with love…

In three years, oil had gone from $14 to $35 a barrel, and that leap had made fortunes for a lot of people, including Ritt. Yet each time West Texas Intermediate crept up another fifty cents, he felt increasingly unsettled. One of the effects of expensive oil was it made people feel they were smarter than they were. Every half-baked junior with two producing wells was suddenly a genius. They convinced themselves it wasn’t market forces (and some manipulation) that made them rich; it was wisdom and insight and corporate courage. And this kind of instant wealth made them feel like they weren’t quite getting enough even as they were getting more than they ever had in their lives. It fuelled a sense of want, it redefined need, everyone living like Elvis. And the nagging remains of Ritt’s Pentecostal upbringing felt a judgment coming.

From his view on the nineteenth floor, the city resembled a huge toy, a model of an urban landscape some billionaire had bought for his useless child, the scale reading one inch = one inch. Ritt took his tuxedo off the hanger and laid it on his desk, then stripped to his underwear. He stood in the window and stared down at the city, ironically recalling Matthew 25: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.

Don Gillmor, Long Change (Random House, 2015)

Literary Map of Canada, 1936

Calgary through the eyes of writers

A literary map of Canada circa 1936, compiled by William Arthur Deacon; drawn and embellished by Stanley Turner; published by MacMillan.

Eight decades ago, Calgary made it onto William Arthur Deacon’s 1936 literary map of Canada. Zoom in on the city and you will see references to four literary works associated with Calgary and its environs:

• Ralph Connor’s 1899 bestselling western, The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills 
• Arthur Stringer’s 1922 The Prairie Stories, a trilogy set on a ranch southwest of the city
• Frederick Niven’s 1935 The Flying Years, a novel about Western settlement
• Isabel Ecclestone MacKay's 1922 poem “Calgary Station” 

Rosemary Griebel's "Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary's Eastside on a Winter Day"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

South Bank of the Bow River near the Langevin Bridge, December 30, 1954 (Photo: Glenbow Museum)

The poet walks through Calgary’s downtown east side on a bitter winter afternoon. The 19th century American poet, Walt Whitman is on her mind, and his Leaves of Grass, poems that celebrate the world. Beside her, the Bow River “churns and smokes/as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless/build cardboard homes in the snow.” In this bleak, frigid landscape where “crystal/meth is more common than a leaf of grass,” the poet reaches for Whitman’s “relentless cheer” and his “great capacity for wonder.”

There I quaffed the sharp chiseled air, the slow, sad light

of merciless winter and said, yes, this world is for my mouth forever…

And I am in love with it.

Yes.

Rosemary Griebel, Yes (Frontenac House, 2011)

Graham Greene's "Dear Dr Falkenheim"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Chinook Centre, Christmas 1963. Business as usual, as far as I could tell.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the British novelist Graham Greene travelled to Alberta several times to visit his daughter, a rancher near Cochrane. According to one account, Greene wrote a large part of his novel Our Man in Havana during one of his stays in Alberta. One of his Christmas visits sparked a short story published in 1963. In “Dear Dr Falkenheim,” an English couple and their six-year-old son move to Canada to “the great steely neon-lit city which lay on the foothills of the Rockies more than three thousand feet up.” In their bungalow on the outskirts of town, the narrator notes, they “did not feel in the least exiled in the far West. If anything there was a sense of exhilaration, of freedom, and of a new life beginning.” But on Christmas Eve, everything changes. At a suburban shopping mall not unlike Chinook Centre, the family awaits the arrival of Father Christmas who is scheduled to fly in by helicopter.

The sun would be going down soon below the Rockies and we heard the helicopter a long way off in the wide green sky; it rose vertically up from some store in the city, hovered like a vulture, and then came buzzing busily towards us, while the babies screamed and gurgled in the perambulators. When Father Christmas looked down from two hundred feet up, below the knifing rotary blades, he must have seen hundreds of open mouths. The helicopter circled above us, and he untied his sack and the air was full of small bright objects dropping down. They fell into the prams and into the cowboy hats and ricocheted all around beside the high heels and the miniature cowboy boots… Then swaying a little, first this way and then that, the helicopter sank slowly plumb in the centre of the roped-off space with its big rubber buffers, and a loudspeaker warned the parents to keep their children away until the blades stopped turning.

The trouble was, no one bothered to warn Father Christmas.

Graham Greene, “Dear Dr Falkenheim,” Graham Greene: Complete Short Stories (Penguin, 2005)

Rupert Brooke's Letters From America

Calgary through the eyes of writers

"The Civic Centre of Calgary as It May Appear Many Years Hence." In 1913, the city commissioned English landscape architect Thomas Mawson to design this plan for Calgary. Never realized, the plan was known as "Vienna on the Bow." (Image: Archives of Alberta)

In the summer of 1913, the charming young English poet, Rupert Brooke toured Canada by rail. In mid-August, he arrived in Calgary. The city was booming. Population had soared from 4,000 in 1901 to over 63,000, and along with it, civic dreams of a thriving metropolis. Brooke visited one of the newest jewels in the city’s crown: the public library on Second Street West. “Few large English towns,” he wrote to British readers in one of his regular dispatches to the Westminster Gazette, “could show anything as good.” That summer, weeks before the economy crashed and the boom turned to bust, Brooke saw a city hell bent on the future. If he didn’t experience an August heat wave during his visit to Calgary, he clearly felt hot air of another kind.

These cities grow in population with unimaginable velocity. From thirty to thirty thousand in fifteen years is the usual rate. Pavements are laid down, stores and bigger stores and still bigger stores spring up. Trams buzz along the streets towards the unregarded horizon that lies across the end of most roads in these flat, geometrically planned prairie-towns. Probably a Chinese quarter appears, and the beginnings of slums. Expensive and pleasant small dwelling-houses fringe the outskirts; and rents beings so high, great edifices of residential flats rival the great stores…

The inhabitants of these cities are proud of them, and envious of each other with a bitter rivalry. They do not love their cities as a Manchester man loves Manchester or a Münchener Munich, for they have probably lately arrived in them, and will surely pass on soon. But while they are there they love them, and with no silent love. They boost. To boost is to commend outrageously. And each cries up his own city, both from pride, it would appear, and for profit. For the fortunes of Newville are very really the fortunes of its inhabitants.

Rupert Brooke, Letters From America (Charles Scribner, 1916) 

Dale Lee Kwong's "Overcoming Adoption"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Calgary's original Centre Street Bridge in 1912. Two years before this photo, the city's Chinatown was relocated from 10th Avenue and 1st Street West to the southern end of the bridge, where it remains to this day. (Photo: University of Alberta Libraries)

As a young woman, writer Dale Lee Kwong set out to discover the facts of her birth in 1960 in Calgary’s small Chinese community. Her search resulted in a few scraps of information. Years later, she receives a letter from her birth mother, Mei Li’an, who tells Kwong she was conceived in a rape in Calgary. I walk up and down Centre Street Bridge, Mei Li’an writes in her letter, contemplating suicide. This news and all its implications traumatize Kwong. Months after the revelation, she goes to the Centre Street Bridge, determined to cross, afraid she, too, might jump.

How many times did Mei Li’an pause here to think of her death? Did those thoughts give her strength while taking away mine? I looked at the passing traffic and nonchalant fellow walkers. Does anyone know about the woman who walked up and down this bridge in 1960? I put one foot in front of the other and kept walking. Can you see my shame?

Dale Lee Kwong, “ Overcoming Adoption: From Genesis to Revelations,” Somebody’s Child: Stories About Adoption (Touchwood Editions, 2011)

Bruce Hunter's In the Bear's House

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

400 million years ago during the Devonian period, Alberta lay close to the equator and was covered by expanding and receding seas (Map: Lloydminster Heavy Oil)

It’s the early 1960s and Will Dunlop is growing up in Ogden at the southeast edge of the city. The deaf boy everyone calls Trout is fascinated by the sea. His basement bedroom is a marine landscape he and his mother have painted aquamarine and dotted with pieces of fishing net, glass floats and his cherished collection of shells. From this refuge, Trout thinks about the world beyond his room, and another, ancient sea.

Above him, a small window and outside, the green laving of the lawn. Past the end of the street, the first farms on the edge of the city and behind them the raw bristle of brome, all that remained of the pale blonde prairie. Beyond the rising dunes of the foothills, the blue slopes of the Rockies, their edges snapped and jagged at the “moment” of upheaval, some twenty million years long. Themselves the wreckage of the Devonian seabed heaving thick plates of shale and limestone into the sky. In places, the shells and fossils of all the earlier seas littered some slopes with sea life so rich, it could be scooped up in delirious handfuls, like unburied treasure amongst the clouds.

Trapped six miles below his imaginary and silent ocean lurked the subterranean and tideless ooze of the Devonian Sea. Full of squashed marine life, darker and thicker than heavy syrup, toxic and exhilarating as any narcotic, pulled up in globular gulps by those mechanical tyrannosaurs, pump jacks, their obedient jaws smacking the ground. The domain of Trout at nine, and his future waiting to be lived and lost and escaped.

Bruce Hunter, In the Bear’s House (Oolichan Books, 2009)

Fred Stenson's The Story of Calgary

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Fred Stenson begins his history of Calgary with the words of a teller of tall tales, Robert E. Gard’s Johnny Chinook: “Anything can happen in Calgary and has.” In this slim volume published in 1994, Stenson recounts Calgary’s story of change over the course of the city's first century: from police fort to oil capital, and everything in between. He sees the city with a novelist’s eye, attentive not only to the characters that figure in Calgary’s past, but the way the city shapes the character of the people who call it home.

Calgary will always be a little out of sync with the rest of Canada. It did not originate in the fur trade. It is not situated in a forest. The people of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Europe were no more important to its development than the people of the United States. In the Great White North, Calgary is not even much of a winter city. The winter chinooks pull it out of the deep freeze into spring-like conditions again and again. The result of all this is that people either like or dislike Calgary a lot. It inspires little in the way of neutral opinion.

When Calgarians look to the future they tend to see brightness. This habit of optimism may be the key ingredient in the recipe that makes Calgary a pleasurable place to be. The expectation of good fortune lifts it up from the economic busts it is prone to, and helps it fly to record heights during the booms that are just as much its fate.

Fred Stenson, The Story of Calgary (Fifth House, 1994)

Ellen Kelly's "Snapshots: Life, Peace and Coffee on the Home Front"

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

An aerial view of Battalion Park on Calgary's Signal Hill. The numbers represent a few of the infantry units that trained at Sarcee Camp during World War I: the 113th Lethbridge Highlands Infantry Battalion, the 51st Canadian Infantry Battalion, the 151st Central Alberta Battalion and the 137th Infantry Battalion of Calgary. (Photo: City of Calgary)

Ellen Kelly’s father was a World War I veteran who served in the 137th Infantry Battalion of Calgary. Before he was shipped overseas, he trained at Sarcee Camp on the Tsuu T’ina Reserve at the southwest edge of the city. In 1916, he and his fellow soldiers hauled fieldstones up a steep hill as a training exercise and formed their battalion numbers on the hillside. Decades later, Kelly contemplates the whitewashed stone numbers preserved on Signal Hill. She sifts through history, photographs and childhood memories to understand her father’s war. In the scene below, she is a cranky five-year-old, packed into her parents’ 1930s Chevy sedan for a picnic adventure on the outskirts of town. It will take her a lifetime to unearth the memory and see the significance of those rock numbers on the hill.

Finally we are there. We get out of the car in a field of tall grass and thistle. Daddy picks me up, looks south, to where he spent almost a year in Sarcee Camp, “learning to be a soldier,” he tells me. Then he looks northwest to the hillside, points at rocks that look to me like rubble.

Daddy pushes back his tweed cap and traces numbers in the air with his finger… He know exactly where the numbers lay…

I am busy with childish interests – chasing grasshoppers, plucking wildflowers, picking the burrs out of my socks.

Mom winds new film into the Kodak box camera, follows Daddy’s finger and takes a picture of the hillside. I eat my sandwich and swat mosquitoes, trying not to think of the long, dusty ride home.

Ellen Kelly, “Snapshots: Life, Peace and Coffee on the Home Front,” Embedded on the Home Front: Where Military and Civilian Lives Converge (Heritage House, 2012).

Betty Jane Hegerat's Running Toward Home

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

Dinny the Dinosaur at the Calgary Zoo, as he once was. (Photo: City of Vancouver Archives)

Corey Brinkman is running away from home, again. For a twelve-year-old boy on his seventh foster family, the notion of home is confusing. This time, he bolts at the Calgary Zoo. The zoo gates close, it’s dark and Corey’s alone. He doesn’t know why he runs but sometimes running is the only thing he can do. On this cold spring night, he’s caged up on St. George’s Island like the zoo animals, scared but oddly at home. As the night wears on, he makes his way to the giant cement brontosaurus at the southern edge of the park. His most recent foster mom told him Dinny hadn’t always been fenced in. In her day, you could climb the dinosaur, or at least try until someone caught you. But Corey is too chicken. Or is he? Sizing up the brontosaurus, he feels a surge of confidence.

The dinosaur’s back was a cinch. Corey stood on the tip of the tail and, like a tightrope walker, made his way up the long curve until he was directly over the hind legs. His head felt like it was floating in front of him, lifting off his shoulders and disconnecting his thoughts from the heavy weight of his feet. He had a clear view across the river to dark houses. Look over his left shoulder, past shrubs and trees, and there were the black conservatory windows. Glance over his right shoulder, through lacy leaves, and there was the dark path leading to the tiger’s small world. But best of all, from where he stood steady and tall on the hump of Dinny’s back, he could see two security guards floodlit against the back wall of their office. They leaned there, smoking and staring across the park at Dinny. And he knew that they couldn’t see him. At last, he was invisible.

Betty Jane Hegerat, Running Toward Home (NeWest Press, 2006)

Nellie McClung's The Stream Runs Fast

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

The Nellie McClung House (803-15th Avenue SW) is currently home to the Colombian Consulate. An enhanced replica of McClung's Calgary home opened in 2014 at Heritage Park as the Famous Five Centre of Canadian Women. (Photo: Calgary Herald)

The morning after the 1926 provincial election, Nellie McClung slept until she heard “the clip-clop of the milkman’s horses” outside her half-timbered Calgary home on the corner of 15th Avenue and 7th Street West. The radio confirmed what she suspected: she had lost her Liberal opposition seat in the Alberta legislature. The defeat came as a shock, but on that sunny June morning, McClung rallied, rolled up her sleeves and set to work.

No woman can be utterly cast down who has a nice bright kitchen facing the west, with a good gas range and a blue-and-white checked linoleum on the floor, a cookbook, oil-cloth covered and dropsical with looseleaf editions. I set off at once on a perfect debauch of cooking. I grated cheese, stoned dates, whipped cream, and made salad dressing, and I let the phone ring. It could tear itself out by the roots for all I cared. I was in another world–the pleasant, landlocked, stormless haven of double boilers, jelly moulds, flour sifters. The old stone sugar crock with the cracked and handleless cup in it seemed glad to see me, and even the marmalade tins with their typed labels, sitting in a prim row, welcomed me back and asked no questions. I patted their honest flat heads and admitted that the years had been long; reminding them, too, that I had seen a lot more wear and tear than they had…

I do not think I could have endured it that day if my cooking had gone wrong, but nothing failed me, and no woman can turn out an ovenfull of good flaky pies with well-cooked undercrusts and not find peace for her troubled soul.

Nellie McClung, The Stream Runs Fast (1945)

Will Ferguson's 419

Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers

View of Calgary from the North Hill, 1911 (Photo: Calgary Public Library)

Laura Curtis lives in a shopping mall. Her apartment elevator delivers her into the village of North Hill Centre. Everything she needs is here: food court, pharmacy, gym; hair salon, doctor’s office, chocolate shop. Her life is constrained and careful. She lives alone, works from home editing books about other people’s lives. Keeps things simple. From her apartment window, she watches the city with the cool, steady gaze of a copy editor.

Laura’s windows were aligned not with the mountains but toward downtown; they looked onto that sandstone-and-steel city below with its Etch-a-Sketch skyline, a city that was constantly erasing and rewriting itself… She could chart the price of a barrel of oil from her bedroom window by the turning of construction cranes along the skyline. When the price fell below some magical point, the cranes would slow down. And then stop. When the price rose again, the cranes would start up, spinning anew. Faster and faster.

The Heart of the New West. That’s what they called the city. And from up here, it did indeed beat like a heart, like one of those stop-motion films of traffic pulsing on aortal avenues.

Will Ferguson, 419 (Penguin, 2012)

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)