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Edmonton - A City Called Home > Interpretations of Edmonton > An Interpretation

An Interpretation


Reflections on Edmonton: A modest proposal
by Curtis Gillespie

What makes Edmonton distinctive to the people who live here? How is it different from other cities? Curtis Gillespie offers a personal perspective.

Curtis Gillespie is the author of three books, the most recent being Playing Through. He has won three National Magazine Awards, and his writing on politics, science, business, sports, travel and the arts has been published throughout Canada, the US and Great Britain.

Sometimes it hits me when I'm riding my bicycle through the serene and unspoiled river valley. Or it might pop up when I'm walking alongside the intricate iron work of the towering High Level Bridge. Whatever happens to be the instigating factor - namely, any number of things unique to being able to live in Edmonton - I do often find myself unexpectedly experiencing a certain intensity of homeness to this place.

Naturally, these musings have also involved asking myself exactly what it is about Edmonton that makes this such a special place to live (though in so quiet a way that we have not yet been forced to deal with the hordes choosing Edmonton over Paris or New York). And this feeling has almost always led me to other trains of thought, such as, what exactly is it that turns the place you live from a mere geographical description into that thing you call home? Perhaps it's just a kind of destiny, a confluence of choice and circumstance. Perhaps it's more a state of mind, the way we happen to look at where we find ourselves. Maybe it's both, a combination of fate and interpretation.

Many of these questions have also tended to come to mind as I've visited and lived in other places around the world. I was born here, at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, and grew up in the shadow of the Municipal Airport, but I have also lived in Paris, Toronto, Calgary, Scotland. Yet I always seem to come back to Edmonton. The truth is, I've often wondered why (usually in February).

So, what is this place, anyway? What is it that makes Edmonton Edmonton? As with any place, really, it's as much about the concrete as the notional; that's what gives a city its vibe, its attitude. Yes, it's a collection of people, achievements and things, but this has to coalesce into something that's not easily described, yet which is felt, which is apprehensible. You know you're on the streets of Manhattan when you're there. You sense the uniqueness of strolling through London, even when you're not near the recognized monuments. Edmonton feels different from other places, and why is that?

Taking on the skeptics

A good place to start might be in dispensing with the cynics. This is necessary only because Edmontonians frequently find themselves defending their city when they travel elsewhere; mostly in Canada, that is, since people in other countries around the world tend to view Canada with the same sort of lazy generalities that the rest of Canada views Edmonton - remote, cold, and impossibly far from the 'centre' of things, wherever that happens to be.

The wintry climate is simply a fact of life when you live in Edmonton. The old saying goes, If I had a dollar...and for me, it's if I had a dollar for every time someone said, Oh, you live in Edmonton during the winter...why? I'd be rich enough to spend the winters in Palm Springs. Of course, other climates can be just as harsh. It's more unbearable to be outside in August in Phoenix than it is Edmonton in January.

But it's true, the length and depth of the winters are a salient factor of life in Edmonton. It's a common complaint. Well, okay, you either love it or you hate it, and even if you hate it, you try to endure. I'm one of those who endures, even though I do love living in a landscape where you could die just from being outdoors. It's elemental, and you won't get that in Vancouver. A friend, the wonderful writer Tim Bowling, said that the weather here makes him feel more connected to the history of our country, to the trials and hardships people had to overcome just to settle this vast space. It also gives him an even greater appreciation for the centuries of native populations that lived here before the European advance.

So, yes, the winter is too long. It's too cold. But it breeds a kind of quiet, almost borderline-pathological determination to not be beaten by it, a determination that can be useful in many other walks of life, such as in running a business or raising small children.

The other major criticism I hear - that Edmonton is rather remote - is largely pointless, given the facts of modern travel and communication. Sure, Edmonton's physical location is not central in the way that London or New York are, but the 'remoteness' of a place is largely an abstraction in today's world. Flying from Denver, you travel about the same amount of time to Vancouver, Toronto or Edmonton. Not much difference there. Business is conducted increasingly in an electronic context. I make my living as a writer, and living in Edmonton has not at all hindered my ability to work for all of Canada's national print outlets, as well as many major American and British outlets.

It would seem then, that the majority of pins other Canadians like to poke into Edmonton are borne of some strange need to paint their place of residence as somehow superior, in the way that when you were young and immature you always wanted to point out the flaws of the girl who dumped you to make yourself look better. It's the old clumsy instrument of definition by contrast.

Vancouverites might claim that Edmonton is cold and landlocked, Torontonians that our city is distant and provincial, Calgarians that we are too blue collar. As alluded to earlier, these sound strangely like the generalizations I hear coming from the mouths of someone in Charleston, South Carolina, or London, England, when asked for their impressions of Canada (cold, remote, land of natural resources). My suspicion is that this is why Torontonians so desperately want to be like New York City, or why Vancouverites want to be Seattle or San Francisco, or why Calgarians want to be Houston or Denver; because they think this will somehow admit them to the major leagues, that aspiring to 'the next level' will make their city a better city.

In a typically Canadian way, too many Canadian cities aspire to the "world-class," whatever that means. It's part of that passive-aggressive inferiority complex we have that allows us to be convinced of our superior way of life while all the time hungering for the economic clout of America and the cultural weight of Europe. But what is world-class, anyway? London's smog? San Francisco's traffic? Rome's corruption? Paris's....well, okay, Paris is perfect, but never mind.

In any case, this kind of collective aspiration is fool's gold. And Edmontonians know this, or at least the Edmontonians I know who love the essence of this place. There's a canny realism to Edmonton, and that's why Edmonton just wants to be Edmonton. The last thing Edmonton aspires to is to be like Calgary or Toronto. What a fate! We're also smart enough to never pretend to be Vancouver; we don't have enough rain or spandex to go around.

The fact is, Edmonton has nothing to compare itself to. Landlocked American cities of the same size, such as Kansas City or St. Louis, have much more benign climates. Even a city such as Minneapolis (landlocked, fair size, big mall) isn't a fair comparison, because Minneapolis simply doesn't possess Edmonton's remoteness or Edmonton's romantic connection to the northern frontier. Large northern European cities tend to be much closer to the sea. Since there are no real comparators, Edmontonians figure we might as well just get on with living our lives and enjoying our city without always wishing it were something else.

But even though Edmonton is a place one can become intensely attached to, it's also a place one occasionally views from afar and wonders, How did I end up here? The city's wonders are in so many ways apparent yet hidden, a place that is so often compelling and yet sometimes also slightly quotidian. You know you love it, but you're not always sure you can put your finger on the Why. Maybe it's a bit like being in a good marriage or examining a lab frog: dissecting it to the last inch still can't fully explain it.

The Edmonton List

Jan Morris, the celebrated British travel writer, visited Edmonton in the late '80s for a piece commissioned by Saturday Night magazine. Though she strangely chose to visit during a February cold snap, she still managed to get to the heart of the place, and had a lot to say that supports the thesis of this essay - namely, that Edmonton is its own place, and is happy to be so, without hankering to be something else.

She began her book, entitled O Canada!, with an introductory essay in which she noted her overall impressions about Canada. "The size of it, the emptiness, the challenges of ice and wilderness... these are what people intuitively and immediately think of when they consider the idea of Canada. There is truth in the reaction... though I have come to feel it is a misleading truth. Canada is one country whose parts are greater than the whole..." She could have been speaking about Edmonton, and she did later on in the book, in her essay devoted specifically to Edmonton.

"Everyone, without a single exception, was good to me there. The city seemed to me remarkably handsome. All my creature comforts were satisfied. I made some extremely agreeable friends, I was interested in many of the things I was shown, and I much admired the enterprise of people who could build so fine a town in so improbable a location."

Though Morris had much to say that was complimentary, she never really did get around to trying to quantify what it is that makes this city a special place to live. Anyone who lives here can always do The List. That's easy.

You have to start with the river valley, and it's maze of paths, trails, hidden locations and fantastic parks. The river valley is not just a beautiful part of Edmonton, it's the essential part of Edmonton. It is a place for us to go, a symbol of what we want to be: flowing, subtle, strong, silent. A few years ago, a good friend visited from Toronto and I took him for a mountain bike ride through some of the trails along the river and through Terwillegar Park. More than once he stopped and said, "I can't believe we're in the middle of a city. This is astonishing!"

I just nodded.

Next up is the sky and the land. We live in a place that is about space. It extends everywhere around us. The flat massive expanse of the land places no borders on us or on our thinking. The sky is a huge, thrilling entity, so vast, so blue, so accepting that to go anywhere else - Vancouver, Toronto, London, San Francisco - is to feel at times as if it's hard to breathe properly. I do love Vancouver for many reasons, but I am always seized by claustrophobia while there: The mountains are pushing at you on one side, the ocean restricts your movement on the other, and from above the lowering dark sky seems to be a ceiling from a horror movie that's inching down on your head. Not here, where the sky and space make it easy to breathe deeply and open your shoulders out. It's called prairie life and once you have that vista etched into your retinas, that air touching the bottom of your lungs, it's in you and it's hard to get out.

Moving on, people naturally mention the festivals. The Folk Festival. The Jazz Festival. The Fringe. Heritage Days. And yes, they deserve mention, because these events are almost unmatched. I've attended the Fringe in Edinburgh, and though it's obviously a different city with a different vibe, it would be hard to say that it's any better than Edmonton's. But to invoke Edmonton's festivals simply for their quality is, I think, to miss the point. Because it's not what's on the bill that makes these festivals so special, though the rosters are uniformly brilliant, it's the attitude that transforms them into events that simply could not happen anywhere else on the planet.

The volunteerism and sense of community is so strong and so pervasive here, as is the simple unspoken courtesy, that perhaps the most important thing about the festivals here is that they simply make you feel star-kissed to be granted this particular existence. Anything that can do that for you is something you don't take for granted.

The music's superb or The plays are wonderful, I always think when I'm sitting on Gallagher's Hill or strolling through Old Strathcona during the festivals. But what's really great is that it's all part of a larger fabric, a community, working and living together to create something wonderful - and here's the Edmonton part - without having to shout about it.

The List could easily continue if that's what we were merely interested in. The University of Alberta is a great campus, and is the second largest university in Canada. The Legislature Building and grounds are beautiful and majestic, and I love the way they sit on the lip of the drop-off into the river valley. One of my favourite views in the city isn't really a view at all, but it's where you stand at the back of the Legislature, and you are almost even in height with the High Level Bridge. It's a peculiar feeling because you know if you walk just 500 metres along the Bridge, you'll suddenly be looking at a scary drop to the river below.

In my person list would also be the John Janzen Nature Centre (and it was Janzen, the city parks planner, who had the vision of a river valley of parks without commercialism; his four children still live in Edmonton) and Fort Edmonton Park, which is a miracle of re-imagination. There's the Birkebeiner Ski Race. The astonishing selection of affordable golf courses (which, trust me, makes us the envy of virtually every other city of golfers in the country). The Muttart Conservatory. The footbridge at Hawrelak Park. Holger Peterson and his Stony Plain records.

And the writers! What a roster. Greg Hollingshead, Gloria Sawai, Tim Bowling, Rudy Weibe, Shani Mootoo, Jacqueline Baker, Jocelyn Brown, Norm Sacuta, Glen Huser, Vern Thiessen, Adam Dickenson, Stewart Lemoine, Chris Weisenthal, Myrna Kostash, Merna Summers, Nigel Darbasie, Candas Jane Dorsey. The wealth of literary voices resident in this city is one of the country's truly hidden secrets (hidden, naturally, since this is Edmonton). It's no surprise that we can support three independent bookstores, when larger cities can't manage to support one.

Even Alistair MacLeod lived here, for heaven's sake, delivering milk in the 1950s for the NADP before deciding that writing might be more up his alley. We've also got the best radio host in the country in Peter Brown. "For a city of its size," wrote Jan Morris, "Edmonton is cultivated not just by North American standards but by European standards."

But now that I've given you The List, I'm going to tell you that this list isn't really what's best about Edmonton. What's best about Edmonton is that we don't need to make lists.

Edmonton's view of itself

"Grandiloquent, Edmonton generally isn't," said Jan Morris. "Indeed, most of the city's claims about itself are disarmingly modest...Edmonton does not feel a young city. There is nothing brash about it...and in winter anyway its style is steady and considered. It seemed to me a gradualist kind of place...and seems to have developed, through many a boom and many a bust, with persistent reasonableness."

What's best about Edmonton is that we're cool with all this great stuff in our town, but on the other hand, it's not really the kind of place where we feel we need to go around thumping our chests. The value of what we have here is not measured by someone else's yardstick.

Of course, as with anything you value, honesty gives the emotion true authenticity. And in the case of Edmonton, the city certainly has its flaws; but more than that, there are some aspects of Edmonton's civic personality and future that I find frustrating and which I am prone to worry about. There is always going to be the aforementioned civic boosterism to deal with.

Whether it is elected officials or empty-headed newspaper columnists, the almost pathetic need many have to be part of something "world-class" is embarrassing. Just let well enough alone. We'll do what we do, and if others around the world want to applaud or visit, let them. And if they don't, they don't.

City planning is also a bother and a fear. With so much space and so much money at our disposal, Edmonton should be an architecturally delightful city, with a variety of unique and livable buildings. This is not always the case, and sometimes a City Council has to set the tone. The strip mall mentality cannot be eradicated, but it can be channelled. Close off one or two streets around the Boardwalk to pedestrian traffic only. Pass legislation that the Rossdale Power Plant will be converted into a Modern Art gallery when it's decommissioned. Redesign the top track of the High Level Bridge to accommodate year-round pedestrian and bicycle traffic and have local artists design the iron work railings. Such moves, just for starters, would be a way to say: This is a city in which people value their community and aren't here just for a job.

There are other flaws - the lack of a decent local newspaper, the lack of a proper repertory movie theatre, the fact that my garage isn't attached to my house - but as with any relationship, the flaws have to be there to provide the contrast. You wouldn't anything to be flawless. How could you live with that?

Success on our own terms

I happen to enjoy the other cities of Canada that I know, and I don't begrudge them what they don't offer. I like visiting Vancouver, and have always enjoyed the sea wall, Granville Island, Stanley Park. Toronto is a place where I always have a good time, and where the whole great swirling mix of it is always vibrant and exciting. Montreal is beautiful and European. Saskatoon is cozy and friendly.

But Edmonton is, simply, comfortable in its own skin. There aren't any inferiority or superiority complexes. Calgary may want to be Denver, Toronto might hunger after Manhattan. Vancouver wants to be Seattle, and Montreal wants to be Paris. But Edmonton just wants to be Edmonton. This is how Edmontonians feel about their city, and it's what gives Edmonton that unique feel among Canadian cities: a quiet sense of contentment and personal discovery, as if to say, This is where we live, and it's great, but we don't want to make too big a deal about it. This is not our way.

Edmonton is an intricate and densely woven set of historical and personal circumstances woven together to create an idiosyncratic place: a city of built on the edge of the frontier, a modern city bursting at the seams with art, commerce and humanity. But it's more than that. Edmonton is not just a collection of facts, it's also a collective state of mind. People who come here from elsewhere often talk all around this hard-to-describe feeling without ever actually putting their finger on it. But that's because the act of trying to put one's finger on 'it' very nearly defeats the point. After all, the minute somebody says out loud, "I'm actually quite modest," the sense of modesty is necessarily lessened. This is why I personally dislike civic boosterism and the overtly stated pursuit of the 'world-class' in Edmonton. Not because we can't do it or don't have it, but because the minute you start crowing about pursuing or achieving something 'world-class' you remove half the charm of achieving it.

When Edmonton hosted the Under-20 Women's World Cup of Soccer here this past summer, the rest of the world seemed astonished that Edmonton, of all places, could do a superb job of hosting such a tournament and then, on top of everything else, actually have 50,000 people come out and watch a (fabulously talented) bunch of girls play soccer. But I wasn't astonished at all. I was in the Commonwealth Stadium for some of those games, and it felt entirely natural to me that this event was happening in Edmonton, even if the rest of the sporting were dropping their jaws in surprise and envy.

This is what makes Edmonton Edmonton. It wants to be a great place to live, but it wants to do it on its own terms, not those dictated by outside agents. The factor that always gives any place its special vibe (or lack thereof, in so many cities) is the way its inhabitants feel about living there.

The Edmonton state of mind is knowing how privileged we are to live in a place that has its own austere beauty, that has a dynamic arts scene, a staggeringly good economy, and with not much in the way of the problems of other cities our size or bigger. And that on top of everything else we carry these blessings with a sense of modesty. We don't feel an urgent need to be something else. These things are what create a community. Edmonton is Edmonton, no more, no less. We call it home, and we can't find it anywhere else but here.