Growing Up In Edmonton: A memoir by Heather Zwicker

A University of Alberta English professor describes her upbringing in Edmonton, and her early desire to leave this 'tough city to love' -- and her rediscovery of the city

When I was a kid, we always had a subscription to Reader's Digest. It was the standing Christmas present from our neighbor two doors down, and it lay on the coffee table with Alberta Report and an occasional collection of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and Chatelaine. I read everything in the Reader's Digest, but my favorite section was "Drama in Real Life." Even once I had learned to scorn the sensationalism of the reprinted stories of derring-do, I still read them avidly.

Now that I'm older, I think that an even more gripping segment would be "Irony in Real Life." At least that's what I think on bad days, when I can't believe I've ended up in Edmonton.

Growing up, I hated Edmonton. I hated living in a city so far-flung that nobody knew where it was. I hated the glazed look that would come into people's eyes - even Canadians' - when they repeated, vaguely, "Oh, Edmonton." Even if you could find it on a map, there was no history in Edmonton, everybody knew that. I hated Woolworth's, and Woodward's, and the humid scratchiness of wool sweaters on overheated buses. I hated the way your feet stung and stung and stung after skating for ten minutes. I hated Capilano Mall ("where small businesses go to die," opined my father) and the Rex Motor Inn ("a bar with rooms attached," sniffed my mother). I hated going to Youth Group on Friday nights and Sunday school on Sundays and I hated the stolid squareness of the IGA store at 106 Avenue and 50 Street. I hated the conformity of my elementary school, which enticed a stage full of Grade 3 girls to twirl parasols and mince while the boys sang, "The girl that I marry will have to be / As soft and as sweet as a nursery." I hated the conformity of my junior high, where you had to take Phys Ed wearing a pale blue t-shirt and polyester shorts. I hated the conformity of my high school, too, though at least by then we had the IB program and a good concert band. I hated being a chubby girl and a brainy one and, though unknown to me at the time, a lesbian one, and somehow all of these things got associatively caught up in the gawkiness of the gap-toothed downtown skyline's bald announcement: "This is Edmonton. You are here."

In university I realized that if I worked very hard and got high enough grades, I could go somewhere else, somewhere real, for graduate school, and so I did. I loved San Francisco's cosmopolitanism: its street life, its artiness, its subcultures, its style, and its casual disregard for anything east of the Bay. Every airport on the continent has a gate leading to SF. But in 1993, an historic low point for the academic job market, I got an offer from the University of Alberta and found myself back in Edmonton. When I reached the north end of 104th Street on a July afternoon after the 38-hour drive from California (no stopping) and saw that skyline staring implacably back at me again, I felt like the city had defeated me.

However, over the last ten years, something completely unexpected has happened. I have fallen for Edmonton. Part of it, of course, is the job: teaching English to inquisitive students at a great university is a far cry from selling men's shoes at Woodward's. Every year I meet students who remind me that for them - from High Level, from Eckville, from Ardrossan - Edmonton is The Big City, and I feel chastened. But it's not that I love my job in spite of the city. There's something weirdly seductive about a city that grows up just imperturbably being itself in spite of what you think of it.
I remember distinctly the day I realized that about Edmonton. It was the December after the Whyte Avenue riots and I was walking home from campus past the Epcor Power Plant in Rossdale. It was one of those incredible winter afternoons when the sun slants in so low and yellow that even the concrete looks magical. My eyes slid over the dates on the pump house and the turbine hall, and then snagged as I realized with a jolt that 1937 and 1954 had somehow become historical. In turn, that meant Edmonton was growing up. Forced to self-consciousness, I realized that I was living the kind of life I associated with elsewhere; only I was living it here. I had friends who were filmmakers and writers who hung out in cafes in Edmonton - cafes, moreover, that were not part of a chain. Other friends lived in downtown lofts. There was good food in town, of any ethnicity you could name, and several organic grocery stores. The boxy IGA by my parents' place has taken on a certain retro sexiness. The whole summer of 2001 I felt like we were living somewhere else. There were street festivals and art festivals and film screenings at Kinsmen Park in addition to the (excessively promoted) World Track and Field Championships. The Whyte Avenue riot was itself a turning point: a riot - a window-smashing, cop-defying, property-disregarding riot - in polite, conservative, conformist Edmonton? Apparently, while I was busy fretting about being somewhere else, Edmonton was quietly taking in all comers and turning into a very different place than it had been when I was young.

It still feels ironic to have ended up here, and there are still times I dislike the city. The winters can be awful, though it's hard to remember that when you're skiing fast on perfect snow just a staircase away from downtown. Edmonton can be a tough city to love: it's a tough city. But that very sturdiness, its stalwart prairie imperviousness to style, its unmerciful constancy, its blank face, works on you over time. The secret of Edmonton is that it's easy to find life more exciting other places.