Calgary memories part 2
Another day of visiting old haunts with Frink. Starting the day with a lighter dog-related note, here’s Frink holding his mother’s new puppy, Shadow. Shadow is a rat terrier, eight weeks new in this photo:
Puppies are so delightful. A ball of wiry nervous energy, eager to please her new packmates and licking and nibbling on and faces or hands within range.
Breakfast with another old friend took place at Tubby Dog.
First order of the day: Forest Lawn. Another place we used to go frequently when we lived in McKay Lodge. One reason was to get me some socialization; being homeschooled and at the time not yet integrated with the neighborhood kids, my parents enrolled me in a bowling league.
That’s me in the baseball cap. I did get a trophy for something at the end of the year, but I never really made friends with any of the other kids. This is where I was forced to learn to tie shoelaces; facist bowling alleys didn’t have slip-on or velcro bowling shoes!
I am amazed that this bowling alley still exists and is apparently still open today.
Also in Forest Lawn:
It’s a Zellers now, but when we first moved to Calgary it was a K-Mart. It might have been in a slightly different location on the lot too, but that doesn’t matter much. What’s important is that this is where I played my first arcade game. My mother went in to buy something and I was distracted by the bright colors and bouncy music of a City Connection machine by the door. My mother gave me a couple of quarters to try it, and the course of my life to date was decided in the next few minutes.
I became a diehard arcade rat from then until arcades finally died out in the 90s. Calgary in the early 80s was a great place to be an arcade rat – every mall had an arcade, most of them were pretty safe places to be, and most of them took the gaming hobby seriously. Almost all of my allowance went to quarters, and when my parents went shopping at a mall they would simply give me a roll of quarters and park me in the arcade until they were done. Usually they had to drag me away.
Naturally I got into home video games too, but they were never the same; arcade games always had better graphics, better music and sound, better controls and so on, and there was something about the arcade experience that just didn’t translate at home.
On to the next landmark: The Calgary Tower.
Once Calgary’s mightiest phallic symbol, it has since been eclipsed twice. But for old time’s stake I decided to go up and shoot a panorama of the city. I’m not posting said panorama because I can’t get the stitching software to do a good job on it.
There’s a new feature up there that i don’t remember from before: a section of glass floor. I could not make myself step on it – the desire to not fall is strong in this one.
Another memory-loaded site I spotted while up there: the central Calgary Public Library.
This library was the source of most of the books I read when I was a kid. My mother and I used to frequently ride our bikes over here (on Calgary’s stellar bicycle path system) and load up on books for me.
In more recent years, I saw Douglas Coupland speak here on his Microserfs tour, and got my copy signed.
Final tour stop of the day: my kindergarten. My parents actually did enroll me in school – for all of six months. Halfway through the year they changed teachers on me, and I did not like the new one at all. I was a sensitive kid, and the activities she had us do usually ended up with my going home crying. My parents pulled me out, and I was homeschooled all the way to the end of grade 12.
My class:
(Plane not actually inside school). That’s Miss Patterson, the good teacher, on the right end. That’s me standing at the other end.
The sitting boy in the red pants, blue jacket and white cowboy hat is Arrey (or something like that), my only friend in the class. We played together a few times at his place outside of school. I was somewhat jealous of him because not only did he have more Lego than me (one of very few people I’ve met who did), but he had one of the earliest Lego train sets. Somehow I conned him into trading me a couple of the blue rails from that set, which was stupid on both our parts since there wasn’t much I could do with only a couple of rails, and it made his set incomplete. But I was young and blinded by brick envy.
The platinum-haired girl standing behind Arrey in the photo is the first girl I remember thinking was cute. I don’t remember her name; just that she was extremely shy and quiet.
We capped off the day with another nerd gathering for supper at Peter’s Drive-In, which is apparently favored by none other than Hugh Jackman. It is my favorite burger joint of all. It’s not fancy, it’s not gourmet, it’s just delicious. The milkshakes are the best too. Avoid the fries though; they give you a lot of them, but they’re not very good.
Back on the road eastbound tomorrow. Visiting Calgary again has been great, and I wish I could spend more time here. The city is still very familiar; I had forgotten how easy it is to get around in this town, and the city fits like a glove. I could easily see myself living here again.
I used to bitch about how crazy Calgary drivers were, but now they seem tame in comparison to Vancouverites.
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Calgary memories part 1
Road trip post for 2011/08/11
Today I spent the afternoon driving around Calgary, friend Frink in tow, rephotographing important sites from my youth. My parents and I moved to Calgary for the first time when I was 5 or 6 years old, my father coming out first to get a job in the booming construction industry. He got us a basement room at 1016 19th Avenue SE, otherwise known as McKay Lodge.
It’s a weird building. It looks like a large house, but it’s a rooming house and at the time had seven apartments in it, plus an additional room in the attic that went with one of the apartments.
We lived in this place for five years, perhaps my most formative years, and I have loads of memories associated with it. A few follow…
My bedroom was a tiny nook under the stairs leading down to the basement apartment. Here’s my father repairing one of my Tonka toys for me. The photo was taken from the stairs looking into my room:
My bed was to the right, under the stairs, and just above it there was a trap door in the wall that led to a crawlspace under the white windowed veranda seen in the previous photo; I would sometimes crawl out there and use it as a play space.
The downstairs apartment was too cramped and my father was making good money in construction, so we expanded by renting a second apartment in the same house. We took the second floor front apartment, the balcony of which you can also see in the house photo above, and with it we got that spare room in the attic, which became my private playroom. That was pretty sweet.
This is where my parents started homeschooling me. I did have friends in the area, though.
This neighborhood (called Ramsay) was full of native kids at the time, and most of my friends came from that set. Pictured above, brothers Francis and Norbert, and Stephanie (who had a nearly identical sister, Yolanda, who I sadly don’t have a photo of). There were a couple others as well as some white kids that I played with. It was easy to get the interest of other kids because I had lots of toys – tons of Lego, and later on a pedal go-kart and the Atari VCS. Stories behind those two items I won’t go into right now.
Anyway, these native kids were a lot less naive than me and were always playing jokes on me and trying to get me in trouble. For the most part it didn’t work; not being subjected to the same conditioning they went though at public school, I tended to be resistant to peer pressure. Looking back at some of the things they said and did that I didn’t understand at the time, I now wonder just how much abuse and emotional trouble they were living under. Most of them had badly alcoholic and disinterested parents, and one year all of them – every native family in Ramsay – were uprooted and moved down to Ogden, another neighborhood to the south, and not long after that shipped off to a reservation named Sandy something – there are dozens of reservations with the word Sandy in their name, so I have no idea where they actually went. I often wonder what became of them and hope it was something better than the standard fate of native kids.
Just a few blocks from McKay Lodge is Scotchman’s Hill, which is a steep bluff overlooking the Stampede grounds and is a favorite spot for watching the fireworks – and has a good view of the downtown skyline. Here’s a skyline photo circa 1995:
Picture-in-picture today:
And, for good measure, a panorama:
My mother and I would often ride our bikes around the right limb of Scotchman’s Hill, going to the downtown Co-Op for groceries. Just across the river in the foreground of the above photo is this unremarkable scene:
It’s an important spot to me because of what happened here. One day on our way to get groceries, I was riding my bike along this sidewalk and there was a small paper bag in the way. Being an energetic kid who liked doing bike stunts, I was going to run over the bag just because. Then it occurred to me that there might be a brick or some other nasty surprise in the bag, and avoided it at the last second.
As I rode past the bag, I distinctly heard a “Mew!” come from inside. I jumped off my bike and waved my following mother away from the bag. Sure enough, there was a bedraggled kitten inside. My mother speculated that someone was going to drown it in the river but lost heart. I sure was glad I hadn’t run over the bag. We took the kitten home and nursed it back to health, and named it Catmatix. He grew up to be a fierce and somewhat wild cat – when we went camping we would keep him on a long leash, but he would still try to catch rabbits. He also wasn’t too bright – a few years later he disappeared in the winter, and we’re pretty sure he must have drowned trying to catch ducks or geese on the half-frozen river.
Onward to the aforementioned Co-Op. Now a parking lot:
There was a good cafeteria in the grocery store that used to stand here; it’s where I developed my love for the hamburger deluxe, and pioneered the idea of the standard test burger (onions and ketchup only) as a means for comparing burger joints. But what I most remember about this location is that it’s where I learned about the troubling concept of death. It just came up in conversation once when my mother and I were heading home from here, and she tried to explain it to me as well as she could. I found it disturbing to think that the time available to me was finite, even if it was an incomprehensibly long time to someone of that age (the year between birthdays was *forever*!) and I wondered how everyone seemed to be at peace with the idea and why it rarely came up in conversation. I know now that the idea of death is an enormous psychological black hole that few people can deal with, but it was that day in this place that started my ruminations about it.
After five years, for some reason I don’t recall, we moved out of McKay Lodge. Probably because the two apartments were too small and inconvenient. We rented a house on 1a Street, just on the other side of the Stampede grounds. Here’s my parents behind the house with the wooden camper my father built:
This entire block has now been demolished, and I expect they’re going to put townhouses in – that’s what has happened to the rest of the neighborhood. Across the alley though there still stands a building which at the time housed a stereo & electronics shop, which is where my parents bought my my first programmable computer for Christmas: a Commodore VIC-20. That plus the tape drive, a 16K RAM expander and a couple of games set them back about $1000 back in the day. But it’s what got me started down the garden path to software development and game development in particular; this house is where I first learned to program.
Jumping forward many years to 1993, when we returned to Calgary, we lived in this house in Inglewood, not far from Ramsay:
I was still avidly programming, but in the meantime had upgraded to a ‘386 PC and had learned to program in C and assembly languages. I was living here when I started taking computer science at Mount Royal College (now University), and when I met via Fidonet BBSing a small group of friends who I’m still very close with today.
This is also the house where my two dear dogs passed away.
Coal was part collie and part Newfoundland dog. She had been mine since she was a puppy – her mother was also our dog. Pictured above not long before she died peacefully of old age. She was about 19 years old at the time. Good dog and I still miss her.
Sporty was not specifically my dog – more my mother’s, but it makes no difference. He was part alsatian or German shephard and part something else; we adopted him after he was full grown (perhaps I’ll tell that story when I get to Manitoba). Anyway, one day when I was walking him near this house, he was attacked by a much larger dog whose owner was not keeping it under control. Sporty suffered a back injury as a result, and there was nothing the vet could do for him. After a year of watching him barely able to walk and in constant pain, we decided to euthanize him. It was a heartbreaking decision but I think it was the right thing to do.
Moving on, here’s then and now photos of me in front of this house. Thanks to Frink for taking the updated version today.
As you can see, I have gained some weight in the intervening years. :(
I’ve barely scratched the surface of the stories behind the places I revisited today, but I’ll cut it off there.
We also did a little shopping, and in the evening gather for dinner and some video watching with a couple of other local friends.
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Day 2: to Calgary
Road trip log for 2011/08/10.
Stayed at the Three Valley Lake Chateau last night, for the first time. It’s not bad. I got a fourth-floor room with a view of the lake. Here’s a panorama of the view from my balcony:
The room was small but adequate. It was pretty hot; I could get a nice breeze going through by leaving both doors open, but obviously that couldn’t go on all night – I also had to close the balcony door because there was too much noise from the highway otherwise. Fortunately the room included a floor fan so I left that running all night.
Could have slept better but I felt OK during the day.
There’s a “Ghost Town” tourist trap attached to the resort that I had always wondered about in passing. Decided to have a look this morning since it was half price for guests. It’s actually worthwhile – I only spent an hour photographing stuff quickly, but I could spend a whole afternoon there. It’s basically an enormous antique collection, including stuff up to train cars, amassed by the founders of the resort. It covers 4 acres and includes 14 buildings.
Stopped at Revelstoke for breakfast, but my favourite breakfast place, Main Street Cafe, was closed today. Had to settle for a crappy sandwich from Timmy’s.
Stopped for a walk at the Giant Cedars boardwalk, and was shocked to discover that my memories of it are in error – the Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island is actually much more impressive.
Stopped for lunch at the Natural Bridge park near Field – basically a waterfall that flows under a rock bridge – nothing spectacular but a popular curiosity.
Lots of road construction between Golden and Banff – I’m pleased that they seem to be working of fixing that scary dangerous section just east of Golden. My dash-cam caught some young bighorn sheep beside the road on that section – a common sight there. view full size and look by the telephone pole:
Also stopped at the Spiral Tunnels to do some rephotography. Here are two old pictures of me there. The left is, I think, from when I was 12 (I was a much better dresser back then, I’m sure you’ll agree). The right was from my early 20s I think.
There was nobody with me this time to properly repro the photo, so instead I did the other kind of rephotography: picture-in-picture:
For those who don’t know, Spiral Tunnels is just that – a pair of spiral train tunnels that help trains negotiate a difficult pass. There is a viewing area where you can often see the same train going in and coming out of a tunnel at once, crossing over itself in the process. The novelty wore off after the first visit though.
Lots of construction delays up to Banff, and heavy rains in that area too, but after that an uneventful drive into Calgary.
I took about 400 pictures today but haven’t had time to go through them. Will perhaps post some another time.
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Memory Lane
Tomorrow I embark on the longest trip of my life so far: driving from the west coast of Canada to the east coast and back. I have traveled a lot in my life, but never this much at once, and I’ve been unusually non-nomadic the last ten years.
I’ve been talking about doing this for a few years. Actually, going back and looking at my painfully ’90s pre-blogosphere website, I first mentioned the idea of this trip in 2001. At the time my friend Phloem described the idea as “Travels with Samantha Lite”. (TwS is a good read, BTW. Go!)
So ten years I’ve been planning this. Wow, time flies. But while the specific route I intend to follow has meandered a bit since 2001, the goals have not changed at all. I waited this long because now I’m eligible for my employer’s sabbatical program – I get an extra seven weeks of paid vacation this year, and that really helps; this is going to be an expensive trip.
The timing kind of works out well in other ways too – for one thing, Labrador just completed their first through road last year, which opens up the possibility of driving through that pseudo-province. For another, I turn 40 next year, so this can count as my mid-expected-lifespan semi-crisis extravaganza. I didn’t actually think of the trip in that context until just recently, but the intended theme does fit:
The main point of the trip is to revisit all the places I remember from my youth. I want to rephotograph old photos, photograph places I remember but don’t currently have photos of, and generally just refresh all those old memories and steep in nostalgia for a while.
As I wrote when I first described the idea: “I don’t want to become like a goldfish, only able to remember being as I currently am. Change is core to my life. Forgetting who I used to be is a kind of stagnation.” My memories are most strongly keyed by places; my hope is that revisiting old places will remind me of parts of myself that are, at present, buried.
Thinking of it from the midlife context, it will also serve to nicely summarize and cap off my life so far. I’ve been thinking I want to change my direction, so this should help get some closure on my larval stage.
A secondary purpose of the trip is to do some tourism stuff – visit places along the way that I haven’t visited before. That takes a definite back seat to the primary purpose though.
I will also be attempting to film a time lapse movie of the coast-to-coast drive in both directions. I did one for the trip between Vancouver and Calgary a few years ago, and learned a bunch from it. This one will be better, provided the equipment can take the punishment (digital camera shutters are not rated for the number of operations that will occur on this trip).
I’m very excited about this trip, and also a bit scared. I’ve actually been having intense dreams and not a few nightmares about it for weeks now. There is so much that could go wrong. I could have an accident or a breakdown. Some kind of financial setback. I could get too sick to drive, or even just too sick to enjoy the trip. By far the most likely problem is that I could simply get too exhausted to go on; I have sleep trouble even at home and especially tend not to sleep well in hotels.
But I’m not going to let any of that stop me. I’ve got too much invested now, and I’d intensely regret backing down. I’ve taken all possible precautions and my past travel history is spotless, so I tell myself my fears are unreasonable and press on.
Bloggination will be perpetrated here as time and net connectivity permit. I do not expect to be booking any face or plussing any googles while on this trip.
Outing: Manning Park 2
As you may recall from an earlier post, I’ve been spotting places in Manning Park that I want to go back to explore and photograph. My first return trip was a partial bust – I got some nice snow pictures but I wasn’t able to get up the mountain road I wanted to explore because it was closed.
Now I’ve gone back a second time. The snow was gone, and the road was open. Here’s part of my GPS log showing just what road I mean:
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The first 5 miles of the road, leading up to the viewpoint are paved but narrow, with no guard rails. It was a little tense going up and down this road for someone like me who gets vertigo on dropoffs and is afraid of falling off.
The viewpoint was nice but nothing special relative to other mountain viewpoints; you could still see a lot of buildings and hear the road below.
Continuing on to the end of the road, another four miles on a rough, washboarded gravel road, brings you to the Alpine Meadows recreation area. There are lots of open meadows at the top of the mountain here, with delicate wildflowers that bloom in the summer. There are easy hiking trails all around, as well as longer trails heading off into the wilderness for overnight hikers.
I arrived too late in the season for most of the flowers though there were still some left. The meadows were still quite nice as were the views. I found a bench to sit on and eat the picnic lunch I had brought. I had a great view to the east with only miles of empty air in front of me, no signs of human presence, and a profound silence. The breeze would occasionally sigh through the trees, but when it was still it was the quietest place I’ve ever been. Not even the rural area in Manitoba where I once lived ever got this quiet.
You can’t get true silence in the city. It’s amazingly relaxing when you do find it. I must make a point of seeking it out more often.
Photo gallery here.
