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.
[gmap file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110811.kml” width=”80%” visible=”true” zoom=”auto” center=”files”]
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.
[gmap file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110810.kml” visible=”true” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” type=”satellite”]
Underway
Road trip post for August 9, 2011.
Not much to say about today. Other than the June outing to Long Beach, this is the first day of my big trip. Uneventful; I got off to a bit of a late start and except for a few short breaks, drove all the way through until 7:30pm.
Stayed at the Three Valley Lake Chateau, that picturesque resort with the red roof between Sicamous and Revelstoke. It’s pretty nice. No cell service here though, and I couldn’t get the wireless working with my laptop, hence the delayed posts.
There’s a big “Ghost Town” tourist trap next door that I’ve always eyeballed on the way past. Since admission is half price for resort guests, I’ll check it out in the morning.
Today’s GPS track (no music because I was driving with the window down all day due to the heat):
[gmap width=”80%” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110809.kml” zoom=”auto” type=”satellite” center=”files” visible=”true”]
Backing up a bit
I actually started (and, in a sense, finished) this road trip back in June, when I took a short vacation at Long Beach. Living in Vancouver doesn’t put me on the west coast proper, so I thought it would be more correct to film my timelapse movie starting and ending at Tofino. It also served as a road test for my new timelapse recording technique.
But more importantly, Long Beach is where I began. In 1971, my parents were living with a small group of hippies in Schooner Cove, which is just south of Tofino. My parents had built themselves a tree house out of driftwood, and that’s where I was conceived. I went back to try and find my spawn point.
Schooner Cove is still somewhat isloated. There is no road and no established trail going there anymore; you have to walk on the beach, and high tide cuts off access so you have to be careful about timing.
There is no sign of former habitation; the houses that were there were removed, and everything else is overgrown. I believe I did locate the old trail head that led to my parents’ treehouse though – the house would have been a short walk in here, just to the left of the stream:
And here is the view of Schooner Cove looking south from this point:
Beautiful. No sign of life. Just the sound of the wind and the waves. I could totally see camping out here.
See that rock just left of center? My father crashed his Morris Minor there. He was driving home across the beach when a wave swamped the car, and he wasn’t able to extricate it. He had to abandon it, and the waves tore it apart. When I was young (12, I think) my mother brought me back here and there was still a lump of rust there that would have been the engine block. No sign of it this visit though – if anything remains, it was under five feet of sand.
I love Long Beach, but my memories of it are recent – a few from that visit when I was 12, and most from visits in the last few years. My parents left the area before I was born – living on a boat north of Sechelt for a while, then around the time of my birth living in Vancouver. I was born at St. Paul’s hospital downtown Vancouver, where by a sad coincidence my friend Erik Torstensson was treated just before he passed away a couple of years ago.
Coming back toward Vancouver, I passed through Coombs, home of the unjustifiably world-famous “place with the goats on the roof”. It’s just a tourist gift shop with that one gimmick, but I lived there for a while. I think it was related to the Long Beach visit when I was 12. A friend of the family had offered my mother a job staffing a booth at the tourist mall going up next to the goat place. Here’s what it looks like now:
It wasn’t as well developed back then though – still early days, with just wood boardwalks on mud. Anyway, we lived in a camping trailer next to the goat place while this business tried to take flight, and I was bored out of my mind. Thankfully there was an arcade here at the time, and I spent much time playing Trojan (still have the first-level music memorized), but money was extremely tight and I really had to beg for that occasional quarter. I was really glad I had brought a few of my favorite comics with me.
After a month, things didn’t seem to be picking up and no money was coming in, so we bailed out. It kind of soured our relationship with that family for a while, but before we left we stayed with them for a a few days and I got to play with their Coleco Adam (only time I ever got my paws on one) and that was also the first time I got to play the excellent Pitfall II on the Atari VCS – spent many hours on that game.
And here’s the result of a little program I cooked up to correlate my GPS track with my iTunes recently played list, and mark up my travel maps with the music I was listening to at the time:
[gmap type=”satellite” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” file=”__UPLOAD__/2011/08/20110626.kml” visible=”true”]
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.
