The Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth. ...Maybe.
Friday was the first day of the 2005 Calgary Stampede, self-styled Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth. And we live in Ramsay, the community directly behind Stampede Park. When I bought this house, I knew what it meant. Even though I was buying it for the inner-city location, and the big yard, and the proximity to Inglewood and the river trails and for all sorts of reasons that pointedly avoided looking the neighbouring rodeo and exhibition (1.3 million visitors each year) in the eye, I knew we'd have to deal with Stampede sooner or later.
Last year we fled Alberta at this time of year, so as we sat at sunset, looking out over the red-spackled mud flats of PEI's north shore and Turner said "Aw jeez, we're missing the Stampede right now," he had to just take my word for it that all kinds of yip-yeehaw hell was breaking loose in Calgary, and we were better off eating Malapeque Bay oysters and slaloming the Anne of Green Gables tourist sites (my theory being that it’s waaaaayyy better to visit someone else’s backyard hokey tourism nightmare than stay home and deal with your own).
But this year, well, we’re here. Sloane was born, there's work projects on the go that require us to be homebodies, family is around - you know, all the 'what-have-yous' that keep you in situ when the Canadian summertime finally arrives. And like every longtime Calgarian, I knew full well what being in town for the first weeks of July meant. It meant living through the Stampede.
We had to get a special parking pass so we can legally park in front of our own house, because we're right in the thick of prime parking for the Stampede grounds. Our neighbours have erected fake raw-wood corrals around their yards and carloads of people in cowboy hats are pouring through the community ignoring the playground zone speed limit. There's an impromptu motor home-and-horse trailer village up in the vacant industrial lot at the end of our street, teeming with cowpokes from across North America. Last week the rodeo livestock roundup went right down Spiller Road, leaving manure all over the road and cutting off the south exit to the community. And this morning two dozen antique tractors went past our house in a long, loud, get-along convoy from who-knows to I’m-not-sure-where. It’s Stampede. Yip! Yeehaw!
This is a city that, for the other 50 weeks of the year, is overrun with thrilled economic migrants from the RoC who’ve found nirvana in an oil patch desk job and a pink-siding-covered split-level in Coventry Hills. Its mere existance as a counterpoint to Calgary's status quo should make me love the Stampede as a phenomenon, but I can't. I just can't. If you’re Calgary-raised, you’re a cynic when it comes to the Stampede. Stampedea, ergo sarcastico sum est. It can’t be helped. The best I can do is a benign if-you-can't-say-something-nice-say-nothing approach, tempered with a bit of Well, I suppose every city's gotta have a summer festival of some sort fatalistic rationalizing.
But then, the Calgary Herald has this weekly Friday magazine, see. It’s new, and I dunno how this came about, but someone managed to wrest its editorial control from the moronic typewriting monkeys that run the regular part of the newspaper. So the magazine, Swerve, is actually pretty great. Good ideas, good art direction, interesting subtle and funnee detail by turns, Shelley Youngblut the editor has done a fine job at the helm, there. And best of all, they’ve had the good sense to hire Turner for periodic pieces.
This week’s Swerve takes a pointed and specifically genuine look at why hometown Calgarians should embrace all the moronic clichés of the Stampede. Hell of an angle - it'd ever been tried in the local media. And I admit that they managed to breathe new life into some of these ideas for me. I’m clearly in a conflict of interest, but for my (biased) money, my favourite of this week’s pieces was the one Turner wrote about the Stampede Breakfasts:
Flipping Over Flapjacks
Look, I’m new in town, so let me get this straight: the breakfasts are free? You just show up in the morning and help yourself to a stack of flapjacks and a pile of sausages? Because that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve heard that back in, like, 1923, there was this guy – Jack “Wildhorse” Morton – who was camped out at the old train station with no money to attend the rodeo, so he started serving breakfast to passers by as some kinda old-timey lark or somesuch. And now, 80-odd years later, there are almost as many free breakfasts around town as there are dorky, wood-panelled corral facades. So for the duration of Stampede, I can just show up practically anywhere – at shopping malls, at restaurants, at places of business, at schools and clubhouses and community centres, at the Stampede grounds itself – and tuck into pancakes gratis. Have I got that right?
OK, so this isn’t news to you Mr. Born-and-Raised-Here, and you’ve been there and done that a hundred times. Ms. Moved-Here-in-’89. And yes, Mr. Yawning-From-a-Patio-on-Seventeenth, a pancake breakfast is far from hip. But I have to say, I’m pretty keen to check out a few of ‘em. Because you can find jingle-jangling spurs and bucking broncs and midway rides and those little doughnuts in a great many places. But mass public pancake breakfasts? That’s a tradition that strikes this new comer as being far more uniquely, authentically Calgarian than a million cowboy hats. More friendly, and more earthy, and yes – let’s be honest – more extravagant and boosterish, not to mention more than a little hokey. That’s our fair city, at least from what I’ve seen so far. So you can either pretend the hockey arena isn’t shaped like a saddle, or you can hop on and take a ride. Know what I mean? Plus also, what kind a crazy person would turn down a free breakfast?
Nicely done, Turner. That shut me up good, frankly. (And I laugh every time I read the part about trying to pretend that the hockey arena isn’t shaped like a saddle – because we all do that. We all try to pretend it isn’t shaped like a saddle. Har har har, seriously. We try.) The other articles were good, too. I recommend finding a copy of the magazine from Friday's paper, if you're in town.
So I’ll keep quiet this year, and try to enjoy the Stampede… this year. Thanks to Turner and Swerve. I'll try. You can't make me wear a cowboy hat, but I promise not to be an active party pooper.
So Happy Stampede, y'all. And for the record, we've got two visitor parking passes up for grabs - get 'em while they're hot!
Categories: Calgary | City Planning | Turner