Blitzed

Growing up I heard watered-down tribal tales that said we weren’t meant to settle here. The wind, that was why. It picks up speed as it surfs down the east side of the Rockies and gets another kick as it whips through the coulees. The wind is a mighty force. It will carry you away if you aren’t ready for it.

I remember being ten years old walking home after school and needing to lean forty-five degrees forward, the metal pole beside me bent in a similar way. My bullheaded posture would cut through the wind. That’s the only way to stand a chance against it - that is until it suddenly changes direction.

The wind, the stories said, does weird things to your head. It is responsible for the violent acts and drug problems of such a small city. Gunshots on an innocuous street corner. A young girl abducted by a family-friend, never to make it home. Walking by someone shooting up as you walk your child into the library. When you leave he’s left with all his belongings safe in his backpack but the needle is still lying on the ground.

The young man you went to junior high with, you know the one. The one that got up in front of the school your first week of sixth grade and sang O Canada so damn horribly but so damn confidently. He disappeared on his way to Calgary - Calgary! That’s next door. It’s the two-hour drive we all take as casually as if we’re carpooling home after work.

Another kid, who couldn’t keep his arm off my sister’s shoulders one summer all those years ago, he chopped up his mother with a hacksaw. A few football players reached the much sought after adulthood just to be found dead at various playgrounds due to drug exchanges gone wrong. Every summer people are baptized in the Old Man from one end to the other just in time to meet God.

I’ve heard people rant about how they hate it here. I have been one of them. I’ve also been one of the people to have immense loyalty to this place, too. We carry with us our collective trauma as we’ve all been witness to the tragedies that sound beneath the whistling of the night train.

There are signs up at every park warning the parents to constantly be scoping out the park for needles so their children don’t get pricked. Don’t you dare take your shoes off, make sure to wear a double-layer of gloves, I haven’t yet found rubber ones for your size. Be careful of where you run, I tell my five-year-old, if you see one of these do not pick it up. Tell me. Why Mommy? What are they for?

While I’m distracted by the endless day I notice that the rolling hills carry a green pigment they didn’t last I looked. The vibrance of the earth seems to feed the things around it turning it into poetry. In it, I understand what people are trying to communicate when they speak of God’s grace.

The High Level Bridge looms over the city. Old buildings stand erect, representing a pre-technological age of the 150-year-old settlement. How far have we come from then? Have we grown in honor as we’ve grown in size? What is it that we stand for? What is it that we must fight?

As I ignore Death’s proximity the coulees catch my eye. The summer dew leaves a shaving of white over the earth in the winter. The pale blue sky cradles the clouds, a reflection of the dusted hills. You catch a glimpse of a person the size of an ant - not against a swarming population but against the wide-open sky. The land stretches out into infinity and so do we.