2006-06-23

The ruins of Calgary

We are, it seems, a breed without limits. Driving into Calgary last week gave some new meaning to the term 'urban sprawl'. Two years ago, on the way out to Vancouver, it was visibly not as large at its western edge. At 789 square kilometres, its physical footprint is now larger than that of Toronto and Vancouver combined, with an additional 150 square kilometres under negotiation. Thus intact, it would rival each of Moscow and Berlin in physical size.*

Another subdivision nears completion, replete with planned cloverleaf:

Cookie-cutter houses march relentless toward the mountain-barred way to the sea, a great and rising tide of angry country teeth chewing up the foothills with such abandon. When we are gone from here, when I imagine what that will look like, I now see the decaying hulks of Calgary's newer homes, these four and five thousand square foot shrines to the latent power of dead animal bones in the earth; the place where we let growth get away on us, the place where, ironically, our most virulent success ostensibly demonstrated defeat was inevitable.

The ruins will stretch on endless and absurd, and a visitor will wonder what could have gone wrong when everything seemed just fine.

A Song on the End of the World
Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

* All figures used are for city proper, not metro area. With a metro area of 5,100 square kilometres, Calgary is the about the same size as the Paris and Vancouver metropolitan areas combined. The photos were taken while flying out of Calgary on the way home.

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