8,683 days on earth – Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada and Seattle, Washington.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada is a place that I tried to understand for a handful of days.  This is what I got out of it.  Calgary is a big place; about 1.3 million people live there and there’s a lot of ground to cover.  The horizon at most times being covered with hilltops, and on top of those hilltops are picket-fenced houses with ADT signs deterring any ne’er do wells such as myself from tainting their Homeowner Association bubbles.  The interior, near city center, is boxed in with skyscrapers and sprawling apartments buildings.  I wandered as much as I could in the four quadrants that separate Calgary, but during my time there I kept finding myself in near-identical, ritzy neighborhoods getting questioning looks from the ever-present-mid-40s-jogging-dog-mom.  I’ve found it difficult so far to try and transmit that I’m non-threatening to these jogging-moms and lawn-watering-dads, being a heavily bearded man driving a distinctly rusty, off-pink accented van playing either loud ambient noise generators (gregorian chants being my most recent favorite) or 1.8 speed audiobooks which even to initiated ears like my own still take a moment to become accustomed to.  They are an amphetamine-like aural delicacy, but one that I’ve come to love.

It’s been a challenege of trial-and-error figuring out how to diffuse any threat on my end to passersby.  I’ve tried smiling and waving, smiling and nodding, a stoic non-smiling nod, to no acknowledgement at all.  But I think my favorite is the mouth slightly agape unwavering eye-stare.  This one doesn’t work well to diffuse threat, but it is some of the most fun to be had when one has an old van and a (what I think to be) rugged man-figure, no matter how harmless I may actually be.  Sometimes it’s good to keep people on their toes and play the threatening-van-guy just in case a real threatening-van-guy shows up some day.  But often times if we both avoid eye contact, and stick to a strict if-I-don’t-see-them-they-don’t-see-me policy, everyone makes out perfectly.  Do not fire unless fired upon.

There is a healthy population of bicyclists in Calgary, and the vast majority wore helmets.  I was worried that there may be a mandatory helmet law within Calgary, and am still unsure, but I wasn’t reprimanded in my time there.  I should wear a helmet, and don’t have an excuse as to why I don’t other than the time I purchased one online.  I delved into the research process that took about 10 hours spread out over two weeks.  I scoured cycling forums, reviews on different websites, checked crash-statistics and notoriety of different brands within the helmet manufacturing community.  I took a tape measure to my head to ensure that I would get the perfect fit of whichever helmet I decided on.  I became a bit discouraged with the tape, wondering if I had an oblong shaped head, or a normal-shaped head that is just big.  One brand had a printout on their website for standard US letter paper that when cut out, would show which size and style of helmet one should get based on where the two ends meet when wrapped around the potential customer’s head.  The two ends didn’t meet with this print-ruler, and I assumed that I must have printed it out incorrectly, it must have been shrunken with the settings pre-print.  Into the bin it goes.  So after all this research, I decided one night to just impulse buy the largest helmet by the manufacturer that the Amazon algorithm had determined to show me the most of.  The day finally came.  That familiar excitement of the package in the mail.  Two days until Helmet Christmas.  The helmet fit snugly, I thought.  This is how helmets should fit.  Maybe it’s a bit tight, but it’ll break in, right?  It was too tight.  Convinced that my skull could cave in at any moment, I put it back in the box and put in in the closet, telling myself that I will return it to Amazon within the weeks allotted for returns.  Even before I put it in the box, I knew I wasn’t going to go through the effort to send it back.  This has been an Achilles heel for me, one that I’m still working on but have made substantial headway in recent years.    Something about accomplishing those menial tasks that require a miniscule amount of effort with a large return just seem to slip by into the endless-procrastination territory.

I made it to Calgary on a Friday and left on a Monday to try and avoid the weekend-traffic of Banff, the reason I was in Calgary in the first place.  The most distinct memory that I have from my time was when I visited a district called Kensington.  I parked my van, grabbed my bike and backpack and started wandering.  A surreal feeling came over me.  There were so many people wearing shiny new cowboy hats.  They were everywhere.  I didn’t understand.  We’re in a large city – not generally the stomping grounds for horses or cattle.  Everywhere I went they were there.  Hawaiian shirts, cargo pants, fanny packs, cowboy hats.  What’s going on?  I went into a coffee shop to hide, a family speaking Arabic in checkered western shirts and cowboy hats – I left.  Outside was back into a cacophony of cowboy hats and children’s wails.  I went to the first bookshop I could find- no cowboy hats in sight.  I knew at least one place that would be safe.  I hid to collect myself.  Reality was unfolding all around me.  I needed to get my mind off of the confusing cowboy hat situation.  I asked the bookseller their recommendations for Calgary-based authors that were less than 2 inches thick – sorry, 5.5 centimeters – so that it would fit in a certain slot in my van where I’ve decided to stow books.  It was good to distract myself from the stream of cowboy cosplayers and ended up with a fantastically well-writen epigrammatical novel called Fishbowl by Bradley Somer.

That distinctly confused feeling of cowboy hat confusion is a treasured one once it was put into context.  I didn’t know what kind of strange cultural style I’d fallen into, but then the signs that I’d seen started to come together: “Calgary Stampede.”  I asked someone what “Stampede” was.  They told me.  I can’t remember how they described it, but what I started to understand over the following days is that Stampede is what happens if you take a week-long carnival and smash it together with a week-long Halloween with a funnelled template of the Wild West.  It wasn’t my scene, but I’m happy it’s an outlet for people that enjoy that sort of thing.  I always got a kick out of seeing the 50s+ man wearing cowboy attire walking around a metropolitan area, unable to separate from that costume.  The man walking around a shopping mall, or Broadway in downtown Fargo has no need to wear that, but he does anyways.  I think there’s a similar spirit in the old man getting a pretzel in the mall as there is in the Goth kid from middle school.  They’re in their particular dress and they know they stand out, but they do it anyways.  I respect that and envy it to some degree.

I wandered around and saw the sights of Calgary, but it just didn’t feel like it had much personality.  Granted, I tended to gloss over the pop-up table shops selling stacks upon stacks of cowboy hats and avoided the Calgary festivities as much as I could – and 3.5 days isn’t a lot of time to soak in a large city.  Calgary is an incredibly diverse melting pot of cultures.  In one city block, there could be such diversity in cuisine and individual styles.  But from what I saw there was just too much of a new-feeling sheen on everything.  I spent most a large chunk of time in a coffee shop called Philosafy reading and having a bit of escapism while I charged my devices.  It was there that I could see some of the beauty.  The staff were incredibly diverse culturally and personally, as much of the city was.  This made it difficult to give it a certain feeling – which is beautiful in ways but makes it a bit uncomfortable for people like myself that like to try and fit things into narrative boxes.  I enjoyed my time in Calgary, but I don’t have a desire to go back.  I’ve found places that feel immediately welcoming and the kind of place that I enjoy, and I just couldn’t find that in Calgary.  I met three people that I enjoyed and connected with, showing that there are always fascinating individuals no matter where it is.