To Camrose from Gotham

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Hello Reader,

Got New York eyes?

“Sometimes, due to the publishing houses being in New York City, and hence many writers being glued to New York, I think we readers may absorb a biased New York person’s view of the world.”

Sean Crawford

Note: Camrose is legally a city to me, with over 10,000 people. But to New Yorkers? Especially when looking down several blocks of Main Street, sans traffic lights? It’s a town.

Forget concrete canyons cramped between cold skyscrapers… Via the vast open road grid of the singing plains I returned to the big town of Camrose. Being further from any big city, Camrose is bigger than other towns, big enough to have it’s own comic book store on Main Street, big enough to have a Japanese (anime and manga) youth-culture store sharing floorspace with a maternity store: This was over in the industrial-retail area of quonset huts and flat-roofed warehouses, just a couple blocks off Main.

This time, instead of a day visit, I decided to “overnight,”—for two nights, in fact— staying at the foot of Main Street in one those big old hotels with toilets-down-the-hall: My usual hotel preference, being a frugal fellow. This time I had a plan, as I told the locals: “Something I’ve never done in my life, anywhere, is spend the day going down Main Street, stopping at one coffee shop after another, reading good books.” I still haven’t done so, my plan failed, as adventure called. What might amuse you, dear reader, is not my private adventure, but seeing Camrose through the eyes of a stereotype New Yorker. Hence this essay.

I have gleaned that in New York City, partly for historical “concrete jungle” reasons, 

(where City Hall wouldn’t help you unless you were part of a group having “some pull,” with the classic question being, “Who is your rabbi?”) 

“everybody and their dog” is part of an ethnic group. Not here. In Camrose folks are just regular. A highway history sign explains that immigration began with a pastor back in Norway sending people on over, but today you wouldn’t know a Norwegian from a Scandinavian from a European in general. 

A New Yorker might wonder: Are the townsfolk insular, are their clothing stores only for working on farms and ranches? No. Some folks here holiday far south to Mexico, while their computers reach across the world. (As farmers check commodity prices) I was talking with a young man at Walrus clothing: The store had no stiff jeans or plaid, only cool, hip stuff. I walked around the racks thinking, “Wow.” He had no single ethnic background, his father from Britain; but he had relatives all over Europe, and had traveled, or meant to travel, to a lot of places on the continent, but not to Germany. “Not Germany? That’s the country I know best, as I was stationed there.”

I related how at college, which draws students from prairie towns, in September we went around the class saying our heritage: something we saw as being in our dim past, not our present. When we got to me I said, “Heritage? Well, I guess I’m a mongrel.” Laughter. (Having ancestors from three kingdoms and the republic of Yankeeland)  I wonder what would a New Yorker think, hearing us in that prairie store, without ethnicity, conversing about the wide world? 

The young man was going to London soon, but only for a week. “Only a week?”

“A busy family,” he explained. 

“I get it. The family store? (Nods) Let’s hope you can get a tax write-off or something—you deserve it, for having your own business.”

“My dad’s an accountant.” We smiled. He wanted to know where to go in London, so I tried to think of things. He already knew to avoid the giant ferris wheel. (Because of line ups, as he had found at the Eiffel Tower, and really, who wants to “take in the view” for a whole 40 minutes?) When I went back later, I only found his sister. She was going to London too, she said, so I could safely leave him a message with her. 

“I forgot to say he could try the Imperial War Museum, after a nice walk from the tube station. It has a V-1 and a V-2 rocket suspended from the ceiling.” I don’t  know if it was from her youth, or from being a nonreader, but surely it wasn’t from being a small-towner: She didn’t know what a V-2 was! I kept a straight face: “It’s a guy thing, your brother will know.”  

A few doors down, again going against the small town “dowdy matron” stereotype, was a ladies clothing store called Fun Fashion. I just had to walk in, right to the back, squeezing past all the lady shoppers, and then out again, thinking, “wow,” because everything in there was fun. In New York they respect, “Bad ass.” At Fun Fashion was sign saying, “big ass woman” next to a sign saying, “Raised on love, sustained on lipstick.” I tell you, “big ass town” does not mean “boring.” 

If towns are less insular these days it’s partly because of economics. I stood chatting in a store selling art, furniture and handicrafts, all locally made, as children, while their artist mother knelt to assemble her merchandise rack, played on the floor. The counter clerk rattled off for me a number of local ethnic restaurants, up and down the street, which I could try. Yes, townsfolk are more broad minded these days, but then again, society is more affluent these days. People here can have exotic palates because they can afford to dine out more than back in my boyhood. Plus, now they can truly afford to eat.

At Fiona's coffee shop I talked to a granddaughter of starving pioneers. Call her “Sue.” Sometimes, as a young mother, Sue had almost no food for her kids. “You can’t make food out of dust bunnies,” she said. Now over 80 years old, younger than my parents had been, she was quite talkative, no doubt as she had talked during her many years as a waitress. Sue told of spending her tip money on the way home to buy a scanty bit of food. I nodded, saying, “My mum had nothing to feed us but jam and rice.” You do what you can, of course; Sue took her husband back three times before telling him to “take a hike,” after he could afford to take his girlfriend skiing, but not give Sue any food money. 

Along the prairie road grid, with relatives and children in all sorts of small towns—isn’t that nice?— Sue would happily drive, but not as much now because, although in good health, she had a spell of  “road hypnotism”—the roads are so straight!—driving miles past her intended stop for coffee. And Sue recently told her daughter she won’t drive into the big city anymore, “you can come and get me,” because Edmonton has all changed.

Her grandparents came from Dakota with 200 head of cattle, but they lost all but two: one of which, thank God, was a milk cow. They had to keep that cow alive at all costs. Some aboriginals collected long grass from sloughs, while other natives brought the parents food. An indigenous man carried a pot bellied stove for them all the way from town. So Sue has no patience for anybody believing in racism against Indians. I didn’t say so, as conversation flowed so fast, but I was reminded of novelist Pat Conroy’s family: While his dad, The Great Santini, was usually stationed in the American south, Pat and his siblings were forbidden to soak up the surrounding white racism: His dear mother’s family, back in the hills, had survived only because good black people brought them food.

I don’t suppose Sue had ever heard of the “hash tag MeToo” movement, but she told me of her sister and her becoming tough fighters so that word would get around amongst the workers to leave them alone. One night they piled too-many-in-the cab of a Peterbilt truck to go to a dance. That dark night the sisters—you never went to the outhouse alone—jumped up onto the truck bed to fight thieves trying to steal some truck chains and stuff. The heroic girls prevailed, partly because the dance emptied out to the excited of calls of “Fight! Fight!”

We talked of dogs, and of her grandpa’s half-wolf dog being nice to her. I spoke of staying with folks in the bush and a visitor bringing a wolf-dog who would do big half circles around us. I joked that we should put a shark fin on that dog. He didn’t like it when I started half circling him!  

Sue and I had a good time… I wondered what a cold New Yorker would have thought, of us talking of old bush life, along with a perfect stranger saying hello to me as she passed my table.

Speaking of friendly, and of me staying two nights: On Day One I spotted a sandwich board inscribed, “The buddha bowl is back!” So I turned on in and asked. A tall man with a wispy goatee explained how they start with a bed of rice and build up shredded veggie layers, with black beans or chick peas, hot or cold sauce. We discussed how early I could arrive and still get fresh-cooked-that-day rice. On Day Two a young lady at the counter said she had heard I was coming in for a buddha bowl. More friendliness: A young man with gentle blue eyes and a plain white Sikh turban was bustling around the back and out near the counter. I asked, “Are you a Khalsa?” That was indeed his brand of Sikhism, and his brand, he told me, was big on yoga. I said, “My roommate was a Khalsa, would invite me to temple on Sunday for free vegetarian food… I met his mother; she was a Roman Catholic.”

I learned that the structure of Catholicism is compatible with the structure of Sikhism, and as we talked I couldn’t help wondering if New Yorkers would be surprised: Of course we out west have converted Sikhs, and Muslims too: There’s a CBC television comedy series called Little Mosque On the Prairie.

Another surprise might be walk-in gender neutral washrooms—in a cafe-store for gamers. And for book lovers. There, besides buying new games and new books, you could play used games and borrow used books. And have coffee. And beer. I asked, “Eh? With minors in here?” Turns out they have a licence like a restaurant would, even with minors present. So I had a craft beer from Turner Valley, South of Calgary, using a Germany recipe, for “Fahr,” a sort of wheat grass beer. Very smooth, I really recommend it. 

I related how the first man to sell investors on drilling for natural gas in the valley took a couple financiers walking in an open field, then suddenly said, “Let’s cook lunch” and knelt to set a match to a puddle on the ground. Cooked a whole meal. Sold!

Good thing I and the youthful owner, father of a two-year-old, had a nice conversation before I ordered my beer: So he cheerfully didn’t hold it against me when I couldn’t stay awake at my table. At least I snoozed sitting up. I truly hadn’t known that my body, after my private adventures, was so marginal a single beer could do me in.

Getting back to racism again, he had a special section for selling new anti-racism books by and about Indians and Metis. (And one was by a US black about whites being silly) That’s because, he explained, if he didn’t offer the books, then where else would you find them? I said I had just learned how the French, through a concerted effort, assimilated the Occitan in the early 20th century. “Alsace-Lorraine?” No, the Occitan were all through southern France. …Incidentally, during my two days in town I saw only two young “persons of colour” (Blacks) together. Perhaps I saw indigenous too, but if so I have forgotten, as I wouldn’t have thought to take note. And of course in a Chinese restaurant I saw a family, “Asians” to us, who, down in the States might have been, according to my reading, self-described as being “persons of colour.”

As I’ve noted on my blog before, I have a knack for talking to strangers; meanwhile, they say visitors to New York are told to avoid even making eye contact—yet, I received one or more stranger’s “hello” on the Camrose sidewalk. I am amused to think that in a single day I had talked cosmopolitan travel, life in the bush, Sikhism and assimilation. I guess I’ve had a well rounded life… even if I never care to visit the “Writer’s Mecca” of New York City.

Sean Crawford

On the Great Plains

April 

2019

Footnote: 

This blog is less journalism, and more what I’d tell you in a bar, but the dialogue is not so much what I would tell you in person, as what fits the printed page. “Less journalism” means I won’t torture myself with lengthy qualifiers, nuance, and excruciating correctness, while if I was a journalist then I would have collected names and proper spelling.

Resources:

~For assimilating the Occitan into French, see a lengthy BBC -Travel- quote at the end of my essay Assimilation, archived January 2019.

   

~For my previous day trip to Camrose, about six months back, see Road Trip Reflections, archived October 2018.

~For talking to strangers, tourism style, see A Tourist Making Conversation With Locals, and Meeting the Locals, archived July 2017 and February 2018.

~For authentic hotels see Cheap Hotels are Fun, and Cheap Hotels I Have Known, archived November 2017 and January 2018.

~For a day of NOT talking to strangers, on a really bad hair day, see Say Hello to Strangers, archived March 2014.

~And lastly, regarding (by hit count) one of my ten most popular essays of all time, regarding why I do refer my readers to look in the archives, and don’t serve to my readers “links on a silver platter,” see No Links is Good Links, archived July 2012. (The blog started in 2009)