The Geography of Hope

What does that even mean? For the answer, click here and scroll down till you come to the two-panel comic strip that answers the question, "Where have all the cowboys gone?"

Anyway, details of the Montreal-to-Windsor Whistle Stop Extravaganza are now finalized, and I'll be posting them within 48 hours. Meantime, the Southern Alberta mini-tour is basically a wrap, and it was a rip-roarin' rootin-tootin' success, if I do say so myself.

Highlights, in chronological order, were as follows:

1) Banff Centre, Jan 24: Well, in addition to a couple comfortable nights hanging out with wife and daughter at one of the country's finest fine-art institutes (and surely its most scenic), I enjoyed a full house for my lecture and a couple of excellent buffet meals in collegial surroundings (one particularly memorable breakfast was spent yakking about Dawson City with the vivacious Lulu Keating of Red Snapper Films, and later I noticed Ron Sexsmith chowing down two tables over).

Greatest moment, though, was probably taking my girl ice skating on the pond behind the Banff Springs Hotel, which is as central to the iconography of Canada as, say, the London Bridge is to Britain's. And which reminded me again how much we've forgotten in this slapdash-modernist-box nation about erecting timeless buildings.

2) REAP Luncheon, Jan 25: Gotta be organizer Stephanie Jackman's humblingly laudatory review of my book, though the event itself was a lovely and energetic affair as well.

3) Step It Up Alberta Rally, Jan 26: Well, Sloane would tell you it was the proximity to Eau Claire Market's fantastic foodcourt jungle gym, but for me it was meeting the panel, which consisted of Alberta Liberal environment critic David Swann, Alberta NDP MLA David Eggen and Alberta Green Party leader George Read. If the province has half a brain, it'll elect more people like these after the writ drops (probably later this week, I'm told).

4) ReThink Red Deer, Jan 31: Humbling, exhilirating, inspiring - three words I never thought I'd use to describe a visit to Red Deer on a bitter-cold January night (-25C at best by the time I got there). The organizers optimistically set out maybe three dozen chairs in the library's basement auditorium. Something like 150 people showed up. Standing room only, the book table moved into the corridor to accomodate the crowd. I'm told half the city council was there, and the mayor came up afterward and presented me with one of his official Xmas '07 portraits - in which he's holding The Geography of Hope in his lap. I swear I thought I was being had. Thank you, Red Deer. I totally misunderestimated you.

5) Kairos Day, Feb 2: Humbled and exhilirated yet again. Always great to be among the  tireless, committed people who do the heavy lifting of social change. (Kairos is an umbrella social justice group uniting the activists from something like a dozen Christian denominations, from Quaker through Presbyterian to Catholic.) I won't pick a particular highlight, but I will say I'm eager to dig into the Very Rev. Bill Phipps' book, Cause for Hope, and if it's half as good as his oratory, you should buy yourself a copy ASAP.

So that was Alberta. Montreal, you're next. And after that, the world! (Or at least the T-Dot.)