Be patient, dear reader, for I shall come shortly to an epic tale of sprawl and massive transport system failure and the twangy fascism of “new” country music.
But – first things first – last night in Waterloo was a roaring success: full house in a great venue, my hosts from Words Worth Books the very embodiment of conscientious and dedicated indie bookstore ownership. Plus because said venue was Waterloo’s local indie movie house, I even got treated to some free movie popcorn, which is probably my favourite snack on the planet.
That said, I’d like to address more fully a phenomenon that occurred during the post-slideshow Q&A, a thing I’ve come to think of as The Calgary Question. The Calgary Question is an inevitable final-act sidebar in the Central Canadian version of my talks. It usually arrives in the form of a generalized query from the audience about suburban sprawl and its antidotes, often qualified with something along the lines of “especially in Calgary, where you live.” The subtext, readily apparent in the tone and angle of head and arch of eyebrow and such, goes something like this:
You come from the sprawlingest, oil-boomingest, SUVingest, CO2-emittingest, 5,000-square-foot-McRanch-on-a-two-acre-lottingest city in Canada, the capital city of the unsustainable, overstuffed, hyperconsumerist, head-in-the-sand status quo. So, like, who’re you to talk about hope and change and our sustainable future? And if I loaned you the matches, would you burn your hometown to the ground when you get back? Thanks. I should note that this subtext is at least as prevalent when the question is asked by a self-identified former Calgarian. Maybe moreso; there seems to be a self-loathing aspect to it, or else the self-righteousness of a reformed addict.
Anyway, I generally answer The Calgary Question by pointing out gently that Calgary’s got a wind-powered LRT, transit ridership per capita about equal to metro Vancouver, and a new alderman who founded the city’s Sierra Club chapter. And so, you know, there is in fact an enlightened counterweight to the well-oiled plutocracy.
But this morning, sitting in the back of a cab bound from Waterloo to Brantford, which cab I was installed in because it is essentially
impossible to take any form of public transportation from one city to the other – they are maybe 50 kilometres apart – sitting there, The Calgary Question started to grate on me. It grated on me the way it grates on Calgarians when yet another Toronto journalist is sent out by yet another national publication to file yet another story on the exotic florae and faunae of the boomtown and yet again sets the opening or climactic scene at Cowboys, an enormous yeehaw-themed dance club patronized almost exclusively by Calgarians ferrying around friends from Back East, plus
aspiring Playboy models. (Note to any of my old journalist friends in the T-Dot: If you are writing a story about Calgary, and you set a scene at Cowboys, and you presume to use that scene as somehow representative of the city’s pulse, this is roughly equivalent to writing a story about the Toronto “scene” set primarily in the CN Tower’s rotating restaurant. Don’t do it. Not ever again. Please.)
Anyway, so the reason I’m in the back of this cab, to be specific, is that the good folks at Via Rail have been providing my intercity travel gratis, but you can’t take a Via train directly to Windsor from Kitchener-Waterloo (a contiguous multipolar blob of urbanity that also includes the four small towns that united as Cambridge a couple decades back). You also can’t take one directly from K-W to Brantford. Plus there’s no bus service
of any kind from K-W to Brantford, which as I mentioned is maybe 50 kilometres away from Waterloo and barely 20 km south of the southern rim of greater K-W’s sprawl. (If you enter the two names Waterloo and Brantford in the Greyhound Canada online search engine, it spits back a nine-hour circuit via Toronto.) I mean, these are cities so fully in the same psychogeographic headspace that Brantford contains a satellite campus of Waterloo’s Wilfred Laurier University. And you can’t, as the saying goes, get there from here.
So this obliged me to book an 8:55am train out of Brantford and shuttle myself to it by taxi, which was costing me more than a train ticket to Toronto and back. I booked the cab for 7:45 this morning, and it arrived at more like 8:00. And the moment I got in, the gruffly good-natured taxi driver informed me that there’s no way you can make it to Brantford in less than an hour this time of day, because your route takes you right through Cambridge, which has significant traffic snarls. Not least because – at least to someone passing through it late for a train – Cambridge comes across like four small towns pooled their resources to buy a big swath of Southwest Calgary’s spare sprawl, thus to guarantee that every single gorgeous old stone building in their respective historic downtowns now houses a tanning salon or dollar store. And this is not even to get into Kitchener’s utter lack of a functional downtown and Waterloo’s undersized excuse for one. (By which I mean Waterloo’s got a great little downtown for a city of 50,000, but not for a regional municipality of half a million.)
So I’m chugging along in my ridiculous taxi through this self-evidently sprawling mess of a regional municipality, and it’s around then that The Calgary Question starts to make me itch like I’m wearing mohair. Because, honestly, the concerned citizen of the Regional Municipality of Kitchener-Waterloo who asked me The Calgary Question last night was apparently under the impression that this strip-malled, trainless, regional-bus-serviceless mess represented some different species of unsustainable urban model than Calgary does. And not to be an asshole about it, but I was in an especially uncharitable mood from the country radio (which I’ll come back to), and she was some kind of wrong. Southern Ontarians (and I used to be one) seem to view Calgary as some kind of aberration, far removed from the vivid green model of Southern Ontario’s urban life. You’re casting the first stones, there, Centre-of-the-Universians, and your glass houses are getting all smashed up in the process. (Is it still wrong to mix metaphors if you do it tidily . . .? Anyway.)
(Another data point: last month I was skiing in Banff, and on the lift I overheard two Ontarians trading impressions of Calgary. The younger of the two was living there to attend university, but she was eager to get back to Southern Ontario as soon as she was done. To a more sustainable place, she said. Yes, she actually said
sustainable. Oh, asks the older lady. Where was home for her? The answer: “The Markham-Unionville area.” I hope that even residents of the Greater Toronto Area’s Markham-Unionville mid-outer-belt strip-mall satellite ring [northeast quadrant] find that chuckle-worthy.)
This, then, was my train of thought as the chances of making my train grew ever thinner. At which point I began to sort of fixate on the radio, which was tuned to a “new” country station. The first song once I started listening carefully (mainly to avoid checking the time, which was not on my side) was a twangy country-rock number called “Watching You” by Rodney Atkins. It sounded – as most “new” country does – like Bryan Adams’ mid-80s backing band added a pedal steel simulator and the first Tennessee resident they found who could make his voice crack on command and hit the road. (The song sounded, in other words, like a mediocre Eagles cover band, and
I’ll leave it to The Dude to note how lousy that is even in its purest original form.)
So I’m listening to this Atkins fellow twang his way through the first verse, when I realize he’s basically describing a country-fried Southern version of the strip-mall nowheresville out the window. (e.g.
Drivin’ through town, just my boy and me / With a “Happy Meal” in his booster seat / Knowin’ that he couldn’t have the toy till his nuggets were gone.) The central tension in the song involves this well-fed youngster’s slavish imitation of his dear ole dad, beginning with the use of a nasty word that begins with “s,” which the kid sputters after he spills his orange pop at the next traffic light. (Atkins was too polite to say, but I’m guessing it was “socialized medicine.”) So in the next verse, Atkins gets down on his knees and prays for guidance, and Junior imitates that as well, and all is right again under the exurban sun. “Watching You” was, I’ve just learned via on-board wifi, the No. 1 country song of 2007.
Now, I’m not saying Rodney Atkins is fascist, nor that “new” country is intrinsically a vehicle for fascist rhetoric. (Though I think its expulsion of Johnny Cash from Nashville in and of itself constitutes a crime against humanity.) What I’m saying, I guess, is that you could certainly put the tone and style of this stuff to the uses of a much more coercive and overtly authoritarian program – make it, for example, actually an ad for McDonald’s – and who, stuck in traffic on the strip-malled boulevard, would even notice? That might, indeed, explain the multiplatinum career of Toby Keith right there.
Anyway, I arrived at Brantford Station five minutes late, but my train was fifteen minutes late. I caught it. And were it not for the fact that I’ve got the cloying chorus of “Watching You” on infinite loop in my head
(‘Cause I’ve been watching you, Dad, ain’t that cool? / I’m your buckaroo, I want to be like you . . .) – if not for that, I’d have nothing else to complain about.
See you in Windsor.