Ahead of the Ice
Fall I stand in the line at the grocery store on a Tuesday evening. Outside, big fat flakes swirl to the pavement. It’s late October and this is one of the first snowfalls of the coming [...]
Stories in Storage
An authentic 19th-century samurai sword, with a manta-skin handle designed to give the user a better grip when the duel gets bloody—brought back to Alberta as a souvenir more than a century ago [...]
Gloria Sawai
Shortly after the death of Edmonton writer Gloria Sawai, I was invited by her children, Naomi and Kenji, to go through her library and select whatever books I should like to keep. Obviously this [...]
What Lies Beneath
Tony Bruder and Ron Schmidt get on either side of the six-foot boards as I crouch down to get a better look. The two Pincher Creek-area neighbours shuffle the weather-beaten wood aside, revealing [...]
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The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Alberta’s Black Swan
The best evidence of our conservative government’s cluelessness before the economy tanked in 2020 is the provincial budget. It was passed in a rush on March 18, 2020, two months after the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, had arrived in Canada. Oil demand in China was already down 20 per cent. Oil storage ...
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, to our “ranchette” near the Crowsnest Pass. We would hear the thrum of the plane’s Rotax motor ...