Big Muddy
I found him asleep at Wendy’s on a scuzzy patch of 17th Avenue, his forehead resting on the makeshift pillow he’d created from one arm. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was my brother: the [...]
Homelessness
Homelessness
Beyond Books
Each morning, David McMain tries to get to work an hour before he officially starts. But he doesn’t head straight to his office at Edmonton’s Stanley Milner library, where he is an outreach [...]
By Jay Smith
A Home for the Homeless
Rick Holler’s bright modern apartment is a long way from his former haunts in downtown Edmonton. That suits him just fine. “I keep away from my old friends,” says Holler, a 55-year-old with a [...]
By Susan Ruttan
Mean Streets
In 1998, Nidal Abuhaija arrived with his wife at the Calgary airport. A skilled immigrant from Jordan, he had a university degree, job experience and the will to work. But the best job he could [...]
By Gordon Laird
MOST READ
MOST READ
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 ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
The Big Man in Cargo Shorts
Leonard was the first to find him. The man was face down in the school’s outdoor learning space, next to a planter of basil. He was fat, his calves the size of a turkey dinner, his hair a gnarled mess of seaweed. Leonard wondered if the man was dead and ...