I look for innovative ecstasies, ways of coming home, ways of decamping, ways to abandon the scene of uncommitted crimes. Rootless. Castaway. Robinson Crusoe without an island, and certainly never with a Friday, eager to break the monotony. (Restlessness, 45) And after all, why nor? Home, arrival and departure. Restlessness began as a travel book which metamorphosed into an anti-travel book, then a book about homesickness, about longing to stay at home, about finding a door to hide behind. Calgary dogged the heels of Restlessness like a bristling husky, a street dog who wouldn't stop barking. Invent a killer. Make him a gentle man with Dupuytren's syndrome, hands curled into the gentlest of fists. Fly him in to Calgary from Winnipeg, make him a good listener, and unafraid of the chinook. Visit the Palliser. Hang out in the lobby, waiting for groups of visiting scholars to arrive. Meditate on how an historically iconic but functioning building like the Palliser Hotel acts upon the imagination of a shoulder -shrugging contemporary city. Why, when Calgary has a host of plexiglass and faux marble hotels bowing ingratiatingly toward visitors and would-be guests, would any writer choose to set a novel in the Palliser Hotel? The Palliser Hotel, archaic, anachronistic, somewhat tweedy, sleeves a little frayed, dusty enough to bring on a sneeze. Why choose a dowager, officially named and opened on June 1, 1914, when there are trendier, possibly more comfortable places to stay, when there are cooler places to write about, places that serve better beer and fusion food. Calgary un-dowagered as any city can get. Extravagantly youthful, brash and upstart teenager hovering somewhere past one hundred, trying to add a few years to its age so it can seem respectable, experienced. Although respectability is irrelevant; Calgary is preoccupied with movement, the parry and clash of driving too fast, getting ahead, of attracting another head office, of inventing another oil or gas strike. Sunglasses and ski racks and the jagged comb of mountains to the west. I travel to escape the rotund, belligerent light of the foothills, the knife of high cerulean blue. Light is seldom muted in Calgary, sometimes gray if snow or rain plunges over the city, but that temporary reprieve seems aberrant, and until the dazzle returns, people look puzzled. (Restlessness, 16) Tomorrow is Calgary's time line, yesterday a gesture made absentmindedly. Calgary's citizens remember the future, forget the myopic past. A good place to invent a suicide. Calgary could not be Calgary without the Palliser, its stately Chicago E-style wings, its timelessly solid brick, the quizzical eyebrows of its window lintels. What is any city without a grand hotel, complete with ritual: climbing the ornate steps to the entrance, nodding to the Edwardian-coated and top-hatted doorman, who gives a firm push to the revolving door, who is quick to relieve travellers of bag and baggage. A city cannot be a city without a foyer to swish through, a marble floor to echo underfoot, a few groomed ornamental trees and plastered plinths. What is the effect of this winged building hunkered along the railway's verge, the shoulder-pad of 9th avenue, the right-hand briefcase of downtown? Emblematic of course, the staid and stately wings, the solid front, the hat brim of an entrance, the smothered air inside. No Calgarian would go so far as to call the Palliser the heart of Calgary. That honour goes to the Bow River or Prince's Island, one of the physical geographies that shape the city. Beyond the market we cross the bridge to Prince's Island, the city's noise a murmuring now, and walk along the edge of the Bow River, from one pool of occasional light to another, until we find a relatively dry bench. The river is groaning with thaw. The ice will soon push itself away from the banks and begin to canoe east. …
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Jan 1, 2023
Skye Strauss 
Open Access