By Lynn Coady
“You have to promise me something,” said my friend Curtis, leaning across the table. “You have to promise that when you look back on what you went through this year, you won’t blame the city of Edmonton.”
I laughed, because here’s how it went down: I was in a relationship for 16 years. Together, we moved to Ottawa. We moved to Saint John. We moved to Fredericton. We moved to Vancouver, where for 10 years we stayed put. In 2005, we moved to Edmonton. A year later, the relationship was over.
“I never had anything against Edmonton!” I said to Curtis, who smirked. OK, I might have done some complaining here and there.
I had complained about the oppressive car culture. I had complained about the landscape blight that was South Edmonton Common. I had mocked Ralph Klein with what was perhaps an inappropriate gusto for a newcomer. And then there was the cold.
That night, for example, was minus 30. Curtis maintained his skeptical smirk as I shuffled out of my top thermal layers. He had watched my relationship with the city steadily degrade, right along with my relationship with my ex.
When we moved to Edmonton, the prospect of renting a whole house, as opposed to an obscenely overpriced one-bedroom apartment, was thrilling. Sure, there was no beach, no mountains, but we had our own backyard – with a firepit! And my partner had just been offered his first job out of graduate school. The delirious double whammy of a stable income in an affordable city – this was pre-boom, remember – made Edmonton seemed like a place with unlimited possibility. Vancouver is sometimes described as a good place to heal, and there is some truth to that. But with its easy-living, cherry-blossoms-in-February kind of lushness, the city never quite felt real. A house, a car, kids – these were all things we couldn’t have imagined in our Vancouver existence. We moved to Edmonton with few regrets.
x
You know how sometimes life gets so bad that you begin to imagine yourself as a kind of voodoo doll to the gods? After the breakup, Edmonton’s once harmless foibles started to feel like a series of long, sharp pins some gleeful cosmic intelligence was slowly working into my flesh.
The breakup was followed swiftly by the boom, followed, inevitably, by winter. Suddenly I was paying full rent and utilities on the house where I’d previously paid half. My heating bill shot up to almost the same amount as my rent. Suddenly my furnace broke, and there was no one to fix it as every labourer was busy making truckloads of money elsewhere. Suddenly, the city’s tolerable quirks seemed to take on a new malignance.
When you move somewhere to start a new life, and said life promptly flushes itself down the pooper, how do you maintain perspective? How do you keep from blaming the backdrop? A year later I had no partner, no job, no money, no family nearby, scant friends, it was minus 30 and my furnace didn’t work. The night before, I’d huddled under a duvet in my inadequately heated house and formulated a plan. It wasn’t exactly a plan; it was more of a realization, a physical urge – like hunger or the need to alleviate pain – finally being articulated: I have to get out of here.
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Category: Career Track, Work
