Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 79: local news, new old road, notes of appreciation

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from slightly off the path that left behind some happiness or gratitude this week. 

Three Things, episode 79: 

                                          

1. Local news 🪰

Of all the news that has broken in the past week, of all the voices that I’ve heard talking about everything from the heat to Hockey Canada, of all the stories watched or read that I can’t quite recall, the story and the sound that have stayed with me were <Jeopardy music here>...cicadas.

You’ve all heard them, but did you know they were here? I owe the fact that cicadas are in Edmonton to Taproot Edmonton reporter and recorder Brett McKay. I enjoy their sound. I like the sound of the word itself—cicada, three syllables, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, which makes it an amphibrach, the name for that kind of foot in poetry. Like Versace or Fitzpatrick or Bob Dylan or There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening. Over dinner last week, I told our friend Ettori about the Taproot cicadas. The word cued a fond musical memory for him of his time in Italy. “It’s the sound of summer,” he said. For me, cicadas are from the movies. In the fading light on the big screen there are trees, a dirt road, telephone poles. There is an electric light above a garage door with peeling paint. The cicadas click in the stillness. It is the end of another languid, summer day. 

Cicada in Waterton earlier this year. Courtesy: Taproot Edmonton

I imagine not everyone who lives within earshot of cicadas are enamoured of their sound. Like I’m not fond of the 18-25 male demo racing their jetpack cars off Whitemud Drive onto 149 Street in July. I recommend putting Taproot’s cicada score on repeat to slow down the soundtrack of speeding summer.
I especially like the fact that a local reporter was out there with his recording device and a question for the dusk in Edmonton: what else do you sound like? He got an answer for the record of this place.



2. New old road 🛣️

I was on the road on my way to meet my friend Dub. We had mapped out a bike ride to Bent Stick for a beer. This was not only an alliterative thing to do, it was also, on a summer afternoon on its way to 56 degrees above 28 below, fairly intuitive. Winter is still a thing at this time of year here. We’re only a couple of weeks and a couple of summer festivals away from that first crisp hint in the evening wind that our summer debts are coming due. We live these July days outside. I did not know the road existed before finding it on Google Maps as the suggested route up to Riverbend where buddy boy and I had arranged to cross paths on our way to the brewery. I have lived in this part of west Edmonton the majority of my life, but I did not know that just beyond Fox Drive there is a stretch of 142 Street that follows the fence line around the old Fox Farm and empties onto a multi-use path up the hill.It’s a lovely bit of lonely road forgotten by the cars and trucks flowing by on Whitemud Drive. The current of traffic intensified the calm of the scene. A horse lifted its head nonchalantly.


I am not a country boy. Country roads don’t take me home home to the place I belong, but I am drawn to roads less travelled. The Bow Valley Parkway between Banff and Lake Louise was a gift years ago. I first pedalled it in late summer 1985. I learned a person doesn’t always have to take Highway 1 to make time. You can make a different kind of time taking a different kind of road. Dub and I talked about these and other things as we meandered across the city and into Bent Stick where the spell of the day made it quite easy for me to accept making some of the worst shots I have ever made in a shuffleboard, losing 7-2—happily. 



3. Notes of appreciation 💧⌨️🍅🎶

It’s been a week. I accidentally knocked a glass of water onto my laptop keyboard, and that got into everything. Water has never been an undiluted good for me. I am not a good swimmer. I’m afraid of the deep end. I can’t follow Auntie Shelagh’s advice to just relax in the water, look at the bottom of the pool to stop your body from fighting becasue, oh, I’m in 12 feet of water, let’s get out of here. For years we lived with a hard-to-find crack in the foundation of the house. Heavy rainfall meant mopping up. I don’t even like to bathe. And, so, the sight of water moving past the square bracket keys and over the o, i, u, y and t on its way to infiltrate the r, e, w and q was slightly terrifying, if you spell terrifying without working t, r, i and y keys. 

Here is where I managed to thrash my way to: water is an unquestioned good for the backyard tomatoes. Those plants have used the summer sun and water to issue cherry tomatoes that hang like heads on the stems of sixteenth notes, soon for the plucking.

Thanks for being out there, friends, see you next time. 


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