EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Life on Mars?

The FOR SALE sign on the unkempt lawn across the street sways and creaks in a gentle breeze speckled with ash motes. Its sound suggests high noon in a Hollywood western, a showdown, a reckoning. Everyone is indoors, sheltering from the pale lemon sky and shimmering blood orange sun. Lights are on inside the Crooked 9 because an average day shouldn’t be so spookily dark at noon what with the window shades up and summer on its way. Twilight is golden, provided it’s late in the evening.

A massive red-flagged wildfire is burning some five hours’ drive north of Edmonton, up at High Level. Evacuations have commenced. The conflagration is a bar bully, overheated and aggressive, and maybe tough enough to create its own micro-weather system. Consequently it’s lunchtime on Mars in the capital city, that’s the way the wind blows. God (or preferably a paramedic) help you should you suffer from a respiratory ailment. Emergency sirens have set the neighbourhood dogs baying.

I’m a jaded old ad man. I was skeptical about climate change initially because that phrase was a rebrand of global warming. Flag! How many times had advertising agencies and their clients got it wrong, tried to fix a non-existent bugaboo? Hello and goodbye New Coke or Coke II or whatever it was. I thought too that the political left, devoid of fresh policy ideas, had shifted its focus to panicky weather reports. Still, intelligent and qualified people were discussing climate change. And so I began to pay attention, investigate, because an uninformed opinion is a particularly cacophonic form of halitosis.

Reading science, even when it’s written in layman’s terms, is repetitive work, my lips move. However, the consequences of accelerated climate change are relatively easy to grasp: fire, flooding and death. You can’t get more basic than the Old Testament. The recently elected right-wing Alberta government achieved power by promising to undo all of the previous administration’s modest efforts to fight climate change. And so it seems that longer, hotter wildfire seasons are here to stay until there’s nothing left to burn.

Edmonton is drier than a Lutheran prayer meeting. Last week nearly saw my nightmare scenario unfold: a firebug loose in the nearby river valley, attempting to ignite catastrophe. The fire department’s response time was so swift it could only be measured by an atomic clock. Even still, embers wafted onto the cedar shingles of a wooden house that predates this postwar neighbourhood.

The goal of advertising is to raise your awareness, change your perception and influence your behaviour. Wildfires should have a similar effect on rational people. Now, all I see is fuel whilst strolling along our smoky, hazy streets. A decade of drought has slowly strangled many old growth trees; pests and disease are opportunistic. Private property is demarcated by wooden fences. Older homes are clad with fir or cedar planks, or wrapped with vinyl siding. Skinny new-builds on sub-divided lots seem mere inches apart, the barest legal minimum.

My advertising career ensured I was sleepless many nights over the course of 30 years. There were always deadlines, sometimes there were moral and ethical dilemmas and from time to time I had to make a really dumb idea manifest. I’m out of the game now but I still have recurring dreams about my work. In days like these as a retiree I feel as if I’m tossing and turning on a pyre.            

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