EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Mean Streets

Our American refugee neighbour Ted flew his family south of 49 for the Christmas holidays, however reluctantly. We look after one another’s properties. We are good friends. Ted has joined Stats Guy and me in the Tuesday Night Beer Club. It snowed on Christmas Eve. Heavily. I shovelled two properties, back and front and in between, and the stretch of public sidewalk linking our addresses, an explicit civic obligation. The snow came again on Boxing Day and kept falling for the next thirty-six hours. That amount is problematic to shift, disperse. Snowfalls like that never fail to remind me of Wallace Stegner’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose (1971). Should you be curious about life out west on both sides of the Medicine Line, read Stegner (I especially recommend Wolf Willow). Ted’s wife texted Ann: “We’ve been checking the weather in Edmonton. Has Geoff run out of swear words yet?”

Fuck, no, never. I can curse in both of Canada’s official languages. And I welcome the exercise, but maybe not the endless reps.

“Edmonton House,” a fur trading post, was established on the flats of the North Saskatchewan River in 1795. Winter came that year, just as it had for thousands of years prior to the colonial commercial initiative. And it kept coming. Winter came when Edmonton was incorporated as a city in 1904. When the province of Alberta was carved out of Prince Rupert’s Land and Edmonton designated its capital in 1905, winter came anyway. Winter has come ever since. It’s as reliable as sunset and sunrise, and full moons. And, curiously, it snows in wintertime.

Edmonton is a young city, even by Canadian standards. It came of age holding hands with the combustion engine. The automobile suggested Edmonton grow out instead of up because there’s a whole heck of a lot of space on the northern prairie. Its populace, now in excess of 1.1-million souls resides on some fantastically botched experimental alien ant farm – a big, very big, spread. Drivers need roads. Lots of them. And roads need to be like car tires in much warmer climes – all season, passable.

Collisions are inevitable. City council, often inert, sometimes inept and frequently nonsensically pro-active, works to rectify a century’s legacy of short-sighted and misguided urban planning. The addition of bike lanes and loosening of zoning and development regulations to encourage population density are inherently good things, attempts to undo unintended consequences dating from a different era. Contemporary retro-fitting and jury-rigging unzip their own duffle bags of gremlins. Bike lanes further constrain already congested arteries. Multifamily dwellings mean multiples of cars in neighbourhoods never designed to accommodate them.

And then it snows like a bastard. As it often will in Canada’s largest northernmost city. The snow abated 27 December, 2025. New Year’s Day brought freezing rain, icing on the cake. Saturday’s 17 January, 2026 Edmonton Journal front page headline: PLOW CREWS FACE THREATS. Verbal abuse of course and shovels as weapons. Alert readers will note the gap of 10 days between accumulation and clearing. Taxes imply a transaction; payers have a right to expect something in exchange for an arbitrary income skim. Efficient services, for instance. While local politics may be a springboard for those with greater ambitions, managing a city is an unglamorous grind. Banning plastic bags except for dog shit in dandelion dog parks is all very well, sort of a bullet point added to an incoherent mission statement affixed to the inaugural charter, but symbolic grandstanding doesn’t make snow evaporate.

Every Edmontonian knew the all-weather fat tire bicycle boys would be looked after first. Bike lane grooming requires a tiny, tank-tracked Bobcat only, not a giant Volvo grader. Those yellow machines, however late to the game, need space to do their jobs – hence parking bans (with generous notice). The gist of the Journal’s story was the breakdown of a tacit social contract. Citizens, already irate with the City’s service lag, were infuriated by its request for their cooperation to speed the tardy clean up. “Move your car, somewhere else, please.” “Fuck you.” Of course, in days like these, manners and civility are rare commodities. “Can we at least agree to talk about winter weather?” “Fuck you.”

The surface of the North Saskatchewan is always an intimidating and fearsome sight to behold once the spring melt commences. Its thick ice crust heaves into snaggled, jagged shards. Sometimes they’re as cloudy as an antique mirror. Sometimes they’re a shade of wedding dress white. Sometimes they’re grey and sometimes their sun dappled spectrum ranges from powder blue to royal purple. Ann and I never expected a view like this outside our front window.

Our street was graded Sunday, 18 January, 11 days after the storm. The snow on the road was alive during this period; it evolved. At first the ruts were like slot car tracks, the mound between them neatly scraped true by undercarriages. Wheeling in or out of them at the end of our driveway was a slippery and sliding hard turn requiring an unsafe rate of acceleration. Workaday traffic eventually compacted the snow into a slick highway. The sidewalks might as well have been ditches. The grader peeled the packed ice from the road as if it was citrus rind, right down to the asphalt. I admired the operator’s precision. I wondered too if operating heavy machinery while wearing earbuds might constitute some form of impairment before deciding the union man was everyman, just hearing what he wants to hear.

Windrows, those manmade banks of snow on the road and against the curb, are officially frowned upon in Edmonton because they narrow the width of a street and inhibit parking. Homeowners are exhorted to heave the snow from public sidewalks onto their front lawns instead of pushing it into the gutter. Springing ahead, the volume of meltwater is always a concern: better to top up the groundwater than overwhelm the sewer system.

The grader operator (sounds like a misheard lyric from Nick Lowe’s “Switchboard Susan”) left the Platonic ideal of windrows in his wake, left and right. Our street is now a one-and-a-half way and pedestrians sidle sideways like crabs – fitting in my case – the crabby part. He did his best at the foot of our driveway; I cleared the remaining chunks of ice by hand because our scooped snow shovel was inadequate for either pushing or cradling and heaving. I enjoyed the exercise.

A renowned winter city’s excuse for its inability to provide essential services was a tired cliché, the “perfect storm.” A perfect storm is the same thing as one of those “100-year events” that seem to occur on a weekly basis here, there and everywhere. I have it on good authority that Alvin Toffler, Faith Popcorn and Nicholas Negroponte were never once employed by the City of Edmonton. But you shouldn’t need a futurist to instruct the municipal council and the bureaucracy it oversees to plan ahead. With a little foresight, what cannot be prevented can at least be mitigated. Edmonton has no plans to collect or dispose of the shark’s teeth windrows. They, like January, the advent of a new year – all 41 days of it – are destined to overstay their welcome. 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set! "Alaska Highwayman" a song I co-wrote with the Muster Point Project is now on YouTube and available on Spotify and all those other streaming services.