Calgary

During our summer of hiking through the mountains of California, we were faced with the dilemma of whether to head for Argentina or Japan in the fall, so we compromised and went to Calgary. We decided to leave the perfectly normal, nomadic lifestyle where everyday offers a new surprise to enter the mad, mad world and seek work. Yes, we are talking about the chaotic world of consuming, capitalism, commuting, cars, carnivores, coping, complexity, comfort, in the short the coop. Rather than remaining free range chickens, we have opted for the life of battery chickens; eat and produce!

We decided not to live in a tent or a yurt but instead, to live in an apartment. Rental units are relatively inexpensive in Calgary and we found a decent two bedroom unit, walking distance from downtown. Whilst the apartment is comfortable, it is no Vista Mar (the place we rented in Mexico). It does not have an ocean view, no roof top patio, no beach down the street, it does not come with built-in concrete furniture, Jesus is not the superintendent, and Corona beer trucks don’t make deliveries. We do have a good view of downtown and are perfectly situated to catch the Diwali fireworks display, er...wrong place, the Stampede fireworks.

Once we had an apartment, life was already starting to get a little more complicated. But, we felt if you are going to join the rat race, you may as well jump-in and buy a car. We ended up with a Japanese fuel efficient car made by, you guessed it, Mazda. We were not sure what to call the vehicle. Should it be the Persian God II? As you know, there is but one God, so we just call it “the car”.

Wheels provided more mobility and the opportunity to fill an apartment with “stuff”. Calgary boasts a vibrant Garage Sale or Yard Sale scene. We spent a couple of Saturday mornings stocking our place with just about everything we could ever need. We now boast a fully furnished apartment and more substantial tableware and crockery than our normal plastic bowls and spoons. Our “media room” boasts a TV & VCR that cost us the equivalent of 800 Bolivian bananas (20USD) sitting atop our 30 Thai banana TV stand. Our first ever CD player belts out tunes on CDs borrowed from the nearby library. Over in the office, our first ever computer offers internet access, though we have to admit it is not as much fun as some of the internet cafes we have visited.

Of course, this all comes at a price. Suddenly, we have overheads! A roof means rent, cars need car insurance, apartments like tenants insurance in case you burn the place down. Then there is health insurance, dental insurance, telephone, TV cable (we get a shopping channel!), internet connection, and we even have electricity. We could travel just about anywhere in the world on the cost of our overheads alone. Then, there are the keys, the addresses, phone numbers, postal codes and passwords. What did we get ourselves into?

To keep the household running, we have both gone out and found work. We heard people questioning our sanity, leaving the security of jobs to explore the world. On our return, finding work was not a problem and now we are questioning our own sanity, why are we doing this? Glenn found work as a consultant back at his old employer Shell. He figured that his post-PCT fitness would facilitate climbing the corporate ladder. However, the elevator is still faster than running up 18 floors. Not to worry, Glenn is now president. He is president of his one man and no dog consulting business, Ord Business Solutions Inc.; there is no BS at OBS.

Meanwhile, Sheila started her job hunt. She did her homework and studied up on interview techniques. She even read up on how to interview so she would know what the interviewer should be looking for. She bagged a couple of job offers, started at one of those and left after 3 days. Then she accepted her current job and they immediately flew her down to Houston Texas for training. Yes, we are a petroleum couple, Sheila works for Shell Chemicals. The company is moving their operations north to the Bangalore of North America (Calgary), because operating costs are much lower here than in the U.S.A.

Best bumper sticker: “Grow your own dope, Plant a man” (if we post this e-mail on our web-site, we are bound to get more visits as people search on “grow your own dope”!)

Indicators of how deep we are settled in

Number of Remote Controls:2

·Number of CD’s owned: 1

Number of keys: 11

It has been over 8 months since we moved into the coop. We admit that the novelty factor was huge. We invested in chairs and lamps. We sleep in a bed and we can have a hot shower whenever we want. Out home entertainment system offers 36 channels, including a steady diet of “Reality TV”. Out on the balcony, we can fire up the propane barbeque for a real taste of the wild.

Despite promises of frequent business travel to the northern frontier city of Fort McMurray, Glenn seems grounded to Calgary. Sheila by contrast trained for her job in Texas last year and later grabbed a one-dollar flight to Montreal. More recently, she set off on a one week business trip through southern USA (Oklahoma City and Chatanooga in Tennessee were the star attractions): she flew 11 times in 7 days. International flavour has been limited to the supermarket shelves, particularly the produce section; Mexican mangoes, Argentine & Ozzie pears, Chilean & South African grapes. Sometimes we seem to eat more fruit than a pair of lemurs in a Malagasy lemur rehab centre.

In our long ago days of freedom, we used to arise early and watch the African sunrise and nocturnal creatures wrapping up the night shift. More recently, our pre-dawn starts allowed us to zip through 25km of desert hiking on the PCT, before the heat set in. Now, we jump out of bed, tingling with excitement; we can add value to industry! It’s not how fast we can knock the tent down and hit the road, but how fast we can get to our desks. We are on the cusp of breaking the 45 minute bed-to-desk barrier. Who needs the sound of a howler monkey when the lure of a day selling solvents or analyzing discounted cash flows is just a logon screen away? It is no wonder we find ourselves at our desks by 7:00 a.m. each week-day!

We used to be Thank-God-It’s-Monday people, but now weekends are suddenly important to us. Whilst we have skied through the winter, camping has become more of a challenge. We went winter car-camping one week-end and filled the car with pillows and bedding. We aimed for a particular campground that features electric outlets, so we hauled a microwave along (why didn’t we think of that on our cycling trips?). When we opened the tent, we discovered that we had brought the wrong poles, so we packed everything back up and returned home. We might be city people.

Desperate to prove to ourselves that we were still capable of an overnight camping trip, we made an assault on Castle Mountain on skis. We practically froze to death. Freeze-dried food comes into its own on winter camping trips; just add boiling water, then eat it. While waiting the required 10 minutes of re-hydration time, Sheila tried out the James Bond technique of “shaken, not stirred”. The package exploded in a rather spectacular fashion in the tent. The result was frozen beef rotini on North Face Harrier tent: was it art? Suddenly, we are in crisis. Are we really city people?

That puts us at the crossroads. Should we admit it, sell our car and buy a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV)? Why should we leave our comforts when we could adventure everyday on our drive to work or to the shopping mall? We have to admit that all those SUV TV commercials have us interested. But it’s the SUV names that perk our interest: Trailblazer, Explorer, Pathfinder, Escape, Discovery, Expedition, Freelander and Frontier to name a few. We are in need of an image make-over!

And finally, to demonstrate the depths of despair that these battered, battery chickens have reached, Glenn spent a beautiful, sunny afternoon indoors doing our Income Tax returns.

The congratulatory and commiserative telegrams and cheques (we are optimistic) are flooding in. It seems the Queen’s message may have gone astray. We have been living in one place for a year.

Our home entertainment system floundered during the Olympics when the sound cut out on our T.V. We decided to renew our commitment to living here and we replaced our 1990 “Emerson” T.V. with a 1984 “Granada” T.V. purchased at a local garage sale for five bucks.

Our sense of reality continues to slip away. Glenn changed work arrangements and became an employee for less wages and longer working hours still in the oil patch. The big perk in his new job is the reserved bicycle parking place.Sheila continues to move chemical solvents in the southern USA. We consider tent nights a good quality-of-life indicator; the situation was so bad that by mid-June, the number of remote controls we owned exceeded our year-to-date tent nights. Should we also mention that we have added a DVD player, a blender, food processor and even an espresso maker to our stable of possessions?

We shifted gears in mid-June and started back-packing on week-ends. We were early getting out of the gate as early summer hiking in the Canadian Rockies normally involves snow. On one of our early hiking trip we spent more time on snow than on ground and we developed such walking techniques that we would surely have been “shoe-ins” to star in a skit about the “Ministry of Silly Steps”. In early July, we turned south to visit Glacier National Park (Montana) and we met up with Ed (PCT 2003). The real story was our encounter with “Homeland Security” at the border. We inadvertently smuggled in something more dangerous than guns which are apparently OK in the USA. We brought Canadian beef into the U.S.A.

Back in Calgary, the annual Stampede arrived and the local scene was dominated by rodeo stars with names like Cody and Stockton. We coaxed Mark (Guatemala, 1996) away from his home improvements for a few week-end backpacking jaunts to train us up for our annual vacation. Later we took two whole weeks for our annual vacation and headed off for a short walk in the northern Canadian Rockies.

We some how managed to haul 16 days worth of food up through Mt Robson Provincial Park into Jasper National Park. Up on Moose Pass, we encountered four grizzlies in two hours, then we bush-wacked our way over an obscure, infrequently traveled pass from the Moose River drainage onto the Jasper North Boundary Trail. We crossed back and forth over the Continental Divide between Alberta and British Colombia so often but we decided to stay on “Mountain” time. Most of the creeks and rivers on the hike were fed by glaciers and we must have consumed many pounds of silt over the trip. Packing in a fishing rod paid dividends and we enjoyed some of the best fishing around (like delicious 2 pound brook trout). With the August tourist season in full swing, we somehow slipped off the radar screen, going a week at one point without seeing other people.

So our vacation has left us re-energized and we are braced for another Canadian winter. Just this week, fresh snow began to appear on the mountain tops a sure sign that skiing is far away.

As 2004 comes to an end, it is an opportunity to reflect on the year, or at least the last 3 months here.

We’ve grown very comfortable in these surroundings. Sheila springs out of bed just past 6:00.a.m. and after pleasant hot showers, it’s time to chow down homemade muesli with strawberries and bananas. We then cycle down the road in the dark and over the Bow River to downtown. We have been bicycle commuting through much of November and now into December. The winter season has thus far been “moderate” and the coldest we have walked in, so far this season, has been an anemic -17C, hardly worth bundling up for. We have been re-programmed to consider -5C to be “mild”; those tropical beaches are a long way away. We are both at work at 7:00 a.m. and that’s when the chaos begins.

Once it turns dark again, it’s only a matter of hours before the walk or bike home. After dinner and more often than we care to admit, it is T.V., the opiate of the masses. We have made some moves on the audio-visual technology front so that we can control our “multi-media” without getting off of the couch. Yes, we have four remotes. To some it might appear that we could be fully advanced to the potato stage. It would certainly hold true at certain times of the evening. We have a bewildering array of good news programs and documentaries to choose from. We also have all kinds of documentaries, films, Seinfeld and a steady sprinkle of reality shows to click on. Once satiated with TV, we heave into our comfortable bed without howlers or penguins to keep us awake, so we sleep well.

Did we mention that we can spice up the week with an ethnic experience by driving to and shop at the Real Canadian Superstore in the N.E. of Calgary? There, we find a small slice of the world’s populations shopping with us each week.

So even after portraying this scene of domestic bliss, the question we are asked most is: “So when are you leaving?”