A darkness in the west
In this very special edition of Dispatches from Gauteng, we leave Southern Africa for the darker, colder climate of the Western Canadian winter.
I’d forgotten how dark Western Canada is. The sun that rises at 8 am, sets at 4. The grey sky, big, but low, like some sort of dome over the city.
Even without a cloud, it still feels too close, oppressive.
My fingers dry up, the little hairs in my nose become staticky.
If African cities are dusty, the cities of western canada are defined by the muddy snow slush, cars that are never cleaned, will not be cleaned until spring.
Most of my memories of Winnipeg are after sunset, that is when everything happens, it has to, when you have 16 hours of darkness.
Winnipeg is a dark city. Edmonton is worse.
The snow justifies, when it is falling. The strange phenomenon - sundogs, light pillars, northern lights - a little magic in this colourless place.
It is not yet noon and it feels like 5 pm.
I am always tired, never sure if it's the darkness or the jetlag. I'm always working on Eastern Time and I started to lose sense of the hour but it doesn't really matter. Noon is grey, afternoon is darker.
The sky only seems to lift on the coldest days, when the sun shines brightly with no effect.
It’s a dry cold, we remind ourselves, it’s a dry cold, and the wind is never that bad, no matter what lies they tell about Portage and Main.
You stay inside, separated by the snow and the cold and the grey.
Everything is different in the summer but the summer is a different season and here, seasons could be different continents.
There are images and memories that filter back, disjointed, like they were dreamlike when first experienced and not just now.
Of city busses that feel a little too warm when you get on because you haven't taken off your coat, of snow that crunches like styrofoam underfoot.
I remember the different types of snow. The small flakes, the big ones, the snow that has a hard crust and when you step on it your foot breaks through to the powder below, the black road snow that is not quite solid, but not quite liquid no matter the temperature.
There is only a dusting now. A little bit more. I will leave before it really comes.
I forgot how cold cars are when you first get in. How they suck the heat out of you to warm the cold metal. Of waiting for the car to warm up.
So many of my memories of Winnipeg are memories of being in cars in the winter, the smell of exhaust and faded junk food wrappers against the cutting smell of the cold.
When I was young, Winnipeg had its own TV shows, not just the news. A kids show on a network station that still went by its own callsign. Puppets that introduced the cartoons.
I’m sure there was more but I was too young to remember.
Winnipeg always was a city of local taste, of local celebrities.
Maybe it still is, it’s hard to tell when you don’t live there.
I’ve never been to the West Edmonton Mall but it’s a place that looms large when I think about being a child in Canada in the early 90s. It may not have had a memorable jingle like Marineland but it was a place. I remember reading a children’s mystery story set in the mall’s Bourbon Street, the idea that it had a water park and roller coasters inside, the knowledge that the West Edmonton Mall had more submarines than the Canadian Navy.
We joke about visiting, we drive by, we don’t go in.