If you’ve lived in an area for long enough, there are memories everywhere. That’s one of the great things about being a tourist in your hometown: not only do you learn new, overlooked facts, but you also recall all the things that happened at a certain place. You’re a time traveler.
Derive is a public art project that runs a few times a year. With this tour, you are given not a map, but an algorithm. For example, walk one block, turn left. Walk two more, turn right. Walk until you get to an alley, walk down the alley, repeat. It’s sort of guided, but mostly it’s up to you to notice details and record them. I took my camera.
This particular tour took place in the Oliver/Grandin area. Now, there’s personal history! During one summer about eight years ago, I spent a great deal of time with my friend Shannon, who used to live in one of the character apartment buildings on Jasper. That was one of the happiest/worst summers of my life, becoming inseparable with a group of friends who I still consider some of my best, but also becoming wrapped up in a relationship that was intense, yet deeply unhealthy. A little over a year later, I would share a house with that guy, a few blocks east and south of that apartment. The best and worst of times.
The photos I took are beautiful, though. Oddball. The neighbourhood itself is largely yuppie, though there are surprise pockets of weirdness here and there. Like these:
That walk finished early enough for me to walk across the bridge to join Todd Babiak on his Garneau tour, which points out where the main characters from his book, The Garneau Block, would live if they actually existed. We started at the Sugarbowl, then to Vivid Print to chat with Mark Wilson, who is a Garneau area enthusiast. He showed us maps and reproductions of old documents and explained why the neighbourhood is important. Then we headed down an alleyway, to the imagined homes of Madison Weiss, Jonas, the handsome Indian man, and the Wong/Tertlesky residence. I liked Book of Stanley better, but Garneau Block is a really great read in terms of setting Edmonton of the early ’00s down. And I like the romance part of it, too.
In any case, then it was down to the university, to Emily Murphy House where we saw this little one:
Todd said, “That’s good luck!” Which is great. It is!
Then we went back to the Sugarbowl, which turns out to be much older than I imagined– my imagination goes back to the ’90s, but it’s about 50 years old. There are a heck of a lot of stories to be told about that place. For example, when I was in third year university, it was the first place I ever passed out from drinking. It wasn’t yet licensed, but on of my professors had fed us a great deal of white wine in order to facilitate discussion that day. Apparently I didn’t have enough to eat or something, and when I went to the cafe to meet a friend, I promptly felt dizzy and lurched into the ladies’ room to pass out. Later that year, it was there that I discovered that Kurt Cobain had shot himself, and that my boyfriend no longer loved me.
