Springtime in Alberta

Saturday Morning. In and around Calgary everything is brown and dirty. I am heading up the highway north to Edmonton, to have Easter dinner with the old farts and the siblings. The snow is almost all gone. Southern Alberta is dry to begin with but the last few years have been drier than usual. Normally this is big sky country but today it is overcast. A purple sky in the southeast does not develop into anything. To the west the rolling foothills and behind them the snow capped Rockies are barely visible because of the clouds.
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As you go north, the highway breaks slightly east and the Rockies break west. It is not long before you can only see scraggy hills to the west. This is ranching, oil, natural gas, forestry and rodeo country. To the east, the skies are clear now and you can see the prairie roll out and slightly downward to the horizon.
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Directly east is the Alberta badlands, with their weird hoodoo structures and deep valleys that have rock faces showing geological strata. There are more dinosaur bones and fossils found here than anywhere in the world. Yet, we are right smack in the middle of creationist country.
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They say this is one of the busiest highways in Canada, but at the very least, it is the backbone of the Alberta economy. Anything you can buy or sell in this economy is visible in one form or another from the highway. RV's, boats, tractors, donuts, Elk Antler Aphrodisiacs, hamburgers, antiques, used cars and trucks, sides of beef & pork. Everything is big and sprawling.
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An aging bachelor in a Corvette blows by me as if I am standing still.
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As you head north, the temperature drops a bit and there is more and more snow. The fields are mostly still white and the snowdrifts in the ditch or against snow fences are weirdly textured from the wind. There are a few stands of poplar and evergreen trees here and there.
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There are trucks everywhere, mostly oilfield service trucks. I have lived here all my life and still have no idea what all that gear is. There are flatbeds hauling the big valves, compressors and pipes that connect the vast web of energy pipelines together. You can see where the pipelines cross the highway. Most of them head south to the American Midwest. There are semis hauling everything imaginable: junk food, livestock, or the latest Wal-Mart crap. Otherwise, the traffic is mostly families jammed into SUV's mini-vans and four-by-four trucks, old folks with oxygen tubes in their nose driving new Cadillacs, and the ubiquitous rancher/farmer in the farm truck. Most of them have bumper stickers complaining about the usual grievances: the Kyoto treaty, the Gun Registry, the Wheat Board, the unelected senate, generally, the idea that liberals live in their world.
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A farmer has a big sign facing the highway that says "Separation Long Overdue" that makes me laugh whenever I see it. It is a nervous laugh because I am familiar with the specific hell that these people want to drag the rest of us into with them. Another has a sign that says Jesus is Lord, which I suppose is saying much the same thing. These slogans always used to be on grain elevators but almost all of the grain elevators are gone now.
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Sunday Evening. Now I am heading back south to Calgary just after supper. The sun is dropping just behind my right shoulder but there are still coral colored wisps of clouds to the south. It gets dark quickly. Occasionally there are clusters of undulating yellow lights off in the distance from some little town. In every direction, there are cell towers and oilrigs with red or white beacons. Some spin, some blink, some just stare back at you. The sky above is clear and the stars are showing.
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The highway gets busier as you get closer to Calgary, and everybody drives fast and tailgates. Soon you see the canopy of light over the city as all the outdoor illumination reflects upward. This is quite pretty in the winter when you get a million lines of light bouncing around off ice and snow crystals in the air. I have always lived in big cities and I have always liked seeing city lights at night. I wonder if it could be a reverse SETI project, beaming all our wattage out to space hoping to meet some interstellar friends. With our luck, they will be imperialistic neo-cons, and we are the Iraq of the Galaxy. Alternatively, all that light could just be a law and order thing, deterring teenage nihilists with odd German accents from stealing your car stereo. Please recommend this post