Winnipeg, Manitoba
When you're born in a place it's almost always impossible to see it clearly. Emotions and biases and expectations always get in the way.
The rock group The Weakerthans have written a song called "I hate Winnipeg," but the song is anything but a rant against the city. If they didn't care so much they wouldn't be so hurt by the disappointment. Paul Tough has a great article in Geist magazine on Winnipeg, and The Weakerthans, and the way that you can leave and come back and leave again and a place can still feels like home:
"The clerk is closing up and counting loonies.
She's trying not to say
I hate Winnipeg.Weakerthans songs don't usually have a chorus, but this one did: "I hate Winnipeg." The song alternated between the chorus and these little vignettes - the golden statue that sits on top of the provincial legislature looking out over the city, "watching the north end die"; a car stalled in the turning lane in front of you - and each time the chorus recurred, more of the audience would join in, and we'd sing it louder and louder each time. By the time we got to:
The Guess Who sucked
The Jets are lousy anyway."I hate Winnipeg" was practically a shout."
Manitoba Parklands
The prairie around Winnipeg rolls out as flat as you can imagine. If the rivers rise a few feet above their banks floods that spread for miles result. The horizon is a ruled line in the distance, beyond the rows of trees and bluffs that dot the landscape.
"This early drive had become a ritual for him and Gill, and every year since Wade was 12 they had set out from Winnipeg, hunted the sloughs and potholes for ducks and geese, and stayed over in Mariapolis to do the same the next day. Every year a few things changed, new gear bought, the timing of the trip, the number of birds in the sky, but looking back at the photos of previous trips, not much marked the changes, and years blurred together so ages became hard to recognize."
"Wade and Gill talked about the city, how Winnipeg always seemed locked in a struggle between decay and rebirth, each chance at renewal never quite living up to expectations as the weight of history hampered the present and the city's people ran out of energy. The tall shapes of the grain elevators and silos began appearing against the eastern sky. The telephone poles and wires, roads and train tracks stretched across the landscape they passed, the right angles shaping and cutting the land, every mile marked by a new road at a new section. The only other vehicles passing them on the road were the big transport trucks pushing walls of air. Silhouettes and shapes showed in the dim distance, a herd of Holstein cattle in front of a tree line, a bluff containing a farmhouse and silver grain bins pushed back in perspective against bluffs on the horizon."
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