My Alberta: The People We Drive Past

I came to Rocky Mountain House because of work.

That's how I encounter a lot of Alberta.

Through a windshield.

I drive into communities because a load takes me there. I stop for fuel, find somewhere to get coffee, do whatever work brought me there, and eventually get back on the highway.

For years, I've probably driven through hundreds of places this way.

But lately I've been thinking about how easy it is to travel through a place without ever really seeing it.

That's part of why I started My Alberta.

I want to slow down.

I want to look around.

I want to talk to people.

And Rocky Mountain House gave me my first real opportunity to do that.

A Man From Nova Scotia

I met a man who told me he had moved to Alberta from Nova Scotia decades ago.

It wasn't an interview.

We were just talking.

I asked about living here and he told me he loves it.

That stayed with me.

There's nothing dramatic about it. No great revelation. Just a man who left one part of Canada decades ago, came west, built a life and still looks around at this little part of Alberta and says he loves being here.

That's a story.

In fact, it's probably the story of thousands of Albertans.

People came here from somewhere else.

From another province.

From another country.

From another life.

They found work. They raised families. They opened businesses. They made friends. They struggled. They stayed.

Somewhere along the way, Alberta stopped being the place they moved to.

It became home.

I understand that feeling.

Mudd

I also stopped at a little coffee shop called Rocky Mountain House Mudd.

I spoke with the young man working there.

It's his parents' coffee shop.

As we talked, he told me a little about his family. His father had been a pastor and is now far away doing missionary work.

Again, I hadn't walked through the door looking for a story.

I wanted coffee.

But that's exactly what I'm beginning to understand about this project.

The stories are already there.

You don't necessarily have to go looking very hard for them.

Sometimes they're standing behind the counter.

There is something I love about a small independent coffee shop.

Someone decided to create it.

Someone took the risk.

Someone opens the doors.

Someone makes the coffee.

Someone cleans everything afterward.

Behind every little business we drive past is a human story we usually know nothing about.

I walked into Mudd knowing none of theirs.

I walked out knowing a little.

Maybe that's enough.

Across the Street

Then I looked across the street.

There was a man sitting alone in a chair near the side of the road.

There were some things around him. Buckets. A small wagon. Some other belongings or equipment.

I took a photograph.

And I wondered about him.

I don't know who he is.

I don't know where he lives.

I don't know why he was sitting there.

I don't know whether he was struggling at all.

And I think that's important to say.

It would be very easy to look at a photograph and construct an entire story about another human being.

We do that all the time.

We see someone and decide they're homeless.

Poor.

Addicted.

Troubled.

Lazy.

Unfortunate.

Whatever story fits what we think we're seeing.

But I don't know his story.

So I'm not going to tell it for him.

What I can tell you is what I saw.

A man sitting beside the road.

Behind him was green grass.

There were flowers hanging from the streetlights.

Cars passed by.

The sky was blue.

People were working.

People were buying coffee.

People were going somewhere.

Life continued around him.

And for whatever reason, I noticed him.

A Beautiful Place Can Hold Many Stories

Rocky Mountain House is beautiful.

That doesn't mean everyone there is living the same life.

That's probably true everywhere.

A community can be prosperous and still contain poverty.

It can be welcoming while someone feels alone.

It can contain thriving businesses and people barely getting by.

Someone can arrive from Nova Scotia and find the place where they want to spend the rest of their life.

Someone else might desperately want to leave.

Both stories can exist on the same street.

That's something travel writing can miss.

We photograph mountains.

We photograph sunsets.

We photograph historic buildings and beautiful downtown streets.

We make lists of the best restaurants and places to stay.

We tell people where to take the perfect photograph.

There's nothing wrong with any of that.

I want to see those things too.

But a place isn't scenery.

A place is people.

What I Want My Alberta to Be

When I introduced My Alberta, I wrote that some stories would be joyful, some would be difficult, and all of them would be honest.

Rocky Mountain House showed me what that might actually mean.

I don't want this to become advertising for Alberta.

I also don't want it to become a catalogue of everything wrong with Alberta.

Neither would be honest.

I want to see what's actually here.

The beauty and the struggle.

The history and the present.

The people whose families have been connected to this land for thousands of years and the people who arrived a few months ago.

The farmers.

The truck drivers.

The small business owners.

The Elders.

The young people wondering what comes next.

The people doing well.

The people struggling.

The people passing through.

And the people sitting quietly beside the road whose stories I may never know.

I want to learn about the Indigenous peoples whose relationships with these lands existed long before there was a province called Alberta.

I want to understand what happened when settlers arrived.

I want to visit reserves and settlements, farms, historic sites, cafés, small businesses, churches, rodeos, festivals, mountain communities, northern communities and places most people simply drive past.

But I don't want to arrive pretending I already understand them.

I want to ask.

I want to listen.

I want the people who actually live in these places to help me understand what their Alberta looks like.

Because I'm beginning to think that's what this project is really about.

Learning to Notice

I started My Alberta thinking I was going to explore a province.

Maybe I'm actually learning how to notice it.

There's a difference.

I've driven thousands and thousands of kilometres through Alberta.

I've watched the landscape change through my windshield.

I've seen prairie disappear into forest and forest rise toward mountains.

I've driven beneath northern lights and through snowstorms.

I've watched the sun come up over fields when almost everyone else was still asleep.

I've seen a lot of Alberta.

But seeing isn't necessarily noticing.

Rocky Mountain House reminded me of that.

A man from Nova Scotia told me he loves his home.

A young man behind a coffee shop counter told me a little about his family.

And across the street sat another man whose story I don't know.

Three people.

Three completely different lives.

One little Alberta town.

And thousands more stories around them that I haven't heard yet.

That's why I want to keep going.

Not just to see Alberta.

To notice it.

To stop.

To listen.

And whenever I can, to meet the people we usually drive past.

This is My Alberta.

Land. People. Stories. Home.