Plug It In, Learn the Grid, Stay Past February

Buy the extension cord before you buy the parka. The parka can wait until the first real cold lands and every store in town suddenly remembers what it's for. The cord you need the first morning your car makes that low, insulted noise and declines to participate.

Welcome. Here is the first honest thing about Grande Prairie: it does not introduce itself well. The approach on the highway is a long ribbon of parking lots and franchise signs that could belong to any growing city in western Canada, and plenty of newcomers decide on that drive that they've seen the place. They haven't. Give it a season. Better, give it four.

Start with the grid. Downtown sits where 100 Avenue meets 100 Street, and the numbers run outward from there in a system so logical it borders on smug. Avenues run east and west, streets run north and south. Learn that and you can find nearly anything. Within a year you will, like the rest of us, give directions using businesses that closed a long time ago.

Then find Bear Creek. It cuts straight through the middle of the city, and along it runs Muskoseepi Park, which is the best argument Grande Prairie makes for itself. Trails, the reservoir, a stretch of green that somehow makes a flat city feel like it has a shape. Walk it in May when the trees haven't fully committed. Walk it in January when the cold squeaks underfoot. It is the same place and not the same place at all.

About winter. It is long, and it is dark, and nobody who's honest will pretend otherwise. In December you'll go to work in the dark and come home in it. The trick is to stop treating winter as an interruption and start treating it as the main event. Skate. Ski the modest, friendly hill at Nitehawk down in the Wapiti valley. Take the kids to the wave pool at the Eastlink Centre in the bleakest week of January and watch everyone in the building briefly forget where they live.

Then June arrives and the light refuses to leave. You'll be pulling weeds at ten at night and wondering why you're tired. Some summers bring wildfire smoke. Keep the windows shut on those days and wait it out.

You'll meet a lot of people whose lives run on rotation: oil and gas, forestry, farming, shifts that make a Tuesday afternoon look like a Saturday. It's not a nine-to-five town and it doesn't pretend to be one. That is part of why people here are generous with their time when they have it. They know exactly how much of it there is.

Weekends, head west to Saskatoon Island Provincial Park in spring, when the trumpeter swans come through. They're the reason this is called the Swan City, and the first time you hear them you'll forgive the nickname. Drive out to Wembley for the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, which is worth the trip with kids or without. Find Kleskun Hill, the odd little stretch of badlands sitting out on the prairie as if it got lost on its way to Drumheller. Take Highway 40 south toward Grande Cache when you start to miss mountains. You will.

Edmonton is about five hours away, which you will stop thinking of as far. The Peace Country recalibrates distance. An hour for supper is reasonable. Two for a hockey tournament is Saturday.

One last thing. Stay past February. Anybody can love it here in July, when the canola runs yellow to the horizon. March is when you find out whether you actually live here.

And the block heater goes on somewhere around minus fifteen. Put it on a timer.