Stompede, Swans and the Long Dark Middle

The swans come back before the festivals do. That is the right order of things around here. Somewhere out by Saskatoon Lake in spring, the trumpeters drop in while the fields are still the colour of a wet paper bag, and nobody sells a ticket to it. It is the best free show of the year, and it happens without a single porta-potty.

Then the calendar wakes up all at once, like a teenager who has realized it is noon.

Spring, for event purposes, is really just the run-up to the Stompede. Out at Evergreen Park, the chuckwagons come thundering around the track at the start of summer, and the whole city briefly agrees to wear the same boots. The rodeo is the reason people go. The midway is the reason they stay too long. My advice, unasked for: go to the wagon races on a weeknight, eat whatever is fried, and leave before the wind shifts and you remember it is still technically spring in northern Alberta. Bring a jacket. You will not want to. Bring it anyway.

Summer is short, so everybody piles into it. Canada Day at Muskoseepi Park is the city at its most relaxed, strollers and lawn chairs and the fireworks going up absurdly late, because at this latitude the sky refuses to get dark on cue. That is the great comic fact of Peace Country summer events. Everything that needs darkness happens at an hour when the kids have long since melted down.

The small-town fairs and rodeos are where summer actually lives. Beaverlodge, Sexsmith, Spirit River, across the line to Dawson Creek. Same basic architecture every time: a grandstand, a beer garden, somebody's prize zucchini under a ribbon, a 4-H kid steering a steer roughly three times his size. They are better than the city events, and I will not be taking questions. You hear more gossip in one afternoon in a fairground bleacher than in a year of Facebook groups.

July and August also hand you saskatoons, which grow wild at Saskatoon Island Provincial Park and in ditches everywhere else. Not an event. Better than most events. Purple fingers are the regional summer accessory.

Fall is underrated and I will die on this hill, probably a muddy one. The harvest pulls half the region off the social calendar, so what remains is smaller and better: fall suppers in community halls, pie tables run with military precision, the geese going over in long ragged lines above the Wapiti. September evenings on Bear Creek are the finest weather this place produces. Nobody plans anything for them, which is exactly why they are good.

Then comes the long dark middle.

Winter festivals in the Peace are a brave idea executed by brave people. Some years they are lovely. Some years it is minus thirty-five and a man in a parka is grilling a hot dog with the grim focus of a field surgeon. The honest truth is that the best winter events are the ones you make yourself: an evening skate on the outdoor ice at Muskoseepi, a Saturday on the slopes at Nitehawk, Christmas lights driven past slowly with the heater roaring. Hockey, of course, is less an event than a weather system.

By March, everybody is hollow-eyed and talking about the Stompede again, as if it might save them. In a sense it does.

And then, one grey morning, you hear the swans.