From the air, Edmonton resembled a pristine white circuit board. It was cut through with grey cement arteries for SUVs and trucks (cars being increasingly scarce), railway lines, and built-up areas, dark with coniferous trees at the edges of neighbourhoods. Briefly I was confused when I saw an especially vast patch of whiteness on the south side. Initially I thought it was the CN rail yards but then I saw the telltale yellow IKEA sign and realized it was South Edmonton Common. The reason there is so much white is that almost every building is a giant square or rectangle, with a flat roof, at this time of year covered in snow, and every building is surrounded by parking lots, also covered in snow. One of the busiest commercial districts in town looks like paper, waiting to be written on.
As the plane swooped even further south, toward the airport, it passed over neighbourhoods that didn’t exist back when my family first moved to Edmonton. In fact, I remember the exact day — only about three years ago — when I realized that residential and commercial development extended even further south than South Edmonton Common. I had been forced to go there for an appointment with a dermatologist (I was fine). I remember asking myself as I drove out, passing underneath Anthony Henday Drive, which I had assumed marked the outer border of Edmonton proper: what the hell is going on here? Does this city have any natural limits?
By the rather boring metrics of city hall, the sprawl of the suburbs plays havoc with finances. It becomes harder and harder to maintain public services when so much money must be spent on miles of new pipes, roads, fire hydrants and so on, and the tax base is so thin on the ground that the new subdivisions cannot financially carry their own weight. Sometimes it feels that this is deliberate. Suburbs this far out are giving the middle finger to city hall and to the very notion of city living.
“And these suburban spawning grounds have a very specific social order. Gone are the young days of boisterous conduct. Everyone is serious here. Everyone is goody-goody, proper, and buttoned up. The men work hard and diligently. The women also work hard and diligently and focus all their energies on their children. There is nothing else.” The Suburbs: The secret to the American character (a subtle tribute to David Lynch and David Graeber).
There is always more to say about North American suburbs. You’d think the conversation would have gotten old, since it dates back, in Anglophone literature anyway, at least as far as John Cheever. But new people are joining suburban life every day — people from all around the world, with their own dispositions and preferences and worldviews — and they make new observations and add new features and languages and businesses.
Transitioning so quickly from the airport to the suburbs, the two seemed more similar than I had previously suspected.
I used to feel that airports were special places. As a boy, I was so thrilled about air travel that one day, I joined up with a friend of mine to cycle all the way out to Edmonton International Airport just to look at planes. We were disappointed that it was a quiet afternoon and we watched only one plane land. Nowadays, time spent at the airport is time in purgatory. All sensations are washed out, dull. Any vibrancy is artificial and garish and hurts the eyes if you stare for too long. You’re constantly being told what to do. Air Canada boards passengers through a class system composed of no fewer than six classes, ehem, zones. Zone One boards first, and then Zone Two. Etcetera. On my way to Toronto I was in Zone Four. On the way back, I was in Zone Five. I can’t account for the difference. I think it might have something to do with the fact that I didn’t hop to it and check in online within minutes of receiving the email instructions to do so.
The zone system provokes a feeling of selfishness in me. I pushed as close to the front of the Zone Four queue as I possibly could. As soon as Zone Three was boarded, my turn came next. I felt quietly triumphant. A small victory in an otherwise somewhat belittling experience. I’d already gone through the usual indignities of security. The uniformed men and women were even more zealous than usual, both in Toronto and Edmonton, and I wondered if it had something to do with Trump’s threat of tariffs that, so he claims, is partly a response to the volume of illegal drugs and illegal immigrants coming over the border from Canada. Just a general ratcheting up of tension. (Canada currently hovers Wile E. Coyote-like in mid-air, with a national crisis of unknown scale below us, but let’s not look down right now.)
Nothing escaped the attention of those guards. I had purchased travel-sized toiletries: contact lens solution, shaving cream, toothpaste, etc. And yet I was in trouble. They wanted to know why I hadn’t collected all my fluids into a Ziploc bag. The suburbs impose a different version of the same approximate vibe. All our movements are prescribed and monitored. The Russian writer, Evgenia, who I quoted above, is exactly correct. The expected comportment is goody-goody. Keep your grass neat and short. Get the recycling out every Friday before 7am. The garbage goes out every two weeks. Clear the snow off your pavement. Everyone should have a purpose at all times. That woman is walking her dog. That man is vacuuming the inside of his truck. This teenager is hurrying to the bus stop. The old lady is doing recreational walking, which is the kind you do with special Alpine trekking poles, so everyone knows you’re serious. That harried-looking gentleman is driving off to work and it looks like he is going to be late! But mostly, nothing is happening outside on the streets, which are typically empty. Everyone is already in their place, where they belong.
I remember how shocked I was when I took my daughter to our nearest playground and a young boy lectured her that she wasn’t allowed to be there. Who had taught him this attitude? Who had made him a little cop? Something similar happened at another playground twenty blocks away. My daughter took a breather on a long bench, at the other end of which was a young boy with his grandfather. The boy turned to his grandfather and complained: “I don’t want her sitting next to me!” I also remember the gang of kids who laughed at my daughter and called her a “freak” for chasing after them, trying to initiate a game. A heavy sadness came over me as I realized during my first few years in suburbia that the majority of kids here don’t socialize with any spirit of curiosity. They are taught to mistrust, they are taught the boundaries of property, they are taught who is in and who is out, and as they learn all that, they’re forced to assemble small social cliques and stay in them until they move away to postsecondary institutions, or if they stay behind, their social cliques may scarcely grow at all.
It is easy to make fun — of how astonishingly contrived it all is, of how you’re always lining some CEO’s pockets while pursuing a life of contentment — and to make fun or complain is to act as if you’re somehow above it all, and how could you be above it all when you’re here?! It’s best to keep quiet. The expected comportment is a humble and even-tempered air of resignation and acceptance. Yet I have been doomed in this life to write. In the first volume of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, I came across these words: “Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur: the deeper they're buried, the better.” I have believed in the truth of that ever since.
We have difficult neighbours on one side. There is an elderly Japanese man who never communicates with his elderly Scandinavian wife in anything less than an enraged shout. “What are you doing there? Are you coming or going? If you’re going, get out! Get the hell out!”
The Scandinavian woman walks endless perimeters around the neighbourhood. She goes out the front door, down the pathway, turns right, walks uneasily and dutifully along the sidewalk, turns right again and walks a few more paces, enters the alleyway, and shuffles down slowly, returning to her starting point, looking into each family’s yard as she goes. If you greet her, she’ll say “How’s X?” X refers to one of my daughters. I say, “She’s fine. Enjoy your walk!” This is the full extent of the conversation. I feel very sorry for her. She walks endlessly, endlessly. She’s the only person in the neighbourhood clocking this number of kilometers on her feet. What she is experiencing at home is undoubtedly some form of abuse, but what is to be done? Sometimes she goes missing and the police bring her back home. Maybe they chalk that up as a victory for their helicopter, which is often droning overhead, on the lookout for criminals and anything else out of order.
Last fall, someone got into our garage and stole my bike and the Thule chariot which was so handy for hitching behind the bike and pulling the kids along. Meanwhile, about ten blocks away, arsonists burned down a large, multi-unit residential property that was still under construction. The blaze was so fierce it melted the siding on houses across the street. We know the people who live in the house next to the building that burned to ashes. They were evacuated by the fire department at two in the morning: two adults and a six-year-old girl. The girl is a friend to my eldest daughter.
The overall impression you get in the suburbs is that you don’t really want anything out of the ordinary to happen. If anything happens, it’s usually bad. It’s usually a transgression against a law, written down or implicit. There are streams of motorists driving down the arterial roads with eyes alert to anything awry. It’s almost as if every last citizen has the eyes of a cop. Unless you’re shopping, earning money or getting an education for the purpose of becoming a shopper or an earner, you’re traveling on your way to do one of those three things. Let me be charitable and add a fifth thing: recreation. You can go to the recreation centre. You can walk a dog. You can walk with those Alpine poles in your tight fists and exude an air of pleasureful, oatmeal-loving purpose. Those are the things you can do in the common areas. Activities aside from this arouse suspicion.
On the plane, before returning to the suburbs, I was reading Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas De Quincey. Man, they would hate this guy in Edmonton. They would consider him the most useless of all people. Dropping out of high school to consort with prostitutes on the streets of London! Dosing himself endlessly with opium, not as a response to trauma or poverty, but as a sort of scientific experiment, to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. Who the hell is this guy? Constantly resorting to a Greek word or a Latin phrase just to prove his intellectual superiority!
“If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this enthrallment with a religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man—have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me.”
What a braggart! He boasts of having set a record for opium eating, and moreover, of having kicked the habit (although what is one to make of this apparent hedging strategy “almost to its final links”?) Did he fully kick the habit or not? My word, suburbia won’t let you get away with such slippery verbiage! You’re either a junkie or you’re not. You're either selling my stolen bike for another high, or you’re in Narcotics Anonymous confessing your sins every Friday evening from the church basement with a host of other sinners every bit as weak and helpless as you once were!
No, this Thomas De Quincey fellow wouldn’t be welcome here. Did you know it was his mother who added the “De” to the name to make it seem as though the family was of a knightly lineage? You can’t give off such airs in the suburbs. Everyone is the same in the suburbs: homeowners, hard workers — or in the absence of a job, volunteering hard to prove their worth. But despite working so hard, no one is so unseemly as to show off about it. The proof of industriousness is in the manicured lawn. The brand new fence (“I just built it myself over the long weekend.”) The clean SUV. If you enter a house in which the residents have worked very hard to make everything perfect, almost beyond doubt they will tell you about some deficiency that might otherwise have escaped your attention. That's the moral code of the suburbs. Everyone is working very hard but there’s always another project to do. That old adage about it being impossible to be a Communist if you own your own house and lot seems too ominous for a mere adage: it sounds like it was the plan all along. The ceaseless accumulation of tasks blunts the revolutionary impulse.
How exciting it must have been for De Quincey, exploring the limits of opium use, providing one of the very first comprehensive accounts of the physical and psychological pleasures and pains of the drug. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was his only peer, and poor Sam was too overwhelmed with shame to make a public display of his habit. Two centuries later, have the frontiers of knowledge about opium moved in suffocatingly close? I am fairly certain the answer is yes. No ordinary person armed with a pen and affluent benefactors need go in search for fresh information about this powerful drug. Go to Churchill Station to see what a few years of steady opioid use will do to a person.
In the suburbs, which always operate under externally imposed constraints and rules, we perhaps still have new frontiers to explore. How much more of the world will the suburbs gobble up? How much harder will they hammer us into weird, misshapen, SUV-ready gnomes?
Staring straight into the face of futility, I am trying to find a new direction. While the liberal, cosmopolitan, and densely populated big city offers all the distractions of a circus, here our main concern is bread. The single family dwelling is our only tabernacle. But everyone has their own tabernacle. It’s not supposed to be that way. It’s important to heed the Alberta sky, the blood-red light of dawn. The sky says there is a force greater than the suburbs, greater than any drug. It compels us to follow new rules, have new longings, and explore answers to new questions. From the air, all this will look very different.
Before all that, there is the matter of everyday living to attend to. And I don’t want to appear ungrateful for all the blessings that have come with this move to the suburbs, above all, the company of very good people. Whenever we are gathered at somebody’s home or backyard, watching the flickering flames of a fire and tasting the delights of food cooked in the spirit of conviviality, and whenever the children disappear because they’re playing for hours and hours, or one of them is clattering artlessly at the piano and then watching with subdued amazement as an older child makes actual music from the exact same set of keys, or even when, for a brief moment, I find myself alone in my own backyard, sipping a splendid local ale, looking at how the sun of the starched sky dances through the branches of the tall evergreens — at moments like these, I can easily become convinced that mortal life offers few pleasures greater than these precious suburban pleasures.
NOTES
I have been spending an inordinately long time trying to write a post about The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Recognizing the Stranger, by Isabella Hammad. I enjoyed one of these books far more than the other and yet it’s making me uncharacteristically cautious to try and explain why. Any reader with thoughts about either book is warmly welcomed to get in touch and share. It’s been a bit torturous staring at the same Google doc for weeks as text appears, gets deleted, new text is added, and so on.
Book
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Other Writings. Thomas De Quincey. Oxford World Classics, 2013. (“Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was originally published in April 1821 in The London Magazine.)
Substack
The Suburbs: The secret to the American character (a subtle tribute to David Lynch and David Graeber, January 23, 2025
Images
"From the 1963 Archive: The Problem with the Suburbs," Peter Blake. The Saturday Evening Post, October 5, 2023
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2023/10/from-the-1963-archive-the-problem-with-the-suburbs/
“Popular 1892 sedative believed to have led to addiction, death of Alice O’Riley”
https://warwickonline.com/stories/popular-1892-sedative-believed-to-have-led-to-addiction-death-of-alice-oriley,238989
You don't even get a true view of Edmonton until you hit Highway 2 after landing in Leduc. Then it's Edmonton Common, the dreaded industrial hell on Calgary Trail and then you get to some decent parts in Downtown Edmonton. That was my trek back home when I lived there. It's either everything in the outskirts is suburbia or you need to bomb some parts like east of Downtown and out to the NE part.
Working in Edmonton Transit, the land use was so hard to plan transit around. I know they went through a route realignment after I left but that was left to be desired.
I know some zoning has changed. But man a lot needs to change.