Alberta

Wasn't Alberta one of Flip Wilson's characters? Or some other black comedian?

Well, in any event, it is also obvious a Canadian province and was one of the featured places for this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The first Canadian province so selected.

It seemed (still does) like an odd choice, as there is certainly nothing very exotic about Alberta. Two big cities (Calgary and Edmonton) each with an NLH hockey team, a lot of wheat, a lot of oil, maybe some Indians in the north, and of course Banff, Jasper and Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies.

So we approached it a little differently from the norm. Rather than walk through the exhibits quickly and listen to the music (the music was either country music or Ukranian folk bands), we talked to the exhibitors. And it made for an interesting Saturday afternoon.

Here is some of what we did and discovered.

First, there were a number of oil exhibits, talking about drilling and about the equivalent of oil strip mining (along with restoration projects). Alberta has billions of gallons of oil, yet to be drilled or mined. In one of the tents, there was an older man acting as docent. We were the only ones there (the tent had various models of drilling equipment) and I asked him what his role in the oil industry was. This started him talking about how he got a job for a local company having grown up as an Alberta farm boy, and how he then worked for Texaco for 37 years, all around the world, where he became a specialist in off shore oil platforms. He supervised the development of Texaco's North Sea platforms and was one of the platform managers for a number of years. We talked about the platforms (built to withstand 70 mph winds with a 50% safety factor on top of that), the number of men (no women, no alcohol) on board normally, and when there were special functions, the managers' shifts (7 days on, 7 off, as opposed to everyone else who had 14 day shifts), the inability of the manager to sleep, the discipline, the supplying of the platforms by cargo ship, the oil and natural gas pipelines, which ran to the Orkney Islands and Scotland, respectively, and so forth.

Then, we met a young woman named Inna Platanova, originally from the Urkaine, who was a trained scientist (physicist?), who worked for a nonprofit sponsored by the U. of Calgary that was dedicated to bring light to places in the world without electricity, where now kerosene or the like was the only mechanism for light, and which did not provide sufficient brightness. Basically, they are working with solar powered batteries, and what appeared to be a form of halogen bulbs (we did not talk about the bulbs) and they have worked in the Himilayas and in Africa, amongst other places. They are also talking to various organizations about the use of these ideas in disaster relief situations. Quite interesting.

We sat through a cooking class taught by an executive chef from a Fairmount hotel five star restaurant in Banff. He told us how to make pea soup in only about two hours with about 200 ingredients. It was a vegan soup, except for the cream sauce and the pancetta. It was actually very interesting, particularly to hear about the ingredients and how he went about acquiring them, and to see how the "designed" the soup, by looking at cook-top mirror placed overhead so you could see what he was doing from above.

We saw some dinosaur bones, and big rocks that were as old as 1 billion years, and talked to a woman who with her husband used to work for the Canadian Park System, but now lead private trips through the Rockies. She told us about the cuts in the park budget that made private guiding a necessity, but how much was lost now that you could not get free what was once available.

Of course, we saw the rancing exhibit, but did not pay much attention, and the urban design exhibit. We saw a techonology exhibit that we did not fully understand. But all in all it was a very nice way to spend an afternoon.

We sat down for a snack towards the end of the afternoon, not in Alberta, but near the native American basketry exhibit, and were joined by a mother (grandmother?) and daughter (grandaughter) from the very northwest corner of the state of Washington, in or near Olympic National Park. The daughter appeared to be in her early twenties and had a 2 1/2 month old son (who was also in Washington, but we were not sure where). They live a 5 hour drive from Seattle.

What was most interesting was talking about the relationship between the various northwest coastal Canadian and American tribes, and an annual ritual where a canoe trip composed of members of all goes from tribe to tribe. Young men and women join in this physical task, and obviously it is viewed with great importance. The children are still taught native languages (starting with the Head Start program), but are losing fluency, using it mainly for singing, not speaking. Their religion seems to be an amalgam of Christian and native religions, which also provided for some interesting conversation.