The dreaming

On the pages of winter, horses gallop through the darkness that is our heirloom, here on the grasslands bent and whispering under the hibernating season. Invisible, those ghost hooves raise the dust of summer, the sweetness of heat while thunderclouds stockpile the fervor of broil. A snowstorm tempts us to remember July, its sweltering grandstand thick with beer and cotton candy, blurred clamor of the announcer through a babel sound system, the cries of hucksters, the stripe of fireworks. Stampede coming. A certain anniversary that will arrive despite resistance or annoyance, despite the strange thrum of “until.” Not tomorrow, but always in the seventh month, the off-centre pivot of the year turning on its axis, saturnalia biding its time. Who counts the days to Stampede? Caterers, accountants, special events coordinators, straw bales, beer bottles, window painters. And who leaves town? The curled lip, the shoulder-shrug dismissing this déclassé debauch, this faux fiesta, with its ragbag history and bricolage of excess. The sniffy contempt: primitive. As if that were an insult. Some say you’re not a true Calgarian until you leave town to avoid the Stampede. Let’s admit it. Joy gets no respect. Popular jubilation and unfettered diversion are suspect, not to be trusted. Never indulge the instability of the mob, its desire to kick the traces, massing the streets in that social deformity known as fun. Am I trapped in a synthetic documentary? Do I breathe a brief trace of what Stampede might have been or what we will remember tomorrow? Am I artist or patron? Or just someone practising disguise? Is this the west then, legend or performance, the old west, the new west, the wild west, the faint west, the dusty west, the wicked west, the uncultivated west, the dishevelled west, the tempestuous west, the unkempt west, the turbulent west, the tousled west, the complaining west, the anarchic west, the restless west, windswept, rumpled and unironed and messy, its depiction as wildly unpredictable as its chaotic generation, a shambles and a jumble and a pandemonium of hope. Stampede or else.