It’s a disconcerting string of stories, to say the least. In April, Arizona passed a law cracking down on undocumented migrants, making it a crime for them to be in the state at all — regardless of whether they’re involved in criminal activity. Two months later, voters in Fremont, Neb., approved new rules forbidding local landlords and businesses from renting to or hiring undocumented workers.

The Arizona and Fremont laws have since run into legal snags (damn those checks and balances!), but elsewhere in the world, outsiders are being similarly targeted by states that want to thicken their borders — even though these same states rely heavily on newcomers for labour. In France this month, police have been uprooting small camps of impoverished Roma migrants, giving them two options: leave voluntarily with government help, or get deported.

It would be comforting to believe Canada is immune from this creeping xenophobia. Yet we saw it after a ship arrived in B.C. earlier this month with almost 500 Tamil migrants from Sri Lanka…

We were driving north toward Jasper on the Icefields Parkway, surrounded by majestic grey peaks, when we came around a bend and spotted him.

No, he wasn’t a grizzly (ursus arctos horribilis), a black bear (ursus americanus), an elk (cervus canadensis) or a bighorn sheep (ovis canadensis).

This was a much more common species, unfortunately — the thick-witted national park visitor (homo sapiens ignoramus). In this case, said specimen had decided to stop his vehicle in the middle of the highway alongside other stopped cars on the shoulder, and stare out the window at a bear in the bush. Or a mountain goat. Or maybe he was just gazing at Indian paintbrush colouring the ditch with its deep, fiery red…

That’s because I’ve been living life instead of writing about living life. Being a dad instead of writing about being a dad. Going camping instead of writing about going camping. You get the idea.

In Valentine, Nebraska.

Our summer started with a trip to Valentine, Nebraska—the “heart city” of the American Midwest, population 2,820. Two of those citizens are my Grandma and Grandpa, who we don’t get to visit very often because of distance.

In Valentine, L. danced down Main Street on painted red hearts and took in a Fourth of July parade that lasted probably five minutes. I played Grandpa’s tater-bug mandolin almost every day, trying to keep up as he played “Wildwood Flower,” “Golden Slippers” and “Red Wing” on his accordion and guitar. Towards the end of our stay C. and I and a few others tubed down the shallow and very rocky Niobrara River (believe me — I had the cuts and bruises to prove those adjectives). All told, it was a fine visit with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It was definitely worthwhile to go down there and introduce L. to her great-grandparents.

Then came the Calgary Folk Music Festival—the anchor of our summer. It’s set in stone, that weekend. Everything else gets planned around it. There, we watched The Avett Brothers rip up the mainstage with their energetic guitar-and-banjo hoedowns. That alone made the weekend worth it, but there were other highlights: western singer Tom Russell’s wild storytelling, The Burning Hell’s hilariously upbeat songs about death and sex and the end of the world, and Ian Tyson performing a new gem of a tune, “Song in a Dream.” Folk fest was different this year, though. Before we were parents, C. and I would go all weekend, from morning ‘til night. Last year we pretty much did the same thing — we could just set L. on the ground. (Weirdly, she screamed through Iron & Wine’s set last year, but fell asleep during The Decemberists.) This year things weren’t so easy. L. wanted to move, didn’t want to sit and listen to music. So we missed a bunch of stuff and spent a lot of time in the kids’ area and didn’t even go to the festival at all on Sunday. Still, it was a fun weekend.

Opapa on his iPhone.

Besides that, we’ve done a bunch of camping in the mountains. A highlight was our recent family trip to Jasper, where my brother and his fiance live. I hadn’t been to Jasper in probably 20 years, and have only vague memories of camping in that area as a kid — nostalgic memories of being there with my parents and Omi and Opapa and aunts and uncles, all together, all having fun. I loved those trips as a kid and I enjoyed this last trip with my family just as much. It was the same but not the same at all — Omi sat by the campfire reading the Edmonton Journal on her Kindle, and from time to time Opapa pulled out his iPhone to look something up on Google Earth. Unlike my tech-savvy eightysomething grandparents, I left my gadgets at home.

Seeing Omi and Opapa pull out of the campground on the last night was very emotional for me. I have all these rich memories of camping with them as a kid, and it’s incredible that now my daughter is forming similar memories. L. has her own Omi and Opapa and uncles and aunts, and later in life, she’s going to look back fondly at family trips like these (that’s my hope, anyway!). What’s really incredible, to me, is that my Omi and Opapa are still here and present while these memories are being written. What a valuable gift for all of us. I’m very thankful.

So there you have it — life is good, and the summer’s not over yet. More to come…

If I want to walk or bike downtown from my place, the shortest route cuts by the Calgary Drop-In and Rehab Centre. That’s always bugged me, and a while back I said as much to a friend.

People down there are unpredictable, I told him. Social justice is important and homeless people deserve to be treated with dignity and all that — sure. But the honest truth is I don’t like walking through that area.

His response? “That’s probably good.” As in, it’s probably good that a guy who has the security of a home, bed and steady income feels discomfort when walking past someone who doesn’t. It’s not meant to be a sunshine-and-rainbows experience — and if you feel fine as you walk by, there’s probably something wrong with you.

My friend’s words recently came to mind when the provincial government revealed plans to launch an anti-panhandling campaign in the fall, encouraging people in Alberta’s cities to donate to homeless-related charities instead of giving directly to people who ask for change…

Here’s a simple request for Calgary’s municipal election candidates. Please read George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language before writing another word.

If you’re like me, you’ll cringe when you read it. The gist of Orwell’s essay is that English is in decline and that political writing, in particular, is characterized by “sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell lists the easy shortcuts we English speakers use when we want to avoid “the work of prose construction” — stale imagery, lack of precision, pretentious diction, meaningless words and so on. Anyone who writes anything is guilty of at least one, and probably more, of these infractions.

With the civic election three months away, there are plenty of examples of bad writing on mayoral candidates’ websites. Here’s one from Wayne Stewart’s: “Calgary is a great city, but we cannot rest on our laurels, we must move forward or we’ll fall behind.”

It’s a string of empty cliches…

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/op-ed/campaign+gobbledygook/3264737/story.html#ixzz0tWmiGUzR

“Yeah?”

“Do you love your woman?” My 11-year-old cousin Q. asks the question as we hunt for lizards on the side of a hill. Dragonflies everywhere, and above and to the southwest, the purple of a summer storm on its way.

“Yeah, I do.” No lizards yet but we’re still looking, walking down grown-over tire tracks and scanning the grass.

“Why?” And again: “Why?”

“Well, because she’s kind and generous and wise and beautiful.”

From Q., uncontrollable laughter at my answer, and then pleas of: “Come out, lizards!”

We keep looking. Nothing.

Then something moves in the grass near Q.’s feet — a lizard, he tells me.

Q. is grinning and I step closer to take a look.

“Just kidding!”

The problem, see, is that I chose to ride my bike to the zoo instead of driving. We live close to the zoo — the ride’s not far at all. Often L. and I bike past the zoo with the bike chariot on the Nose Creek Pathway when we’re out for a ride. So why drive when we’re so close?

The Nose Creek Pathway goes by the zoo — in fact, it kind of wraps around it. The path is a stone’s throw away from the parking lot. So there must be access to the zoo’s main entrance from the pathway, right? Some kind of connector pathway or road? A gravel path, even? I checked the city’s pathway closure site before I left, and it seemed to indicate we were in the clear. Surely the path must connect somehow.

Wrong. It doesn’t connect. You can get to the zoo on St. George’s Drive, but that road is shut down for construction, which eliminates that option. What I had to do is pull up on the pathway right beside the zoo parking lot, and then cut across a gravel road that looks like it’s part of a construction site, bumping L. over a few 2x4s in the chariot and then squeezing us into the parking lot through an opening beside a closed gate — an opening we clearly weren’t supposed to be using.

Any cyclist in Calgary who’s serious about getting anywhere has little choice but to go where he’s not supposed to go. We were going to the zoo, and I wasn’t about to turn around and find some long alternate route because of the city’s planning negligence.

But it did make me mad that I was dragging my one-year-old daughter through part of a construction site. It made me think that maybe I was being a bad parent — but more than that, it reminded me that nothing has changed in this city. A bunch of us cyclists have been bitching about the lack of bike infrastructure here for as long as I can remember, and nothing has changed — no matter what the suits at city hall say. The city likes to boast that it has “the most extensive bike pathway system in North America” (whatever that means), but the reality is city hall’s priorities lie elsewhere — with roads, mostly. It’s sad. The city’s message to cyclists has been the same since I moved here almost ten years ago: fuck off. And get a car.

The City of Calgary's message to cyclists is twofold: fuck off. And get a car.

Need more proof? Just head north on the Nose Creek Pathway, where construction halts the pathway in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it’s not in the middle of nowhere — it’s mere metres from 32 Ave., a road that cyclists could use to work their way north, past the construction zone. But the way the city has set it up, it might as well be in the middle of nowhere. The pathway suddenly ends. And there’s a sign with a long-ass detour that nobody in their right mind would actually use.

When the city shuts down roads for construction, there are workable detours, warnings well in advance and so on. With bike infrastructure it’s a different story. The underlying assumption seems to be that nobody rides their bikes the way people drive cars — to get from place to place, running errands, going to work and what not. The city — despite all its empty talk about alternative transportation — seems to think that cars are for commuting and bikes are for recreation. For amusement.

Well, I ain’t amused. And neither are a lot of other Calgarians who are making an effort to leave their cars at home. This is the one thing that’s encouraging about all this: a lot of people in this city are getting fed up with Calgary’s roads-roads-roads status quo, and are speaking up.

But will it change anything? Who knows. I certainly hope so. That was my hope before I had a kid, and now that I’m pulling my little girl behind me when I ride, it’s that much more important. We need safe, practical cycling infrastructure. The city is working on some kind of comprehensive bike strategy thingy right now — but who knows if that will actually make a difference. The city’s always working on some feel-good strategy like that while working against it in practice. Jawing about cycling (“a fun, healthy and an inexpensive way to get around,” says the city’s website) is all well and good, but the proof is in the pavement — and that’s still lacking. I’ll believe it when I see it.

(Cross posted to my FFWD blog, Klaszus Corner.)

But here’s a news flash: the world ain’t all peacocks and petunias. A kid’s gotta learn that sooner or later, and what better way to teach that lesson than by taking a stroll down 32 Ave. N.E., one of the most unimaginative stretches of asphalt in the city? There, planes roar overhead, and semi-trucks rip past mere metres away. The sidewalks run out suddenly, leaving you to walk on dandelions, cigarette butts and under all that, a bit of grass. Where there are fences alongside the street, they’re usually topped with strands of barbed wire. L. and I killed a few hours walking past strip malls in this urban paradise as we waited for our new car stereo to get installed.

All told, I’d say our expedition was a success. L. saw humanity’s capacity for dullness, we weren’t turned into roadkill and we can now listen to our iPod in the car.

"Never bring me here again, Dad."

The bird sanctuary is one of those places that’s beautiful and peaceful when you’re there, but easy to forget about when you’re not. Tucked against a bend in the Bow River, the forested inner-city wildlife reserve doesn’t attract too many visitors (at least, not when I’ve been there) — and that’s the beauty of it. Aside from the constant hum of traffic on nearby Deerfoot Trail, and the calls of the many birds in the park, it’s quiet.

There’s a nice loop through the forest but today, as often happens with L., plans changed and we didn’t make it around the loop. Instead, after just a few minutes of walking we stopped at a grassy area. There, L. tried to feast on pine cones, sticks, rocks and pieces of bark. Preparing for this summer’s camping trips, I guess.

We stayed there for close to an hour, L. stuffing her face with non-food items, and me digging them out and trying to think of new and original ways to say “No, you can’t eat rocks…” I’ve been told that instead of saying “no” all the time, parents should tell their kids what they can do instead. Be affirmative and all that. Nice theory, but it doesn’t seem to work very well in my experience.

In any case, we just lulled around (L. is very contemplative, very low key for the most part) and enjoyed the relative stillness of the park.

“Tree,” I’d say, pressing my finger against bark.

“Dee!” L. would reply.

“Tree!”

“Dee!”

Primitive conversation, to be sure — yet rich, too.

Speaking of trees, on the weekend, I won a National Magazine Award for “Mr. Tree,” my memoir about my Opapa. The story took gold in the One of a Kind category. I’m thrilled, obviously, but also trying to keep in mind a wise man’s utterances on these matters. His words struck me last year when I was bummed about not being nominated for any writing awards: “If you win an award, you can’t go around thinking you’re the bees’ pyjamas…. And when you don’t get an award, you can’t think, ‘Well, this is a travesty of justice and I am outraged.’ You’ve got to put it in perspective.”

Said wise man, by the way, is Brent Butt of Corner Gas fame.

The lack of punctuation begs the question: what did ice cream do, exactly, to deserve such enthusiastic affirmation? Must’ve been good, whatever it was.