This month’s Sunday Short is excerpted with permission from Half-Light: Westbound on a Hot Planet by Amy Kaler (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2024).

 Orphans

The ruins of the west are not like the ones I have encountered elsewhere in North America, mainly on the Eastern Seaboard and in the Great Lakes region, where I spent much of my life before moving to Alberta.

I lived in Philadelphia in the 1990s, which at the time was floridly apocalyptic with miles upon miles of abandoned industrial precincts overgrown with vines, and boarded-up rowhouses lining the tracks of the SEPTA commuter train. The water in the city’s concrete-channelled canals looked like it hadn’t moved since the 1940s. Yet the inhabited neighbourhoods of Philly could be vibrant and vital, and in my own neighbourhood, commerce, recreation, schools, and playgrounds coexisted with decay.

West of Philadelphia, I’ve passed through the burned-out cities of the depressed US Rust Belt. I can even claim to be from there— the city where I was born, Worcester, Massachusetts, has been called the eastern extreme of the Belt. My father’s father worked for US Steel. The abandoned futures of these places are right up in your face; you can walk down any street and there’s the chained-off factory, the shell of a house. That kind of ruin is ingrained in American pop culture by now—Bruce Springsteen and Eminem both made their early fortunes from writing and singing about it. Venture farther west beyond the Rust Belt and you’ll find more examples. First, you’ll get to the Midwest, home of prairie gothic and In Cold Blood, and then you’ll get to Las Vegas and then to California, the west of which there is no 58 half-light wester, where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, and Blade Runner locate their decaying worlds.

The ruins of unrealized futures in the Canadian west are different from those in the east, and also different from those in the American west. Perhaps because there’s so much space and so few people, they’re spread out thinly and can disappear easily into the background of endless prairie or forest or badlands. In addition, the resource booms that have animated the Canadian west have worked against the preservation of an extensive built record of the past. Edmonton, my home, is a young city that keeps tearing down anything that shows a sign of getting old, and other western cities like Saskatoon and Calgary are similar. But away from the cities, on the long gridded stretches of range roads (north–south) and township roads (east–west), things are different.

Some of the ruins are testimonies to what happens when an economy is dependent on resource extraction, which almost never ends well. Alberta is dotted with old coal mines that boomed and went bust by the 1930s. Sometimes the full external apparatus of the coal mine is still visible, other times there’s only an indentation in a hillside or a rotting wooden crossbar to show where men tried to dig out the cheapest, lowest-quality coal. The eastern end of Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River valley is pockmarked with tiny former mines, too many to count, as is the valley of the Red Deer River.

The southern part of Alberta is becoming littered with the traces of another disappearing future, in the form of “orphan wells”: oil and gas wells that are no longer producing, but have not been decommissioned by the companies that set them up. The gently nodding pumpjack in the field has become so familiar to me that I don’t really register seeing them anymore, but the image of the pumpjack that has stilled, that hasn’t moved in who knows how long, registers strongly in my consciousness now as part of the wreckage of oil and gas extraction.

There are somewhere north of fifty thousand orphan wells, sometimes politely referred to as “legacy” wells, in the province. Most have long since gone dry, but still leak contaminants into the soil. Maps of orphan or legacy wells look like a galaxy superimposed on Alberta, with countless dots spiralling out around Drumheller and Crowsnest Pass.

Many orphan wells occupy the same territory that the coal companies opened up in the early twentieth century, and then abandoned when demand for coal fell off as cheaper energy sources, like oil and natural gas, took over in the 1950s. The old coal towns are still there, with a few inhabited houses but not much in the way of commerce, shopping, or educational facilities. East Coulee, Blairmore, Luscar, Anthracite, Coalhurst, Coalspur, Coaldale—once there was no more coal to ship, and no more railroads to ship it on, the towns dwindled. The extraction of natural gas was much less labour-intensive than coal mining and didn’t require railroads to move the stuff to market.

The old mining towns are strung like vertebrae along the spines of the old rail lines, on which no trains have run for decades. In places like the Rosebud River valley, the tracks themselves have long since been torn up and carted away, leaving indentations in the land like harrow-marks, and the pilings of bridges that connect nowhere to nowhere else. These are the outlines of the bones left behind when an economic nervous system dies.

Walking around the ruins of the west, especially the ones in rural areas, is an unnerving experience, because there’s no way to know whether a former townsite is really, completely, abandoned or whether a few people (eccentrics? hermits?) are still hanging on. Is that an empty house, or just one that’s in need of repair? Does anybody drive their vehicles into that yard of old cars anymore, or has the gate been locked since the 1980s? How obvious am I, a stranger, poking around the old gas station, taking a picture of the spur line silhouetted against a sunset? And is there anyone left for my presence to offend, anyone who might take issue with my presumption that the history, or the future, of this place is over?

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