How I ended up on a small island: part 1

I never called myself a Canadian until I moved away from there. In England, where I settled, you’re surrounded by a sea of faces from around the globe and you become classified by where you came from – even if it’s a few generations back. You may be born in Tottenham but could get away with saying you’re Jamaican even if you’ve never been there. So in the middle of London, I am always classified first as Canadian – that Canadian salesgirl, a Canadian friend of mine, my Canadian girlfriend – I don’t mind that as long as they didn’t mistake me for an American.

When I was growing up, I never thought about where I was from or any stigmas that sat around it. Being in Edmonton, Alberta as part of a family that never travelled, there didn’t seem to be the opportunity to meet anyone apart from the people who were also born and raised there. This could be due to the distances between cities as everything is so far away. The nearest big city to Edmonton was Calgary, a 3 hour drive if you stuck to the limit but could be done in two if you had a fast car and a keen eye for speed traps. We were lucky to have a place that close as most cities were at least 5 hours away.

In my early twenties, I headed to Vancouver to go to school and for the first time saw the ocean and found that people judged me on where I was from. Vancouver is one of those places that everyone ends up moving to and those who move mainly move from east to west. Though it’s probably an urban myth, some people say Vancouver has the highest suicide rates. The Americanized Torontonians, the poor sons of Maritime fishermen, all make their pilgrimage west for a better life, an easier time, easier weather. As Vancouver is as far west as you can go without living with Wolves and grizzlies before you hit Japan, if life isn’t great then there’s nowhere else to go. Hence the high suicide rates. Vancouver, the final resting place, the horde of huddled masses, the destination on one-way tickets handed out to the homeless of Toronto and Edmonton in the winter.

What shocked me the most when I moved there was not the change of environment or the snowless winters, but that people could tell I was from Alberta straight away. I, of course, thought I was more sophisticated than that. Alberta is the home of rednecks and mullets, oil men, farmers and cowboys. We’re the Texas of Canada. Even our premier, with his grade eight education, embodies the stereotypes I thought I could escape. With a midnight drunken visit to a homeless shelter to rant at the jobless to get a job doesn’t really help our cause. So it’s easy to see why I wouldn’t want the association.

It took me some time to understand, it wasn’t the stereotypes that I was bound to but something greater. Albertans talked slower and took up more space – like we embodied the whole of the prairies as we walked through life. We all carry a piece of our home in the way we deal with the world and I understood why some people gravitate towards others from their hometown. In Vancouver, I found myself relating to the pockets of prairie kids banding together cause no one really understands wrangling cattle in an old, red pick-up truck unless you’ve been there. But Canadian?? I never referred to myself as one.