Cold and damn cold

Edmonton in autumn:
it doesn’t get any better

Maybe you’ve heard of Stockholm Syndrome. If you haven’t, I’ll do my best to explain it here without going into minute — and thus, boring — detail.

Stockholm Syndrome holds that people held against their will quickly come to realize they rely wholly on their captors for their well-being. Over time, that reliance transforms into empathy, affection, even love.

Patty Hearst, the kidnapped newspaper heiress-turned-domestic terrorist, was a documented victim of Stockholm Syndrome. Peter Pocklington claimed he suffered from it, too, when he was taken hostage. Small groups can be similarly affected. Probably a most striking example was the staff of a bank in Stockholm that gave the syndrome its name. Many of the female tellers grew so attached to their captors during the six days and nights they spent together under siege in a bank vault that they actively engaged in sexual activity.

It has been posited that Stockholm Syndrome can affect not just individuals and small groups but larger groups as well. It is my argument that an entire community — even one that is home to more than a million people — can fall under its spell.

Say hello to Edmonton, Alberta.

Edmonton is an utterly charming city located on the edge of Canada’s boreal forest, within a two-hour drive of the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. And despite its preponderance of Soviet-era architecture — both in appearance and vintage — Edmonton was built amidst a wild, natural setting and at times can be breathtakingly gorgeous.

Edmonton is a lovely place to visit — and most certainly a wonderful place to live and raise a family — for about five months of the year. Summer in Edmonton is a delight; not too hot, not at all humid and, if it’s a dry summer, there are no mosquitoes or other airbound pests. Autumn presents the city at its best. The fall colours from its canopy of elms and ashes, the crisp air, and the bright sunshine all combine to offer resident and visitor alike a delightful reminder of the city’s charms.

As for the other seven months, well, those charms are not so evident. Visually, spring is the worst. Once the snow is gone, the city is slow to green. The resulting brown landscape is unrelentingly bleak. Then there is the litter. Snow is on the ground for more than six months of the year. Once it melts, what remains is half-a-year’s worth of litter, as well as six months of accumulated sand, left behind by city work crews who dumped load after load in an effort to make snowbound roads passable. Edmonton in the spring is, to put it kindly, the highest branch on the ugly tree.

Then there is winter, the season on which I base my assertions about Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s not just the snow. The snow can be charming. Edmonton does not endure blizzards. What comes instead is gentle snowfall that is reminiscent of a Currier and Ives Christmas card. The only drawback is that once is starts snowing, it doesn’t stop for three days. And that is not an exaggeration.

Nor is it the cold, though cold it can be. On most winter days, the sun shines brilliantly in a cloudless sky. You cannot help but marvel at how it can be so bright and so cold at the same time.

No, the problem is not winter. The problem is that there is so much of it. The first snowfall usually comes before Halloween. It’s usually there to stay by the first week of November. And it is still on the ground in late April, well into May in shady areas. Daylight is in depressingly short supply. Through December and January, when the city feels most like a Siberian outpost, you go to work in the dark and return home the same way. By the time the winter solstice officially arrives on Dec. 21, Edmonton has already endured close to two months of winter.

After all that, the cold is simply adding insult to injury. Frosty temperatures linger in Edmonton when most of the rest of the northern hemisphere is revelling in autumn or awakening to spring. As for the months in between, you need only look at one of those colour-coded weather maps. See that large blob of purple that creeps down from the polar region? More often than not, Edmonton is smack-dab in the middle of it. Sadly, it is often the only major North American city enduring temperatures so frigid that they are the same whether measured in Fahrenheit or Celsius.

I can remember once flying from Edmonton to Palm Springs, where I live now. Our flight’s departure was delayed for two hours. It was too cold to de-ice the plane. Maintenance crews had to wait until it “warmed up” to minus 35 to apply the aircraft-saving goo. Ugh.

Longtime Edmontonians will tell you the best way to endure winter is to embrace it, and there is a certain logic to that. You can’t stay indoors all the time. But they make a game of how best to “survive” winter, and take a great pride in doing so. I know this, because for 16 and-a-half winters I shared this pride. I only threw in the scarf after I discovered my angina meant that if I wanted to keep living, I would no longer be able to put up with sub-Arctic nights and bone-chilling curling rinks. It meant getting the hell out of Dodge.

It was only after I removed myself from the isolation of an Edmonton winter that I realized this survival strategy so many Edmontonians employ is, in a word, perverse. In two words: really perverse. The best of human existence should not be measured by our ability to “survive.” As my daughter points out, survival is not something you aspire to. It should serve only as the baseline of your existence. After all, if we need only drink water to survive, why drink beer?

For close to seven months of the year, winter is Edmonton’s captor and for all that time, Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Edmontonians appease it, co-exist with it and some, dare I say it, love it. Yet just because humans can endure an Edmonton winter doesn’t mean they should revel in their suffering.

I read somewhere once that Edmonton, which is home to 1.2 million hearty souls, is Canada’s best-kept secret, yet it’s a secret with an identity problem. The author suggested twice as many people would call the city home if only something could be done about the bloody winters. As a columnist in the Edmonton Journal for a dozen years, I understood such thinking. I once suggested in print that the city’s slogan should be: “Edmonton: Not as bad as you think.”

Nowadays, civic boosters are promoting a more positive spin on that saying: “Edmonton: Cooler than you think.” Yeah, it’s cute all right, but it’s also a declaration of unconditional surrender to winter, its cruel jailer. Alas, those bank tellers in Stockholm might have approved.