Ahh yes, Leduc...what a special place, holding a special place in my heart.
I remember being a teenager growing up and feeling cramped in Leduc, constantly complaining as my friends and I attempted to avoid getting liquor tickets along Black Gold Drive as we walked home from another night sitting in [insert name here] Mom and Pop's basement. We always felt that there was nothing to do, and that the bright lights of Edmonton had so much more to offer. Just wait until we graduate!
Although not many years have passed since I was just like the majority of Leduc teenagers-- heading to the fair on a May evening, already 'half cut,' trying not to get lost within the maze that is South Park in the pursuit of an evening of good ol' Leduc entertainment with friends amongst the creepy carnies and smell of hot donuts in the air (please excuse the run-on!)
Well since then I have graduated, and have been a resident of the City of Edmonton going on four years. I now look back on all my "Leduc-memories" with fondness because I doubt that my friends and I would have gotten away with half of the stuff we did had we been living in the city instead. Nah, I'm just joking, there's more to it than just that...
What I miss now, as a twenty-year-old, always on the verge of being broke university student, is the simplicity of Leduc dating back to the pre-Walmart Age. As much as I hated the "small-town feel" of Leduc when I was younger, that is now a feeling I wish I could recover. However, it seems as though the Leduc I once knew and lived has been overtaken and trampled on by the birth of the dreaded Leduc Common.
Please, don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't like Edmonton, I LOVE Edmonton. But I also like the idea of being able to return to the quiet little Leduc that I once knew when I start feeling like I'm becoming too much a part of the city grind.
The 'city,' as we Leducians call it, was where I always believed those big box stores and shiny yellow smiley faces belonged-- away from sleepy Leduc. Despite my wishes, Leduc has changed and I foresee that its 'face-lift' is only in the beginning stages. I'm not sure I'm ready to see what's next..
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I had actually spent a summer with my friend Eileen in Camrose while she did her pharmacy practicum there. Not to stereotype against all little towns, but it was a Wal-mart surrounded by a neighbourhood. I found this extremely strange, and this inner hate for Wal-mart began to stir inside me.
ReplyDeleteOther than this, I mean there was the Boston Pizza, and the KFC. Haha, I was expecting a bunch of little quirky mom-and-pop stores, but instead I was bombarded with these huge corporations, especially the enormous Wal-mart that seemed to take up half the town.
Since then, upon meeting people from Leduc, Lethbridge, and other small towns, I've found it fun to talk about how laid back it is to come from these places. It was so comfortable living there, and so easy to smile and wave at every passerby. I remember traffic lights being, well, absent during my stay. Flashing red lights, or empty 4-way stops devoid of any man-made signatures including any octagonal absurdities. Traffic was DEFINITELY not an issue.
"Sleepy Leduc", as you call it, is exactly how I would describe Camrose. And we went out to eat with Eileen's roommate, and he lit up a cigarette inside the restaurant. After the initial shock, we both saw the ashtray and it kind of hit me like "ooohhhh yeaaah!" It hadn't dawned on me that certain things like that were still acceptable. He showed us around the hidden mom-and-pop stores downtown, telling us the "best place in Alberta" to get your snowboard shaved down and waxed.
As much as I enjoyed staying in Podunk, Alberta, I couldn't help but feel like a complete outsider, a city boy devilishly taking pleasure in putting my life on auto-pilot, stopping to smell the Alberta roses. Strange, that to experience life, I must escape the city.
Leduc holds a special place between my friends. About two years ago, on a whim, we all decided to drive to Leduc just to see what we could find. We had a late dinner (or, I guess, early breakfast) at 3:00 am in the Nisku Truck Stop, which we now return to every few weeks because they have, hand-down, the best coffee anywhere.
ReplyDeleteTrue, Nisku truck stop is indeed outside of Leduc proper, but I do not believe their management minds the distinction.
After we chow down on greasy food, we usually head to the Leduc cemetery to spy on some of the historic graves. We've also visited Main street and Telford Lake on a number of occasions, most recently when we returned a string of Christmas lights to the boardwalk around the lake which we had absconded the year earlier (always with the intention of returning them, of course).
I have many memories of Leduc, it is a place where I have had a myriad of different experiences — and even some sad times. My first break-up was in the parking lot of the truck stop… my better half tearfully driving to the airport to relocate in Toronto dropped me off there, and I proceeded to cheer myself up with two of my best friends waiting for me inside the restaurant. It was a surreal experience, and makes the place more meaningful to me than any locations I have known in Edmonton.
As we told a greater number of friends of our adventures in Leduc, we found a few interesting connections; a mutual friend of ours worked at the truck stop, and my mom is friends with the proprietor. These funny coincidences really made Leduc all the more mystical to us.
I am a small-town Alberta boy at heart, and even after vacationing in the Allerton Hotel on Michigan ave in Chicago, I still look forward to Leduc every time we drive there, waving at the mannequin on a treadmill outside the Flaman building, looking at the planes flying overhead, and even singing the song we wrote about Leduc County (which is actually quite good).