Stampede 101 is in the books; now the cleanup will. . .never begin.

Calgary Stampede 101 is in the books; now the cleanup will. . .never begin.

 

Say you threw a party for a million of your friends, because you knew you could rake in billions.  Would you feel a slight noblesse oblige to clean up a bit afterwards, after you’d kept the whole community up with noise and revelry and lights and fireworks after 11 p.m.?  Let’s put it in more comprehensible terms.  Say you had a big backyard, and you invited 100 pals over every year on a summer evening for a binge you knew, and your neighbours knew, from long experience, would probably inconvenience many but at least would be over after a bit.  You’d charge $100 a head, and you’d know there’d be some collateral damage.  But since you’d made so much money, and had the indulgence of your neighbours, maybe you’d make a slight effort to clean up, maybe go and pick up cigarette butts on the other side of the fence, etc.

 

You ain’t the Stampede board.  Every year, the Stampede leaves incredible waste along the Elbow river that sketches the Stampede grounds on more or less three sides.  The grounds themselves, well, different story.  Each year, the experienced carnies show up and erect their tacky booths and rides with lightning efficiency and practice, then take them down and move out, almost before dawn, so as to move on to the next “Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” just down the road.  The grounds are suddenly once again empty and calm and acres of pavement can once again sing a siren song for vehicles that rarely come.  Different story on the other side of the chain-link fence, one millimeter from the Stampede grounds.  There, the predictable garbage left behind by the mass volume of visitors will stay or be buried or grown over or absorbed by the environment for. . .ever.  Mostly fast-food garbage, but also clothing and other kinds of detritus, always there in the wake of the Stampede, never picked up, despite the billions the Stampede has taken in and the windswept concrete grounds you could land a plane on on the other side of the fence.

 

When you pass along the Elbow river (or those parts of it that are passable now, in the wake of the floods), you really do come back to the neighbour analogy.  I mean, say I’m a millionaire (or billionaire) member of the Stampede board of directors, and I throw a big whoop-up at my place.  Odds are, I hire people to clean up after me.  If you’re just a normal person and you have a party at your dwelling, you probably clean up after yourself.  But if you can make billions off of hosting a party with 100s of thousands of visitors, if you’re the Stampede board, anything 1 millimeter outside your hallowed precincts is. . .somebody else’s problem.  So the filth piles up, year in and year out.  With a crew of minimum-wage workers, the Stampede could probably pick up after themselves along the river in a day.  But no, that would be a ludicrous abuse of the Stampede board’s sense of entitlement.  Imagine, being asked to take responsibility for hosting “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth” and giving a damn about the outdoors one foot outside of your doors!!  Next thing you know, Putin will be running for a third term, and we’ll be getting robo-calls telling us where we can’t vote!!

 

It’s surprising, in other ways.  Most venues that cherish themselves will go to many lengths to make sure the run-up to their establishments looks good and inviting, too.  Not the Stampede board, that owns most of the land around the Stampede, anyway.  As the decades have passed on, one of Calgary’s historic neighbourhoods, Victoria Park, has been essentially completely destroyed, looking first like hockey teeth, then like 90-year old gums, if gums were parking lots.  A largely uninhabited condo tower here and there, and empty (of course) unmaintained empty lots.  People who own empty lots and sit on them for decades should be forced to keep them clear of needles and nails and dangerous garbage, but that doesn’t apply to the Stampede, naturally.  In the Erlton area nearby, the underground parkades for pricey condos are gradually drying out, but the few remaining old houses or low-rise apartments are all boarded up and condemned. the renters gone to . . .wherever—the condos 30 feet away, they can always be saved and repaired, for they are worth something.  Such a blessing for the owners, really, eviction of riff-raff by natural disaster, no need to get your hands dirty.  The lands around the Stampede grounds have that curious upper-class derelict feel of, well, much of downtown Edmonton.  Useful land that could be used for something, but used only for surface parking lots until the owner can convince in-the-pocket governments to use citizens’ dollars to build things not one citizen in 50 could afford to enter, or one with a job as a $10/hr private security guard.

 

Say you were a wannabe aristocrat, and you wanted to have lots of friends.  You leased yourself a Mercedes, and asked girls out on dates.  But then you filled it with Wendy’s cheeseburger wrappers and used tissues and smelly t-shirts—that’s how the Stampede approaches the notion of community integration.

 

If you ever see a Stampede talking head on TV, s/he’ll always talk about the great volunteer spirit of the Stampede.  Sad how that simply does not extend one inch beyond the Stampede grounds.  Rotting garbage left for others to deal with.

 

Of course, people will say, “dude, if it bugs you so much, why don’t you just pick up the garbage yourself??”  Sort of like if you host a birthday party for your kid, and some other kid pukes, you get right on the phone and tell the other parents to come over and clean up their kid’s puke.  Well, if I lived right next to the grounds, and I were walking my dog of an evening, maybe I would take a plastic bag with me and pick up after not only Rover but also the Stampede.  But I don’t.  Normally, when I’m on the paths near the river, I’m running, or maybe riding or rollerblading.  I’m not going to bring bags in my car and zigzag back and forth into the bushes as I’m jogging so I can clean up after the multi-billion dollar industry that is the Stampede.

 

Do cowboys have a code, or codes?  I’m not a cowboy, but my guess is that they would tell you that they did.  But the people that represent them and mutually enrich themselves, the Stampede, have only one code: “make a hell of a mess, and if someone else has to clean it up, so what?”

 

Yahoo.

 

-zr