X Marks the Spot

When I think of Edmonton as a city, generally, I’m not. Not thinking of it as a city, that is. I have my own places that constitute Edmonton for me. Not a city, but rather, for lack of a better word, a home. My places are clustered along lines – the line of the river, the line of the LRT. I visualize those lines in perpendicular intersection – perhaps because that’s how they run at their points closest to my house, or perhaps just because it’s simpler that way. In reality of course, the river winds as rivers do, and the LRT line is jagged to accommodate destinations and existing roads. Somewhere though, at the middle of this map, that imaginary perpendicular intersection does exist, as the train and the river both cross with my life.

I said that my Edmonton is clustered along those two lines, but I should be more specific. If you look at the cross on the map, the southwest section, just by that perpendicular intersection, that’s home. Or my house at least. Home extends to the right of the yellow line too – Whyte Avenue, Garneau, Old Strathcona. On the other side of the blue line, to the north, is my downtown – the Citadel, Winspear, City Centre Mall, Churchill Square, the Legislature.

Edmonton is not only that central intersection though – even though I may leave much of the city unexplored, those lines still define the breadth of the city for me. I’ve ridden the length of the LRT in one go: south to north to south again, and at least twice in my childhood, I’ve gone the length of the North Saskatchewan by canoe. So I suppose I have a sense of a broader Edmonton, an Edmonton as a city. But that broader Edmonton is not where I live – I live in the crook of river and LRT, a fictional perpendicular zone that’s real enough to me.