Back to Barrhead

My wife landed her dream job in Barrhead, Alberta, in 2018. She got a position teaching high school English online at the Alberta Distance Learning Centre (ADLC). My daughter was finishing her last year of high school in Hanna, Alberta, so we stayed behind in our home while my wife lived in a small apartment in Barrhead. It was a challenging year apart.

I followed my wife to Barrhead in 2019, my daughter headed off to college in Red Deer, and all was well. We found ourselves enjoying the town and I got out for many walks and had a great time doing photography, although a lot of it was with a mobile phone. That was the year I really got into Instagram and I was having a blast because I finally learned that not every image has to be a piece of fine art. You’re allowed to have fun with a camera and do silly things with it, too. So I did.

The happiness was short-lived. Our flaming, suck sacking, pudstick of a provincial premier, Jason Kenney (who is a real piece of shit), decided that it would be a good idea to close down ADLC, Alberta’s nearly century old distance learning institution. I’m sure it was just a coincidence that his slimy fucking cronies were running their own, private, for-profit online schools.

That is how in October of 2020 we found ourselves living in Strathmore, Alberta. I have missed Barrhead ever since. We finally had the chance to go back this weekend to visit one of my wife’s old colleagues, and I took a quick trip through a section of walking path I loved when I lived in town. There were some changes. The maze above? That was new.

The stairway at the left is from my time in Barrhead and is seen from a slightly different angle in the image at right, recently taken. The path has become overgrown in the past four years, which is a shame. It was beautiful when it was accessible.

The water treatment ponds in town are mostly as I remembered them. I did forget that the fence showing in my shots irritated me and I would sometimes Photoshop them out.

Another thing I realized is how my memory has sanitized parts of Barrhead over the last four years. I tend to fondly remember how nice it was to have forests in town with rivers and creeks running through them. I completely forgot how muddy and gross the water there was. It was always brown, brakish, and looked horrible in images unless you got a rare, good reflection shot at sunrise or sunset. The water was nasty at any other time of day. It was good to see reality again and realize that I am not as badly off in Strathmore now as I like to tell myself.

I also forgot about the bugs. There is a lot of standing water around Barrhead so they have mosquito problems that are much worse than we are used to in Southern Alberta. Not that it’s all sunshine and unicorn farts here, but they have it worse up north than we do in the south.

I do very much miss the lush forests and trees around Barrhead. We live in farming country here in Strathmore and there are not a lot of leafy thickets of trees around town. I appreciated getting to walk through some again, other than I should have worn bug spray. Frig.

It was nice to go to my old stomping grounds and remember what I had, but it’s also good to be reminded of what I have now. Things aren’t so bad.

All images from my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. A Samsung mobile was my camera of choice the year I lived in Barrhead, so it was only fitting for me to use that.