Calgary, as seen from the Bow River during the late 1800s. Shortly before I left.

I made the decision not to fight highway and airport traffic to go home for Christmas. Ever since, I’ve been looking forward to setting aside small town living for a few days in a booming city that’s easy to navigate and home to most of my family. On Friday afternoon I’m driving from Whistler to Calgary with an overnight stay in Kamloops, and with just a few days left before we depart, my thoughts are turning to my favourite spots in town as well as a few new places I’m hoping to make time for.

Favourite restaurant: Vin Room, 2310-4th St. SW You don’t have to be an oenophile to enjoy the atmosphere here. In fact, you may get more out of the experience if you’re uninitiated, as the concept behind Vin is the creation of a space that allows for the discovery of wines. This makes it an ideal meeting ground for groups of friends that have varying degrees of experience, adding an exploratory element to dinner out (the tapas style food is excellent). www.vinroom.com

Want to try: Holy Smoke BBQ, #4 4640 Manhattan Rd, SE What can I say, I love meat and I’ve heard that this place delivers the goods. (It’s closed on the weekends, so hopefully we can schedule a weekday visit this time around.) holysmokebbq.ca

Favourite shop: Rubaiyat, 722 17 Avenue SW A store well-known for stocking opulent goods, Rubaiyat is easy to stumble upon while strolling 17th Avenue and hard to leave with the sense that you’ve fully explored it all. The 8500 square foot building showcases hundreds of artists and designers of jewellery, pottery, furniture and more. Though this may be a place you browse more often than shop, there are certain occasions when Rubaiyat is the go to place for something special (it was here that both myself and my sister-in-law went to find wedding party gifts to last a lifetime). I recommend a visit when the store is decked out for Christmas, and larger than life. www.rubaiyatcalgary.com

Favourite local craftsman: Andi Strand, Hoakon + Helga A Canadian designer with a fine arts degree in textiles, Andi turns vintage leather jackets and second hand fabrics into quality handbags maintaining the whimsy of their past lives. Combining buttery soft leather with plaid, navajo, floral or tie die, her bags hint at different regions and time periods while a set of classic designs ensure that her collection remains cohesive. Andi sells through her online Etsy shop as well as frequenting markets around the city. www.madebyandi.com

Favourite lazy Sunday activity: Grabbing coffee and taking the dogs for a walk along the Bow in the expansive, well maintained Southland dog park.

Want to try: Cafe Beano, 1613 9th Street, SW If the Albertan in me loves meat, the Pacific West Coaster in me appreciates coffee shop culture. This spot has a reputation for exceptional attention to detail. www.cafebeano.ca

Favourite Pub: For a night out: The Ship and Anchor, 534-17th Avenue SW  (ideally in the summer, when the patio doubles the number of seats). For craft and seasonal beers: Brewsters (176 755 Lake Bonavista Drive SE, among other locations). www.shipandanchor.com / www.brewsters.ca.

A piece originally published in the 2011/2012 edition of the SBC Ski and Snowboard Resort Guide.

Above: The Jenkinson kids, circa 1991.

As a child, the far reaches of your world were tangible. A plot of lush grass with clearly defined boundaries, the rises and depths of your sandbox were an entire continent, the frenzy of an anthill an empire. The closer you looked the more there was to see, and each season provided a splendour of new experience. To gaze up at the crisp colours of fall was the preview to beloved winters, when mounds of white clay lie waiting to be shaped into kingdom or battlefield.

As you grew older, your world expanded to your neighbourhood, your city and beyond. Initially satisfied by the riverbanks and mountain ranges of your greater backyard, you outgrew these too, in time. You became enthralled with the idea of international offerings, of layer upon layer of culture and scenery. Your youthful ego traveled the world with a checklist of places seen and unseen, an immature imperialist conquering the world with foreign beers on a budget. Travelling ceased to feel like sacrifice as it became increasingly easy to stay in touch with friends and family far away. Time passed with the grain and you managed to find routine within the ever changing.

Yet as you grew older and your checklist grew longer, as you video conferenced loved ones and perused instant messages, the map that once spread out before you began to fold in from the edges. Like a child pulling up and over the fence, your ideology of motion could no longer be sustained. It became clear that the world is not infinite, and what’s more, every place you could go was not necessarily a place that you wanted to be.

You began to recognize the subtle ache once the haze of excitement had settled. The joy derived from anticipation, of holding in your mind every possible landscape, event, personality and interaction, every joyful celebration or testing complication, was gone. You learned that experience is only infinite before hand, when all that could be hasn’t yet been revealed.

You haven’t ceased to explore, but you are altered. You’ve taught yourself not to qualify adventure, believing days of exploration in the Whistler backcountry to be as valuable as sharing a knowing smile with a fellow traveller on the Rome Metro. Every tiny detail polishes you now, like a wet mitten over the face of snowball. This realization sets the surface of your skin on fire as it means that everything you do, everything you see and you feel, has its own inherent value. The steeps of Switzerland or the ski hills of your origin. New York nightlife or a dinner in your backyard with old friends. Comfort or complication. Celebration or solace.

And so you explore and re-explore with an eye for the small and an ear for the quiet. You are intimate enough to see similarities in the places you visit instead of differences. When you look up at the bows of snow weighted tree tops or down from chairlifts to inspect and appreciate the lines of fellow conquerors, when you take the time to speak casually with strangers without stunting your laughter or filling the silences. When you notice something for the first time in a place you think you know by heart, your perception of the world expands once again, and your heart expands along with it. You learn that only through attention to the smallest fractions of the whole can you hold most of the world in your hands. And only then can you accept, and even appreciate, what inevitably slips through your fingers. -Allie Jenkinson

Originally produced as online content for WhistlerIsAwesome.com.

An acclaimed indie music journalist and host with CBC Radio, Grant Lawrence lived an urban existence as front man of Canadian band The Smugglers. He is also a facial-haired outdoorsman, growing rugged in the elements of our province’s lush and salt-strewn West Coast. The latter description is a positive side effect of a place touchingly close to his heart: a cottage forged by his father in an often-unforgiving environment. The relationship is chronicled in his national best-selling book, Adventures in Solitude: What not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and other stories from Desolation Sound.

The book, Lawrence’s first, is segmented into anecdotal chapters that verge on short stories, ripe with likeable self-deprecation. Lawrence juxtaposes historical reference of Captain George Vancouver’s exploration of the area (which he unfavorably christened,) and his own interpretation of Desolation Sound.

Adventures in Solitude is also a study in geographical relativity, with a great deal of attention paid to the people drawn to a remote area with a minute population, little external stimulation, and a bevy of places to hide. Draft dodgers, philosophical squatters and gun raising border protectors run up against European immigrants and rich yachters in a way that seems utterly impossible in any other area of BC.

Lawrence humorously recalls stories of his childhood experiences in the sound from within the perspective of his own nuclear, law-abiding, and initially shell-shocked family. The featured anecdote, an innocent description of his family unknowingly accepting an invitation to a nude potluck on neighboring land, is likely the memorable take home for his readers. Other stories see a cherished cottage burned to the ground, a pair of visitors stumbling upon towering grow ops, and Lawrence accidentally exposing himself to a pair of eco-tourists.

The introduction is a delightful love letter to Desolation Sound, with a glimpse into a self-transformation that Lawrence himself is still surprised by:

Climbing into the boat I looked into the clear, bottle-green salt water and saw the reflection of my face: relaxed, unwashed and grizzled from weeks in the wilderness… there was no place I would rather be.

For anyone not versed in the character of British Columbia’s west coast, Adventures in Solitude is a great introduction, focusing on one of the province’s most historically rich areas. For those of us who are, the book provides sweet, and possibly nostalgic, comfort. It is also a humble nod to sacrifice for the sake of serene pleasures from an appreciative Canadian voice.

More information about Grant Lawrence and Adventures in Solitude: What Not To Wear to a Nude Potluck and other stories from Desolation Sound can be found at www.grantlawrence.ca.

On fresh food and festivals: below is the front cover of the summer 2011 edition of Jay Peak Magazine and a couple of articles I compiled and edited, one on Jay’s August West Music Festival and the other on Vermont’s Green Mountain farm-to-school program. The issue is produced by Origin Design + Communications, with Mike Berard serving as Managing Editor. All design and illustration is done by Kevin Peacock and Guy Paolaggi.

The Winter/Spring Issue of the Mountain Life is out, and it features a wellness article that I wrote to the issue’s “Extreme” theme. It also includes my favourite pull quote to date: ”…what’s a girl got to do to get an enema around here?” The Coast Mountains Edition of Mountain Life is edited by Feet Banks, and special thanks are due to yoga instructor Julia McCabe, Wendy Howarth of Origins Wellness, and Coleen Fraser of Whistler Healing Arts.

When I close my eyes I dream of surf. A hammock bleached pastel in the sun, hung from a wooden beam by the rough hands of a romantic. An outdoor post spraying water over a slab of cement. Ducking under green brush on a dirt path guide to the sea. Shifting water and rising peaks that create and recreate a liquid landscape. North American holidays simplified. Fish for one friend, a board wax for another. A bittersweet taste, more sweet than bitter, of friends and family far away. With each flash of sunlight that makes the world go white, with each inch of skin submerged in water, with each morning you wake up before anyone else and tiptoe out the door, your life becomes your own. I’ve been to places like these before, felt the cool on my feet and the warmth in my hair. But lately I go there often. I daydream in the dark, with little care about drifting away from consciousness. Meditation or escape, I couldn’t say.

The year of 2010 was difficult. Struggling with down payments on a mortgage that always seemed just inches beyond our grasp while paying inflated ski town rent. A hard year that landed on the shoulders of my husband as I struggled with the realities of finishing six years of post secondary and coming out with nothing more practical than a firm grasp with photography and classic literature. A self-destructive streak of stubbornness and minimal tolerance for the casual rudeness of service industry customers or the misdirected anger of fellow employees. Crippling self-doubt crept in, not limiting itself to my short-term occupation, but effecting long-term goals. Finding its way into the part of me that should be brought to light from the inside but never plucked out. And yet, my day-to-day problems made me terrified to write. Terrified to find out that I can’t do the only pursuit I feel something real for.

And as is life, a hard, rough year is the background to days that shine. Moving into a beautiful new home still small enough to be quaint and cozy, with a view of the mountains in front and a network of year-round trails behind. Finding out that my brother’s one-in-a-million wife is expecting. Spending a weekend in Canmore for a simple family wedding and taking the route home North of Kamloops as the leaves turned color. Starting to find a writing voice again while witnessing an ocean of modern inspiration breathing life into others. Most recently, waking up in the morning and knowing that I will never take my husband for granted.

My life is a good one, and I’ve been fortunate throughout to have many who love and care for me.

I feel in my heart that I’m a writer of fiction, and I feel my family and myself in everything I write. And yet lately I feel some things so deeply that I don’t want to hide them in the conduit of a fictional character. I know that something is turning over as I suddenly refuse to hide my insecurities and shortcomings. I want to expose my heart to open air, and let strangers bear the burden of interpretation. And as I drop the layers of anger and frustration that hide me from the world, the wind makes them stir, and then takes them away.

I’m learning that being happy isn’t being perfect, but being flawed and still having nothing to hide.

So no resolutions this year. No small changes or the tearing off of corners. No sewing small holes only to re-thread the needle and sew another. By the time doubt arrives I’ll be long gone. To the next idea, the next creation. Moving out from under the clouds to find another place in the sun.

In the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to find friends that feel like family, and there’s talk of spending Christmas and New Years Eve in Nicaragua next year. And if they can’t make it happen, I’ll still go. I’ll wake in the morning and tiptoe outside. Slip on my suit and shower outdoors, walk the long path to the beach, and paddle out with a song in my heart for the girl that spent the previous New Year’s with water in her eyes, dreaming up a life of sweet creation and a New Year spent on sparkling surf.

A little bit of silliness: below is my article In Search of Utopia on the anniversary of a fictional ski resort for the 2010/2011 edition of the SBC Ski and Snowboard Resort Guide (edited by Dean Seguin, illustration by Dan Brandon). Thanks to Les Anthony, Mike Douglas, and TJ Schiller for sharing their expertise. I also wrote an homage to my origins for the annual, in the form of a piece on Southern Alberta Ski Resorts.

B

elow are a couple of articles I compiled and edited for Jay Peak’s custom publication -produced by Origin Design + Communications- as well as the front and back covers. Cool, eh? Mike Berard served as Managing Editor, and all design and illustration was done by Kevin Peacock and Simon Roy. The Magazine features articles by Les Anthony, Dean Seguin, and many more.

To my merriment the table of content includes the following quote from Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read”.

With no notice or explanation

We’ve ruthlessly fired our former selves

And have closed the position.

Nudging the sky

Or punching the ground,

We refused to fight the everyday.

We freed our feet from the creek bed,

Touched our toes to our foreheads,

Broke the surface

And violently filled our lungs.

Unbeknownst to us,

Our minds were unmemorizing numbers

Our skin and hair was renouncing its code

Our eyes were sharpening and resharpening

With each flicker of the fire.

On orange strands in darkness

On primitive and peripheral fears

On blue on blue on sparkling blue.

And so we went.

To raise a child under a warmer sun

To watch wind over sand

With a bird in our chest

And sweat over dust on our skin.

A

Vancouver Island town’s unique culture and frigid swell unlock the mysterious draw of the Canadian surf scene. A brief excerpt from a recently completed  article on Tofino, British Columbia.

“Anyone that finds the idea of getting into the water during a Canadian winter out of the question will have an equally hard time with the following phrase, written without a hint of sarcasm: you get used to it. If you don’t love being in the water in the first place, you certainly won’t enjoy it here. But as you might imagine, the climate breeds a surfer of a particular resilience, and the gum boot wearing locals take pride in the fact that though hooded wetsuits, sleet and snow may not be ideal, when you combine a passion for surfing and an appreciation for this unique environment, ideal is irrelevant.”