Slave Lake II

October 23, 2005

I am so ready to get the hell out of this town.  Now yesterday when I was writing about how much I enjoyed this place please don’t confuse the town with the lake itself.  Slave Lake, the body of water, is amazing.  Misrepresenting itself as a small ocean (from certain vantage points) with beautiful white sandy beaches the lake itself is about the last thing that you’d expect to find in Northern Alberta.  The town… well the town is fairly typical of what you’d expect to find in Northern Alberta.  I believe the liquor store to person ratio is likely extraordinarily high.  

Hardly to my surprise yesterday’s Edmonton Sun ran the “shocking” cover story that Alberta led the nation in mental illness and depression numbers among citizens.  Apparently the oil patch has something to do with it.  I’m shocked!  The working conditions are dismal, the jobs generally terrible and the only reason most people do them is for the obscene amounts of money to be made.  The sad fact is that the oil patch probably extracts an equal amount of life, or the will to live, out of its workers as it does crude.  As an uninformed visitor looking around these towns and hearing about the substance and alcohol abuses I’m not surprised.  Usually I would be the last person to encourage more social spending on community support but here I think the cry for these resources is actually justified.  The majority of the guys working up here are here to make tons of money and leave.  What I don’t understand is how they figure they are going to be able to escape from the lifestyle the oil patch allows them to afford.  Sadly many of them don’t seem to be able to make that break of reaching the ‘magic bank balance’ and then quitting to pursue whatever it was they originally wanted to do.  For many of the young men that move here in pursuit of that dream they don’t have any social network and few if any friends.  No wonder depression is a leading killer in Alberta.

I’ve spent the great majority of the last two days in my hotel room and as nice as it is I tire of it too.  I’m really looking forward to staying with my Great Aunt in Leduc tomorrow night.  This much alone time isn’t all that much fun.

I rented four DVD’s yesterday and how finished watching them all now.  Last night I watched the first four episodes of Desperate Housewives which I enjoyed immensely.  After the Housewives I watched Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter which was a surprisingly good movie.  Not at all what I expected it to be a definite recommend.  Today I watched Mulholland Dr. which I thought would be a great movie but turned out to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life.  The only reason I rented it was because every time I go into a movie store I always notice it and think that it maybe good.  So I finally rented it.  BIG MISTAKE!  After that I watched The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, which I know I vowed I would never watch.  In spite of myself and a killer headache I found myself enjoying.  It was quite loosely based on the book so I can’t fault them for screwing up what I view as one of the best books ever written.

Tonight I am going to pack my things up and try to go to bed early.  I’m hoping that the headache will go away with some rest.  Tomorrow looks to be a very long day.  Week 1 of 4 down.  Only 3 more to go.