Alberta

Patricia Myers is a historian with the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development.

In 1967, as part of Canada’s Centennial celebrations, Kroetsch set out
to explore Alberta. He travelled through the Rockies, across southern
Alberta, and into the Peace country. He explored Calgary, Edmonton, and
Fort McMurray, and followed the Yellowhead Trail and parts of the
Athabasca River. The essays that came out of that trip are reprinted in
this new edition.

For this edition, Kroetsch went back on the road, visiting communities
and fairs and museums throughout the province, trying to pull his
perceptions into a portrait of Alberta 25 years later. He learned that
“to understand a place you go and take a close look, then you think
for a long time about the fragments that constitute your perceptions.”
This precept not only forms the basis of his introduction, but also
underpins the work penned in 1967. In that year, Kroetsch discovered a
province marked by both optimism and regret, a mixture of those who were
excited about the future and those who yearned for the past. During his
recent trip, he found that little had changed. On both trips, he relied
on intimate portraits of individuals—each a person whose life captured
one part of Alberta’s historical experience—to give depth to his own
musings.

This finely crafted book gives the reader both a thoughtful portrait of
Alberta and a glimpse of Kroetsch’s maturing as a writer. Its moments
of sheer joy, despair, pleasure, and honesty—the marks of good travel
writing—can be enjoyed like a memorable trip.