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Saskatoon, a clue!
Saskatoon - Friday, September 28, 2012

Cities, just like people, have a character, a composite of the individuals who make up the society that reflects to those who visit, a distinct nature of what that city is like.

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Saskatoon is one of Canada's most dynamic cities and nothing about the place is simple. Its drivers are a mad combination of homicidal and suicidal blind men and women, rarely paying any attention to speed limits and determined to get their bumper ahead of all others in sight. That same rambunctious nature can be seen in the produce section of a Saskatoon supermarket, its trample or be trampled.

Saskatoon residents and former residents, hold their city in unjustifiable awe. They swoon over its beauty, its bridges and cultural richness, while ignoring one of the worst crime rates in the country and ghetto poverty that equates parts of the city, with the worst sections of Detroit and Chicago.

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Having never lived there and only paying short visits to the place, I have always been confused and skeptical of the people who praise the wonders of the city. In my profession, I had to endure the arrogance of the University of Saskatchewan alumni, who felt they had been endowed with some special deity, when in their performance, there seemed to be nothing to warrant their inflated opinion of their education.

What is it about Saskatoon that create this delusion? I think I have a clue.

On Wednesday we went in search of an RV park that is in the midst of the city. I have never been to Gordon Howe park before and of course, I wondered off and came off Idylwyld into a neighbourhood of towering condos and there on the corner of Lorne is a park. This looked like a special place. A place of quiet and natural beauty less than half a block from the Saskatoon Motor Speedway, otherwise known as Idylwyld. We stopped and took a picture. The iPad showed us how to get to our destination and off we went.

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Back onto the crash car alley, then off down 20th street, alas, yet another place I had never been in Saskatoon. The street is lined with artwork, both large sculptures and graphics, clearly we were in the heart of the city's ghetto. Home to its First Nations people, few if any have jobs, or can ever expect to have work. Their lives are a matter of surviving, trying not to be rounded up by police, or drug runners, over whelmed with poverty. But there in that part of the city was bold, beautiful art.

A few minutes later we dodged a detour and found ourselves in an immense park. Gordon Howe Park, a park worth of the name, with swimming pool, football field and an idyllic RV campground.

All of this is incongruous, the poverty, the aesthetics, the beauty, the crime rate, the dangerous driving, but somewhere in all this, there is also the multiculturalism, the fire burning in the hearts of the First Nations people to affect change, the unstoppable growth of the suburbs and industry, employment and investment flowing like a tsunami.

Saskatoon and its believes see not what is and has been, but what is coming and the promise of a bright tomorrow.

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