I splurged on a room with a view of Calgary International Airport at the Airport Delta Hotel. I said good-bye to my mother who had come to believe that I was a professor at Mount Royal University and had been given a car by the grateful college administration. That's what she told her friends which they quickly forgot or didn't hear in the first place.

I watched the planes taking off and landing until the airport closed for the night. I finished the last of my whiskey watching. I'd been drinking heavily in the evenings after leaving my mother's home.

I became enchanted by an old photograph of a diesel electric engine on the road in the mountains.

I miss my father, not like I did when I was his dependant at his death with tuition, books, rent, and materials hanging over my head. I now miss him and his wisdom, his logical good sense and his dreamy dreams of homesteading near Grand Prairie and getting back to the land from which he was forced onto the industrial road. But, there it was on the wall of my hotel room, the romance of the road. Scrambling the Yoho Mountains at Field, British Columbia where the crews laid over in cabooses without water, toilets, safety glass, and heated by a charcoal fire. The stingy charcoals weighted out by the railroad while the rest of the industrial first world warmed itself with central heating.

And I was charmed by the other photograph of the winterised prairie road through farmlands. Calgary is haunted by rough stuff on the edge of civilization only a lifetime ago. It's a long way from Montreal, Toronto, Paris, and New York. It's a long way through time and space traveling from past to present, back and forth.