Tower Records

In 1980, when I was nine, my family moved from Calgary to Spruce Grove, just west of Edmonton. The small city still had a row of grain elevators, which from a distance almost resembled the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Up close, they were so large and so colourful — and they immediately fascinated me. That same year, we drove to Disneyland, and I decided I was going to record the name of every town we went through by reading the grain elevators. After nearly 3,000 kilometres on the road, I was very disappointed that so few places in the western United States had them.

Eventually, we moved to Sidney, Montana, with its own row of elevators, and then down to Houston, which didn’t have any. After ­finishing high school, I returned to Calgary. One day, I went for a drive in the country and passed through the village of Champion, which had seven wooden grain elevators in the 1920s...