Detours and Discoveries

A writer and professor of sociology at the University of Alberta, Amy Kaler took the first year of the COVID‑19 pandemic to explore the province she’s called home for two decades. She stumbled onto ghost towns, austere natural wonders, and relics from some extraordinary historical moments, all of which make their way into Half-Light: Westbound on a Hot Planet. Part memoir, part farewell to the natural world, and part memorial road trip, this book takes the reader on a cinematic roadside tour of Alberta, while Kaler reflects on “getting older during an environmental catastrophe.”

The eclectic personal narrative is structured around detours and discoveries. “I am drawn to the ruined and abandoned,” Kaler writes in her prologue. As she drove, she found mournful human footprints everywhere: deserted farmsteads and schools and thousands of orphan oil wells. She explored places that momentarily housed roadside attractions, government-funded institutions, or what the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “capitalist ruins,” like the deserted hamlet of Retlaw (an inverted tribute to the Canadian Pacific Railway official who founded it, Walter R. Baker).

In Newbrook, between Edmonton and Fort McMurray, she came upon a defunct observatory. In 1957, its resident scientist, Art Griffin, captured North America’s first photographic confirmation of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. She also visited one of the earliest coal mines in southern Alberta, the Newcastle Mine, which was operated for decades until the mid-twentieth century, just off the Dinosaur Trail in the Mars-like landscape of Drumheller Valley. Today the only vestiges from the significant operation are a few metal fragments, “curled with rust” and trapped in the “dried mud of the plain.”

Half-Light touches on the complex role of immigration in the province. While stopped in a hamlet named Dalum, after a district in Denmark, Kaler considered how little Danish influence seems to remain in the Badlands. She drove through the “Ukrainian heartland” surrounding Edmonton that is actually home to people with roots all over eastern Europe or, “more precisely, from Galicia, Ruthenia, Bukovyna, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, places that are no longer countries.” While describing the region’s various houses of worship, she briefly delves into how religious groups splintered and evolved throughout the twentieth century: “The Anglo Protestant elites considered the Slavs and eastern Europeans as only nominally white — a few cuts below the Catholic Germans and Portuguese, and maybe a step or two above people from India or China.”

One of the more compelling passages follows the Manitou Stone. The meteorite and “object of spiritual focus” for the Blackfoot and Plains Cree was stolen by a Methodist missionary in 1866 — ten years before Treaty 6 was signed. By charting multiple relocations of the massive iron rock, Kaler tells a larger story about colonization, theft, and reparations. “It has still not returned to the place from which it was taken,” she writes, noting the stone’s current home at the Royal Alberta Museum in Calgary (though a recent co-stewardship agreement promises its return to its likely original site near Hardisty).

Half-Light is more than a meditative, meandering stroll through Alberta’s past. To Kaler, “westbound” also means heading toward death, both for her and for the planet. And she uses this space — replete with traces of history, ancient and recent alike — to reflect on mortality and human flaws. Her prose is intimate and reads as if we are listening to her innermost thoughts.

She writes unflinchingly about the climate emergency, sharing her insight with great perception and urgency. She does not shy from confronting heat domes, wildfires, and floods, as many of us might be tempted to when faced with something so unfathomable and terminal. “This is the truth I’m headed into,” she realizes. “The period of my own life marked by decline is happening on a planet tilting rapidly into destruction.”

She draws connections between the worst mass extinction (the Cretaceous-Tertiary event, when an asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs) and our own looming disaster. Similarly, she relates our contemporary moment to “the Worst Year Ever”: 536 saw massive volcanic eruptions, plunging temperatures, widespread agricultural devastation, and the bubonic plague. In an observation as comforting as it is unsettling, she notes that “for the people alive then, the world may very well have been ending.”

In addition to navigating what it means to age, Kaler carries the burden of watching extreme climate change up close, like the wildfire that devastated Jasper in 2024. Readers in Canada’s two biggest cities — Toronto and Montreal — are relatively free from such fires, aside from faint tendrils of smoke drifting across pink skies. Thoughtful and full of spectres of times past, Half-Light is a woeful warning about the reality of our collective future.

While Half-Light is not precisely uplifting, Kaler has produced an arresting self-portrait alongside one of Wild Rose Country. And there is the rare moment of unqualified joy. Her “last hike before the snow” along the trail at Bunchberry Meadows is one such instance, with a “birch cathedral” at one end and a golden tamarack “cathedral” at the other. In writing about what she reluctantly calls her “happy place,” she reminds us to find our own, and to protect them with both our words and our actions.