"Red Deer, Alberta should be called Red Ditched Car, Alberta"

My Uncle Greg is an insane driver. He wouldn’t accept not going over 100 km/h through the downtown. He would swerve in and out of lanes without slowing, and without proper room to do so safely. He passed people at a blur. He didn’t break unless he absolutely needed to, and he wouldn’t break until the last second. Had I not been sitting in his eye line via the rear-view mirror, I would have looked worried. As it was, I white-knuckled the seat, but my face remained neutral, sometimes with a grimace that I hoped just looked like a smile.

I told my cousin Shannon later that evening, while driving through Calgary with her, that I liked her style a lot more than her father’s. It was still a bit out-of-control, but mostly in reaction to other cars out-of-control driving. And at that point, I’d take what I could get. She said that they had to drive like that because Albertans are terrible drivers. I wasn’t completely convinced.

The next morning, Mother, Brother and I rented a car to drive to Edmonton. Brother drove. I rode shotgun.

We hit a snowstorm just outside Calgary. It wasn’t that bad, as snow storms go. We’d driven through a lot worse in our day; definitely managable. We were the only car in the fast lane, going about 110 km/h down the highway. We would have gone faster, but it felt awkward, given that we were the only car in the fast lane, while every other car on the highway seemed panicked at 60km/h. We were relaxed and confident, listening to Graceland and wondering why everyone was driving so slow for a little bit of snow.

Then we passed a car in the ditch. It seemed fine, as were the people inside it; it was just stuck. I noticed, as we passed, that the people in the car seemed almost bored, like they’d been sitting in their ditched car forever, waiting.

If we’d been in the Maritimes, someone would have pulled over, taken a shovel out of the trunk and have them free in under five minutes. But this was Alberta, so they sat in their car, not knowing what to do but wait.

A few kilometres down, a transport truck and a car had flipped on the opposite side of the median. There were cops on the scene, and a road clean-up crew. They’d blocked traffic on that side of the highway, and created a detour.

In the next five kilometres, there were three more cars and another transport, all in the ditch.

Oh, also, we passed an SUV driving the same direction as us on the other side of the median. The passenger was reading a map. The driver looked like he knew what he was doing, but then again, he was driving straight toward on-coming traffic on the wrong side of a divided highway. So he probably didn’t know what he was doing.

“I thought Shannon was making a weird generalization when she said that Albertans were bad drivers,” Adam said. “But given the evidence, I think it may be an empirical fact.”

We continued toward Edmonton, making a game of the ditched cars. (Well, Adam and I did. Mom was too busy praying in the back seat, poor lady.) It was called There’s One. I was a simple game. Every time we passed a ditched car, we would say “there’s one” then mark it on a piece of paper.

“There’s one,” Adam said happily. A minute later: “There’s one.”

“Ditched cars are like the deer of Alberta,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Only you don’t have to worry about them running in front of your car… there’s one.”

All told, between Calgary and Edmonton, which is a three-hour drive, we saw – without exaggeration – 55 ditched cars. Some were wrapped in police caution tape and looked like they’d been there for a while, like tow trucks couldn’t meet the demand, so the cops just marked ‘em and left ‘em.

At one point we had to take a detour because of a transport truck laying across the highway on our side. It was through a little farming community outside of Edmonton. Before the one and only stop light in that town, there was a sign that said “High Collision Intersection Ahead”. In Edmonton, those signs came before nearly every intersection we went through. Every intersection is a high collision intersection.

So basically, my point is that I am now completely convinced that all Albertans are terrible drivers, and that is not some weird generalization, but absolute, irrefutable fact.