Ten years ago, in 2015, a ten-year-old Ansel wrote his first screenplay, Wings of Canada. It was an action-comedy feature involving a war breaking out between Canada and a hegemony of Russian, Chinese, and American forces. A whole squadron of characters, funny yet ingenious, would rise up to fight the invading forces, and through their camaraderie and sheer force of will, they discover the intricacies of their own relationships, and maybe they save the world too along the way. I remember spending more than a year writing for that screenplay, recruiting all my friends to help be my camera operators, play as my actors. My old friend Zach Myers took the lead on so much of that project, helping me design logos and sets for when we’d eventually shoot this big story. I remember watching Film Riot on YouTube to hone my filmmaking skills before I’d employ them towards this big film. And though the film never ended up being made – probably rightfully so, given the embarrassing story structure, the cheesy dialogue – it still occupies this fond place in my heart, if not for helping me discover how much I love making videos, merely for that moment when Zachary Myers and I dared to stare at that blank page and write, create with the audacity of the children we were and just make something, if not good, at least something we could call our own.
I was reminded of Wings of Canada this New Year’s Day. While I was out for festivities, I got a notification on my phone for an event I had set back in 2015. Since Wings of Canada was set in 2025, I’d set a notification in my Apple Calendar for when it’d ‘finally be 2025.’ It was really special to see that, like something akin to a message from my younger, more innocent self. I wonder what he’d think of me today, all these projects I’m working on, all these incredible things I got to do. ’24 in particular was a good year for me. Academically speaking it was probably the most successful year I’d had in a very long time, but, which is so much more: I got to really figure out who my people were, had these moments where I really just started to sink into this idea that I’m Ansel, the filmmaker, the student, the writer, sure, but also a partner, a friend, someone who people genuinely look at and enjoy being around. The nights spent wandering the streets of Toronto, Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Seoul, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Port Townsend, Forks, Ocean Shores, Boston, New Hampshire, Maine, New York City, and, of course, Calgary and Vancouver are just as important to me as those quiet nights in my apartment when we’d laugh and talk and scream our heads off like idiots sipping on cheap PBRs, those nights spent out for dinner with people who mean the world to you, the cold winter nights at the Kilt spend reminiscing over high school stories, the nights in your great room up in Calgary watching Home Alone 2 and imagining yourself again, all these years later, that you too could be Kevin McAllister soaring down the Queensboro Bridge, sticking his head out the window of a NYC cab and choosing to be anything, if alone, if independent – at least you’re free.
A few days ago, in the last few days of 2024, I called Jacob and Laurence and went out to a couple of lakes in the Rocky Mountains to go skate and play some pond hockey. The next day I picked up Patrick and Thomas from their houses in Calgary and drove them out to Banff to hit the slopes at Sunshine. I got absolutely destroyed by these guys, who’d spent so much of their lives as ski racers, and yet I’d kept up with them okay, and still had a blast. Just yesterday I went to grab breakfast with Jacob and Laurence at the Blackfoot Diner, and we drove around to a bunch of record stores shortly after where I picked up a few old favourites for my record player in Vancouver. I really appreciated sitting in the car with them making the kind of jokes you can only really make in Calgary, reminiscing about taking the 825 to Bishop Carroll in the mornings, going skating out at Cardel Rec one day with all our new friends from high school, wandering the streets of downtown late at night and checking out the Glow festival, that day Brooke went skateboarding on her back through the tarmac, those first days when I met Patrick, those countless hours spent up in the English room working, the days when we’d walk over to MRU for lunch. I missed these boys.
I’m convinced there’s something magical about that simple act of catching up with old friends. It’s that night at the Ship and Anchor after driving back into the city from skiing, how much we shared that we didn’t even know about, this unspoken understanding, this comfort that you can make whatever jokes you’d like, laugh about whatever, talk about whatever, completely free of judgement because you grew up together. They raised you. You ought to say thank you. You owe them that, at the very least.
I never thought I would miss how quiet it gets here. Honestly, it was one of the things I disliked the most about being in Calgary. I didn’t like how there was never anything to do, never anybody out on the street, never anything happening around. But just now I stepped outside to grab my backpack from the car, and I got that huge blast of air again. That frigid prairie air, the kind that just smacks you right in the face, pulls your skin taut, makes you shudder through your whole body. And I saw those vast skies, one of many sunny winters, not a cloud in the sky, and that golden light beneath the flat prairie horizon. The streets were silent, the usual sounds of the cars muffled either because it’s New Year’s or because the snow dampens it all. But either way, it was nice, peaceful, and I felt that nostalgia again, felt those pangs I know too well that make it that much harder to say ‘laters.’
It gets harder to leave this city every time I come back. Even harder still when I spend my nights with my mom and my sister in Kensington when I have to watch that glimmering city in the distance and know that it will always be mine and yet one I will have to watch shrink smaller and smaller from an aeroplane window in just under a week from now, again. But then I think of Wings of Canada, of that licence to create like nothing matters in the world, to create unrestrained by these thoughts of loss, of guilt. And I know then that we’ll have all this forever, all these memories to live for, and time and time again they’ll beckon you to remembrance, to inspiration, to reminiscence. But they’ll always be there, these stories, these people, these moments, these memories, if only encased in a long-forgotten notification on your calendar, waiting to be remembered. And they beckon you to step forward, to keep going, to make new stories, to live like you can do anything, like you’re those kids running down Beverly Road setting off car alarms, knowing you can do anything, be anyone, go anywhere.
There’s this fraternal social club down in the US called the Elks Lodge. I stumbled across it once while doing some research in the UBC Library. Every year since 1868, their members gather for a reunion. When the clock strikes the 11th hour, and they get ready to retire for the night, return to the faraway parts of the continent from whence they came, they first stand to give a toast to the ‘Hour of Recollection.’ Absent the certainty that they will ever see each other again, they raise their glasses, to brotherhood, remembrance, memory. To nostalgia, to hope, to gratitude:
‘It is the golden hour of recollection, the homecoming of those who wander, the mystic roll call of those who will come no more. Living or dead, Elks are never forgotten, never forsaken. Morning and noon may pass them by, the light of day sink heedlessly in the West, but ere the shadows of midnight shall fall, the chimes of memory will be pealing forth the friendly message: “To Our Absent Members.”‘
-ansel
calgary, alberta
line of best fit 