Ice on Whyte

The winter festival on Whyte Avenue was famous for two things: the ice sculptures, which were enormous and beautiful and slightly frightening, and the cold, which was simply frightening.

On the last Saturday of January, the thermometer on the Blue Plate's front window said minus thirty-one. With the wind, the radio said, it felt like minus forty-two. People came anyway. That was the strange thing about Edmonton that Marco had never fully understood in his first winter and now loved: the colder it got, the more stubborn people became. They came in parkas and face masks and three pairs of socks, they looked at the ice dragons and ice castles, and then they wanted something hot. Very hot. Immediately.

The Blue Plate truck was parked on the avenue, in the festival zone, between a crêpe stand and a man selling hot apple cider. It had been Marco's idea to bring the truck in January. Gus had said it was crazy. Darnell Price, the festival organizer who had written the newspaper column in August, had said, "Crazy is good. Crazy sells."

By two o'clock, there was a line of forty people in front of the truck, stamping their feet. Marco was in the truck, frying potatoes as fast as the fryer allowed, wrapping breakfast sandwiches in paper, shouting orders to Daniel, who was taking money at the window with a face that had gone past red to a kind of purple.

At two fourteen, the lights went out.