A couple weeks ago as I was getting ready for my summer posting schedule, I wrote about the local “world’s biggest” attractions that are dotted all around the rural countryside near where we live.
As it happens, we took the scenic route home from a weekend camping trip, driving for two an a half hours along the twisting and turning secondary highways connecting various small communities throughout the province.
One of our stops brought us to a giant sausage.
Yes, that’s right.
In the town of Mundare, Alberta lives the world’s largest sausage, or kielbasa to be precise.
The forty-two foot tall fiberglass structure beckons from a roadside park across the street from a gas station and nearby to a locally famous smoked and cured meats company (sadly, closed on Sundays!)
We pulled to the side of the road, parked, and wandered around the odd monument to the rich history of Ukranian immigration to the area. A hundred years ago the settlers who left eastern Europe to settle in the middle of the Canadian prairies staked their future on this sliver of their culture.
And today (well, yesterday) I am able to park beside an obscenely oversized statue of tube of garlic-seasoned meat and ponder why this is among the tallest human-made structure for a hundred kilometers in any direction.
I could probably write an entire series on the odd time-capsule-like effect created by mass immigration to Canada over the last hundred years, how cultural heritage seemed to have frozen-in-time as large groups of people moved here with their unique memories of “back home.” What started as serious traditions or means of income, have continued to be acted out in the foods, styles, dances, and other artifacts of their ancestry, having changed or evolved little, practiced almost exactly as they were from the moment they stepped on the boat, train, plane or whatever vehicle took them from their original lands. As such there is this entire pocket of people who come from, say, one region in eastern Europe in the early twentieth century embracing a cultural identity deeply rooted in the wonderful indulgences of, say, sausage and perogies and pysanka. Meanwhile (at least from what I’ve observed travelling) the generation of cousins who stayed behind have shifted and grown and evolved their culture… as humans are wont to do.
In other words, I have no idea if modern Ukrainians are as deeply connected to sausage, perogies, and pysanka as their Canadian relatives, but I somehow imagine that connection is much more multidimensional over there than over here.
I don’t mean to call out any of my friends of Ukrainian-ancestry because that sentiment seems true of most everyone here who “colonized” this place… well, besides noting that I just drove past a forty-plus foot tall statue tribute to garlic sausage in pretty much the middle of nowhere on the Alberta prairie.
If I come across a sixty-foot tulip, or a wheel of gouda as big as my house, you can bet I’ll be posting some pictures here.