When I first moved to Edmonton, I was job hunting and in need of an apartment with low rent, utilities included. A downtown waiter who had seen me looking at apartment listings over lunch had volunteered advice. Castle Downs was a good choice, he’d told me, because apartments were cheap and “you’re way less likely to get shot there than in Mill Woods.”

That was all I needed to know. My roommate and I moved into a small Castle Downs walk-up with little to recommend it except the view from the balcony doors of the pleasant patch of woods next to our building.

We quickly discovered that our generically twee apartment, with its peach carpet and white moulding, had a troubled past. My roommate’s bedroom door had a badly patched, fist-sized hole in it. The bathroom door, which didn’t shut right, seemed to have been kicked in the shin. Dunning letters to the former resident arrived each week, and our intercom was often buzzed by her acquaintances, who seemed not to have been told that she had moved. They would demand that she come downstairs and, presumably, fight them. We didn’t mind all of that. It was cheaper than cable.

We were less thrilled with the other residents of the building, who seemed to have been partying like it was 1999 since roughly 1999. One in particular, a broad and ruddy man my roommate called “Shirtless in September,” had a gift for disturbing sleep throughout a five-block radius or more.

From the beginning, as we fought traffic up and down 127 Street and our new friends asked us when we planned to really “move to Edmonton,” we considered moving out of that apartment as soon as we had reasonably stable jobs and found a place that appealed to us. As is usual with such vague plans, though, it took a little push to get us out the door. Ours came as we were standing on the balcony one warm spring afternoon, watching the woods burn.

“I can’t remember,” I said to my roommate. “Have they set the woods on fire four times this week, or five?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

I know that seems to be the sort of thing a person would remember, but it wasn’t uncommon for our view of the woods to stand in for a fireplace. Our neighbours—Shirtless among them—never seemed to get the hang of building a firepit without creating a miniature forest fire. We’d been hoping they’d learn from their mistakes. Maybe start smaller fires that they could put out with a bucket or two of water. So far, though, we’d seen no sign of progress.

We mulled over the number of fires that week as a single fire truck bounced across the newly awakened grass of the adjacent park. It skidded to a stop next to a group of men who were watching the fire with, primarily, disappointment. It couldn’t have been more obvious that they were the responsible parties if they had been holding roasting sticks and marshmallows.

“I can’t believe this,” a fireman roared as he jumped from the truck to stand in front of them. “I have been out here five times this week to put out your fires!”

“Oh,” I said, turning to my roommate. In unison, we said, “It’s five!”

By the end of the month, we’d found a place in Westmount. We liked it and I’d like to say we never looked back, but nostalgia is a powerful thing. Every once in a while, we’d put on tank tops, buy cheap beer, light a few dozen candles, and think about the good old days in the burning woods of Castle Downs.