World's loneliest dolphin swims endless circles in mall, just like some humans

Howard is in a race against the clock.

He is 25 years old -- nine years past the usual life expectancy for dolphins -- and he is, appropriately, swimming counterclockwise, round and round and round endlessly in the nearly empty Dolphin Lagoon on the main level of the West Edmonton Mall.

He has been alone since July, when Mavis died at 23. There were once four of them -- four Atlantic bluenose dolphins captured off the Florida coast in 1985 -- and one by one they have passed on. Maria in 2000. Gary in 2001. Five calves either stillborn or dead shortly after birth. Then Mavis. Next Howard.

Around and around and around he swims, 18 years a mall attraction, although now far, far from a major one.

"It's still there!" a child cries out as a young family pushes up to the glass barriers.

"Yeah!" shouts a younger brother.

The wheels on the stroller do not even stop before the young family pushes on, leaving no one to watch Howard as he continues his seemingly endless race against the clock.

A straw poll in the paper has found the city split on what to do with him. There is some thought he would never survive a trip to another pool where he might have company.

Let him live out his life in the mall, half the people say. Let him die at home.

It is a home quite unlike anywhere else in the world. On one side of Howard's lonely pool sits a replica of Columbus's Santa Maria. On the other side is a larger submarine force than the Canadian navy can muster.

And all around, of course, is the largest shopping mall in the world.

Edmonton is a place where they do things big. This weekend, it was the site of the largest crowd ever to watch a National Hockey League game -- 57,167 at frozen Commonwealth Stadium -- but not, unfortunately, the largest crowd ever to see an outdoor hockey game. That record belongs to Michigan, where 74,554 turned up two years ago to watch a college hockey game played in another football stadium.

Even so, Edmonton has its places in The Guinness Book of World Records. Here is the home of the largest pair of jeans in the world (a 62-foot waist), the longest oil pipeline and, of course, the mall, which also boasts the world's largest parking lot, the world's largest indoor lake and the world's largest wave pool.

Now, sadly, it can also claim the world's loneliest dolphin.

The mall has been open for more than 22 years, and yet it just keeps getting bigger. The Ghermezian brothers, who made their money importing Persian rugs, had this idea that you could combine the carnival with shopping and they kept expanding the place until its very outrageousness became its biggest draw: a shopping mall the size of 115 football fields, a fantasy hotel with theme rooms letting you sleep in anything from an igloo to the back of a half-ton, a roller coaster, a full hockey rink, a massive arcade and even a faux ocean filled with everything from sharks and green sea turtles to, in one separate lagoon, Howard the Dolphin.

It may have cost a billion or more to build, but 23 million visitors come a year -- and, if anything, it is going to get even bigger in the decades to come.

Anywhere a shop closes will be a sign saying something like "Coming Soon -- Ben & Jerry's" or a roped-off area with another sign saying "New Attraction Coming Soon."

It is a place endlessly having to reinvent itself to bring people in, whether tourists or locals.

Claude St-Onge has been there since 1995, drawing caricatures ($5 black and white, $10 colour) not far from where Howard swims his endless circles, and he is convinced there is no better place for him to ply his trade.

"I used to do this in British Columbia," he says. "But it's different here because before I had to go where the people were -- parks and street corners and places like that -- but here they all come to you. "Everybody comes here at least once when they come to Alberta. And they keep changing things so even the locals come back once a year.

"It's great."

To work, perhaps, and to visit, at least once in a life.

The mall has had four "phases" already, and a fifth is planned. It would, the brochures say, bring about "the complete WEM experience" -- a new vision that is intended to tap into a trend "that blurs the lines between shopping, living and working spaces."

Over the coming years, $145-million will be invested in commercial space and prime living space with the idea in mind that "people should be able to live, work and play without getting in a car."

Never having to leave the mall.

The human being as captive dolphin.

rmacgregor@globeandmail.ca