The Hoodoos - Banff, AB
The Hoodoos of Banff have watched over this Bow River – flowing eternally from the mountains – for a long, long time. They have sat quietly, listened – as the world swirls around. Water and pine, a crow and an osprey. They have watched deer and elk, bears – drink from the river or catch some fish. Far enough away from the townsite – this is what I see, what I imagine. I sit in their presence like a sister, become quieter as I sit. I get up to hike closer, pulled towards them in awe. Their sand and softness. Their bold presence. Their humble and quiet power.
Nine years ago, we came through Banff on our move to BC, stayed for a few days to ground ourselves before heading off to our new home of Vernon. We had just quit two full-time power jobs and sold our beloved home back in London, Ontario, for the promise of trees and mountains, the calming blue of Kalamalka Lake. We wanted beauty that would blow us away – every day, remind us of the energy and aliveness that lies at the centre of every living thing. For our first few months, we had long hikes on most days and jumped into that blue. We still do.
Naive and happy after our recent time in Banff, we head off to Jasper – aware we are heading into some other kind of wildness. We learned more about bears in the past few weeks than our entire time in BC. So many of us walking around with bear spray, unsure of the threat. Where’s the bear? Towing our tiny T@B, we turn into our campground after a gripping drive on winding mountain roads. If it wasn’t for the man in the dark green Parks Canada shirt handing us our ticket for the next twelve days, I would have thought we had just taken a wrong turn – driven straight into a clear cut. What the heck happened here?
Pine beetles. And more pine beetles. Tiny pin head bugs killed all the trees. That’s the short answer. After backing our wee-camper into our tiny and treeless camping spot, we assess the damage of the landscape. I count twelve tree stumps sticking out of the earth, right in front of our site. Some black trees had fallen to the earth on their own, exposing their dead roots. We walk on a path towards the bathroom amidst the chaos of brittle branches, more stumps and fallen trees. We step over a few trunks lying across our path. Circles of black soot from burned brush and grass sporadically appear. My body suddenly feels as lifeless as these phantom trees.
Phantom Pine — Jasper, AB
We agree to stay, start calling it our “apocalyptic campsite.” We say, we can enjoy ourselves anywhere, no? We can do this. It’s our holiday; we’ve been planning for months. We’re here to celebrate our
twenty-five years together – we must! When we bump into someone and chat, they are as horrified as we are. Although when we look around, it’s more like the scene in a very dark satire – each tiny circle of us reading books in our lounge chairs, holding hot dogs over small fires, enjoying an evening cocktail as if we can go on in the backdrop of a massacred land.
Then the smoke moves in from the BC wildfires. After a few days, we can no longer take in the beauty of the long view – the mountains, now too, invisible. The “wapiti,” the elk, continue to wander and nudge their noses into the earth where they used to be in the shade of a tree. When I try to sleep at night, my body feels as if it is one big phantom limb, absorbing the pain of what is lost – but should still be there. We decide to leave the next day – check into an Inn, even though we’re sure we cannot check out of this current apocalypse.
The long answer, of course, is living within a climate that has changed. It’s getting too hot – too early and too often. Pine beetles are multiplying faster and no longer dying off in the needed extreme cold. They can live longer and multiply. Infect more trees. The smoke, of course, it doesn’t take a fool to know that if I throw a match outside my window right now, here in the Okanagan, I could eliminate my entire town and beyond in a very short period of time. It’s that hot, that dry.
Once we can’t take it any more, we go back to the close view, the beauty we can find while in Jasper – and we do. We find so much beauty. We bike to the blue-green mountain lakes every day and jump in, swim in the warmth of Lake Annette and Edith (the lakes named after women is not lost on us!). I delight in the ground squirrels and the very fat marmots, who I learn, hibernate for the winter. Who knew? On our bike back to our Inn, we stop once more to plunge our warm bodies into the glacial water of Lac Beauvert, and quickly jump out – charged!
On our gondola ride (on the one non-smoky day), I take an aerial view of the green and orange and black pines – a collage of breathing and death. Our gondola then glides into a cloud where all we can see is gray haze and mist. Once our gondola breaks through the inversion, I’m sure we have lifted up into another good world – one so soft and pure above the clouds. It’s all here on this one ride, on this one trip, which has altered me, deeply. My body will always remember, limb that it is.