Canada, Solo 1978

Yesterday (June 14 th ) it rained, so I spent the day in Banff, sightseeing at the Banff Springs Hotel, the hot springs and the 'Silver City Saloon'.     Did the necessary shopping for provisions, eschewing the tacky tourist shops with their gaggles of camera-laden customers.  Banff's a pleasant enough town, but not what I'm looking for right now, thanks very much.   The next morning I woke to a promising looking day and set off up Johnston's Canyon to the 'ink pots'.  Terrific hike for the first bit – on a paved walkway suspended from the steep rock sides of a fast-flowing creek – the creek very aqua-marine in colour, full of glacial flour.   I got almost to the pots when it started to rain!  So I didn’t stay long before heading back down.   I packed up my gear and drove, through mist and clouds, to Lake Louise, where the sun peaked out for just a few minutes, treating me to a spectacular view of the fabled aqua-marine La...

Yesterday I sat for a time just watching clouds.     I watched how they dispersed and regrouped, melting into one another, or breaking off and forming their own discrete entities – lonely little cloudlets all on their own, or gaggles of them in happy sky harmonies.     Magical shape-shifters.     Is that an elephant? There – there’s an ear, a trunk.     And over there, a bird?     I see an eagle, wispy white wings outstretched, their tips trailing off into nothingness.   Clouds of so many different colours and textures – those thin white stripes like jet trails, but not, streaking across the sky; the thick more grey-white billowy-pillowy clouds that look, probably deceptively, soft and inviting; the darker grey and blue-grey clouds that hang heavy, water-logged and vaguely threatening.   I watched as some little white puff-balls leapt and bounded over the high mountain peaks.  Or was it that the mountai...

Note: For reasons unknown, now, I didn’t take any photos on these Jaspar mountain-lake trips.     Thankfully there are some available on Travel Alberta’s website, free to download.   Jaspar is situated in a range called the ‘Maligne Mountains’.  Not exactly friendly sounding, but as the weather was good, a mid-June sun warming the skies, and the colours, the mountains didn’t seem so malign to me.  I based myself in Jaspar and visited several of the many lakes in the ear.  First up were Maligne and Medicine Lakes.  I drove in to them listening to Mozart and Tchaikovsky, and back out listening to Copland and Vaugh Williams. The symphonic music dramatized the majestic scenery – it was easy to imagine the trees as stringed instruments, the rivers as woodwinds and the mountains as great booming, crashing drums.  A tremendous, private son-et-lumiere show.  I turned the volume up high, and imagined myself as conductor. ...

I felt like I’d just been let out of jail, having escaped the fortress of the Rockies and coasted, free and clear, into the rolling hills and flat plains of Alberta.     I spent the first few miles checking my rear view mirror: the Rockies were still there, and there was no posse coming after me.     I’d left them behind, for now, for good.      I exited the main Jaspar-Edmonton highway as soon as I was, choosing a quieter road that took me south down the Drayton Valley to Winfield, a place that’s on a map, and yet no place at all.  No ‘town’, no sign of a settlement, even in the distant past.  A gently rolling landscape of fields and family farms.         Some lovely stands of birches.  Birches always remind me of the Robert Frost poem.  The last lines stick in my mind – I’d like to be a ‘swinger of birches’.   I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begi...

Today was one of those days when you’re glad to be alive, when and where you are – in my case meandering along Saskatchewan roads, enjoying the quiet, slow pace of life here on the Canadian Prairies.     In my ten hours of driving, which took me less than 50 miles from where I’d started that morning, I saw less than a dozen other cars.     I guess it’s not too busy a time right now in this neck of the woods. Crops that were sown in April and May are now steadily, quietly ripening.     The wheat, rye and oats green-green against a blue-blue sky – the endless prairie sky, Mustard is blooming yellow seas of flowers, exuding an incomparable fragrance that permeates even the hard steel and glass body of my car. It's an arid smell – a dry fragrance with notes of wheat, grass and dust. Prairie farm perfume. Ah...   In the early evening the sun’s golden rays highlighted the silver-white telephone poles marching down the green­gold-rust road-ribboned landscape....

Most of the little towns – some so small and disorganized that surely anywhere else they would not warrant the term ‘town’, but hey, this is Saskatchewan – I passed through in the half-dream-state I’ve come to think of as ‘Prairie Mind’.     I’ve never been in such open territory – it gives new meaning to the term, ‘the sky’s the limit’, especially when the sky appears so limitless.     Unbounded.     Freed from all barriers and obstacles.     My thoughts take wing, my brain buzzes off, my mind meanders... .     I jump from thoughts of the diversity of peoples and places in this great nation, Canada, and what holds us together, as a nation, to who I am, where I’m going, and what holds me together.     And keep seeing the back of that packet of sugar: “Discover Canada.     Discover Yourself.”     I did a lot of driving, often in circuitous circles, following back roads wherever they took me, consulting a map ...

Manitoba, 'the forgotten province'.     I drove through it in less than a day, not stopping to take even a photo, not even stopping for lunch.     I wonder how often this is Manitoba’s fate.     Cross-Canada travellers west to east have had enough of the flat, monotonous prairie landscape by the time they’ve driven through Saskatchewan, and just want to be done with it.     Well, that’s my excuse, and now I’m in Ontario, where there are trees, and hills, and .... bugs.!   At the first opportunity I drove down a dirt track and stopped for lunch.  A giant horsefly (they are so aptly named), crawled up the passenger seat of my car and slowly turned to peer at me with his yellow slitted eyes.  His long thin tongue dropped down obscenely between his legs.  He started using his tongue to clean his head – well, that’s what it looked like he was doing, I couldn’t be sure, and didn’t ask.  He continued his climb...