Post-it Notes from Hades

This morning, for the first time this year, I hesitate, and decide not to crack open the windows.  There is a growing wildfire near Sooke, a community west of here, and while the city is bright with summer sunshine, I feel the dryness in my mouth that signals the presence of smoke, something that has become sadly seasonal here.

My mind drifts back, like smoke, to the two summers when my mother was a "hostel parent".  These were the summers when I was 7 and 8; Demeter had discovered that an affordable and comfortable summer holiday could be had, if she took over, for a few weeks, the running of one of the smaller and more remote international hostels in the great Albertan parks of Jasper and Banff.

I have about half a dozen memories of the hostels and enough time has passed that I can't readily distinguish which memories are of Jasper, and which of Banff.  I remember an early morning breakfast and seeing my mother drop the corpse of a mouse into the wood burning stove.  

There was a creek running by one of the hostels, where Double Leo Sister and I would play and paddle in the afternoons.  We were equipped with emergency whistles and told to blow on them if we needed help.  At the shrilling of them, Demeter would come running, banging a pot, to scare off bears, only to hear:  "Wasses, Mummy!!"  (We were terrified of being stung.)  By the end of the summer, we had become the girls who cried "Wasses", and Demeter decided the bears could have us.  (I've told this story before, haven't I?)

Demeter, questioned this summer, can only remember "Coral Creek".  There is a Coral Creek Canyon, quite far to the southeast of Jasper - and Demeter believes the hostel was in the southern part of Jasper National Park.  However, there is also a Corral Creek to the east of Jasper, past Hinton, Alberta, and another Corral Creek, nearly at Banff and less than five kilometres south of Lake Louise. Perhaps this other Corral Creek was the location of the Banff hostel where Demeter was a hostel parent.  None of these places appear to have hostels now.

Nothing left but distant memories.  I'm pretty sure that the Jasper hostel was where we were the summer I was seven, because my father came to see us there, and he left the family the summer I was eight, although I was never told.  

The second hostel was, I believe, near a railway track, because a family with girls roughly my age came to stay, and we children were at the railway track when a train came roaring through.  Our rather feather-brained dog, a poodle/Scottish-terrier cross, stood still on the tracks, gazing at the oncoming train, as it blasted its horn.  Too terrified to try to retrieve her, I tried to run in the other direction to avoid seeing her crushed, while the other girls, held on to me.  The dog sprang to safety with seconds to spare.

Demeter was called a "hostel parent" because of the youth of the visitors coming through, often in cycling groups.  A largish contingent came from New York City; they were loud and lively.  I was furious to be banished to bed.  For years, I remember a song they'd sing after dinner:  Hey, jig-a-jig, kiss a little pig, follow the band . . . . My husband's a baker . . . is he/ All day he bakes bread, he bakes bread, he bakes bread, and at night he comes home and (expectant pause) drinks tea!!

The implications of the pause zoomed right over my eight-year-old head.  I didn't know that the song is at least 300 years old, and was far filthier.  The cleaner version I remember turns up in the 1976 television movie Sybil, which starred Sally Field and Joanne Woodward.

 Toward the end of this second hostel summer (I'm pretty sure), Demeter had the bright idea of taking six-year old Double Leo Sister, and eight-year-old me on a spiralling hike up and around a mountain. The gravel road climbed in an ever-upward curve, as the sun beat down, and we wore out.  I've seen the pictures Demeter took that afternoon.  We looked weary.  We never found what Demeter sought: the fire look-out station at the top.

This week, Jasper National Park and the town of Jasper itself is aflame. I probably visited the town at some point, but my only memory of it was passing through it by train, when Demeter, Double Leo Sister and I moved to British Columbia. I was in my bunk half asleep when the conductor passed, calling for everyone to set their watches back an hour for Pacific Time. I may have thought of the hostels before drifting off, like smoke.

Younger daughter and I were descending the hill on Yates Street near our apartment building. In the distance, I could see the pearly-grey smudge of a large fire that destroyed an old deserted building downtown. I can no longer smell, but I felt the scratch at the back of my throat, and a hint of sour taste in my mouth, which reminded me of when the forest fires across BC had even surrounded Victoria with an air quality index of !0+, worse than Beijing.

The sun shone brightly, though, and I veered suddenly into the pathway of the apartment next door. I had spotted a splash of scarlet amid the creamy blossom of a flowering shrub, and thought that surely, it must be from another plant.
It wasn't; it was indeed a lone red flower growing from the same bush. Younger daughter and I gazed at it, before continuing the journey down.

"It reminds me of the cards painting the roses in Alice in Wonderland," I remarked.

Younger daughter chuckled to herself.

I'm afraid I took this picture myself.

When I look back at this summer during which I was effectively locked out of this blog, I will remember three key things.

The third (I may discuss the other two later) is the relentless spread of wildfires across the province of British Columbia, even to the northern end of Vancouver Island -- an American cousin thought the the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca could shield us. Even if the fires had stayed beyond the water, the skies darkened for days at a time. In the Interior, it was for weeks, and is still a problem from time to time.

For the worst of it, we had an Air Quality Index of 10+, which is worse than Beijing.

I kept the windows closed, and didn't stray far. The air had an orange tinge and a taste that scratched the back of my throat, which reminded me of the August smog in Ottawa before limits on industrial emissions largely cleared the skies about eight years ago.

This song by Kate Bush drifted through my mind, like the smoke outside.



She was singing of nuclear fall-out, but really, how hopeful are the implications of what seems to be becoming an annual event?

....but we won't discuss that.

If the sky is clear enough, you can see Mount Baker in Washington State from Willows Beach in Victoria, so I recognized it immediately from the runway at Victoria International Airport.

The first leg of the flight back to Hades this year was to include a four-hour layover in Calgary, where all the traffic congregates in one wing while the other two are oddly deserted.

First, however, I had to get across British Columbia, so we flew north-east - and directly at Mount Baker.

We veered to the left of it.

I had never seen it so close -- which is a wee bit alarming, because as lovely as it is, it's a volcano.

And not far beyond lay other terrors.
The Interior of British Columbia has been relentlessly savaged by wildfire this summer. This first plume flowed like a flesh-coloured serpent across the horizon. I think it was somewhere near Harrison Springs.

Below us, smoke bubbled up like a cauldron of burning witch's brew, from some conflagration in a hidden valley.
And not long before we reached Calgary, we saw this rising somewhere out of the Canadian Rockies.I had to explain to younger daughter, when she saw the photo, that this, unlike Mount Baker, wasn't a real volcano.

A pall of smoke spread hundreds of miles over Alberta. I saw it from the plane to Hades.

So, late this morning, I was returning home from the drug store, rushing for the crosswalk signal which changed before I could reach it.  Stranded on the curb, there was no escape from the incessant drilling above my head, and it occurred to me that there were workmen on a scaffold removing the upper part of the brick wall that has stood forlornly for three and a half years following the six-alarm fire that took out our local hardware store, half a dozen other businesses and several apartments. Clearly, we're in for another three years of booms, thumps, and blocked sidewalks as yet another cluster of so-called luxury condos take shape in the glacial tradition of Ottawa construction.  The promotions are aimed, predictably, at youngish couples with no kids who will presumably be delighted to pay optimum prices for the location - and spend precious little time in their tiny, expensive abodes. There's a set of townhouses, which also took three years to build, on our street.  When we see the residents at all, they seem to be on their way elsewhere, usually clutching rolled-up yoga mats.

There's an edging below the brick and above the doorways of the abandoned shops.  It's very long and wraps around the corner, because the whole thing used to be the entrance to a bank which was still in operation when we moved to the city fourteen years ago.  In these days of online transactions and ATMs, banks are disappearing right and left, so this one did too, leaving these strange Gothic figures aimlessly waiting in line, including a mum in a tunic with her two baby monks.

It's a longish light, so I fumbled with my phone to capture the stretch of edging farthest away from the workmen, who seemed to be knocking out the bricks individually - for safety reasons, I guess, or dare I hope this stark queue of banking customers will be preserved to wait endlessly for something else?   None of them resemble in the slightest the people whom the condo developers want to attract.

I would have preferred to watch the BAFTA awards this year, but no Canadian broadcaster seems to be carrying them, so I started on the Grammys instead.

Oh dear. The Grammys have always a bit of a mystery to me. The "stunt" duos and jams are always fun; this year they paired up Justin Timberlake and Al Green, for example, but they had Miley Cyrus making a big fuss over singing with Taylor Swift (gee, how can you tell that girl is under twenty?) "for the very first time!" Sorry, is this important? Add to this my mystification over the popularity of Coldplay...

After an hour of listening to people who seemed very assured of their importance in the scheme of things, I switched over to TVO which was showing the second half of When the Levees Broke, the epic Spike Lee documentary about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the surrounding area. The third and fourth "acts" of the film cover the rage and grief of the displaced survivors, many relocated to 44 other states, and months later, unable to return.

The reasons for rage and grief are almost too numerous to mention: the painful inadequacy of the levees in the first place, the sluggish and in some cases, non-existent responses of the national government to the emergency and its agonizing aftermath, the refusal of the insurance companies to pay, drawing up ludicrous definitions and delineations between "hurricane damage" and "flood damage". ("There's a special circle in Hell for insurance companies," says one fellow, with a grim smile, "Dante would see to it.")

To me, though, the most interesting "rage button" is when the displaced survivors are referred to as "refugees" by the media. Al Sharpton, among others, is outraged: "They are not refugees! They are American citizens!" The objection seemed to be that refugees are from another country; they are homeless (and, dare I say, faceless?) "We weren't refugees; we weren't homeless people," says a survivor (I am paraphrasing, so I might not have the exact words), "We were taxpayers." Well, I guess that puts the refugees in their place. Definitely way below Grammy Awards attendees...

Every now and then, I'd flip back to the Grammys, but little had changed. Lots of people wearing sunglasses indoors. I went to sleep with the images of water-devastated Louisiana and fire-scorched southern Australia in my mind. One hundred and seventy-one people burned to death near Melbourne, last I checked. No more words.