Jasper

On living in a national park

My heart goes out to the people of Jasper, facing what this devastating wildfire has done to their community.

In the 1980s I lived in Jasper with my family. I went to high school there. I met my first girlfriend there. I hiked, encountered wild animals, climbed mountains, nearly died on an ice climb. I accepted a tab of acid from some other teenagers one day in school and lived through a few hours of psychedelic nightmare.

The town and the national park are deeply meaningful to me. An indelible part of my psyche, really, that I’ve attempted to find words for ever since my first novel, Icefields.  

Here is a piece I wrote in 2015 for a video conference on Canadian literature based at the University of Toulouse in France:

The official title of my talk is “The writing of ice,” but I have to let you know that as I worked on this talk my focus shifted away from writing about the Rockies to the actual experience of living in the mountains.

I want to speak today about growing up in a resort town in the mountains, and how the landscape, the history, and the unique culture of the place shaped me as a writer. Why did my first novel turn out to be a novel set in the mountains, when I’d already moved away from Jasper by then and was living in a big city? That’s what I want to explore today.

For those who aren’t familiar with my first novel, Icefields, it’s set in a semi-fictional version of Jasper, Alberta, and involves the early years of settlement of that town, from 1898 to the early 1920’s. Much of the novel is set on a glacier.

Jasper, Alberta is a site where the human and the wild meet and interpenetrate.  

The truth of course is that this happens everywhere, all the time, and that the boundaries between these two concepts are utterly porous, and continually being redrawn. But for me, Jasper’s unique setting, in a national park, made this porous boundary much more obvious and present. For me it became a lived boundary.

When I was fourteen my father, a manager for Alberta’s electrical utility company, accepted a job transfer from our home in Grande Prairie, several hundred miles northeast, to Jasper. 

I did NOT want to go. I had friends, a life. I had a crush on a girl at school.  But I was fourteen and I didn’t have much choice at the time. So we uprooted ourselves and moved to the mountains. The move brought us to a much smaller and older house than the one we’d had in Grande Prairie. That was especially difficult for my mother. The transfer meant that my Dad’s salary increased, but the move had its hidden costs, in the strain it put on everyone in the family.

At the time my hometown of Grande Prairie was a growing city, undergoing one of its periodic oil and gas boom times.  Jasper, in contrast, was very much a small town, with the peculiar exception that during the summer, thousands of tourists flocked to it, and drove through it, and wandered around in it.

It didn’t take me long to pick up on the peculiar attitude of some people in this town toward the tourists that brought them their livelihood. The derogatory slang term for a tourist was “gorby.” In the minds of many of the local young people I went to school with, these gorbies were all incredibly stupid. They blundered around, gaping at everything and asking dumb questions, like “Who painted the mountains white?”  All summer they clogged the sidewalks,  creating traffic jams and paying ridiculous prices for stuff they could get much cheaper somewhere else.  We teenagers mocked them and ridiculed them. Sometimes we gave them false information.  

A friend of mine told the story of how a carload of tourists had stopped him on main street and asked, “Where’s Jasper?”  He pointed west and told them, “Jasper’s down that highway about another hundred kilometres. Just keep going. You can’t miss it.”

But I think now that this negative attitude towards the tourists was the ungenerous side of a deeper feeling shared by pretty much everyone in town: that Jasper was a special place, and that it somehow belonged to the people who lived there. I shared that proprietary attitude and I still catching myself thinking that way when I visit the park. Despite the fact that I haven’t lived there in decades, these are somehow still MY mountains. The town itself has undergone some changes, but the mountains themselves look much the same as they did thirty years ago. I look up at the peaks and it’s as if I’m looking at my own past, writ large.

From my encounters with other people who’ve lived in the mountains I know that this sense of ownership—or call it deep belonging—is a pretty common feeling. Long after moving away from Jasper I used to dream about its landscapes quite often.

I had one dream in particular, about climbing Mount Edith Cavell (something I never did in real life) that haunted me with its vividness, urgency, and what I would call its purity. The dream involved me setting out from the town on foot, and walking all the way to the mountain, and climbing it, alone. To the summit. That was it. As stark and linear a dream as I’ve ever had. In Akira Kurosawa’s anthology film Dreams, there’s an excruciating slow scene in that film where a group of mountain climbers slog towards a summit through a howling blizzard. At the end of the scene, just when all seems lost, they see the top of the mountain appear before them in all its radiant beauty.  This dream was something like that moment in the film. I think it was a seed of what later developed into my first novel. My subconscious was trying to tell me where I should be looking for inspiration.

In other ways Jasper was a typical small Alberta town. For a restless teenager it could be boring and stultifying. The temptation to drink and do drugs was pretty strong, especially with all of the transient young people coming through town and bringing pot and other drugs with them from places like the BC coast. At that time there was a “free camp” just on the outskirts of town, a place where mostly young people with no money could pitch a tent. If you wanted to get into trouble, that was the place to go. Parks Canada eventually shut down that camp, but not before I’d accumulated all sorts of sensational stories about it.

Jasper did have one incredible advantage over the growing city I’d come from. Only a few steps outside the door of our house, and I was in the wilderness.

I was already a big reader in those days. I had read and loved fantasy novels, most importantly The Lord of the Rings. I had read Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens. The forested hills and valleys around the townsite became a place where I could play out the fantasies that those books had put into my head. On rainy days I would wear my green rain poncho and take a walking stick and wander up and down the hills, pretending I was one of Aragorn’s rangers. The majestic landscape became a canvas on which I could paint my romantic dreams, and all the emotional turmoil of my teen years. 

In those mountains I began to imagine that some day I might write a fantasy novel, something that didn’t come true until much later. Back then I didn’t dream that I would write about this place itself.  I never thought of Jasper itself as a place to write about.  It was only as a place that could stand in for the fantastical worlds of my imagination.

On those solitary walks I also used to wonder where the dividing point was, exactly, between the town and the wilderness that surrounded it. I was sure there had to be such a boundary,  though I was never completely sure when I had crossed it.

If you took even a few steps away from the paved streets, you were already heading into the wilderness, but when did you actually  arrive there? The park had many well-used trails, and of course there were always nearby roads and power lines and warden stations      and other markers of human presence.

(I should also mention that it always seemed odd to say that one was heading into the wild. As if the outside was somehow also an interior.)

In fact the wilderness never felt entirely wild, no matter how far one went into it. You could never forget this was a national park, a fact that all by itself seemed to sap some of the “wild” out of the place. This was a tended, guarded, in some ways controlled wilderness. And it was inescapably a part of the rest of the world. Airplanes flew over it. Pollutants from elsewhere fell on its snowfields and trickled down into the rivers. People had colonized it, paved it, storied it.  And yet it was set apart. It was special.  

But the fact that Jasper was not total wilderness also somehow meant, in my irrational rationality … that if I was in a place that was not completely wild, then nothing wild could harm me.

And by that I mean, bears couldn’t harm me. The bear was the presence that turned this fantasy wilderness into a real and dangerous zone of potential hazard. Jasper had one indigenous lifeform that Tolkien’s Middle-earth never mentioned. It had bears. Specifically, grizzly bears.

Well, it had cougars, too, but they were rare. Almost never seen by anyone. No one had ever been attacked by one.    It was the bears we were aware of when we went into the woods.  Especially the grizzly.

I knew the bears were out there, and from time to time on my solitary walks I saw them, happily from a safe distance. For years afterwards, too, I enjoyed the trails without much fear of bears. Sure, I knew they were there, but I was young, I was having an adventure; nothing could harm me. And anyhow I had the logic worked out in my head about how and when it was possible to be attacked by a bear. The problem being that it wasn’t really logic. It was pure magical thinking.

This was my logic, such as it was: if I’m still on the non-wild side of the boundary, I can’t be attacked by a bear. If I can still see a road, or hear an airplane, if I’m less than a kilometer away from the end of the trail and the parking lot, then I can’t be attacked by a bear.

Of course on some level I knew better, because I also knew that the town itself was never completely non-wild, either. Living in Jasper was a bit like living in a house with all the doors and windows wide open. Deer grazed on the streets, much to the delight of the tourists and the annoyance of anyone with a garden in their yard.  Bears and coyotes prowled in the back alleys for garbage. One summer there was a mountain lion living under a house trailer and preying on neighbourhood dogs to feed her cubs.

Then there was the time a black bear strolled into the lobby of the Lobstick Hotel.

The panic that ensued was shared by both bear and hotel guests.

That was the kind of noteworthy incident in Jasper that made you notice the edges of things. And that included the edges and limits of your own ideas about the world.  

A bear in the lobby of a hotel was a great story because it was scary and funny, too, but it was also a fertile disorder. It was the crossing of a conceptual boundary. Why don’t bears belong in hotel lobbies?

Jasper was also a place at the edges of history, with a story of marginalized people and a forced removal. People in Jasper were generally more talkative about the history of the place than people I knew in Grande Prairie. I heard a lot of fascinating stories (and a few tall tales) about the early years of the town, about the first businesses, the beginnings of tourism, and the rough, colourful lives of the first park rangers and their families. But still there was very little said about the very first inhabitants of the region, the Native and Metis settlers. In order to turn Jasper into a national park, and pave the way for the railroad and the resort hotels, these original settlers had to be persuaded to leave. Actually in most cases they were given no choice.

Once they were gone, resettled elsewhere outside the park boundaries, the wilderness itself was allowed to grow back over the traces of their habitation. The wild was used, ironically, to erase part of the story of Jasper in order to make another story more visible, the story of the railroad, and tourism, and white settlement. The train and the highway were meant to take visitors through a pristine, untouched wilderness, even as they invited in more and more industry that would push back and alter much of that wilderness.

And yet, eventually I came to see that there really was no definite, definable boundary between the town and the wild. Or if there was, it was almost entirely a mental one. We’re always trying to put the messy world into neat, manageable, conceptual boxes. Living in Jasper had shown me the porous, semi-imaginary nature of all borders and boundaries, though it took me a while to learn the lesson.  I spent many years returning to the mountains from the big city, believing that there was something there, some pure transcendent WILD that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

I would say that Icefields was, among other things, a way to think through that notion -- to pick it apart and look at it from all sorts of angles. I still know in my bones that something very special happens whenever I set foot in the mountains -- I still feel I’ve crossed into a different space. But what is happening there, exactly?

Now I think that the harder you look to find the dividing line between one thing and something else, the more slippery and uncertain that boundary becomes. It’s as true of oneself as of anything else. You can witness it happening every time you take a breath. If the idea of the wild has any meaning, then I think it has to be something we carry around with us, in our DNA that we’ve carried through millions of years of evolution. We came from the wild and it is still in us. And what does that mean? Well, that’s probably a question for my next book, the one I’m working on now, in which, interestingly, a lot of animals starting to appear, including bears.

As a writer, I find that I often write about those moments when one thing becomes something else. When things change their skin and reveal themselves to be other, or more, than what they seemed to be.   

I look for a contrast, an edge, a border, a boundary, and I start writing there,   and the boundary opens up and reveals a dynamic, fluid, constantly changing reality, something very like a glacier, I suppose. A reality that I can only attempt to trace with words.

[Image ID: Leech Lake, Jasper National Park, photo by the author]