It’s raining when we step off the plane in Edmonton. Big, fat, lovely drops that spatter the puddles against our shoes and sneak down the backs of our necks. This is mid-May, and it’s our first family trip to Alberta with our two young children, having flown in with a plan to drive back, exploring their family’s history and playing tourist along the way.
After the requisite trips to West Edmonton Mall (where we picked up new Lego sets and Build-A-Bear creations), Fort Edmonton Park (where we all squealed with excitement as we rode the steam train and the trolleys) and the Telus World of Science (where we pretended to feed our kids to the enormous animatronic T. rex) we began the three-hour journey out to Slave Lake, where my husband’s family has had a cabin for more than 40 years.
Though I’ve made maybe a dozen trips to the province over my lifetime, I haven’t been to Alberta in nearly a decade, and I realize how much I’ve forgotten about this wide-open space as we drive.
In Sharon Blackie’s The Enchanted Life, there’s a chapter where she writes about how our environments and our surroundings influence who we are at a deep level. We inhabit our landscapes, but our landscapes also inhabit us, she explains. Those who live in the mountains have an energy that’s distinct from those who live in the desert, or on a small island. And it’s those pages that come back to me as we drive north through Alberta, and then further north, travelling along a highway that’s so arrow-straight it feels surreal. The horizon is far enough away on either side that it shifts and blurs before I can make out the edges, while the endless sky overhead is heavy with ominous clouds broken by swaths of the deepest blue.
A through-and-through coastal gal, I’m feeling the brine in my blood keenly, here where I’m more than 1,000 kilometres from the ocean, and the landscape greens are muddied with browns and greys, and the very smell of the dirt is so different.
Unexpectedly, it takes two solid days for the prickling at the back of my neck to ease, too. With no mountains hemming in the horizon, or trees stretching up to the sky, or even hills rolling through the landscape, some instinctual part of my brain feels as exposed as a vole in a freshly turned field.
Up at the lake, we settle into the cabin and one overcast evening we trek out to the beach where the water undulates in a false tide and smells like deep earth and rain. And although our only wildlife sightings so far have been magpies and grawking ravens, we still head back as the light starts to fail, remembering an account in the cabin’s journals about a mountain lion recently stalking some of our cousins.
Campfire and cabin traditions satisfied, a few days later we begin the homeward leg of our road trip and drive on to Drumheller and the Royal Tyrrell Museum. It’s been 25 years since I was last here, on a road trip with my mom, who was born in the small town. The dinosaurs are a major draw, but the landscape itself feels like a homecoming for me, despite never having lived here. Our road cuts through the hills as they grow taller, and dips down into steep valleys before climbing out again. The striations layering the distant hills gleam in a sudden shaft of sunlight – a rare break from the rain that will follow us through our entire trip – and we stop by the hoodoos, where my mother used to play when she was small, and an old cemetery where a number of my great-removed relatives are buried.
This landscape resonates somewhere deep inside of me, and for long moments as we travel, I can imagine how my roots would stretch and thrive in a place like this.
Driving on, there’s a storm so furious as we approach the Rockies that we can barely see the other side of the road, let alone the majesty of the mountains, but we slide into Banff amid a lighter mist and a small herd of elk grazing at the welcome sign. The sky clears and we wander the main street, purchasing entirely too many kitschy souvenirs, and I stop more than once to marvel at the snow-capped peaks surrounding us. They’re so much bigger than what we have on Vancouver Island, and I can’t get enough of it. It feels like being cradled in enormous, ancient arms. Thinking back to Blackie’s words, this landscape resonates somewhere deep inside of me, and for long moments as we travel, I can imagine how my roots would stretch and thrive in a place like this.
We take a side trip to Lake Louise where the water is so clear and calm it reflects a perfect mirror image of the mountains. It’s gorgeous here and our kids waste no time playing in the piles of snow that border the pathway, but the real excitement is when I hear – and feel – a deep rumbling beyond the lake. Directly across the water, we spy a massive cloud of snow pluming into the air and watch an avalanche spill down in the far distance.
We’re all sad to leave the mountains behind as we make our way across the provincial border and descend farther into B.C., but I notice myself breathing deeper and cranking our windows down as we go. The forest creeps up until it leans out over the highway, with trees that reach for the cotton-ball clouds overhead. Hours pass and the greens outside grow vibrant with undertones of gold and blue. I watch the unbroken wall of undergrowth tangle between the trunks and the sharp, green smell of moss and leaf fills a hole that I’ve been missing in myself since we left home. I feel stretched, bigger on the inside with everything we’ve seen and done and explored, and I am so thankful that we had the chance to share this trip with our kids.
But also...it’s good to be home.
This feature appeared in the September issue of Boulevard Vancouver.