Lac und Shan

I joined members (and their spouses) of a Davao City High School ’59 class reunion travel from Calgary to the Banff and Jaspers National Parks over the weekend, overnight at Lake Louise that’s popularly visited in the winter for its historic Chateau Lake Louise, supported by the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 1) that cut across its area in the Calgary to Vancouver line.

Members of DCHS’59 class were mostly visitors from the East Coast of the U.S. (Connecticut, New Jersey, Virginia) and Michigan, invited by a classmate for the Calgary Stampede and the Banff-Jasper Park tour. One of the Connecticut class alumni is married to a Canadian from Montreal so we also had a Canuck in the crowd, albeit an Anglo in Frenchified Quebec.

We are mixing metaphors in our title here. Lac is French for lake (Canadian official signage is bilingual) and the impressive one in this telling is Lake Louise with the numerous lakes that dot the Banff and Jasper National Parks in Alberta. “Lac” recalls the first anniversary of the disaster that devastated the town of Lac–Mégantic in Quebec when a railway 72-container convoy of fossil fuel exploded; more than 40 folks perished. Und is a German conjunction we heard many times uttered in the throng of visitors.

Shan is the Chinese word for mountain, like Changbai Shan of the elevated crystal lake in the border of North Korea and China in Jilin Province not too far from where I reside. I was struck at the frequency of Putunghua heard in the crowd. The two-day trek through the lac und shan of the Canadian Rockies was spectacular and the conviviality of members of the DCHS59 was very welcoming. An amicable ambience was set by the classmates’ Pinoy jokes during the bus ride and during the shared meals; it raised the levity threshold to a high level. They were also friendly and earthy (as one said, not “suffocated,” a mistaken term for “sophisticated”), not elderly resigned but maturely engaged.

If one mistakes our title as a weak Asian version of “rise and shine,” forgive the blandness but my downbeat is more on the dominance of the “foreigners” in the crowd of tourists, who evidently, like the crowd I joined, came to sniff the horse droppings at the Calgary Stampede and just moseyed on to the fresh and fragrant aroma of Banff and its immense natural surroundings.

Banff and Lake Louise are known tourist destinations because the Railway folks did not hesitate to use both in their promotions from the day the line from Calgary to Vancouver was built. The National Park Service also had programs that invited artist to take residence in the park; those who were just beginning their craft had the added caveat that some of their work were used for Railway publications.

One of the remarkable features of the park is its story. We were told that we were just visitors to the natural wildlife dwellings in the waters and trees; humans were the aliens rather than the natives. The image was vividly drummed when we were asked how we’d feel if someone came to our yard and started taking pictures.

Park trash bins were operable only by humans, designed to thwart scavenging bears whose numbers were decimated by campers when the wildlife came to share in the discarded dinners.

In the major valley highway that connects Banff and Jaspers through the valley between the two ranges, there were wide crossover paths that were not designed for vehicular traffic. Since the wired fences were constructed to limit the incidence of potential accidents, the crossover naturally joined families with ease.

Wildlife was visibly abundant from the ducks and birds in the waters and in the trees. A young grizzly and a black bear also managed to come within sight of the road, and the park police urged traffic to move on as the delighted gawkers snapped their smartphones and SLRs for the rare sighting. The aquamarine, emerald, and green coloration of the waters characterized a pristine surrounding that even kept its ground “out houses” inoffensive.

Noteworthy were the headwaters of the Bow and Saskatchewan rivers. In our tour, we scooped the water of the majestic Moraine Lake (moraine is a pile of rocks resulting from a landslide abetted by an avalanche induced by glacier movement), named by the rocks falling on the downward side of a stream that created the lake long ago.

We ended in the Columbia ice field among the Athabasca glaciers in Jaspers. That was a treat as a busload of us were ferried to the ice crawlers with tires bigger than those of farm tractors, effecting incredible traction to navigate the 45-degree incline on-and-off the glacier surface. The glacier moves at one centimeter a day so there was no immediate danger of an accident unless one falls between the crevasse (ice crevices); the visit was orderly, the group given 20 minutes to walk around the surface of the ice before returning to our sci-fi looking crawlers.

Lac und shan, it can happen anywhere in the world. Got me in Canada.