A Carter-Johnson Trip to Calgary

The Carter-Johnson’s picked me up in Annis Bay and let me ride along with them to Calgary and back, on their bullet trip to Alberta to see Grandma Verlaine Carter – the last time to see her before they leave for London, England in the early summer. On the way to Calgary, we stopped at the Kicking Horse Rest Stop to go down and check out the river landing for the rafting company that takes tourists on trips down the river. There has always been a good wind blowing through that gorge when I have stopped there and this time was no different. I love the view of the bridge at Ten Mile Hill, and the milky colour of the water. The boys threw chunks of ice into the small eddy by the side of the path that leads down to the river.

Two days later, on the way back to Annis Bay, we stopped in a candy store at Lake Louise, at the Samson Mall, owned by the Samson River Band of the Hobbema First Nation’s Reserve. Rebecca doesn’t like shopping but being in a candy store is not considered by her to be shopping. For a half hour, she and her boys looked at infinite variety -- rolls of candy, each one of which contains a wrapper with a Shakespearian insult on it, i.e. “Thy breath sinketh like a cheese sandwich”. Alex bought Warship candies -- a lemon drop, the outside of which is coated in a white powder that is designed to bring the sucker to his knees, by sheer power of lip pucker.

Rebecca bought a roll of Pastel Pastiches, a return to her youthful past. The pastiches are a thin, slim wafer-like disk of candy. I remembered buying them when I was young, for if I sucked slowly on them, they would last a whole movie. The roll that Rebecca bought, she dropped and the package of pastel pastiches were not as much fun to eat as shards.

Alex can name every flavour of the mini jelly beans that he choose to buy. Now there is a talent – naming jelly bean flavours.

He bought a package of bacon-flavoured mints, which he freely shared. Nasty.

Illecellewaet.

I am always trying to get people to learn to spell that word as we drive along in the car. Illecellewaet is the name of the river and the river valley that the #1 highway follows on its the westward descent from the pass. That First Nation’s word means running water ,and has the same meaning as the Maori word, Wyora, which is my mother’s name. The last syllable of the word is a kicker. There are not many English words that end with “waet”. If a little boy doesn’t have a penchant for spelling to begin with, getting all of those small syllables spelled right and separated by an “e” breaks down by the time he gets to the end of the word. There was a cash prize for anyone who learned to spell the word, which kept us at the task longer than usual.

We tried to capture some other facts on the drive: the elevation at the top of the Roger’s Pass is 1330 metres; the elevation of at the top of Scott Lake Hill (the road that climbs toward the west out of the Stony First Nations Reserve) is 1410. People think that sign is a clerical error. How could that point on the foothills be higher than the top of the Rogers Pass?

I brought Doral Pilling’s Oral History with me to read to the boys when their interest in the trip waned. We laughed again at the story of Frank and the white horse; the story of Loran and the knife under the hat; the story of 16 year old Doral and 21 year old Ivan’s first fight on the prairie; Amanda and the ghostly door handle; and the old classic of Amanda and the poisoned oats.
As we drive along the highway on our return trip, Duncan spotted a mountain goat. He drew my attention to a magpie hopping along the sidewalk, showing off the iridescent colours of its tail at our mall stop.

I saw a hawk sitting on a fence post as we drove along the Bergenham Marsh Reserve.

We walked along the shoreline of the Shuswap when we reached home. Long parallel lines of fine sand run along the edge of the water, deposited during winter storms. I could hardly take a step along the edge of the beach without seeing the whitened carcasses of salmon, now lying on the rocks and their skeletal bones bleached by the sun. Rebecca and I picked some up, turning them over, thinking ways to turn the fine fish ribs into necklaces. Finding none we threw them back to the ground. Alex picked up big boulders and dropped them against even larger rocks on the shore, testing out which ones would crack to reveal the pink and white quartz and soft mica inside. The creek by Sandy Beach is full of water. I listened to the rushing sound of its beach reach, a melodic line against the soft lapping of the water of the lake on the shore.

White bubbles move out from the stream’s base into the water.

Rebecca and I watched the concentric rings left when fish jump, flowing outward in the still water of the lake. We talked about the silver triangle of the light of the setting sun on its surface. Two ducks were swimming close to shore. An osprey slowly flapped its wings, gaining height as it flew from the water toward its nest in the forest.

skunk cabbage in bloom

We walked back up to the house, passing the dusky glow of yellow on the skunk
cabbage, still flowering in the stream.

This might have been the end of a perfect day, but Duncan has been begging people to play Risk: The Lord of the Rings – Middle Earth Conquest Game. For four days no one could facilitate him. It was now at the eleventh hour. It is not without some pain that Rebecca, Bonnie Wyora, Alex and I sat down to play since this is a 4-player game. At the same time, Steve read the rules to us, going back again and again to underline that fact that the players must attend to 1) reinforcement, 2) combat, 3) re-deployment, 4) drawing cards, and 5) fellowship.

You can imagine how much fun it was for us to stay up until the game ended at 2:30 a.m.

Sacrifice.

Spelled in caps.

Arta