I’ve always attributed my mild claustrophobia to being somewhat vertically challenged. I get that panicked feeling most often in a crowd because I can’t see where I am or where I’m going. There are also, no doubt, little headlines running through the back of my mind about people trampled to death at soccer games and parades. But there is another factor in my need to be able to see around me and where I’m going: I’m a prairie girl.
My mother was born in Edmonton, I was born in Edmonton, my father was born in Calgary. We were all raised under the great sky of the western prairie and foothills. At 3,000 feet above sea level, life is spent not just under the sky but in it as well.
It is very difficult to convey in words what it means to be under that sky. A few years ago, okay, several years ago now that I try to put a date to it and realize the girls really
were girls at the time, my parents were still alive and we were pulling the large cat cage of a trillium trailer with a 4-banger workhorse Volvo station wagon.
Where was I? Oh, right, we were on a camping holiday driving through the Rockies via the lesser traveled highway 3. As the Volvo laboured to climb yet another steep grade, we were pretty sure we knew why the Crowsnest highway was so named and the road less traveled. But it was all new and exciting to us, except for a lake whose name escapes me but apparently I had been there before. My mother’s one comment on hearing the name of the lake was, “Well I think we stayed in cabins there when you were little…John, isn’t that where Moe peed the bed?” Ah, parents.
The plan was to stay at Waterton Lakes National Park for a few nights and then drive, in
one day, up to Edmonton. Yes, it was a man who thought there would be nothing wrong with that bit of scheduling. Waterton is definitely breathtaking. One of the lesser known mountain parks, it straddles the Canadian U.S. border. It is also unique because of many of its geological formations. Most immediately noticeable is that, thanks to glacial action, the prairie comes right to the foot of the mountains with no foothills in between.
We left there and commenced the great trek north. We were half past Lethbridge when the girls started to grumble. To them it had been hours of looking at nothing but flat land. I had been watching the sky, the rolling landscape spread out all around us. In the course of that day there was bright sunshine, a small thunderstorm, the gods of Valhalla face down drifting overhead and more mountain ranges in the sky than the earth has space to hold.
People from the really flat lands of southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba complain about how the mountains and trees get in the way of the view. I thought the roof of the car kept getting in the way of mine.
Zenith: the point of sky directly above the viewer.