Not all Canadians Are Kind
Too long and don’t want to read?
Here are the Clif Notes:
- 6 days in Canada, and almost nothing went according to plan.
- Spice Girls. Every. Day.
- quick escapes
- friendship bracelets
- beautiful trails
- 189,705 Big Horn Sheep
- 2 Elk
- the best guacamole
- matching tattoos
- all the kind Canadians
- no sunshine
- and a near-death driving experience
- I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.
My first trip to Canada was such a high for me and proved that Canadian trails are way more accessible than I ever imagined – my excitement might have been contagious, so one of my favorite hiking friends, CC, said she had a bunch of PTO to burn and wanted to go. At the same time, JLM, my friend I had previously mentioned, who lives in Canada, expressed her offense about me having gone to Canada and not visiting her…even though, as I’ve mentioned, she has been completely unreliable to this point. I didn’t not visit her because of that, though. That trip was a 24-hour whirlwind to Banff, and she lives in Calgary.
After deciding that CC and I would have our own longer Canadian adventure, JLM became very energetic about presenting herself as the host-with-the-most. She invited another friend, so we were to have a long girls’ trip. She requested our dietary preferences (I am vegetarian and gluten-free), said she wanted to provide our meals and was involved in my process of building an epic itinerary of short hikes and hot springs to see many of the regional highlights. She even decided we would all dress up and have a night in the city (Calgary), where she would cover the expense! How generous. And what a bunch of lies.
I blog because I am very ill, and 1. I enjoy writing, and I have needed to develop a healthy hobby for the days my body will not let me put my feet on a trail, and 2. I want to leave a piece of myself behind for my children. I did not realize the additional perks of helping readers see places they might like to experience or inspiring readers to continue to experience the wilderness, even when they have to accommodate limitations.
With that said, JLM was a total disaster, and I want to tell the truth, but I do not want to focus too much on that. First, her house was not hospitable: it was the dirtiest home I have ever seen. Like, it makes your stomach turn. And her youngest child was very sick. Pneumonia and strep throat. That kid ran that house. He screamed until he got what he wanted, pulled the hair of adults and kicked and punched them, and used language that would be considered abusive no matter how old you were. And she completely disregarded the itinerary THAT SHE HELPED MAKE. She did not start her days until almost 12 pm, and sunset in the winter is 4 pm. There was no previous communication that her child was so ill so that we could have the choice not to expose ourselves, there was no communication that she had changed her mind about all of her intentions on being a great host, and by day three (of six), CC and I were mostly ignored.
Despite so much potential for the trip to be ruined, CC and I are too stubborn, motivated, and creative to give in to that. We agreed that we wanted to be in that house as little as possible between the filth and the tiny terror of a child, even when it meant leaving without JLM. And we did, and we had a ton of fun, which worsened the mood at the house – so much so that we ended up leaving earlier than we had planned and moved into a hotel.
Our decision to move to a hotel was not received well, and JLM lashed out in anger towards me, which scared me, and simultaneously verbally lavished affection on CC. The crazy behavior, from beginning to end, demanded that I be self-aware of my emotional response and process it before I allowed myself to be pushed into the darkness of PTSD. I have not spoken with her since, but it’s taken me this long (3 months) to write it all.
I am in love with CC. She is so wild, so sincere, so good. She handled it all well and helped me stay grounded by validating the experience I was having while not allowing me to unpack and sit in it. She did all the driving because driving is not always easy for me – chronic pain and chronic fatigue make it difficult to focus and remain in one position. One day while we were driving from Calgary to Banff, it was snowing hard, and the temperature was rapidly dropping. Despite her caution, we hit black ice and spun out of control. We could either stay on the road, go in the ditch, or go off the side into what appeared to be the unknown. We had one of those slow-motion movie moments while the vehicle continued to spin out of control and pick up speed until it finally went into the ditch. While we sat there to put our scrambled feelings into a little order, a Canadian law enforcement vehicle went by us. And kept going! I think at that point, watching help coast right by us in an area with no cell service, we knew we would be okay. We had no choice.
I am in love with Canada. Canadians are generally just as kind and accommodating as they are stereotyped to be. We listened to a lot of Canadian radio, which was somehow both wholesome and hilarious. Their commentary on US politics is spot-on and embarrassing. We had stopped at a cocktail bar to warm up before getting new tattoos, and our bartender asked us, “So, what do they do in Idaho?” I told her they shoot guns and vote for Trump. “Ew. That’s exactly what we thought they would do there.”
Banff is incredible. They are so organized – one day, most trailheads were accessible, and then as soon as the the-snow-storm-that-tried-to-kill-us came, they swiftly shut down access to any trailheads that took you too far off the main highway or required you to navigate hilly, icy roads. Trailhead parking is clean and organized, with bathrooms, and the most impressive of all is that they have done so much work to make sections handicapped accessible!
We could go to Lake Louise, which was covered in low clouds, so CC will need at least one more trip to see it fully. The cold and snow made it so that we were nearly the only ones there, unlike any other time when there were 908,567 people at once. My favorite hike was the Grotto Creek Canyon Trail. It was like stepping onto another planet; I felt like I was the only one there. CC wisely refrained from hiking in due to how much ice was covering everything – I could not be compelled to miss out on this hike and ended up slipping on a boulder; my knee still hurts from the resulting twist.
I am often angry about being so sick. Sometimes, I’m thankful for how much I have had to slow down, though. I now think a lot about the relationships in my life, and although I’ve chosen to end relationships through this horror-fest of cancer, the ones I have kept have been kept after serious contemplation. I think if I was still living life in rapid-fire moments, I might not have CC in my life. I think I would have missed out on getting to know the peace that comes from her example – her example that says I can be wild and crazy, but it’s also okay to be steady and serious and that not everyone and everything deserves to have access to me.