Jasper and the great sadness

Jul 31

Jasper has me stumbling for words. “Grief” doesn’t capture the feeling. That seems too precise. There isn’t even anger, not yet anyway. Just a bone-deep sadness.

I don’t know why some catastrophes hit deeper than others. It’s not the first town incinerated in this new, fossil-fuelled, Pyrocene. Not in Canada. Certainly not around the world. “Another town burned,” reads one news post, almost humdrum, passing across the screen. It wasn’t fatal for people, didn’t kill the most wildlife. More than half the townsite may have survived.

But we love Jasper. It may not be peak Instagram, like Banff, but those silver slopes are somehow quintessentially Canada. Always top of the list for me as a young treeplanter when there were enough days off between contracts for a night or two in the Rockies.

An achingly beautiful and soul-stretching part of our planet. Still, the depth of sadness defies explanation. Very few people weeping openly on social media have any ongoing connection to the area. I’m reminded of a friend who once came out with one of those brilliant blurts: “It’s like art or husbands,” she said. “We don’t choose what we love.”

I’ve never even been inside the iconic Maligne Lodge, but I suspect that shot will haunt me, and many of us, for years.

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Peter Allan

Jasper and the great sadness

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