Memories of Jasper
Resilience in a mountain town
I was born in Jasper, Alberta, Canada. A year or so after I was born, we moved into the house I lived in until Grade two.
My memories of life in Canada, before I embarked on a post-high school gap year that I stretched into 4-decades, have faded. I like to blame my lack of recollection of what was a carefree childhood and adolescence on the fact that I graduated from high school in the 1970s. Wasn’t everything blurry in the ‘70s?
Fortunately, my parents are great storytellers. The stories my mind has forgotten have been told so many times that I have new memories of life in Jasper when more people worked for the railroad and the national park than for tourism.
Part 1 - The “Olden” Days
I almost grew up in a single-parent family. On a chilly August afternoon in 1959, the house my parents lived in blew up. After a hike in the mountains with my aunt and uncle and their two kids, Dad went to the basement to light the furnace. Unbeknownst to him, there was a gas leak. Even worse, the tank had been filled with a gas that didn’t have the smell that is added to propane. The leak was undetected.
Until Dad lit a match.
The house was moved 18 inches off its foundation. Mom held onto the sink to avoid being catapulted through the kitchen window. My uncle instinctively swept his young son off the front steps and flung him into the street. The brave lad didn’t start to cry until an onrushing samaritan picked him up. My brother was in the yard. A million razor-sharp pieces of shattered glass punctured his backside. The glass was removed and he was rewarded with ice cream for his toughness.
Dad survived.
One of the two town doctors had served in the Czechoslovakian Air Force during WWII. He had seen his fair share of burns. Despite the lack of available equipment, he performed grafts and moved skin from Dad’s thighs to his badly burnt face and hands.
I was born seven months later. The doctor told my Mom to expect the worst due to the months of trauma she suffered while Dad was in hospital. I used that story as an excuse when they asked for an explanation every time I did stupid things kids do.
They never accepted my claims of pre-natal PTSD.
Because they had destroyed their landlord’s house, my parents decided it was better to own than to rent.
We moved into “our house” a year or so after I was born. They were very proud first-time homeowners.
So proud in fact that, in my memory, we messy kids were only allowed inside the house to eat and sleep. Parental supervision of our outdoor activities was strict. Mom checked the playpen in the yard at regular intervals to ensure two-year-old me hadn’t escaped. On a sunny June afternoon, she looked out and saw a neighbour racing toward the pen with a broom held above her head ready to strike me down. Mom rushed out to prevent the senseless murder of her second child.
It turned out the neighbour was protecting me. A black bear had wandered into the yard. It was about to ask me to share my animal crackers when the neighbour chased it away.
In the 1960s, only the road near the park headquarters and the railway station were paved with asphalt in Jasper. A tanker truck sprayed oil on the dusty dirt road outside our house once a year to keep the dust down. The lack of asphalt was a benefit the day a sudden summer whirlwind picked me up and dropped me on the street next to our neighbour’s VW Beetle.
Hospitality and customer service is in my blood. My father and a business partner owned two small drugstores in Jasper. One was called the Round Store and the other was the Little Store. They might have had other names but that’s what we called them. Dad taught me customer service.
When my older brother started school, I complained bitterly that I couldn’t join him. To calm me down, Mom promised to teach me to read. She planned to teach me for as long as it took for me to get bored, usually about 37 seconds and then put me back in the playpen where I could share animal crackers with bears. I foiled the plan. Learning to read thanks to a phonics book with pictures wasn’t boring.
In 1964, I believe child labour was still allowed in Jasper. Dad used my reading skills as a business magnet. I entertained the tourists in the Round Store by reading price tags and labels on the candy bars and vitamin jars.
Jasper was a sociable town. People liked to gather and have a drink. My mom doesn’t drink, so gatherings were often held at our place. We might have been upstairs when the first guests arrived and the first drinks were poured, but kids were sent to the basement and were fast asleep before the parties got too loud.
One Saturday evening, we had a visit from two guests. My brother and I (the Leaf fan in the family wasn’t born yet) were told to call them Aunty and Uncle even though they weren’t. We were forced to bathe. Our hair was combed. We had brush cuts but our hair was combed anyway. Our guests were obviously VIPs.
When we had important guests, there was always a slide show. Dad would show them pictures from the eleven months of the year they wouldn’t experience on their short visit. It was after six pm so we had our p-js and housecoats on. I sat in the mini-rocking chair expecting popcorn. Then I noticed something was missing. It felt important. I needed to bail my folks out before scandal set in.
“Aren’t we going to have a drink?”, I asked.
Our guests were missionaries. Alcohol was not on the menu.
My parents sent me death stares.
I didn’t get the memo about the missionaries, so I continued.
“We need to have a drink.”, I said, “How about a gin and tonic or a rum and coke?”
The death stares were firmly focused on me now. Telepathy was never my strong suit, though.
“We have Crown Royal, Canadian Club, Smirnoff and Grey Goose. Or Beer? How about a Canadian or a Labatts?”
I was in bed before the first popcorn popped and the whirrrr-click of the automatic slide projector fed and entertained our guests. I lay in bed and deduced that label-reading skills were fine at work but frowned upon if I used them at home.
The bottle-filled cabinet that was only opened when we had guests was declared off-limits.
Dad’s stores were open seven days a week from early to late. Most days, he was gone when my brothers and I woke up and we were in bed when he returned at night. In winter, he found time to flood our backyard so we could become professional hockey players. We didn’t, but sometimes we wore our hockey gear to school. When the bell rang, we’d trudge through the snow across the field to the arena and wait until an adult who could tie skates showed up.
In the summer of 1967, we moved from the mountain town to a huge metropolis called Kelowna in British Columbia’s central Okanagan. Years would pass before I saw Jasper again.
Part 2 - The Returns
In 2000, shortly after I met my Danish wife and stepdaughter, we visited Jasper on an epic cross-country, meet-the-family road trip. Geikie Street had been paved and our old house was now hiding behind the trees my parents planted.
Snow-capped mountains surrounded the town and rose majestically above the tree line
.We road the Sky Tram up Whistlers Mountain. I told stories of how my younger sibling had been the star attraction in the Sky Tram brochure for many years. They needed models and, since we had a family history of childhood labour, Mom offered him to the Tram company. He looked pretty spiffy in his little white shirt as he sat in a high chair and dreamed of his future in the entertainment industry. It came true.
We visited Jasper again in 2006. This time we brought my mother-in-law and one of our nieces. We stayed at Tekarra Lodge,
rode the Sky Tram,
and saw the giant marmot that lived on Whistlers.
For the Danish contingent, Jasper was an unbelievable paradise. Mountains impress people from a country whose tallest point is “Heaven Mountain”, a hill that reaches a height of 147 m (482 ft) above sea level.
Part 3 - Tragedy
In more recent times, when flying over the Rockies we noticed that the glaciers and snowy peaks were giving way to barren rock as a warming climate took its toll.
This week, thousands of lightning strikes ignited the tinder-dry forests. Blue skies turned dark at midday when smoke suffocated the sun and ash started raining down on the town of my birth.
Thousands of residents, seasonal hospitality workers and tourists from around the world were forced to flee.
At the time of writing, authorities say as much as 50% of the town’s structures have been destroyed or damaged by wildfire.
Jasper was safely evacuated.
For many people, the only escape was to British Columbia, a province already struggling with fires and evacuations of its own.
My heart bleeds for the evacuees as they make their way to safety and wonder what is left of the lives they left behind.
People will step up to support. Communities will open their doors to provide shelter. Many hotels will be a place of refuge.
In 1991, staff at our hotel in Kuwait escaped Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army to safety in a Jordanian refugee camp. That was my first experience with a mass evacuation.
Since then, hotel, city, and country evacuation planning has been part of my job.
I trust the hotels that house folks fleeing Jasper's fires, and wildfires in British Columbia and elsewhere will understand that they are not just filling rooms with unexpected guests.
They are providing shelter to people whose lives have been upended while they vacationed in the boundless beauty of the town I grew up in.
As we think of the traumatized evacuees, let's tip our hats to the wildfire service personnel, the countless volunteers, and the hospitality employees supporting them.
When the weather cools and the mountain air again becomes clear and crisp, let’s remember that the people of Jasper will need our support for years to come.
May the paradise where I was fortunate to spend the first formative years of my life be resurrected so new lives may be formed there and experience the magnificence of living in the Canadian Rockies.
Stay safe, Always Care
Thanks for reading our newsletter! It means a lot to me. I’m grateful and hope you’ll consider hitting the “like” and “share” buttons or adding a comment if you enjoyed this article.
More importantly this week, I hope you’ll support the people of Jasper in the years to come as they rebuild their lives and their town.
All of my stories are personal, authentic, and unashamedly enhanced by imperfect memory and literary creativity.
In addition to writing stories, I love to tell them.
As a multi-award-winning corporate leader in hospitality and global security, captivating keynotes, compelling coaching sessions, and edutaining, motivational workshops are all part of my repertoire.
Email me at paul@alwayscare.ca.
Thanks for being part of the Always Care Community!
This was unopened at the bottom of my inbox. I had no idea it would be such a personal story. Very well done, and very sad too. (By the way, are you HS class of 77?)
I had forgotten you lived in Jasper as a tyke. Thank you for this story! I live in Edmonton now and have acquaintances in Jasper that have lost everything. Last summer my niece lost her home in wild fires in West Kelowna. Always care!