Various Borders

Canada’s the easy and (relatively) cheap way to satisfy that urge to visit another country, at least for those of us in the North. I hadn’t been out of the country since before Ann was born, so it was about time too.

The efforts by both federal governments to tighten up the border between the two is counterproductive nonsense. What are they going to do, build guard towers every 500 meters, as there used to be between the Germanys? (All in the east, and it sure did keep the terrorists out.) You’d think the entirety of Canada and United States would be the unit to defend against overseas terrorists.

But crossing the border, both ways, wasn’t really much of an issue for us this time. We crossed into Canada July 3 at the terminus of I-29 in extreme northeastern North Dakota/southern Manitoba. You’re advised to slow down as you approach the customs hut on the Canadian side, and the actual border is marked by a stone next to the road that says that this is the 49th parallel and border.

A small marker, and I almost missed it. I wanted to ask the Canadian customs officers if I could go back and stand next to it, straddling the two nations, but it’s better not to make odd requests of such officials. They called us into the building, where they examined our passports, politely asked us a few questions about our intentions in Canada, and we politely answered. It was a clean, well-lit place with picture posters of CANADA here and there on the wall like at a travel agency. The only other person there besides the Canadian civil servants was a young, bearded fellow who was explaining something about living with relatives somewhere in the country; I think he was in for a much longer visit with customs than we had, which was about 15 minutes.

We returned to the United States on the evening of July 12, at the Port of Fortuna, in extreme northwestern North Dakota/southern Saskatchewan. I was a little more apprehensive that time, since this is a rural border crossing, and who knows what a bored border guard might require of us. There was one person at the border station, a man about my age in uniform (now part of Homeland Security) who did, indeed, look a little bored. It was about an hour before quitting time, it seems, since the station wasn’t open 24 hours.

We were his only “customers.” He asked a few questions, and took a cursory look in the back of the van, packed with camping equipment and other debris. I repressed the sarcasm urge when he asked if these were my children. I did not say: “No sir, we find it very entertaining to drive long distances with little kids, so we rented some.” Pretty soon, he’d decided (correctly) that we were no threat to the well being of the USA, so we were back in.

The interprovincial border between Manitoba and Saskatchewan was a disappointment, since it wasn’t marked in any way on the Trans-Canadian Highway. I want a sign or something. Alberta had one entering from Saskatchewan, but even better was the marker between Alberta and British Columbia, which also marked the border between Banff and Kootenay national parks, and the Continental Divide as well.

That border sported three flagpoles—flying the provincial flags on their respective sides, with the Maple Leaf between them -- a large sign that mentioned the Continental Divide, and a large stone marker that mentioned the provinces. This is my kind of border, one with a little ceremony but no international border formalities. Sure, it’s only an imaginary line. But a lot of other things people fuss about are imaginary. I can be a border aficionado if I want.

Wapiti &c.

“You are now in a bear habitat,” a number of signs posted at Wapiti campground, a couple of miles from Jasper Townsite, said in English and below that in French. Also included were stern bilingual warnings about staying clear of bears, not feeding bears, etc., with the unwritten message being, don’t be a moron who mistakes real bears for Yogi and Boo-Boo.

We didn’t see any bears at Wapiti, though there were plenty of elk, which could also clean your clock if you acted threatening or weird in their vicinity. Elk or no elk, Wapiti quickly became my favorite campsite anywhere, edging out other favorites such as the walk-in site at Pete’s Lake in Michigan with its view of starlight on the lake or Bastrop State Park, which evokes a little high school nostalgia for me.

Wapiti’s an enormous wooded campground, 366 sites spread on a large piece of real estate between the road to Jasper Townsite and the Athabasca River. It’s also bounded on one side by a creek, which I later found out was called Whister’s Creek, and we got a site next to the creek that included plenty of tall trees and a flat spot among them just big enough for the tent.

We parked some folding chairs creekside, which made a fine place to read. It was rapid and rocky, meaning great sport for Lilly and Ann in stone tossing. Even better than any of that was the constant low rush of the water, recorded versions of which people pay money for. By itself it was soothing to fall asleep to, but it also had the bonus of drowning out noise from our neighbors on either side, who weren’t that near anyway. No distant caterwauling or radio noise from people who just have to have their Retro-80s! Superstation! Flashback! Weekend! playing in the middle of a national park.

The campsite at the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt NP was shady and quiet, too, because there weren’t many people there. People go to South Dakota. People go to Yellowstone, Glacier and the Grand Tetons. North Dakota? I asked a park ranger about the low number of visitors, and she said yep, TR NP’s an unknown jewel of the park system. I agree.

A thunderstorm greeted us on our arrival in that part of North Dakota. We’d started the day, July 12, in a motel in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and didn’t particularly make haste on the drive that took us back across part of Saskatchewan and into North Dakota. By the time we stopped for gas in Williston, ND, it was almost dark and we could see an angry-looking storm off to the east. Just the thing you want to see when you’re planning to pitch a tent not far away, to the southeast.

But we pressed on, and the darker it got, the more terrific the lightning became. The country around there isn’t completely flat, but it’s flat enough to let you see for miles—boiling dark clouds lit up by bolts. Best lightning show I’d seen in years. The girls were so scared they covered themselves up with a blanket. So scared they actually shared the blanket without argument.

Sleeping in the car wasn’t something I really wanted to do, since I have long legs, and as soon as we got to the campsite, I put up the tent as fast as I could. It rained a little but mostly I had lightning and thunder to content with. There were trees around, and the time between the flash and the rumble was fairly long, so I figured I was fairly safe. We piled into the tent and listened to more thunder and watched everything light up with spooky blue lightning light for a while. When we woke up the next morning, the sky was clear and the ground wasn’t wet.

After our very first day of driving, the long Schaumburg to Fargo run on July 1, we arrived at Lindenwood Park, which is along the west bank of the Red River of the North just across from Moorhead, Minn. It’s a Fargo municipal park, and yet has campsites, a couple of rows for RVs near the river, and space for tents right on the river. I’d called ahead a couple of weeks before but was told that the tent sites had flooded. “It’s been raining a lot here,” the attendant said.

So I wasn’t sure we’d be able to camp there, but the river was down by the time we got there, so we got a site for a reasonable $12.50 a night next to the river. It didn’t have a picnic table, so we took (and cooked) our meals on the ground. Not many rocks were at hand to throw in the river, so the kids pried loose pieces of earth from a nearby spot that had been flooded, then dried and cracked, and used those. We had some mosquitoes, but not as many as I would have thought.

Our neighbor was a minor pest, though. A wiry, grizzled fellow in his 50s who was bicycling long distance, he was eager to make conversation, beginning while I was putting up the tent, including almost immediately oblique comments on my skills at it. “So this is the first time you’ve put up the tent, huh?” I might have answered him as a younger man, but I didn’t bother, especially since I was busy actually putting up the tent at the time. (The answer: I’d put it up in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana, all successfully enough to shield my family from rain and wind and bugs.)

Later conversations with the man, which luckily weren’t that extensive, made me think he was just one of those people who had a knack for saying mildly irritating things, probably without realizing it, so I won’t be too hard on him. Still, like the Red River mosquitoes, I wasn’t sad to leave him behind.

Deep Time & Space-Alien Barbecue

After taking in the view of Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff NP (see July 20), I walked down the feature known as the Rockpile on its other side, away from the vista. The view from that side was nice enough, two forested mountain ranges right and left forming a broad valley, but it isn’t the kind of view that winds up on many postcards.

A sign part way down pointed out that during the most recent Ice Age, the entire valley was full of ice. An illustration of the mountains showed no valley, only ice up to near to peaks. It gave me pause, because however imperfectly, I could look out from there and imagine the valley full of ice. Where I stood was once thousands of feet under ice.

Geologically speaking, that glaciation wasn’t very long ago -- ending 10,000 years ago, maybe. But it made me think about Deep Time, a concept analogous in some ways to Deep Space, and one that’s fascinated me for years. The Rockies themselves inspired that kind of musing even better, since their age in the low 100s of millions of years represents some serious time, though I understand that they’re mostly a youthful range compared to the Appalachians.

Which made me speculate, again, that we’ve never been visited by intelligent creatures from other worlds, nor are we likely to be. It isn’t just a matter of the vastness of space, though that’s surely a barrier. Maybe more important, we’ve missed each other in the deepness of time.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure, and the idea of space aliens sure can be fun. Ask the proprietors of Space Aliens, a theme restaurant concept we first spotted in Bismarck, ND.

Space Aliens Grill & Bar, a sign said above a small billboard of a space-alien face. You know the sort, an anthropomorphic mug with two bug eyes, a nose and mouth, all bulbous and rounded and hairless. Under that was a smaller sign that said “Earthlings Welcome.” The signs pointed to a space-alien decorated restaurant building just off I-94. We’d already eaten lunch, and we had some driving to do that afternoon, but I liked the idea and made note of it.

Hey, if something as fatuous as the Rain Forest Café can be a hit, so can Space Aliens. We saw another advertised near Fargo, and when we got in to St. Cloud, Minn., that night at about 8:30, after checking into our motel we went looking for somewhere to eat and there it was: Space Aliens. Earthlings Welcome.

I’m not one to sneer at serendipity, so we went. The décor was a little amateurish, with bulbous space aliens on the walls here and there, doing things like flying cartoon space ships, and looking like they might have been painted by the founders’ art student cousin to save money. More fun were the Weekly World News articles, all with space-alien subjects, framed and hanging on the walls. From the one in the men’s room, I learned that George W. Bush had had strong space alien support in his bid for re-election in 2004. (Gives new meaning to "resident alien.")

There were also collections of space alien bric-a-brac, most of it behind glass, and SF TV and movie tie-in junk, mostly from very famous confections like the original Star Trek, Lost in Space and E.T. Guess they couldn’t find anything from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Elsewhere there was a game room and bar, which also sported smatterings of space-alien doodads.

I’m happy to say that the food, which tended toward heavy meat and had goofball alien-sounding menu names, was really good. We had a selection of barbecued items: beef ribs, pulled pork, chicken, sausage. Not the very best I’ve ever had, but very tasty all the same, with fine sides. I asked the waitress about the chain, and she said there were four, the three I’d seen, plus one elsewhere in Minnesota. So maybe Space Aliens will expand nationwide. You heard about it here first. I can see the ads. SPACE ALIENS! COMING TO YOUR TOWN! “We come in peace. Maybe.”

Fauna

The only creature I run into regularly while camping is one or another kind of mosquito. The weather had been dryish in Jasper NP, so there weren’t that many there. Things had been even drier at Theodore Roosevelt NP, and we encountered only a very few hardy mosquitoes who managed to survive wrigglerhood in the risk-of-wildfire badlands this summer.

The plains near Regina, Saskatchewan, were another story. On the evening of July 3, we found a private campground a few miles east of Regina for a reasonable C$14. The place was sparse with people, probably since the Canada Day long weekend was winding down, but well populated with blood-drinking vermin. Their main diet likely came from the livestock on the surrounding ranches, but they weren’t above snacking on human beings. Once a cloud of them followed me, so I had to zig-zag back to our camp to lose them. Others buzzed intensely around the tent door until I sprayed it with Off.

Prairie-dog town hardly describes the colonies we saw next to the single road in the South Unit of TR NP. A couple of prairie-dog cities is more like it, with suburban prairie-dog sprawl thrown in. The more you looked, the more of them you saw, and the more holes in the ground you saw. I understand that some prairie dogs act as guards for the colonies, and I believe it too. One little fellow eyed us pretty closely the entire time we were admiring his hometown.

Elsewhere in TR NP we came across the small group of wild horses which, contrary to popular image of creatures spirited and running free as the wind, looked pretty much like any saddle- and bridle-less horses eating grass. The difference, I guess, would be in what they do when people come near. We didn’t get near enough to test this, but I suspect that they would behave like most wild animals and get the hell away from people.

On the morning of July 13, we took in a ranger presentation about buffalo, near our campsite (at the amphitheater, as park literature called it—a collection of benches facing a table). Fairly interesting, especially right at the end, when a bull bison wandered by, as if on cue. He showed no interest in us.

We saw buffalo elsewhere in the park from time to time, mostly lounging around on hillsides. That’s the life. No Indian nor white hunters to worry about, though the ranger did say that every few years the Park Service culls the herds of its older and more infirm members, taking the part of buffalo predators that no longer roam the park. So it’s the life of Logan, sort of.

And I don’t care what zoologists and park rangers say. I plan to use American bison and buffalo interchangeably. Those creatures are buffalo, and they can share the name with bovines in Asia and Africa without confusion. The U.S. minted buffalo, not bison, nickels from 1913 to 1938, and it’s buffalo soldiers, buffalo wings, and Buffalo, NY.

Back in Jasper NP, we saw a lot of elk. We stayed in a campground called Wapiti, which I’ve read means “elk” in Shawnee, and that was a fitting name, because they wandered through every day we were there, sometimes picturesquely (to us) next to the fast-flowing Whistlers Creek.

In Kootenay NP on July 6, we stopped for a walk to the Paint Pots, where iron-rich springs bubble up through small pools, coloring the surrounding ground a Georgia orange, or, as the guide signs call it, ochre. Apparently both Indians and white men used the pigmentation in pre-park days, with some of the latter’s mining tools still littering the site. At the end of the trail, a couple of near-circular pools were a remarkably gaudy green, because of certain other minerals within (I forget what).

On the return, Yuriko and Lilly went ahead of Ann and I, because Ann’s easily distracted, and because Lilly wanted to go back to a riverside and throw rocks. En route, Ann and I sat on a bench facing a stretch of pools and ochre ground. Behind us were some woods.

Ann was standing on the bench looking back into the woods when she said, “Bear. Bear. Look!”

I looked, and about 100 feet away was a black bear, standing up and looking at us. About a second later, he turned away and disappeared.

From Alberta to Zap

We had a lot of linear space to deal with on this trip. Driving sanely — no all-nighters two nights in a row, for example — it takes roughly three long days, maybe 10 to 12 hours of driving each day, to reach the Canadian Rockies from metro Chicago, including the inevitable stops (which are more frequent with children in the backseat). Stacking three days like that in a row would seriously tedious, but fortunately we had the luxury of two weeks’ time, so we were able to include one “rest” day going and coming.

Alberta, then, was the major destination, famed in tourist lore and literature, and lately featured as a starring backdrop in Brokeback Mountain, passing for Wyoming. But we also had a minor destination: North Dakota, famed for not much.

Still, the state had much to recommend it to us. It was roughly halfway, we’d never visited it before, and for that matter not a lot of other people visit ND, which makes it an appealing little gear to whirl next to the big-gear destination of Alberta. Seven days and eights nights in different parts of Alberta were thus complemented by four nights and three days in ND.

When we finally encountered the Canadian Rockies, entering Banff National Park on the morning of July 5, I thought about all the other mountains I’d ever seen. The Colorado Rockies and assorted western ranges from West Texas to Idaho; various Appalachian ranges from Tennessee to New England; the Swiss and Tyrolean Alps; the Japanese Alps and the mountains of Hokkaido; the range that forms the spine of Korea; even the Yablonovyy Range on the east shore of Lake Baikal, a spectre in the distance, as if the Colorado Rockies were set next to Lake Michigan, though later I learned that the Yablonovyy are nowhere near that large.

Impressive, each and every range. But not as impressive as the mountains in front of me last week. What is it about the Canadian Rockies? Their massiveness? The mix of barren-topped peaks with lower, wooded ones? They way they soak up the sunsets? The periodic sight of glaciers? The ribbony waterfalls, sometimes in cascades that looked like the mountain was melting? The certain knowledge that, despite a few roads and certain amenities, that these are wild places given over to wild creatures and wild weather?

On the afternoon of July 7, we reached Jasper National Park by way of the Icefields Parkway, a two-lane road connecting the two parks, and a travel event in and of itself—easily one of the most remarkable drives I’ve ever taken. By then we’d taken walks around Banff NP to see forested ground and waterfalls and swift rivers passing through gorges and by meadows with outbursts of wildflowers. And we’d visited some hot springs and taken a side trip into Kootenay National Park in BC.

In Jasper NP, we ogled more mountains, took more walks, visited another hot spring, rode a cable car nearly to the top of a mountain, and backtracked down the Icefields Parkway one day to take a bus ride on a glacier.

As for North Dakota, we broke that destination in two parts as well. After a hard drive from Chicago, we spent two nights and a day in Fargo, where we found plenty to do, such as visit a museum that had collected old-time buildings from all over that part of Dakota, and a small zoo that featured, among other critters, a South American terrible poison-dart frog (really, that was its common name in English).

Returning from the mountains, we spent another two nights in far western North Dakota, ultimately seeing both parts of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The North and South Units, the Park Service calls them, something very different from mountains. Badlands. Quite beautiful in places, including along I-94, for those who believe that the Interstate’s completely monotonous.

Returning across ND, I couldn’t resist two final stops in the state. One stop was in Bismarck, for a few minutes at the state capitol, a domeless structure that reminded me of the Daily Planet building without the orb. The other place was Zap, ND, site of a queer incident in 1969. It wasn’t really much out of the way, so I stopped, just to say I’d been to Zap, ND.