Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
My Kind of town
While the Cosmos was on hiatus at the beginning of the month, my wife and I took a short trip out west for a couple of important ceremonies - a farewell to my mom in Edmonton, and a landmark family anniversary in Kelowna. In between, I decided to take Lisa through the Rockies, partly because she had never been there, and partly to relive a bit of my childhood, when my mom and dad (both now gone) used to to take us kids camping every summer in the shadow of the mountains.
We headed first to Jasper, where I had memories of the steep and twisting road up to Miette Hot Springs. As it turned out, although those mountain roads have tamed somewhat, they’re not nearly tame enough for my wife, who enjoyed the mountains themselves, but not the experience of getting up, over or between them. An oceanside girl forever after, it seems.
As we headed to Jasper town, my sister reminded me of the time Mom, an indefatigable beachcomber, almost succumbed to quicksand on the marge of one of the park’s fast-receding lakes. It’s a good thing my Dad, pretending to beachcomb a couple of hundred yards further south, had sharp hearing. Convinced it was a freak occurence, Mom was back on the Jasper beaches the very next day.
This trip, we visited the thunderous Athabasca Falls, where my brother and I used to leap about on the rocks, a practice highly discouraged nowadays by hundreds of feet of concrete walls which try to blend in to the environment, but fail miserably. We stopped at the Athabasca Glacier, which seems to have receded a couple of miles in the five decades since I first walked to its edge. Global warming indeed. Even the glacier at Lake Louise (where it was suitably misty) has retreated significantly up the mountain.
At Banff, we paid a visit to the Banff School of Fine Arts, where for three summers I was a councillor at the United Nations Summer School. I represented Mali at a model Security Council - I still have an affection for that nation, I must visit someday. Lisa and I parked the car on a side street, and as I stepped out, I could suddenly see myself among a hundred or so students marching down that street in the late summer of 1968, absolutely furious at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ah, the passion of youth.
With still a few days before we had to be in Kelowna, we continued southward along the western edge of Alberta. We saw grizzlies and mountain sheep (once together, which is a whole other story), deer and elk. We stayed at a posh place in Kananaskis, visited a fascinating historic ranch near High River, the mystical Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, and in Cardston, Alberta, both a Mormon Temple and an excellent museum dedicated to horse-drawn vehicles. But enough of the travelogue. Let’s talk about retirement.
Although our financial advisors assure us that we really probably can’t afford to retire until we’re about 83, Lisa and I keep thinking that we’d rather like to retire a few years before that, if at all possible. So we chat from time to time about what that might look like. Would we still live in a house? Would we live in a one-room cabin in the woods? Where would this cabin be? In Uxbridge? Up north? By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea? We’ve gone to take a look at Elliot Lake. We’ve sent for brochures about Miramichi.
But during our Rocky Mountain journey, I think we may just have found the very place. Take out your road atlas and turn to the map of Alberta. Look way, way down in the southwest corner. There you will find the very smallest of Canada’s mountain national parks, Waterton Lakes, about a hundredth the size of Jasper, if that. And the settlement in it is equally tiny, so small that the post office takes the name of the park, not the village. I don’t remember if we ever visited there when I was a kid, but I think I’d remember. It’s a beautiful place.
We’ve talked about retiring beside the water. Waterton village sits on the shore of Upper Waterton Lake, a long glacial lake that nestles between mountains and reaches down into Montana. Speaking of which, the U.S. is only an hour away. Cross-border shopping! More water - there’s a lovely waterfall right in downtown Waterton. And talk about close to nature. There’s a herd of deer that live right in town. When you wake up, you’re liable to find them sleeping on your front lawn, or eating it. Mind you, sometimes the cougars slip into town in search of them, but they’re interested in venison, not you, so no worries.
Also no worries about the mountain roads, even though the peaks tower above you to the south and west. They call it the park “where the mountains meet the prairie”, and you enter (and exit) from the northeast, the prairie side. And it’s in Alberta, the cheapest province to live in, right? Well, it is a tourist town, but I figure if you’re actually part of the industry, like doing a summer play, it’s bound to be cheaper.
Wait just a minute there, buster. I thought you said retirement. Doing summer theatre sounds like work.
Ah, well, it was worth a thought. There are still a few years until I’m 83. But we always talked about retring to the south-west. Maybe SW Alberta will be good enough.
