After going through the town of Jasper, we headed east and then south to see Maligne Canyon and Maligne Lake, the largest glacier-fed lake in the Western Hemisphere. We hiked down into the Canyon, which was something like a miniature Royal Gorge. A pretty white ferry was cruising across the turquoise waters of the lake, taking tourists on an excursion out to Spirit Island, which was several miles beyond our sight.
We managed to take pictures--closeups!--of a bighorn ram. He was eating alongside the road, and wouldn’t even look up and mug for the camera, no matter how we coaxed.
Here we began to retrace our steps. We drove back through Jasper, turned south on the Icefields Parkway, and then went exploring and hiking around Athabasca and Sunwapta Falls. We climbed down into a ‘forsaken channel’, where the water used to flow, and pondered our stratagem, should the river suddenly decide to take this alternate route again.
I thought I saw bears up high on a glacier. I snatched up my “beenoclurs”, as Lydia used to say, and saw...a man walking up there! The bears turned out to be big black boulders feeding in an icy blue crevice.
Driving southward, we spotted a cow moose and her calf grazing in a valley directly below the road. They were so close, there was no controversy this time about whether it was a moose or a bird. We pulled onto the shoulder to watch them, and the cow’s bristles on the back of her neck and shoulders began to rise; and when the baby looked at his mother, his hackles rose, too, making them somewhat resemble razor- backed boars. Other vehicles were not concerning them, so we decided it must be the high-pitched whine of our turbo that was causing their vexation. The calf tried to sneak around his mother to look at us, but the cow kept herself between her offspring and us.
Stopping at the top of Sunwapta Pass at The Crossing for fuel, we decided to have supper--potato and ham chowder, and apricots.
Many nights we had a hard time finding a place to camp. Each time we thought we had at last found a campground, we saw the sign: “Comple`t!”-- full, in French. Larry spent a good deal of the time entertaining us with his imitation of the French accent. I suddenly realized why he’s so good at it: he’s part French-Canadian, himself!
The trailer’s water pump was on the fritz, so we needed a place where we could hook up to water. We drove around a pitch-black little village one night, hunting for a likely parking place. Every road we went on was either sharply uphill, or sharply downhill; no road we turned on had an outlet or a place to turn around; and if we turned too sharply, the trailer had a meeting with the pop-up camper, and the after-effects were not pretty. Especially since poor Larry had only just before we left home fixed it up snazzy.
In our quest for the elusive parking spot, we ended up on a narrow road that turned out to be the driveway to a long, modern, elaborate building which I imagined to be a hospital. However, strangely enough, there was no parking lot, and, as one could’ve guessed from former experience, no place to turn around.
We began backing.
Now, that rig of ours was approximately fifty-two feet long. It bent in the middle. The wide pop-up camper blinded the driver as to exactly what the trailer was up to as it wigwagged its way backwards. And, as previously mentioned, a Cummins turbo diesel does not sound like a Dodge Stealth.
As we began backing, I noticed several quizzical faces in the windows of the aforementioned building. That’s when I noticed the sign: QUIET. RAILWAY ENGINEERS AT SLEEP. The disconcerting thing was that I was not anonymously inside the big blue behemoth; I was outside, rushing feverishly to and fro, directing traffic. Horrors.
Escaping that village, we proceeded on our weary way, running into a raging thunderstorm, through which raced hundreds of fearless eighteen-wheelers, passing us as if we were standing still. A thousand screaming trucks, 220 kilometers per hour on the straight-aways, and faster on the hairpin curves and inclines, or so it seemed.
We finally parked way back in the forest in a pretty little spot behind, conveniently, a trailer dumping station. The nearby rest area was closed, on account of...too many bears. Disappointingly, we saw none.
In the morning, we hooked up to the water so that everybody could have a bath. And that’s when campers began arriving fast and furious, looking to dump holding tanks. Remember, the water pump didn’t work; the only way we could use the water in our trailer was if we were hooked up to outside water with enough pressure to send it through our pipes and taps. So, we’d back up, hook up, and somebody would take a bath. Then we’d pull forward, let a waiting camper dump, and pretend to be busy getting ready to go. As soon as that camper left, we’d back up, hook up again, and pretend to dump while the next person took a bath. Pull forward, let the next waiting camper dump, pretend to be busy preparing to leave. And on and on, ad infinitum. It takes a long time for ten people to take a bath in that manner!
Guess what we discovered around the next bend?
A campground. Complete with all the hookups. We stopped to mail some postcards, and the manager said there had been many vacancies there the previous night.
Oh, well; everybody was well fed, nice and clean, and all that for free. One must remember to look on the bright side. Besides, it was funny.
Leaving Yoho, an Indian word meaning ‘yoho’--no, really, it means ‘wow’--National Park, we proceeded on through Glacier National Park of British Columbia, and then Mt. Revelstoke National Park. At the town of Revelstoke, we stopped to repair a broken brake drum on the trailer. We parked in the lot of a little super market.
While I fixed dinner, I sent some of the children in to get some juice. They bought five small cartons, one of every kind the man had. He glumly checked them out, acting as though everyone who came in bought five cartons, every time. They came back to the trailer, giggling over this stoic individual.
So I sent them back for five more, just for the fun of it. He acted exactly the same, and one couldn’t be sure if he recognized them or not. I would have kept it up, but the little blighters cost too much. Baby food was seventy-five cents for a small jar, and there was practically no selection at all. Perhaps babies are weaned on moose meat up there?
While I was cooking, Larry was working on a trailer brake, just below my kitchen window. Nearby in the parking lot, two or three large American ravens were strutting about, uttering their raucous cries, looking for food. Larry, entertaining the children--and me, too, no doubt--suddenly yelled, “CAW!”, in precisely imitation of the big birds. The ravens held bolt still for a moment, tipping their heads in surprise at the human-looking creature who sounded so much like one of their own kind.
The nearest raven tentatively responded with a loud, “CAW!”, and again Larry answered him. The birds stepped closer, and the interchange continued. The children were all in stitches over this cacophonous conversation.
Then I noticed, from a window on the other side of the trailer, that a pedestrian was coming along the walkway beside the store, and his route would take him around the back of our camper, so that he would be walking right beside Larry. I leaned over the sink and called out the window, “Larry!”, but he was cawing loudly, and didn’t hear me. The innocent pedestrian strode on.
“Larry!” I hissed, louder this time. But the ravens were all responding at once, and he didn’t hear.
“Larry!” I cried, but it was too late. The hapless man-on-foot rounded the trailer. He was right beside Larry now, and had not yet seen him in his position halfway under the camper.
It was at that precise moment that Larry let loose with an especially loud series: “CAW! CAW! CAW!”
I tell you, if gravity had have only been a few pounds less per square foot, that man would’ve been gone, right into the stratosphere. Indeed, he tried; but, fortunately, gravity took a grip on him and brought him back to earth surprisingly quickly, considering the force with which he left the ground.
The children went into such spasms of mirth, they nearly fell to the floor. Several collapsed onto the front sofa, and one or two staggered to the rear of the trailer and dropped onto the bed, gasping with hilarity.
Larry, only slightly abashed, concluded with the repairs, and then we all ate supper.
A little farther west, we gained an hour as we entered Pacific Standard Time. This gaining of time is intriguing to the children; they wondered, if we drove fast enough, would we catch up with the sun? And what would happen if a person passed it? Would he wind up a day ahead of time? A fascinating puzzler.
We turned in a southerly direction then, heading toward the Galena Bay ferry. We crossed Lake Revelstoke on this ferry, which is part of the highway department, and therefore free to the user. The lake is one hundred miles long and five miles wide, and deeper than one can hardly imagine, making the idea of a bridge nothing more than a flight of fancy.
“Now, mind you,” I expostulated just before we got to the ferry, “if this boat looks the slightest bit rickety, or if they act the least amount dubious about whether or not we can safely traverse on this craft with our big rig, we’re turning right around and going back to find another route.”
So saying, we rounded a bend and came upon the ferry, which was being loaded with a big truck pulling two trailers, both of which were regular size trailers; two full cement trucks, and several campers and cars.
So that’s when we decided -- “that’s when you should’ve decided” interrupted my mother when I was telling this tale to her, “you certainly ought to wait until the next go-around, so as not to be on the bottom of the lake with two cement trucks!”
“Oh, Mama.”
As I was saying, that’s when we decided it was safe. Quite an adventure! I attracted more than my fair share of attention by rushing agog fore and aft, snapping pictures like a madman.
We camped beside Lake Kootenay in the small town of Balfour that night, in a pretty campground comprised of one narrow ridge about eighty feet wide. Before us, about fifteen feet down, lay Lake Kootenay. Immediately at the back of the camper, about twenty-five feet down, rushed a small mountain stream, Kookanee Creek. ’Twas a good thing nobody sleepwalked! The moon rose, full and orange, illuminating the water and the mountains all around us. During the night, the Kootenay ferry could be seen several times as it arrived, lights glowing from its windows. A few minutes after it passed, waves from its wake began lapping at the shore, practically at our doorstep.The ferry disappeared into the cove where the cars awaited, loaded them up, reversed the props, and headed back out across the lake. Around a jutting mountain, it turned toward the north and disappeared, its fog horn drifting back mysteriously through the night.
Early the next morning, we crossed that lake, along with eight other campers and several cars and pickups, and turned south toward home. We were nearly exactly north of Washington. Traveling southeast, we went through some beautiful mountain scenery, where towns were few and far between. In some of the smallest villages, made up of snug log cabins, electrical lines were nowhere to be seen, but we noticed generators behind some of the houses. Big stacks of split wood were beside every door. Often a water pump would be at the side door, and an outhouse, in good repair, at the back. Nothing but four-wheel-drives and snowmobiles graced the driveways.
It seemed as if the days of the pioneers in their horse-drawn wagons, with their stalwart spirits, were not so long past; and we felt a bit like intruders in the quiet solitude as we came rumbling through with our Cummins turbo diesel.
As we entered Idaho, smoke from forest fires bothered Hannah and Teddy, who had asthma, and stung our eyes and hurt our throats. We crossed the Moyie River on a high bridge, looking down at a river that was wide and deep, remarkably like the Missouri, but with mountains rising sharply from the bank sides.
We ate supper later than usual, since we didn’t want to stop until we were out of the worst of the smoke. There were fires in Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, and once we actually saw flames on the side of a mountain not far away. After eating a supper of grilled cheese sandwiches, tomatoes, and plums in Whitefish, Montana, we were just leaving the pretty little park when we met...whom, but a Schwan man! Larry braked, leaped out, flagged him down, and bought us a box of English toffee bars. Mmmm. Just right on a hot summer’s evening.
Back we went to Elliston, then, where lived the nice man who had kept our guns for us. The forests were teaming with white-tailed deer that night. We saw a big buck in velvet, just ready to cross the road. There was no campground there, so we rented one room at the cheap-looking motel just across the road from his house, since it was getting rather late.
Cheap? It was forty-one dollars. Oh, well; we thought that it would be nice for the little girls, who’d been sleeping on big thick comforters on the floor of the camper, to get to sleep in a real bed for once. There were two double beds in the motel room, so Larry and I, Hester and Lydia, and Caleb, who could sleep on the floor between the beds, took the room. Hannah and Dorcas slept in our little bedroom in the trailer, which saved us the job of having to make their bed by laying the table down and folding down the couches. And we thought it would be good for Hester and Caleb, who seemed to be getting colds, to sleep in a nice, heated room for once. For, you see, neither the trailer heater nor the pop-up camper heater had worked once on this entire trip.
We discovered those heaters wouldn’t work when Larry tried to fire them up at Big Sky, Montana, where it got mighty cold at night, way up in those mountains. Lucky for us, I'd brought plenty of blankets...just in case.
Yes, we did try out the heaters before we left home.
And yes, they did work.
Guess what. The motel furnace didn’t work, either.
Anyway, the days weren’t cold. Not unless you call ninety-seven degrees in the shade cold. And no, the air conditioner in the crew cab didn’t work.
Overnight, Caleb learned to say, “Toot toot!--gug gug gug gug gug...”, no doubt because the motel was right across the road from a railroad track where coal trains rumbled loudly throughout the night, blowing their whistles with an uproarious screech, and shaking the earth.
The next morning, we went to the house of the man who was keeping our guns. As we’d trusted he would do, he had our guns, safely stored in the attic, and he also had a check for us in the exact amount of the refund he’d received for the master cylinder! So he wouldn’t take anything for his help and kindness.
With grateful hearts, we pressed on. And then the fan belt broke again--for the third time--south of Helena, right on the Interstate in the middle of a construction area. We had been driving on the shoulder, because they were tarring and feathering--or something like that--the road. Therefore, the only place to go when a person had car trouble was onto the driving lanes. Into the tar and gravel. Furthermore, the manual gauges we had purchased had worked for only a very short time, so the engine got hot again, without us knowing it, although not as badly as it had on McDonald Pass.
As stated, the water pump in the trailer didn’t work. So Larry had to get the water out of the pop-up camper’s little pump-sink. Fortunately, we’d just filled its tank. This Putting-On-The-Fan-Belt Operation took just long enough that everybody needed to use the rest room before Larry was done. So they climbed out of the pickup, walked through the tar and the gravel, and climbed into the trailer.
Actually, the gravel was deep enough that no tar was tracked into the trailer; but Keith did get tar on his new shirt when he slithered underneath the pickup to help Larry. Many of Larry’s shirts were likewise tarred or greased by the time we returned home.
Things were back together again directly, so we all got into the pickup, returned to the shoulder, and were once again in the Business of Traveling. We were glad when the construction work was over, and both lanes of the Interstate were open again, partly because of the traffic congestion, and partly because the scent of the tar was making us feel queasy.
A dune buggy went flying past us, and Hester exclaimed, “Oh, look! A June buggy!”
That being Friday, we abandoned all hope of returning home by Sunday, as we’d planned. At this point, my postcards home underwent a subtle change, wherein I quit describing everything in glowing terms while leaving out the troubles, and began describing the troubles explicitly while neglecting to say how much fun we were actually having. This is because I felt guilty about missing two Sundays in a row while nevertheless enjoying myself; and I didn’t want anybody to judge us for it and thereby spoil the fun. Also, I didn’t want to set a bad example of Vacationing, Regardless of Responsibilities.
We decided to make our return via Yellowstone National Park, since we hadn’t seen much of the Park the previous week. After all, it was paid for already! Having given up on getting home, we camped early (for once) at Gardiner, Montana, at Yellowstone’s north entrance. I cooked potato stew. Larry, outside getting everything hooked up while the kids and the dog played, said that the stew made the whole campground smell good.
So there we were, having a lovely supper, when there came a knock at the door: it was the person camped beside us. It seemed that the dog, outside on her nifty little corkscrew and cord, getting some well-deserved fresh air and exercise after being cooped up inside that pop-up camper all day, had gone over onto his lot to do what dogs do, and he, having no doubt tripped over it, was a mite bit bent out of shape over such things.
We offered our humblest apologies, and Larry went out to do janitorial duty.
Soon, back around the corner of the trailer he came, a small box in hand. “Do you have your address book with you?” he asked. “I thought we should send someone a souvenir.”
Aauugghh! He’s awful.
That evening I finally had time to bake Teddy’s birthday cake--and it even had decorations and candles on it! He was quite surprised.
During the night, a wild animal made off with Aleutia’s food, dish and all. The boys said they heard something snuffling around outside, and Aleutia, who slept in the pop-up camper with them each night, sat up and took notice. But she’s a quiet dog, and she never made a peep.
We spent all day Saturday in Yellowstone, and this time we really did see Old Faithful go off. The previous year when we’d been there, we were all sitting along the edge of the boardwalk, the children--all but Caleb, who wasn’t born yet--all in a line, among hundreds of people. As the geyser began to make noises as if it were getting ready to blow, the people began quieting and watching expectantly. It suddenly spewed forth a small amount of boiling water, and everybody became dead silent.
It was into this hush that Hester’s piping little voice could be plainly heard: “It’s about to sprout!”
The entire assembly burst out laughing.
We saw moose, geese, swans, ducks, antelope, whitetails, and mule deer. But no bear. The antelopes reminded me of the time my mother accidentally called one a ‘cantaloupe’. We never let her forget it.
The waterfalls were beautiful. We stopped at each one--Tower, Undine, Cascade--and enjoyed the show for a while. At Keplar Cascades, tourists were all pointing excitedly at the opposite cliff.
“It’s a wolverine!” one man said knowledgeably, frantically focusing his long lens. We saw a bushy tail flailing, so I rapidly changed lenses and got ready. The creature came into sight for one split second, and snap! I got the shot.
“Aaugh!” wailed the man beside me, still worrying his lens. “I missed him!”
It wasn’t a wolverine, anyway. It was a woodchuck. I left Knowledgeable Norman with his illusions.
Larry made the tourists nervous, causing an involuntary shortening of their fingernails, as usual, by getting altogetherly too close, as usual, to buffalo, elk, and moose. But what pictures he got!
At Undine Falls, chipmunks, ground squirrels, and a beautiful gray, black, white, and charcoal bird about the size of a blue jay were eating peanuts out of our hands. The bird would soar down from a tall pine, pull itself upright in midair in front of our hand, and take the peanut from us with a good hard jerk. As he glided back across the hollow to his pine tree, we could see that each black wing feather was interspersed with a white one. We learned from our bird book that it was a Clark’s nutcracker.
We enjoyed the little golden-mantled ground squirrels; they were only about five inches long, and quite tame.
After buying absolutely delicious fresh fruit at the Fishing Bridge, and putting fuel into the pickup, we headed south.
There were loons on Lewis Lake, looking decidedly loony as they splatted across the water gazing anxiously at the far bank and wondering if they would get enough lift before they ended up bill first in a ponderosa pine. And there on a big telephone post was a huge bald eagle’s nest! On a fence post nearby perched the eagle himself, surveying his domain with a lordly air.
We camped in the northern Tetons that night. I love the Tetons; they remind me of the verse, “Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance; behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing.” (Isaiah 40:12, 15)
Sunday found us coming down through Jackson Hole, which was crawling with tourists. We bought the usual souvenirs: a couple of spare fan belts. Just in case. And fuel, of course.
After Pilgrim Creek, which was nearly dry, we ventured a bit west into Idaho, where we bought a few postcards and three cute little folios for the littles that said ‘Idaho’ on the front and had pictures on them. Soon we were flying grandly down through the Palisades, where we ate supper by a little park that had a double tornado slide, which is the primary criterion for a park to be considered a park, according to those same littles.
I was just finishing washing the dishes when Teddy and Joseph came rushing to the trailer with news of a big black snake. Larry went striding off to investigate.
Rocks, sticks, and broken bottles were all around him; evidently people had thrown them at him, but without any apparent results. Nothing had dented his rubbery body, because that’s just exactly what it was: rubber.
The snake was duly collected and added to the collection of souvenirs. Every now and then, we were jarred from our doldrums by an earsplitting shriek--Lydia had once again gotten herself too close to the horrible stretchy thing and touched it.
As we were coming through the Palisades, a left front air bag blew out with a resounding WHAM!, which did not alarm us in the least, since we assumed it was just Teddy popping the doritoes bag. He likes to do that, you see.
As we traveled through southern Wyoming, we saw many deer, some with fawns, several with twins. The snow on the Medicine Bow Range of the Rockies glistened in the late afternoon sun. We stayed the night in a park in a little town by the name of Hanna, which Hannah, of course, thought just the right thing. As we drove through town, hunting for the park, we saw deer everywhere we looked. Most of them were standing smack-dab in the middle of people’s gardens, calmly chewing away at the produce. During the night, coyotes set up a jamboree on the high plains to the north of us.
A few miles west of Laramie, we made use of one of our recently bought fan belts. “There!” said Larry cheerily, “That one should last us all the way home! No more trouble!”
Shortly thereafter, Larry noticed that the rear end was leaking gear grease, splattering it all over pickup, camper, and trailer alike. Now, this was not all bad, since the children were then better able to slide down out of the pop-up camper. Less friction, you see.
We started collecting gear grease at each truck stop we passed.
We entered Nebraska in the afternoon, noting the sign, “NEBRASKA! THE GOOD LIFE!”--and it was raining cats and dogs. In western Nebraska, as always, there were large numbers of antelope. And, as always, they are invariably too far away, or moving too quickly, for me to take a picture.
A small car went by, hanging low under a luggage carrier almost as big as the car itself, stuff stacked ceiling high in the back seat.
“You can sure tell they’re going on vacation!” observed Hester, “’cause they’re really crammed in!”
Three hundred eighty-five miles from home, the rear end went out entirely.
No problem. Larry coasted off onto the shoulder, climbed out, and donned his coveralls, which by now had seen many different types of soil. Then he simply removed the drive shaft, put ’er in four-wheel-drive, and kept on a-truckin’. Saved us from having to buy more gear grease, too!
Since I’d used up almost all the food, and the only thing left for supper would take a good half-hour to prepare, and we were trying really hard to make it home Monday night, we decided to splurge: in Lexington, we bought tacos and chicken fajitas for everybody.
The moon rose, red as fire, then dark orange, then lighter and lighter, until finally it was a big golden orb overhead, illuminating the Platte River and the deer with their young that were grazing in the clearings.
We stopped for fuel. Everyone went in the station, leaving Hester and Lydia’s fajitas on the table in the pop-up camper. They’re turtles when it comes to eating; and they were probably getting rather full, since they’d already downed the tacos.
And then that Siberian wolf-beast we call our pet gobbled up the fajitas.
When we returned to the pickup and the little girls found nothing but the wrappers, they both howled in unison. “The dog ate our fajitas!”
I dutifully bawled out the dog, and she dutifully looked remorseful. I then went back into the station to buy a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches to take the fajitas’ place.
Then both little girl-urchins, who had continued bemoaning greatly over their loss, looked distastefully at the sandwiches and announced, “I’m full.”
Oh, well. More Stay-Awake Fodder for the pilot.
We arrived home at 11:45 p.m. The first thing Joseph did was to count the newspapers on the counter: there were twenty-three.
The next Sunday, we were still seeing the aftereffects of our trip, as evidenced by the following:
We were exiting the sanctuary on our way to Sunday School. Dorcas slid her hand along the sliding door, causing it to make a squawk noise. Caleb, whom I was carrying, whirled around, looking for the source of the noise.
“Toot!” he said, right on the same note.
Being safely out in the vestibule by then, I snickered. On we went down the stairs to Sunday School. We seated ourselves. Our teacher prayed. Caleb sat quietly.
“Amen,” finished Frank, and there was a short spell of utter quiet, into which Caleb proclaimed brightly, “TOOT!” and looked at me expectantly, hoping I’d laugh. I poked him, only to hit his tickle spot, whereupon he squirmed and giggled.
So Sunday School began.
The crew cab was soon enough back out of the hospital, having recovered nicely. It was, forthwith, gearing up for next year, and we hadn’t the heart to tell it that we were seriously considering vacationing no farther from home than Lake Babcock, some five miles north of town.
(It’s closer to Larry’s shop than Lake Maligne.)
We sent the man in Elliston, Montana, a beautiful calendar of scenic America, by way of a thank-you; but we never heard from him again. We have often thought that, sometimes, it is God who sends along people to help us, just when we need it most!
