Leaving Clearwater before 4 a.m. would bring me into Ottawa in mid-afternoon. Flying east put time zones in my favour and I had a special reason for wanting to be wide awake when I landed in Canada’s capital city nine hours later.
As the plane surged upwards from Kamloops airport, the early morning view of the city disappeared. Clouds obliterated everything except for glimpses of unidentifiable mountain ranges with small glaciers and even smaller snow patches showing pure white against the brown background. Remnants of snow cornices outlined lengthy mountain ridges.
When the clouds won, I became immersed in reading Trevor Goward’s book, Treasure Wells Gray. Reminiscing over the hikes he was describing, I almost missed the next bit. Mountains below, now definitely the Rockies, were snow-free.
Suddenly my mind time-travelled back further, to my Grade 6 classroom in Brisbane, Australia where we had drawn colourful maps of continents and countries free-hand. Along the western side of North and South America, we sketched dozens of brown upside-down Vs indicating continent-long ranges.
“They are not just one long, long even ridge,” our teacher had informed us. “All sizes of peaks poke up everywhere.”
Now I told myself that I hadn’t drawn nearly enough of them. Based on those peaks below me, I wondered if there are actually millions of those pointy bits.
My husband John would have been analysing, calculating eras, upheavals, plate tectonics, and wanting to chip into them with his geologist’s pick to learn their story. Not so scientifically, I noticed shapes, patterns, and colours.
Abruptly we left those sharp edges behind, descended, flew briefly over green, wooded foothills and reached the iconic patchwork of the prairies.
“It’s so green, except for those few yellow fields,” I remarked to the girl in front of me. Throughout the flight her interest and attention to the sights below us had matched mine.
“What is she thinking?” I wondered. With Grandma snoozing beside her, she’d had no one to talk to either.
After looping past downtown Calgary and across winding, glacial-green Bow River, the pilots executed the smoothest possible landing.
At the beginning of my second flight, our hostess immediately caught passengers’ attention: “Now that you have your seat belts securely fastened,” she began, “we’ll show you how you did that. In the unlikely event that oxygen masks descend in front of us,” she continued, “put your own masks on first – once you stop screaming – then put them on your children or anyone acting like children, such as my ex-boyfriend.”
Quickly losing the prairie panorama, we went up into clouds and turbulence, making my handwritten notes almost illegible. Once larger fields and treed hills showed up again, water could also be seen – where it did not belong.
Ah, that’s what the weather people have been talking about for Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Muddy creeks and rivers overflowed, turning otherwise blue lakes brown along shorelines. Clouds thickened and changed, making it difficult to distinguish between land, water and shadows. A map on the TV monitor showed our progress across Canada: part of Winnipeg spread out below us, Lakes Manitoba and Winnipeg beyond. Not too much later we crossed northern Lake Superior. Almost any flight over our country points out just how much fresh water we have.
Why was I flying half way across Canada, anyway? That, of course, is the best bit.
Waiting for me in the Ottawa Airport was a former student I had last seen in 1966 in Churchill, Manitoba. We had just a few days together to catch up on each other’s lives during the past 48 years.
