Cameras used: Nikon D5600, Ricoh AF-5D, Olympus OM10, Lubitel 166B, Polaroid
In June we threw our bags in the trunk and left Thunder Bay, me and Priscilla and Mae, heading west to Edmonton. The first stop was my birthplace, Sioux Lookout, where I spent the first ten years of my life. We swam at my childhood beach and sprinted away from the dragonfly larvae, ugly little things who perched like freaky black freshwater crabs under the shallow waves. Cilla’s brave with bugs and collected them, so then Mae and I decided they weren’t so bad, maybe even kind of cute and dumb. She also fought a crayfish. Mae took photos on her trusty waterproof digicam that made Cilla look like a mermaid, blue hair glowing under rays of sunlight through the lake water, and I thought: This is summer.
Photo by Mae Walsh-Gibb
Photo by Mae Walsh-Gibb
Photo by Mae Walsh-Gibb
We got lunch at Chicken Chef with my Papa and I sat in a halo of nostalgia. The small town diner vibes were definitely present, from the chipped white coffee mugs to the kitchen staff loudly arguing. I couldn’t tell if Papa felt shy around my friends or if he just couldn’t hear us soft-spoken youngsters, but once someone offhandedly mentioned the news he perked up and sure had something to say. After filling up on greasy pizza and coleslaw, we went to his place and took a walk around the trailer park under a beating sun. We played on the rusted seesaw, tire pit, and scalding metal slide while I took film photos. We were in a bubble of childlike excitement, like our big road trip was a well executed game of pretend. Papa sent us off with surprise cash for gas money, pizza leftovers, and the rest of his Oreo Cakesters.
My Papa is a stoic, stubborn man. He refuses to leave Sioux Lookout to live with us in Thunder Bay, even though it leaves him with only old westerns on TV and his cat for company. It makes me sad, but I get it, there’s a beauty in standing still when the world is slippery. Maybe he’s just refusing to bend to time. He told me that he wants to see the races in Thunder Bay and find an abandoned grave yard outside of his hometown of Nolalu this summer. I told him I’d be there.
We spent the first night in Winnipeg, at Priscilla’s Aunt Lori’s house. It’s a quiet place on a street where time moves sideways. She saw us from her garden, squinted at us, and within ten minutes had Cilla on a ladder changing a lightbulb. She was hard to read at first, cold eyes, quiet house. But then, once we asked her about some photos on the wall, she opened up like a shaken pop can and couldn’t stop. She dragged us into her bedroom to show us her trophy shelf of sand from around the world, little film canisters labeled with masking tape: beach names, dates, weather scrawled in pencil. Her eyes lit up like Christmas when she saw us listening. Luckily, Mae is experienced in chatting with older folks from her waitressing job. That night I slept on the couch under a ceiling fan, half-dreaming, and heard Lori whispering goodnight to every one of her beta fish by name. When we left, she cried and took pictures of us under the willow tree in her front yard.
The next day, we drove into the unfamiliar, crossing Saskatchewan as it stretched out like a held breath. We blasted Ethel Cain’s haunting Preacher’s Daughter into the prairies and I wore my white square neckline dress and tied my hair up in blue ribbons to take pictures outside of a big gas station with slot machines inside, trying to look like something out of a postcard. When the sun sank, we switched the radio on to a fuzzy western and blues station, turned it low. I was enamoured by how huge the sky seemed with the way it arched forever above us and around on all sides, so big it swallowed us up. The openness thrilled me on the way west. But on the way back east it haunted me… dark clouds stacking on every side, no lights, no houses, no animals. Just nothingness, stretching forever.
Photo by Mae Walsh-Gibb
Photo by Mae Walsh-Gibb
Photo by Mae Walsh-Gibb
We slept in Saskatoon that night, and the next morning we made an impulse stop at the Saskatoon zoo just because we were alive and we could. Lemurs danced and mocked us, Priscilla made friends with a goat bashing dents into his fence like a prisoner ready to riot. I was too scared to go into the butterfly house, but Mae and Priscilla went in and dutifully listened to the instructions: do not move the butterflies if they land on you. But the butterflies really liked them and they were stuck standing still with butterflies on their shoulders for half an hour! When I went to get the staff to give them a hand she thought it was adorable that they listened to her instructions so obediently, and gave us temporary butterfly tattoos as a reward. We all giggled. However, at the end of our visit when we saw the bear exhibit where the bear was pacing round and round in a loop like a broken record, the charm wore off and we wished we’d never gone.
Edmonton rose out of the plains with strange machinery, all those oil rigs like giant metal insects. We stayed with our friends Clover and Myrtle in their tiny new studio apartment on a quiet street that’s right near all of the small shops and even the farmers market. Funny how you can know someone for years and still feel clumsy with them at first, hugs in the doorway, awkward laughs, but soon we were all limbs and luggage crammed together in the apartment with Mango (their cat) glaring like the landlord. That first night, Priscilla slept on the floor because we forgot an air mattress. She’s a trooper.
Clover graduated from her graphic design program. The ceremony was quite full and busy but we managed to get the remaining seats. It was very official, there was even a sceptre with a glass ball on it that was transported to the stage on a silk cloth in a fancy box by a man who’s only job was to carry it. Myrtle sent me on a mission to buy roses. I chose orange ones. We gathered around Clover after the ceremony to take photos of her with the lively city in the backdrop. She glowed with success.
Edmonton surprised me. Busy but not frantic, leafy and alive. I liked the numbered streets, the way the city unfolded without drama. We played caveman poetry in a boardgame cafe (and all got destroyed by Myrtle's superior intellect), witnessed the glass walled public toilets, got walk-in tattoos together, and went to a jazz bar where we were cocooned in the most beautiful vocals and saxophone by Icelandic artist Anna Greta and her father. We even attended an open mic night at a cafe covered in hand painted, framed memes. Clover read her poetry in a sultry, serious voice that caught everyone’s attention, and then Mae and I were able to convince Myrtle to do an acoustic After the Fireworks song with us since the cafe had an (out of tune) piano that anyone could use. What a thrill! And of course, we hit the West Edmonton Mall, which was as huge as expected, and spent twelve hours there. Yes, twelve. Yes, our feet hurt. Yes, we started to groan and slouch and bicker. Myrtle almost killed us because we couldn’t decide on which restaurant to go to at the end of the day. It was lots of fun though. Mae was on a mission to shop until she dropped but still only bought one thing (soap from lush) which we all found endearing and mysterious. Priscilla, Myrtle, and I played mini golf (I won!) While Clover treated herself to a pedicure. Best meal of the trip? A styrofoam container of Filipino food in that skylight lit food court. Rich chicken adobo, golden lumpia. My mouth still dreams of it.
The next morning Priscilla encouraged me to split off from the group for a bit to hit the art gallery instead of getting brunch. She knew I really wanted to go but the others didn’t. I hesitated, felt guilty for going off on our own, but God, I’m glad I did. There was an exhibition all about fire, ranging from forest fires, to oil rigs, to cooking. There was this painting of the highway at night alit with the glow of oil refineries that nearly took my breath away and made my hand twitch with a jealous desire. It’s life affirming when another artist sees the same beauty I see. We also saw some Ed Burtynsky photos of oil refineries. I told Priscilla everything about him later, everything I learned in school. She actually listened. That’s what love looks like, sometimes. I used to get bored in galleries, back when I didn’t know how to look. Now the act of looking is what makes life worth living.
Then, Jasper. Jesus. Witnessing the power of the rocky mountains was my favourite part of the trip. The day before we went I was so excited I couldn’t sleep (haven’t felt that in a long time), stayed up searching reddit for the best trails or things to do. Some guy was talking about the SkyTram, I thought sure, why the hell not, and decided we’d drive over there tomorrow without knowing if we could get tickets or not. I figured there’d be a picnic table at the very least, since the day before we had played a game where we all bought an item for a road trip picnic from the farmers market (spicy feta, fresh pesto, chorizo, baguette and bruschetta) and Clover had baked a pear crumble (divine, truly).
My heart leapt when we saw the first hint of mountains in the distance, faint blue points on the horizon line. As we drove closer and closer I actually felt so exhilarated that I was scared, my heart beating faster and faster and my arms growing tingly as I gripped the steering wheel and shrunk, dizzy with scale. I can’t pinpoint why. I told this to Clover and she recalled how when we were at the jazz festival performance the beautiful Icelandic singer was talking about her move to England, and how the forest scared her at first because in Iceland it’s all open space so in the forest she felt claustrophobic and like the trees were watching her. It may have been something like that. The mountains were seeing me for the first time too. I swear we both blinked first.
The first thing we saw as we entered the park was a group of wild goats grazing on the side of the road. I pulled over to take photos, not sure if I could get out of the car or not I just rolled down the windows and we all observed them, mystified at these free roaming wild animals and feeling like we were on a real adventure. Driving up to the SkyTram, we saw black skeletons of trees burned by last year’s fires. Clover asked if we could park near the river and walk through the burnt forest, so we all piled out of the car and wandered off with our cameras, shoes crunching on the brittle bones of trees. The charcoal shone holy under the white sun.
When we finally got up to the SkyTram ticket centre I jumped out of the car and ran to the ticket booth. Five tickets left for the last ride up the mountain. No time to look in the gift shop. The ride up the SkyTram was only seven and a half minutes long but the view as we went up and up and up and the jewel green horizon rolled out and out and out like an ocean took my breath away. There was a line on the side of the mountain where the forest fire had just stopped for some reason, and beyond there it was green until it turned to rock and snow and sparse grass.
At the top of the mountain I looked around, felt my chest swell, and then burst into tears. I could see forever. Mae asked if I felt small. I laughed through tears; maybe small, maybe endless, maybe both. Below us, helicopters looked smaller than toys. I asked her for a hug in a rare moment of vulnerability, and then I hugged everyone. It’s so beautiful. A completely new sight, the mountain wind blew all apathy out of me. My hundreds of photos all fail to capture it. They’re just souvenirs of the feelings. So I took off my shoes and pressed my bare soles to the mountain.
That night, as my head hit the pillow and I finally started to drift off, I was woken by Priscilla squirming around. I groggily asked her what she was doing and she told me that she heard air leaking out of the air mattress. We rolled around trying to find the source, and sure enough there was a steady stream of air whooshing out of a small hole near her head. Likely culprit: Mango, telling us she was done having visitors. The patch we applied and waited thirty minutes to set ended up not holding, so we just tried our best to sleep nearly on the floor, waking everyone up at 1am, 3am, and 5am to refill it, laughing like lunatics. It was like camping in a sinking raft, except in someone’s living room.
Mango by Clover
Somehow in the morning we managed to leave in a timely manner and said our tearful goodbyes while Myrtle got ready for work. Before she left, she turned around at the door with big, shiny blue eyes and we all swarmed to give her a hug. It’s hard to live so far away from dear friends. But Edmonton has been good to them. It’s diverse, beautiful, and youthful. We drove Mae to the airport and then drove back into the city to get lunch, gas, and exchange our air mattress. That was a quest. The lady working at Canadian Tire was giving me a headache and rang up the wrong barcode on our receipt, so when she called for an exchange, a guy appeared holding a dumbbell. I stared at it like maybe I could sleep on that if I really believed in myself. Eventually we got the mattress.
The day before we left, my mom had texted: “Papa says go to Drumheller”. I actually didn’t know anything about Drumheller but I was loving the spontaneous road trip atmosphere and decided that Priscilla and I would spend the first night of the road trip back to Thunder Bay there. (I sleepily, accidentally booked a motel in a nowhere town called Three Hills an hour away from Drumheller. Oops.)
We drove to Drumheller in the midday sun, rain speckles on the windshield. I felt loose. Full of wonder. We spent the whole three hour drive talking without music on. We saw new kinds of birds lounging on telephone wires beside the highway (lots of magnificent magpies), cowboys on horses in the distance, even a small plane presumably doing flying lessons across the prairies. We just chatted about our trip and enjoyed each other’s company, the road slicing through neon-yellow canola. Suddenly, the car I was lazily driving far behind seemed to sink into the road ahead of us. As we neared the point where the car had disappeared, the land broke open and the road dipped inconspicuously under the fields. We started down a long hill, moving deeper and deeper as we entered the badlands, where were greeted by a giant dinosaur sculpture (which of course Priscilla had to climb and mount) and finally, I realized what Drumheller was all about.
The badlands are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and I had no idea we had this landscape in Canada. The hills (or are they canyon walls?) are visibly made of layers of dry sediment of different shades of brown, with completely flat grass tops. It totally feels like an ancient land where dinosaurs roamed. On the sides of the hills there are sparse muted green patches of long grass and even the odd small cactus. I grabbed Priscilla’s hand and pointed at the cactus with my mouth agape like a little girl. She was more enamoured with the gophers. Brave gophers squeaking everywhere begging for food and running around people’s feet and car tires. Around that point, our words started getting sharper, not because of anything the other did but because of the heat and hunger, so we ate Twinkies in a parking lot, sticky fingers, sun in our eyes, and gophers threatening us for a bite.
We had childish fun in that dinosaur town. From the Royal Tyrrell Dinosaur Museum, to the streets named after dinosaurs, to a home-style restaurant called ‘The Old Grouch’s’ that smelled like my grandma’s trailer and played cable TV, to the worlds largest dinosaur sculpture. They had a splash pad but we didn’t have bathing suits so Priscilla ran to the car and came back smiling with my umbrella joyfully on her way to set off the sprinklers. Water erupted from the mouth of a painted metal brachiosaurus and ricocheted off of her umbrella like fireworks while she giggled and tried to stay dry. The hills of the badlands around us created a warm sense of safety as the sun began to set. Unlike the towering pointed mountains of Jasper, the flat tops radiated a soft and steady strength.
As we left Drumheller to get to our motel in Three Hills I was so glad that I made the mistake of booking our motel in the wrong town. The wilderness of the badlands showed it’s true colours under a purple sunset as we followed the winding road through the valleys out of town. The hills got steeper and steeper, and a lone deer stood still at the top watching our car move along, nothing but open, darkening sky behind her. Eventually, the road sloped up again onto the tops of the hills, and the sky opened wide, and without warning we were back in the flat, haunting prairies at night.
Deer on the hill
Driving through the prairies for the entirety of the next day was excruciating. I don’t say that lightly. I drove the first stretch in silence, watching the flat land roll out beside us, the sky still pink with leftover sunrise. Eventually we got bored and moved on to deep conversations about love and life, then moved on to fighting about nothing because we were too tired. We visited the tiny abandoned mining town of Wayne, with it’s notable eleven bridges. We kept driving. She wanted to stop at a carwash just for something to do, I wanted to hurry up and drive to Regina so I could get out of the car. We ended up doing the carwash. And playing disc golf. And going to Dollarama. By ten o'clock we were finally driving into Regina in a thunderstorm that we had seen approaching from hours away The sky tore open, and through the downpour I saw Carl’s Jr’s neon star blazing like a beacon. We drove towards it like moths and burgers saved our friendship that night.
The last day of the drive was filled with long shadows and comfortable exhaustion and the best chip truck food either of us have ever had, in Dryden. Since she only had her G1 license at the time, Priscilla finally took the wheel in Ontario and I slumped into the passenger seat with a butter tart from the Upsala gas station, thinking “life is good. Life is so good”. If I had to pin the whole trip down to one feeling, it’s this: the hush on that mountaintop, and the purple glow of the badlands at sundown, stitched together like two extremes of the same thought. One said, You are endless. The other said, Time is older than you can imagine. And between those two truths, somewhere on the prairies, somewhere under a sky so big it felt like it could swallow us whole, we laughed in dirty gas stations and cried over mountain wind. We were alive for every errand, every wrong turn, every Twinkie in a parking lot. That’s what I’m carrying home. That’s the souvenir worth keeping.
Thanks for being someone I can write to like this. I’m grateful for the space, for the slowness, for the connection. If you made it this far, I hope a part in this letter made you feel something. Or at the very least made you want to go somewhere new, even if it’s just down the street.
