It Was A Sign

The highway sign announcing "Banff 6 km" was not where I expected to come across Mr. William Wordsworth.

But there he was, there, that is, his words were, or some kind of idea of his words from Book Sixth of The Prelude, where the young traveller realizes in some anguish that he had, while briefly lost, unknowingly succeeded in his quest to hike across the Alps. The painful news comes from a local peasant:

          Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
          For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
          We questioned him again, and yet again;
          But every word that from the peasant's lips
          Came in reply, translated by our feelings,                  
          Ended in this,--'that we had crossed the Alps'.

The picture conjured up by those words has for decades lingered in my memory, even though I have never been to the Alps, so I cannot really be seeing anything that I have actually seen. And it's not a televisual image or a photograph I see. It's more of a feeling, maybe. And the feeling wells up and surfaces in those episodes of my life when the ending happens, the goal is achieved, the target reached with some actual, well, surprise.

Like the Banff Gran Fondo.

It was a 150-km bicycle ride through the mist and memory of a Rocky Mountain morning. Some 30 years ago, Banff was the start of Day 2 of our bicycle tour from Calgary to Jasper and my introduction to a stretch of road, Highway 1A, that would stay in my imagination, or, in truth, form my bicycling imagination. And last Saturday, there I was, astride a rented road bike and taking the first tentative pedal cranks on what would be six-hour plus journey up Tunnel Mountain, out to Lake Minnewanka, back up Tunnel Mountain, along Highway 1, into the undulating beauty of 1A as far as the Lake Louise turnoff, and then back to Banff. And back to Banff. Borne back to Banff.

There were stretches of the way back to Banff that seemed endless. One hill conquered, leading to another curve, another drop, another hill to top. And then repeat. My body's pain agreed to meet in loud convention in my neck, proudly ignoring the ibuprofen on its riotous way there.

And then, somehow, the concrete columns carrying cars and trucks along Highway 1 came into view. And the "Banff 6 km" sign, which told me that the day's odyssey was, essentially, over. I had crossed the Alps.

I was not like the young traveller Wordsworth in that I was more than ready to stop and have a beer and hug my wife. My hopes did not point to the clouds at that instant. But, still, the sign surprised me.

The sign left me with the sense that it, somehow, had been moving toward me as mechanically as I pedalled toward it.

It was a sign, I believe.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more