American memories may just fade away with nation

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/03/2025 (280 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I was going to write about an old set of keys — lost by someone and then found, years later, by me, deep down inside my office desk. A set of keys that absolutely no one at the Free Press will claim or even really acknowledge, keys that now sit on a bookshelf in my office waiting for their owner to arrive.

Or I was going to write about hearing the sheer intensity in the checked measure of an 11-month-old’s short, quick breaths — as you lie on the floor, not moving, stretched out like a mountain range, a motionless human cordillera — they move along you, just learning to walk, hoping to reach and grab and steal your glasses, their cautiously deliberate steps and handholds as hesitant and as driven as a first-time mountain climber.

Instead, I’m going to write about snow. About snow, and sadness, and more than a little loss.

Snow. Dry, cold snow. Fast snow.

Out at Beaudry Provincial Park, just past Headingley, a few weekends ago when the mercury was busy contracting and frost was forming in moments into fine and filigreed designs on every one of the lint-like threads on your knitted gloves.

The air had a catch in it: you know what I mean if you’ve felt it. You pull your breath in hard, and there’s a point at which your body says “Enough,” and just refuses to breathe in anymore.

That kind of cold. Pee-sicles in the parking lot pit toilets. The snow hissing fast on hard green ski wax, the hills quickened in their downhills and backslidingly hard to climb up.

In under the maples and the bog-oaks, the oaks especially twisted as if particularly suffering in the cold, and there are deer tracks and footprints unknown, crossing the ski trail in straight lines to somewhere. And the trail we were on was on an oxbow island, river all around, so it’s only really available in winter, when there’s a river crossing.

High bright half-light of a scrimmed sun behind fine cloud, long strides and a clean trail.

It all … distils.

That’s what it does: a few hours of experience condenses into something sharp and clear and small that you can carry around safely in your memory almost effortlessly, something you can draw up like a cup of cold water when you’re thirsty and need it most, unfolding it in all of its wonder.

It made me remember other similar but far distant trips: out on Ebb’s Trails, the cross-country ski trails near Saskatoon that wend and wind though hardwood and spruce, trails where, when you stop, the chickadees come down to interrogate your presence, landing on your outstretched fingers, looking for black sunflower seeds, heads tilting, wings ruffing the air with a sound like a tiny, shuffling deck of cards.

Or the languorous winding of the South Saskatchewan River in high summer, canoeing south from Paradise Beach in a bright-red canoe with a shore lunch and the ability to stop anywhere, anytime: for a deer skeleton sticking up out of the sand or a 10 a.m. IPA and sandwich, or even a back cut through an eddy and inlet stream, just to see how the canoe will pitch its head high and go where it’s directed.

Newfoundland, alone on a fast brook with an old and familiar fly rod, setting a tiny Grey Adams fly down in front of a mud trout that’s lying exactly where years of experience and the touch of rod and line tells you it would be. The mountains at Banff, with the dirty teen-armpit smell of the lodgepole pines and the realization, every time, that the mountains are so big you cannot capture them in memory.

They all share the ability to be folded up like a lawn chair and get hung up somewhere safe in your head, to be brought out exactly when you desperately need a place to sit.

But.

But I have other places like that, too: the empty lands of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The odd and convivial town of Gerlach, where we’ve been so many times now, always passing through, that every scrap of it feels familiar when we’re back.

The emptiness of a Bureau of Land Management cabin at Soldier’s Meadow, where we watched the sky not just fade to black, but drop straight into it like you’d had a bucket upturned over your head.

The high lands in the middle of Phoenix, where you can leave a bustling empanada restaurant and find yourself, steps later, in high country with pummelling heat and static cactus, as if you’d stepped through a curtain from one place to another.

Chicken Springs, where hot alkali water whorls up through sand in a particulate whirlpool like a conjurer’s trick, hot enough to burn skin.

I can find them all in seconds, open them up, walk around in there.

Problem is, the Canadian places, I think I can imagine going back to.

The American ones, right now, it feels like never again.

Not with the threats to Canada levelled by, of all things, an U.S. president.

I heard Wednesday that parks like Beaudry are being identified by Google Maps this week as being “State Parks.” I don’t know if that’s true, if it’s an accident or someone’s idea of a 51st-state joke.

I can’t really bring myself to investigate further.

The keys and the 11-month-old may come back in future columns, in other structures, either in this space or in my other writing corners.

Because everything seems to be a circle, even if there is no clear reason why.

But for now, for American memories I have cherished, there’s mostly a hard backlight that looks very much like regret.

And a cold, hard spot I’m not sure will ever melt.