Now off on the local 1A, I ascended and twisted my way to and then past Castle Mountain's alternating layers of glacial carved shale and harder limestone, dolomite and quartzite. In my retreat I spotted a promising campground amid stately pine, spruce and fir. Its entrance sign warned ‘closed for the winter’ but a half opened gate and fresh tire tracks invited otherwise. I once owned a Pacifica and put 300,000 miles, or 483,000 kilometers, on it. I knew it was up for the challenge.
A century back, nearby, during World War I, the tented Castle Mountain Internment Camp housed seven hundred enemy aliens; civilian Canadian immigrants from Ukraine, Austria, Hungary, and Germany. Their forced labor built park infrastructure by draining, filling, clearing, and quarrying for future tourists. As winter was too severe for tents these enemy aliens were relocated during inhospitable conditions to military barracks adjacent to the impetus for tourism, Banff’s Cave and Basin hot springs.
The paved campground drive looped back. Castle Mountain came into view. But, a parked pickup truck was not quite off the road. I was uncertain whether I could proceed until I spotting the tracks of another vehicle; evidence my left tires too could enter the snow to circle the truck. I was wrong. The undercarriage of new Pacificas are full plastic cowling. My own Pacifica had none. I bottomed out, my left tires spinning freely. The odor of burnt tire rose.
I got out of the car to inspect and share my embarrassment as I realized not one hundred meters ahead three workers were roofing a new public restroom. A portable generator powered their nail guns as they whacked 2x4 rafter blocking into place. Classic rock from a boom box, also plugged into the generator, wafted into the silence of the moment. A short distance away was a bobcat - a skid-steer loader - not a Canadian lynx.
I stood as meek but competent as I could muster. The closest worker then spoke, not to me, but up and over to the other two working on the far pitch of the roof. “Eh, see that guy? His car looks stuck.” Silence. “Eh, see that car? Should we help?” Nail guns whacked more blocking into place. “Eh, should we do anything?” Silence. Cautiously, I walked over to the other side of the building and stood near the generator to be spotted. The workers continued to work. I saw a pile of their 2x4 blocking and asked: “Ok if I borrow this? The response: “Sure, take as many as you need.” I lifted a dozen and placed them into my snowy trench, freckled with asphalt chips and shavings of burnt tire. Nothing. I could not rock the Pacifica forward or back.
The three workers paid no interest. So, I walked back to my outpost near the generator to plead my case. At length from one worker: “Eh, how’d it go?” “Not well. I am stuck,” I replied. Him: “Eh, we are just back from lunch. You’ll need to wait until our foreman comes back. He should be here soon, maybe thirty minutes.”
I retreated to the Pacifica, and not two minutes later the foreman drove up in his black high-clearance truck. He was the friendliest person I have ever met. Big hulk of a man, face and body weathered by sun and experience but out featured by a broad smile and gleaming eyes. “Eh? We’ll getcha right out.” His three now equally friendly workers scrambled off the roof and sized up various ways to get the Pacifica unstuck. Each was eager to present various solutions to the linear Euclidean problem. The sheathing hid all the usual tow points. The improbable intersection of slope over rise presented by the full plastic cowling. I was an afterthought to the challenge I offered. Turned out we did not need the bobcat. They cradled webbing straps between the spokes of my right rear wheel, chained the webbing the offending pickup truck’s hitch, and pulled the Pacifica free in seconds. The reward of my thanks was a distant second to the recompense of their own satisfaction in solving my linear dilemma.
Back on terra firma, I drove the Pacifica gently out of the campground. I never found a suitable spot for the photo I wanted of Castle Mountain. I gained something else. It is trite to characterize the nature of Canadians as friendly. In action, the friendly I saw was merely correlation to the causation from their joint effort to solve. My interaction had ripped the cowling off of my built in notions.
That night back in my lodgings, I sloshed Canadian bourbon over rocks. On the TV, a Canadian government official was being asked to account for the death of a patient who was forced to wait too long before admittance in to an emergency room. I knew the stereotypes of long waits in the free Canadian health care system. I always figured it was the shortage of doctors created by the long time and great expense to train them in quality medical schools. The government official, however, described it as a linear problem. Use the difficulty. His solution, interpreted as Cartesian coordinates of a point along a Euclidean plane, was to provide more beds. Then, for him, on to the next blockage in the critical path toward a success patient outcome would be explored. Despite my stubbornness, instilled by bourbon, I now was less able to dismiss his point. I too strive to fix what blocks me. My mind's eye took the cowling off.
