This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on Jan. 14, 1939.
It is always new, this wildering beauty of the foothill country. From the time the train leaves Calgary, the magic grows. Beside us runs the Bow River, swift enough to keep the frost from binding it, rippled and braided in its current, as it swings and twists and glides. The snow is only in patches, so the cattle still are feeding, with strawstacks on the stubble land for shelter. Their coats stand out like plush this cold day.
There is a place before we reach Cochrane where, looking from a south window, the passengers can see the engine and half the train in a sweeping curve against a hill. The engine is black, the tender is red, and the willow plume of smoke is pearl grey — black, red, grey, the colours of fire.
The whole scene is primitive and elemental, without pretence. Roads are looped over the hilly country, leading off to the ranch houses and farms, and over these the chuck wagons come at stampede time, with their tin pails and lanterns clattering. The old-timers know the glory of the old days is departing, but for the week of the Stampede, no one dares to hint at such a thing. It is all the sweeter because its days are numbered.
A magpie dressed in saucy black and white teeters on a fence post, and a saddled cow pony is standing near, waiting for orders. As we approach Morley, the ice tightens on the river — and the indigo of the mountains changes to brown. It is a clear day we have to see the Rockies, with every gully and crevice outlined in snow. The mountains in the distance are clear of snow at the top but have a vallance of white lace around their feet.
The willows beside the track still hold a trace of the red that flushed them with false hope of spring in the warm weather of the fall, but the old evergreens, wise with years, have let their sap run down into the roots, and so stand ready for the icy blasts. They have the weather-sense of the mesquite in the south, that never shows a leaf until spring has really come.
There is so much that is unintelligible to our dull senses in this living landscape, that we know there must be another world to answer our questions. Telescope and microscope only intensify our desires to know life’s mysteries, and even the poet’s eye, seeing more than these, leaves his soul unsatisfied. Man plays in this lovely scene the exile’s part.
When the train stopped at Banff, I went out and heard the wild geese, high overhead, hurrying south, with their thin piping cries. I wondered if these are some of the idlers who “almost missed the boat” and seemed likely to be put on government relief for the winter. They should have been well on their way long before this.
Wild geese flying have always stirred men’s hearts with longing. They sound so glad to be leaving the cold. Michael Casey, the Montreal poet, who has just gone “to see for himself,” wrote a poem on “the page of night, flinging their winged words against the listening stars.”
Not so poetic, but still poignant, was the reply a lonely station agent once sent to his boss, who had wired him if he was going to say the year out in his far northern post. The agent replied: “When you see the first flight of wild geese, they’ll be carrying a green for me!” (A green flag at the end of the train means another train is following.)
The snow thickened after we entered the mountains and we could see whirling storms on some of the peaks. The Three Sisters had clouds wrapped around their heads and looked like three old ladies in a row, with colds in their heads. The day grew grey and the colours deadened as we climbed toward the Divide. The waterfalls became twisted columns of ice. The snow beside the railway is marked with millions of tracks, big and little, for we are still in the park where the wild things are protected. Dan McCowan would know every one of them. They are marks to us, but to this wise man of the woods they are all personal letters from his friends.
When we reached the tunnels the snow began to come down listlessly, whitening the trees, each one taking its own pattern, and all the little tracks were filled. Snow on the roofs of the houses, snow on the telegraph wires, and before we reached Revelstoke, we were travelling through a white world of fairy loveliness. And still the rivers and streams ran free, sometimes blue, sometimes green and as the sun went down, jet black — defying the snow and threat of frost.
There is a fascination in the open stream that makes its way through the snow. To us, who lived on the prairie where the spring comes late, the little streams that burrowed through the snow were signs and tokens to us that spring was not far behind.
And so I sat, and revelled in the twisting streams and read or wrote no more. My measure was full.
