Jasper, Perspective, and Sickness

1,757 words · Alberta, General topics, Hiking and backpacking "policy"

Everyone knew it was going to happen. The town of Jasper is… was? in a forest of trees killed by the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, over recent decades. Dry, hot summers, prone to lightning at all times of year, and filled with tinder. Now it sounds like the town is burned to the ground. Inevitable, but no less sad for it.

Naturally, blame is being cast. It’s the provincial government’s fault. It’s the federal government’s fault. It’s Parks Canada’s fault. The simple fact is that forest fires happen there, always have, massive ones, and when civilization came and started putting them out it did not eliminate the conditions but let them accumulate until they were past human control. Alberta, and Canada, are a long way from the only places to see this happen.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
 vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
 at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
 but the earth remains forever.

Ecclesiastes 1:2–4, English Standard Version. “Vanity,” in Ecclesiastes, means “meaningless;” the literal Hebrew word means a vapor or mist that one cannot hold or contain.

Thanks be to God, the great tragedy of the Jasper fire does not appear to be the list of the dead. As of Thursday morning Parks Canada had reported no known injuries, which is a phrase that deserves gratitude even if subsequent events modify it.

The evacuation started both with a great hurry and in plenty of time. Very possibly there are dead, someone who was in the backcountry without a permit or a satellite messenger who Parks Canada didn’t know about, or someone who simply refused to leave, or some other tragic slipping through the cracks (there are drifters in Jasper). There aren’t many ways out of Jasper, and with fires advancing from the north and the south it wouldn’t have taken much to cut them all off. That did not happen, and although those who drove from Jasper to Calgary via Valemount would have had long, stressful, anxious days, it could have been a lot worse.

The tragedy was inevitable and so much less tragic than it very easily might have been. That doesn’t make it not a tragedy. There are millions of Canadians with fond memories of Jasper, from childhood, from two weeks ago. Through some fate it had been substantially spared the mass-tourist renovations of Banff and Lake Louise, the off-brand alpine chalets and the chain pubs, the jewel shops and the designer apparel stores. It was not unaffected, it was degrading year by year, but it was still on the right side of kitsch. It was still a place you went for nature and fellowship, not because the brochure told you to. Whatever is rebuilt there, it won’t be that. It’ll be worse. Everyone knows it. It would be impossible to bring back the old Jasper, and it might be possible to bring back its spirit in a modern style, but of course nobody is going to try. A properly rebuilt Jasper would echo the old one; the rebuilt Jasper that we get will echo the indistinguishable corporate slop of the twenty-first century.

Nobody has it worse than the residents and small businessmen of Jasper, who, insured or not, have lost so much. Just things, let us pray, but even if this afternoon they got a cheque for every dollar they’ll need to spend rebuilding, and even if they got away with all their truly irreplaceable belongings, theirs is a long road. First off, neither of those conditions will be true; second, rebuilding a home is not something that you just hire out, it requires time and stress and effort and anxiety; third, Jasper is a national park, tightly controlled, and if we know anything about federal bureaucracy those controls will not easily be lifted for the sincere humanitarian needs of the humble individual. They lived in the midst of the great beauty of God’s creation, but that creation is bigger and stronger than they are, and coming to terms with that in the most practical, houses-and-furniture sense, is going to be a strain, to say nothing of the emotional or spiritual senses.

The blow to the rest of Canada is in the heart. A good thing is gone. Trails you like will be scattered with deadfall for the next thirty years. That pub you like, even if it comes back, will never be like it was. The hotel you always stayed at will be replaced with something more expensive and less characterful. You’ll look at the new builds and remember the old with a pang. For me it’s the train station, Jasper Pizza Place, the Parks Canada information centre, even the CIBC which was the nicest bank I’d ever been in. Some of that may still there physically, but the setting will be changed. It won’t be the same.

But we don’t go to Jasper for the pizza or the train station, do we? We don’t go for those products of man’s vain toil. We go for the mountains, the streams, the lakes, the sunrises and sunsets. We go to experience nature. Man’s works will change, but the enduring creation, the one that answers the call of our hearts, will still be there, give-or-take a few hundred thousand trees that were often dead and will now experience their long-delayed regrowth. What humans built in Jasper was flawed, it always was, even those of us who loved it see those flaws; what God built is not. Eventually the memory of the Jasper-that-was will be gone, just as the memories before the railroad came of that place where the Miette River joins the Athabasca are gone. Eventually the memory of whatever form of Jasper follows the one we remember will be gone too, one way or another.

What has been is what will be,
 and what has been done is what will be done,
 and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
 “See, this is new”?
It has been already
 in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things,
 nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
 among those who come after.

Ecclesiastes 1:9–11, English Standard Version.

One of the marvelous things about Ecclesiastes is that it puts the works of our lives in perspective without telling us to despair of them. All we do, all we love, all of our earthly wisdom, in this world is impermanent, fleeting. However, we are still asked to toil and to be wise, not to down tools and give up. Perspective, and humility, are not nihilism. Just because something is fleeting does not mean it is wrong. Rebuild, and love your neighbour and help him rebuild, by all means. A good thing that cannot last is still good.

However, humility is a part of wisdom. What really matters is not the thing that the level of government you hate most could definitely have done to delay a tragic fire another couple of years. Surely there have been enough demonstrations over the past few thousand years that nature is bigger than we are, that the idea that we’ve “tamed” it is arrogance. One can dam the rivers and line them with concrete and replace the trees with buildings and irrigate the deserts and have all the codes and programs and funding you want, eventually nature will play its trump card and take the trick. The more artificial the world gets, the more we need places that aren’t artificial to escape to. We don’t go to places like Jasper in spite of their exposure to nature, we go because of it. You can’t put nature in a straitjacket without ruining it. To borrow a secular proverb for once, you can’t have your cake and eat it.

The need for humility goes all the way up, and all the way down. For all the heroics of their people on the ground, there’s nothing humble in Parks Canada posting ten-tweet threads about how sad they are, with any information people actually want in tweets three and four and the rest a proclamation of official organizational deep, deep feelings, nor in reports they are angry that people are “leaking” photos and footage of the damage (i.e. sharing things they saw). No doubt we are only days away from the photos of politicians wearing high-visibility jackets looking at the wreckage for the cameras and promising the Government Recovery Action Plan to give $6 gazillion to x, y, and z (and who knows, maybe the victims will even get some).

Nor is there a jot of humility in the people using this to pick at their preferred political scab, the pundits who have only a hammer and see nothing but nails. Could somebody have done a better job? Oh, most certainly. Is the government corrupt and wicked? Obviously so, and it doesn’t matter which government you’re talking about. But anyone with eyes to see can notice that forest fires do not spread along party political lines. California votes one way, Alberta votes the other, and nature visits them alike. The archaeologists tell us that, before European settlement, most of North America was on fire from time to time. We are dealing with that which is infinitely stronger than Danielle Smith and Justin Trudeau, or their bureaucrats.

What these reactions have in common is that they reverse the true perspective, they put man above the sun rather than under it. That’s not just incorrect, that’s sick, in the sense of illness rather than the sense of sickos cackling “haha, yes” (though that sometimes applies too). Without losing sight of our neighbour who needs our help right now, without throwing up our hands and saying “why bother?!”, remember the right order of things. God will always bigger than us, or if you’re not Christian nature is still always bigger than us, and the believer and the unbeliever alike are smacked in the face by this fact again and again and again, floods in Toronto, fires in Alberta and British Columbia, and still we just don’t get it, we narrow our gaze to think that we crappy little humans with bad knees and weird brains and four-score years or so of life are bigger and better than that which made us.

If going into the wilderness should do anything, it’s cure us of that delusion.

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