Cruel Summer

When my boyfriend told me not to follow him to another continent, ending the first relationship I’d cared about in years, I was so bereft I couldn’t eat. At nearly thirty, I suddenly wanted to be in my childhood home, so I flew from New York to Edmonton only to find myself unable to discuss the breakup once I arrived. My parents responded by falling back on an unwritten script. They took me to Jasper.

A four-hour drive away, Jasper was hardly around the corner, but the mountain town was our habitual source of grandeur, a place where the air smells like pine and the prairie horizon ruptures into jagged peaks of shale. We took its superiority to Banff as an article of faith, insisting that Jasper is less commercial and less contaminated by proximity to Calgary, the arch‑nemesis of any self-respecting Edmontonian. I’d shown up with the frost in late September — shoulder season — so my father booked us a last-minute cabin, and we set out in search of redemption by landscape. For the next few days, we decorated my despair with a backdrop of jewel-toned lakes and glaciers, opting for sites just off the highway to spare my mother’s knees. If I was going to sob, the logic went, I might as well be leaning over the railings at Athabasca Falls. The torrents did not wash away my sense of abandonment; more realistically, they would have crushed it into a narrow canyon with a force that regularly kills reckless tourists. But at least I got to be despondent in a setting old enough to remind me I was young.

There’s something cruel about the town of Jasper joining Fort McMurray as a victim of one of Alberta’s most devastating wildfires. The Rockies are the antithesis of the oilsands, the reputational and spiritual counterweight to an economy of extraction. In the national parks, nature does not need to be useful. It’s too busy being sublime. The mountains make up only a western sliver of Alberta, but they’re on the flag and in all the brochures; nationally, they decorate our passports and our money, the pristine version of Canada we’d like to imagine represents our rugged souls. A Latin American friend once sent me a meme that satirizes this imagery: it juxtaposes Lake Louise (when you visit Canada) with a strip mine (when Canada visits you).

In a sense, it would be comforting if the inferno that incinerated a third of Jasper’s buildings were the transparent result of human folly, the strip mine coming back to haunt us. Blaming people is not just satisfying; it gestures toward a world in which disasters can be prevented. Yet while climate change has made wildfires more frequent and more forceful, this particular blaze might have happened anyway, a consequence of boreal forests and their burn cycles. As reports emerged that a hundred-foot wall of flames had hit the town, Jasper’s mayor, Richard Ireland, said he felt “absolutely helpless in the face of nature.” When a news anchor asked him how the government should help, he didn’t have an answer. “It wasn’t necessarily for lack of resources,” he explained, that his community was burning. Reports have highlighted a startling combination of factors — low humidity, high wind, lightning that struck far too close — that conspired against containment efforts, despite the legions of firefighters dispatched in the town’s defence. Although the mayor lost his own home, he has continued to warn against searching for culprits. The powers that be absolved themselves by getting everyone out alive.

As luck would have it, I was supposed to return to the Rockies this fall for a happier occasion. Seven years after heartbreak laid me low, I was bringing a different man out west to meet my family. I went back to the old script and booked us three nights in Jasper. We grabbed the last available reservation at Alpine Village, a set of fifty-five log cabins along the Athabasca River — twenty-five of them now gone.

The weight of these catastrophes is never borne equally. The day we received news of the destruction, Edmonton was grey with smoke in a kind of apocalyptic solidarity. I scoured the internet for images I didn’t really want to see and shared a non-partisan sob with Danielle Smith, the premier. Two days after that, I rerouted our trip through Banff and dutifully called my credit card company to retrieve our deposit. The venue had told all booked guests to do this, but the gesture felt gross, an acknowledgement of who has to sift through the ashes and who is merely inconvenienced. Whatever my sentimental ties, my life will continue largely unchanged.

On our modified itinerary, everyone talked about the fire. It was hard to tell whether this was collective mourning or a form of regional small talk: It’s so sad. When were you there last? Remember last year when Kelowna almost burned down? You could always go to Waterton instead. In Banff, which was as crowded and stunning as always, one café sold $5 cookies as a Jasper fundraiser. Amid the wood-finished shopping centres, the prospect of destruction seemed remote. A charred strip along the Bow Valley Parkway suggested otherwise.

The town of Jasper will be rebuilt, more slowly than anyone would like but probably faster than normal, given its iconic status. I doubt Alberta politics will be transformed. But even if we learn nothing and even though it could all happen again, being in the Rockies held a certain comfort. These mountains were always going to outlast our desire to live among them. Some of the buildings that were lost were nearly a century old, the kind of structural history that is in short supply in the Canadian West. I know it fixes nothing, but we might as well remember that a hundred years is still young.