Jasper and the great sadness

Written By Peter Allan
Jasper fire 2024
 

By Chris Hatch

Jasper has me stumbling for words. “Grief” doesn’t capture the feeling. That seems too precise. There isn’t even anger, not yet anyway. Just a bone-deep sadness.

I don’t know why some catastrophes hit deeper than others. It’s not the first town incinerated in this new, fossil-fuelled, Pyrocene. Not in Canada. Certainly not around the world. “Another town burned,” reads one news post, almost humdrum, passing across the screen. It wasn’t fatal for people, didn’t kill the most wildlife. More than half the townsite may have survived.

But we love Jasper. It may not be peak Instagram, like Banff, but those silver slopes are somehow quintessentially Canada. Always top of the list for me as a young treeplanter when there were enough days off between contracts for a night or two in the Rockies.

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Peter Allan
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