Hi friends,
On Saturday, we went for a hike in an area that is still recovering from a severe wildfire.
The Kenow Wildfire1 swept through Waterton National Park in southern Alberta near the BC border in 2017, killing wildlife, destroying homes and infrastructure, triggering evacuations, reshaping the landscape, and terrifying many.
Of course, fires like this have become common over the years, both here in western Canada and across the world: that deadly climate change combo of incredibly high heat, dry conditions, and strong winds are a sure recipe for devastation. I’ve grown to truly despise the phrase “the new normal” about such things - it seems like it trivializes people’s very real experiences of loss. Even this summer, people have lost their homes. A young firefighter in BC lost her life just a few days ago. #FortMacStrong lives on, Lytton is struggling to rebuild, and so many more stories like this are accumulating around the world. Many of us have lived with dangerous air quality due to smoke for weeks every summer for years now. We’ve watched the sun turn a shade of red that would leave any fundamentalist nervous. Communities across Canada and around the world are all grappling with these realities of climate change and, despite the natural need for fire in nature, the severity and frequency has been unprecedented, uncontrolled, scary. This particular wildfire consumed 35,000 hectares, including Waterton Lakes National Park.
And yet, this weekend we went for a walk in the aftermath.
Waterton is a remarkable place: slower paced, not as commercial or developed as other more famous mountain towns, and it’s right where the prairies kiss the mountains. Big horn sheep blink at you from the roadside. Elk wander by easily. We saw bison roaming with their young in the prairie, eagles soaring above the lakes. Rocks shimmered like jewels under the clear water at the shoreline and we nearly had the hair torn out of our heads by the force of the ever-present wind coming down the water when we climbed to an overlook.
We were in town just for a short visit so we chose an easier path up to the Lower Falls of Bertha Lake for our hike. It’s about two hours or so - longer if you’re with me - boasting very manageable inclines for toddlers and grandparents alike. We had been warned to wear sunscreen and hats: there would be little to no shade as this was straight through the wildfire landscape and the day was already heating up. Brian and I loaded up our water bottles, laced up our battered runners, anointed ourselves with SPF 60, and hit the trail.
In no time, we were enveloped in the mountain’s wildfire aftermath. It was quite surreal: evidence of the fire such as blackened stumps, crumbling ash heaps, and skeletons of trees were all around us and yet everywhere we looked, there was also an abundance of wildflowers2 - blue asters, bluebells, red clover, goldenrod, cow parsnip, mountain hollyhock, wild bergamot, and pearly everlastings among many others carpeted the mountain in a riot of colour.
We ate saskatoon berries and thimbleberries by the handful as we walked along the dusty trails. Like most prairie kids, I grew up eating these humble berries out of ditches and at roadsides. Even now, saskatoons serve as time-travel all their own, instantly transporting me back to girlhood’s hot summers and prairie fields buzzing with grasshoppers and lake-wet hair. I love these berries so much, more perhaps for their absence in glossy big-box grocery stores or fancy restaurants, and their insistence on growing wild for everyone to access easily.
We hiked in the blistering sunshine most of the time. Due to the speed of the fire, many of the trees were burned bare, yet still stand even though their leaves and branches are gone. Felled charcoal trunks sprawled across the forest floor. Most of the trees that still stood had lost their blackened bark, now bleached as white as driftwood. There were also inexplicable survivors, trees that somehow missed the burning and remain vibrant, even in the middle of destruction.
It was terrible and beautiful in a dark fairy tale sort of way.
We bore witness to the way that overwhelming beauty can thrive even with the terrible origin story still true and present. The reminders of the fire were as present as the glorious re-wilding.
The fireweed in particular - a gorgeous pink-purple flowering plant that is known as willow herb or river beauty in other places - bloomed everywhere, in all of the most devastated places like a 2-metre high phoenix from actual ashes. After an alpine fire, this is often what grows first, a promiscuous first reclamation after the devastation. It’s evolved to reclaim land and to re-establish ecology after a fire. Thanks to their work, then pollinators arrive again and the magic of hope and resilience begins anew.
Other flowers and berries are born again. Wildlife returns. New trees begin to sprout up again, often nourished by and communicating with elder survivor trees around them. We rejoiced in every young tree we witnessed taking root next to a skeleton trunk, hanging on and stubbornly insisting on growing anyway.
We eventually arrived at the lower falls from Bertha Lake and clambered down to the streams below the wood bridge. Perched on sun-warm rocks, we stripped off our socks and shoes, groaning as we put our hot feet into the water. We washed our berry-sticky fingers in shimmeringly clear water. We took our time resting, brushing away the occasional black fly that buzzed by.
We kept marvelling at how something so terrible, so overwhelming, can also somehow bring beauty and somehow eventually even healing. How after the end of everything, there is something like rest.
And then, stubbornly hopeful signs of life appear.
The signs of life don’t erase what was lost. Rather, everything that was lost somehow finds a home in the renewal of all things.
Listen, no one wants to be a metaphor. No one wants their suffering to become someone else’s lesson learned. It’s not a cosmic trade-off. There is no balancing those scales. You can’t say that it was worth it.
And yet? still? anyway? there can be beauty in the aftermath.
After the fire that sweeps away everything. After the diagnosis. After the truth. After what was hidden is brought into the light. After the changes. After the losses. There may be a few sturdy remnants, but if it looks like a landscape of death and ash, that’s because it is.
But then.
Afterwards.
(Sometimes a very, very long while afterwards.)
It may be hot and desolate, dusty and lonely for a while - even while life is doing what our ornery lives insist on doing under the surface to heal us. Right in the midst of the ashes and the skeletons, in the midst of scorched earth…somehow, life does weirdly come back (I can testify to that at least).
It won’t be life as we knew it before. It takes a while for shade to reappear, for the trees to grow again, for the soil to heal.
But then: a sprout. A flash of colour.
Hawkwood winks out in golden hues of possibility, scarlet Indian paintbrush flames out against the green, and shaggy purple bergamot once again lazily bobs on a stem that defies physics.
The berries ripen to a heavy indigo blush. The bears return, so do the bees.
Look, there are daisies everywhere here.
It will always take longer than you want and yet somehow in the end, it will be quicker than you expect. It will be more beautiful than you could have dreamed.
Turning to face the descent, we put our runners back on and then embarked again. We slowly walked back down the path, opening our hands to gently drift our fingertips over the tops of the wildflowers, like a benediction for rising again.
Love S.
And in case you missed these recent Field Notes:
5+ books on intentional sobriety: Plus sobriety apparently makes strange bedfellows?
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You can read more about the Kenow wildfire here at the Parks Canada website.
I’m getting pretty good at identifying wildflowers but I still rely heavily on my beloved PictureThis app and handy guidebook.
YES this. Not the whitewashing or sugarcoating or "good vibes only" of spiritual bypassing, but we seek the "And yet" and "But then" of transformation and healing and regrowth and rewilding.
Beautiful words and gorgeous pictures! Your experience reminds me of a similar one my husband and I had at Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park many years ago. We walked a path called “Devastation Trail” where hot lava from a previous volcanic eruption had flowed, burning everything in its path. On one side there was scorched earth, just complete destruction. On the other sprouting plants and other signs of new life were everywhere. In my scrapbook I titled the photo I took showing both “Death and Resurrection on the Devastation Trail.”
Another interesting but eerie sight was a highway that came to an abrupt dead end where lava had flowed across it. What used to be the rest of the road was a vast field of hardened black lava.