Canada

In Canada, a scale of feeling swelled to match the immensities - curiosity as colossal as the cerulean lakes and awe the size of the Auroraed sky, longing as massive as the mountain range and love as large as the glaciers.

It's hard to recount the sensation of wild discovery, unmoored and revelatory -- rounding a corner to see the hillside full of lounging bighorn sheep, peering into the depths of a crevasse or the shallow microhabitat of a cryoconite hole - postcards come to life.

Near the beginning of our trip we took a Medicine Walk with a Cree man whose mother is a traditional Knowledge Keeper. I was reminded that many Indigenous people don’t name things like caves and rivers as much as they use words to describe them. Naming implies ownership, and the land doesn’t belong to us, we belong to the land. For example, nearby waterfalls are called things that mean cold and wet, lacy and magnificent. 

Led along a flat trail at Cascade Ponds, we listened to stories of how our guide's ancestors used (and still use) many of the plants that grow in the Canadian Rockies. He pointed out buffalo berries beloved by both bears and humans; aspen bark dust that works overtime as a natural sunscreen, a wild yeast, and a pain reliever; spruce trees that serve as pharmacy, grocery and hardware store all in one; and rosehip, edible berries the name of which in Cree roughly translates to a riotous “itchy bum berry.” 

This anecdote allows an apropos segue to the incredible joy of traveling with three boys who are so special, who tolerate our initiatives to fix wings to their backs, who appreciate our efforts to navigate traffic and chaos and fatigue, who carry around hearts that stretch to see the beauty in it all. And also who called "pluh" when the noise from the backseat might've bore a hole into my head, who tricked one another to look down the collar of their shirt and spell attic, who played an absurd guess my fart game because they are apparently made entirely of beans and what else are you supposed to do when you're thirteen, die of boredom at bedtime in a hotel room?

The five of us are still in the foothills of what I hope will be our travel adventures together, but I really loved the way the boys looked when they were looking at the Canadian Rockies.

I also love the boys' given names, but considering they don't actually belong to us either, I would like to know what it might sound like to call them things like creative, intrepid, mystifying, brilliant, malodorous...