Even through binoculars, it’s clear that this mountain range has scale running through its granitic veins. It’s almost inconceivable how high the peaks reach and how quickly they get there. If Colorado and Alaska had a hippie love child, the Canadian Rockies would be the result.

Logically, being surround by enormous slabs of rock might make the world seem smaller but it doesn’t. Perhaps that because there are lyric human voices speaking a swirl of languages alongside the walking path at the base of the mountains. It’s as if a bit of each continent has come together right here.

So many people have come from everywhere to watch the mountains reach high and, I imagine, determine for themselves if the water’s color is the same as the pictures. I was also curious and can report that no filter is required. This is a destination for a reason.

There is a sixty year old British woman beginning to peel down to her bathing suit, exclaiming about the chance to jump in the glacier-fed water. There is the son asking his mother to film his rock-skipping attempt after the first one went a dozen hops in. There is an Irish family with a dog that barked at its companion like a poodle homing beacon, to tell them where home base would be. There is a grandfather helping a young child pick up a rock in order to chuck it into the water, almost hitting the binoculars around his neck on the boy’s head. There is a mother speaking sign language to her elder daughter. There are women in abayas who double over with laughter at something I missed.  

When we all return to our respective homes and tell tales of what we did here, will they feel pulled to this ground? Will I? If so, I will be part of all the planet’s largeness in three ways: the number of people, the millions of beautiful words tripping off their tongues, and the size of the mountains we are all here to witness.

All of which makes my head a bit wobbly so I stow my binoculars and walk down the trail. Not far along, my ears tune to the two hikers behind me likely because they are speaking the language I know (and I’m embarrassed it’s only one, especially in this international crowd.) A man asks a woman what she used to do for work. She laughs gently and responds that they aren’t supposed to talk about that, right? Then she returns the question and he says he is happily retired.

I peek back at them for a moment (but only a moment because they are moving at quite a clip) to see that they are not new to the hiking rodeo. Both sport well-worn trekking poles, dusty shoes, and appropriate sun protection clothing. Their obvious experience explains why they might choose a hike on the shoes of Lake Louise for a first date.

She responds to his question by narrowing down her lifetime of vocation into a few sentences and I wonder how I would summarize myself were I to be asked. I wonder what it would be like to meet someone later in life with all the more thing to share and all the extra baggage that comes along with it. Most of us get some sense of a person by what they have done and what they haven’t, and there’s not a whole lot to say when you’re eighteen. But when you’re sixty-eight, my heavens. What time you could spend on things that made you weep and things you allowed to recede in the rear view. Just talking about books could fill a month’s worth of hikes.  

They continued to talk in the get-to-know-you vein but it’s not the kind of conversation that has the same urgency as teenagers. There’s an understanding that some things that might happen and some definitely won’t.

I’d like to know how the rest of the date went. They branched off onto a trail to a mountain peak and I had to return to my family. I’d love to know where they went next, both physically and conversationally.

They used their language for its ultimate purpose; to connect. The words and watching the mountains were the things we all had in common that day. We spoke, we observed, we walked away with a story.

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