Champagne at Jasper

There was a dreamlike quality to our stop in Jasper. We detrained for about an hour, then waited in the station for time to board. They served champagne in the dome car, as they did leaving Toronto and Winnipeg. Just after I put my camera in its bag, as we were picking up speed, it was announced that the engineer had spotted elks on the left. I scrambled to get my camera back out, but watched about a dozen elk slip by before my camera was ready to shoot.



To the right is the inside of the station in Jasper. This is a train station with character.

In the poem, I speak of drivers in the west: they are trained to stop for pedestrians; if you step off a curb, anywhere, they stop for you to cross. I can see westerners getting into trouble in the east: eastern drivers have difficulty in Cornwall stopping for official flashing amber crosswalks. It got so bad, they had to change a pedestrian crosswalk in the east end of town into a red-amber-green signalled stop.