This was the second part of the personal account, with more to come. To read the first part, visit: Jasper reporter shares day leading up to heartbreaking evacuation.
Walking back to the front steps of the house, my landlord told me there was an evacuation warning, something she had learned from watching the weather on television. There was no alert on my phone, so I double-checked online.
My partner Tessa Nunn and I started packing. It’s just a precaution, I thought. Her background with Sept. 11, 2001, however, left her always thinking readiness. She was a lifeguard also, trained in concurrent calm and fast action. Me: I couldn’t make it through nursing school. I turned to writing instead. Slow work that’s all in my head.
Around 10 or 10:30 p.m. on Monday (July 22), I had a few things put in bags, but felt a different urgency. I had just sat on the toilet when my cellphone rang out the unmistakable, panicky, blaring alarm. EMERGENCY ALERT: Everyone in Jasper and Jasper National Park must evacuate now.
My toileting interrupted, I immediately made sure Tessa knew. She is hard of hearing, so one cannot simply yell across the house. You must be face-to-face. A poor stroke of fate the day before left her hearing aid broken on the floor.
We went into high gear, packing food and clothes and other essentials: her paintings were at the top of the list. I made sure to retrieve a sketchbook containing poems that I wrote for her. Our cat Princess’s ashes. Jewelry. Passports. Pictures of my children, Jackson and Kira. Computers.
Outside our front door, Connaught Drive was a barely moving parade of vehicles heading west. The emergency alert instructed us to head to British Columbia. “Follow directions,” it said. Ash was floating through the air like gentle snow. The sky blackened. I took another photo.
Someone walking on the sidewalk. It was Janeen, an outreach worker in town, always smiling her easy, peaceful smile, and always helping people who are struggling. She and her team had arranged for me to get a free three-month Community Outreach Services pass, so I could access the gym, get some much-needed exercise, and also blow out some ‘steam from the pipes’ as I would call it. Stress reduction. It was a lifesaver.
We said hello. True to form, Janeen was carrying a tub of supplies to Maligne Lodge, a muster point for people in town who needed bus transportation. She was walking because sitting in her car wasn’t getting her anywhere. We wished each other well.
Because of the traffic jam, Tessa and I figured there wasn’t much harm in continuing to pack the truck before getting into it, only to sit in such a slow-moving caravan. I boiled two dozen eggs. I kept looking around for odd necessities. A hairbrush. Shampoo. I nearly forgot my eyeglasses and contact lens case. A first aid kit.
Tessa and I were in the kitchen, standing next to the clock when the time turned 11:11 p.m., so we kissed as we always would. By 11:30 p.m., we were in the truck, though some of her larger paintings didn’t make it under the canopy. We told ourselves that they would probably be okay.
It was a 700-metre drive west down main street to get to the connection with Highway 16 to British Columbia. Everything was mostly orderly in the chaos. No one was honking or acting aggressively that I noticed. People took turns; merging was facilitated smoothly, happily.
The Yellowhead Highway was bumper to bumper stop, start crawling for much of the distance to B.C. before the fork in the highway: one way going south to Valemount and the other north to Prince George. Electronic signs on the road directed us to Prince George. Follow directions, we reminded ourselves. That’s where the evacuees will get taken care of.
Tessa was driving. I offered to take turns but my night vision is not the best. It was raining pretty decently too, and the lull of the wiper blades was tough to ignore. Around 3 a.m. she said that she needed to stop. Many other vehicles found pullouts to stay for the night.
We found a roadside rest stop with outhouses somewhere near Small River, and we slept in our seats. Mine wouldn’t recline because of all of the stuff in the truck, so I sat upright, getting perhaps 3 hours of actual sleep.
In the morning, we continued on and arrived in Prince George nearer to noon, winding our weary way through the city, following the signs for evacuees to get to the destination.
Once there, however, the news was disappointing. B.C. had no services to offer us other than a bottle of water and a place to stop briefly. “You have to go to Grande Prairie now,” we were told: another six-hour drive.
This was the second part of the personal account, with more to come. To read the first part, visit: Jasper reporter shares day leading up to heartbreaking evacuation.
