I fly home every summer. The airport is aligned so that the plane always hits the runway heading north from the southern outskirts of the city. My childhood home is at the north end of the city and so as the wheels hit the ground with that familiar thud, I can see all the land-marks whiz by as we head north on the runway… the down-town core, the football stadium, the Olympic ski-jump, the university, the hospital….
But as the plane slows to a turn and heads back towards the terminal, as though in a show created just for me, and as the wing curves a painfully slow arch, I can see it! It is the expanse of green hills that embrace the city where I grew up. They are now protected grasslands, and over the decades, they have been left just as they were in the days of my youth.
My eyes hunt furiously. I seek the landmark of my youth. It has become a ritual for me ever since I married and moved away from home… I am not really “home” until I see Turtle Rock… a single glacial erratic, a geological remnant flung out of the great heaving volcanic thrust that became the Canadian Rocky Mountains. A geological find to be sure… but to me it is the hallmark of my childhood where at the end of a half-day hike my family would picnic in the summer and toboggan in the winter. Sometimes when we were very adventurous, we pitched a tent and camped overnight.
My father took us there as far back as I can remember… I rode atop his shoulders as a toddler, trudging beside him as a youngster pulling at his arm to please slow down! Charging ahead of him as a teenager on snowshoes in the winter, racing to be the first to set camp at the base of the rock…. The memories are vivid and sharp and flood my heart each time I touch down at the Calgary airport, and each time, my tears flow through my smile.
I am home again.
