Serendipity Guide
A guide is required to enter the Wolcott Quarry in Yoho National Park, since British Columbia Park was designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. Although it is controlled and you cannot keep the “stone bugs” you encounter, the journey can be a treasured experience even if you lead a sophisticated life.
Madison, my guide, moved across the fallen rock on the trail like a nimble-legged mountain goat. She kept a brisk pace in the thinning mountain air, and she wouldn’t stop climbing unless I asked her to, which (of course) I wouldn’t ask her, simply because I was a boy and she was a girl. But I did ask him questions about the stunning scenery, about the park’s history, and about Charles Wolcott, who discovered and quarried the quarry for his hoard of trilobites (prehistoric anthropods) fossilized in the rock.
He couldn’t take his eyes off Madison, and she knew it! We were both young and single, and soon, my questions became personal. She also responded to those. To me, Madison was: different, pretty, but not ravishing, flirtatious, but in a mature, rough and a little rough way, but in an interesting way. An hour after the hike, I forgot where I was going! She wasn’t chatty, but she volunteered, not just answering my questions. Soon his Canadian accent became the hum of a hummingbird in my ear. This was my fault because I was now walking so close behind her that it sometimes brushed against her mountain jeans.
Interestingly, he wore puttees (a strip of cotton gauss fabric wrapped around his ankles and the legs of his blue jeans to mid-calf). I commented on them, to which she replied that they kept insects from crawling up her pants legs. To that, I said, “But they have a color and they look like the puttees used by Allied soldiers in World War I.” For the first time on our walk, Madison stopped and turned to look at me, and for the first time, she suggested that we stop walking. “Let’s sit on that flat rock over there.” She pointed to the rock.
“This set of puttees belonged to my great-grandfather, who was in the Canadian Third Division,” Madison told me. “He used them in the Battle of the Somme in World War I.” I was stunned. She explained that he had survived the war and that it had become a thing with his sons and daughters to have and use some of their equipment. Puttees were what had happened to him three generations later. He wanted to know everything he could about Madison.
She insisted that he have the services of a professional guide, for which she had paid him. But she was my guide in other ways at our camp that night. I’ll just say that Madison was a talented cook and ran a disciplined camp. Fluent in three languages, Madison shared with me many stories that she had received from other hiking clients, in the language of my choice. As I understood that she was a full-time guide, hiking and camping in the Canadian Rockies all the time, I asked her how she could do it, given that she had a lot of talent that could translate into a better paying city job.
“You and I are the same,” Madison told me. “You work in an American city to make money, then you come to a wild place because you want a wild experience. I live in a wild place and I make as much money as you do winning at poker and trading daily stocks, so I can live wild here. all the time “.
I thought I had come on this trip to see the landscape and to pick up a trilobite fossil as a souvenir. Instead, I took a trip to serendipity. Sometimes it scares me that I never get over that experience. By the way, Madison caught me with a little trilobite fossil. She took it from my hand.