Advise from Mr. Bradbury

We drove to Slave Lake today, it's our 3rd time this year. The most I have ever been is maybe 3 times in my life up until this year. It's a bit of a drive but it's worth having the kids have some outdoor exploration in a new environment.

They get to "make levels" out of big drift wood logs and try to balance on them, if they fall off into the water they "die" and have to re-spawn at the beginning. Build sandcastles or, if they are lucky inherit an already constructed castle from beach-goers from earlier in the day. And today, I had to get really upset and tell Little Dragon that if he wanted any more normal "people" snacks he HAD to stop eating ants. He's almost 8, I say while I shake my head slowly and put my palm to my forehead.

While making the 90 minute or so drive up North on the kind of scary, single-laned highway, we play a game that I win every time. We used to play this game when I was a child back in the blissful 90's and I would clean up, every time.

Let's call this game, for reasons of simplicity, Spot the Wildlife. For every bear or moose (the more rare animals) you saw, before anyone else did, and you could verify it's actual existence, my father rewarded the wildlife observer $1 (and we would do this while we traveled over the Logan's Pass in Glacier National Park, heading to Kalispell, so it would be an American dollar!). For the more plentiful animals, such as mountain goats, etc you would get a quarter. But let me tell you, they usually aren't lone animals so if you are the first to spot a group of 10 or more, you would get rewarded pretty handsomely.

My kids, unfortunately have inherited their father's spotting ability or lack their of, and barely can see the animals that I shout to view to them as we drive past. Look a black bear! A Black bear! Where? Where? I missed it!!! So I upped the ante to $1 for a deer (we, as kids were never paid to spot a deer because they were so common) and $5 for a bear or a moose. I figure, if they ever spot one before me it would be worth the monetary increase, especially if it prevented a collision. I have yet to pay any money to either child. One day, I hope, they start to see the fun and spot some animals.

Driving to Slave Lake today (at approximately 10:30am-noon) I saw one LIVE deer running in the bushes and one DEAD moose in the ditch. On the way back (around 4:30-6pm) I saw a car pulled over as they were watching a live moose in the bushes and maybe 10 minutes after that I saw 2 other moose walking around in the bushes. My children did not see any of this of course. One was passed out and the other was busy drawing sketches of Dog Man.

Seeing all of this wildlife brought up a recovered memory of when I was about 12 years old. We were going to Waterton National Park to stay at a lady from church's cabin for the night. It was a Young Womens activity for the Beehive Class, which just means girls from ages 12-14. There was probably 8-10 of us girls and 2-4 adults and we were divided into two vehicles. I was in the first van and we thought up a pretty good prank to pull on the slowpokes.

One of the girls had a large brown blanket and there is a great hill that is after the official National Park entrance but before you hit the town site. We had her hike up the hill, quite a distance, and put the blanket over herself. This transformed the 12 year old girl into a bloop of brown on a predominately green backdrop. She looked like a freaking bear! We all played into the prank and pointed towards her in great excitement. We had a number of other cars pull over too to examine this rare brown bloop sighting. It's a bear! It's a bear! We even had a busload full of tourists!! After a number of minutes, the girl, who was probably starting to get pretty hot under that blanket, stood up and everyone stopped using their binoculars and cameras. Then I remember one of the girls from the other car exclaim, "Oh, it's just a horse!" Not even figuring out at this point that it in fact was another girl. Classic.