Dateline: Lake Louise, Alberta. For a relatively small place, maybe one mile by two miles, Lake Louise is one of the earth’s most stunning looking sites. We’re here in mid-July and the cornices of snow or ice hanging over the valley are still huge, or maybe they’re glaciers, who knows? At one end of the bowl are these glaciers on a sheer face a few thousand feet tall. At the other end of the bowl is a spectacular “railroad” hotel originally built by the Canadian Pacific to lure in fare-paying tourists. Now run by the Fairmont chain, the Chateau Lake Louise is nearly as imposing as the Banff Springs Hotel. In between the glacier wall and the Chateau is the lake, a milky turquoise blue and very clearly glacier-melt.
People canoe on the lake, and a couple of hardy retriever-type dogs went for a swim in what must be icy water. Our favorite thing to do at Lake Louise is to take the walk along the northern edge of the lake starting on the east end by the lake’s outlet and walking to the west end where the glacier-melt runs into the lake. It is an easy walk, quite level, and with places along it to stop and rest. Down at the far end we were pestered by pan-handling golden mantle ground squirrels and also chipmunks, which are much smaller. As good national park visitors we didn’t feed them, but their behavior made clear they were accustomed to be fed junk food. Our second favorite thing to do here is buy an ice cream cone at the Chateau and sit outside to eat it, looking at the panorama.
The drive up the Trans-Canada Highway 1 from Banff was very pretty today; we actually had some decent weather for a change. I don’t believe we were rained on all day. The Canadian Government is converting this stretch of the highway to four lane divided highway. It is about time, too. As a nation which wishes to sit at the table with other developed nations, Canada needs to make its national highway an expressway from end-to-end. I believe that is their intent, they have already greatly improved highway two north from Lethbridge to Calgary.
One could wish that New Zealand would catch this highway-building fever; for a developed country their road system is sad. En Zed’s roads are well-enough paved but often winding, and mostly narrow and without shoulders. Some of their one-lane highway bridges, shared with a railroad track, are a joke. The Kiwis’ way of doing things would make it a difficult country for me to call home, although it is a nice place to visit, very scenic.
One of the fascinating things about the Canadian, and U.S., national parks is all the languages one hears spoken there. Today I heard German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese, and several more I couldn’t identify. Most of these people can also speak some English; most of us cannot speak any of their languages. To be sure, people with some English are more likely to travel to predominantly English-speaking countries like the U.S. and Canada. Still, I wonder how many Americans and Canadians are vacationing in their countries speaking a bit of the local lingo? My guess: not many at all.
There is something about having the vast majority of a big continent (North America) speaking one language (English) that discourages language study. North America is an enormous place where you can visit many different climates, cultures, cuisines, and landscapes without needing a second language.
During the twentieth century monolingualism was clearly an advantage for the U.S. and Anglophone Canada, diverting energies elsewhere devoted to language study into more economically productive pursuits. As the world continues to move toward globalism in the twenty-first century, is it possible monolingualism will become a liability? Or will most of the world end up speaking somewhat broken English? The future, as some wag used to say, lies ahead.
