Three Years of Waiting and Now This……

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Issy was feeling a bit ordinary yesterday and wakes up feeling a lot worse. It’s not the dreaded COVID, surely, we tell ourselves. She managed not to get it when I came down a few months back. We were in very close contact just before I tested positive, so we both thought she must be one of those “COVID nevers“ who won the lottery and are just naturally immune from the dreaded disease. It’s just a bit of a cold we tell ourselves, although she decides to keep her mask on when we’re close to people for the time being just in case.

Today is the very long awaited day when we finally get to see our beloved Emma again for the first time in going on three years. We’re meeting her and partner Michael in Hanna, which is out on the prairie a couple of hours east of Calgary. We’ll be staying there with Michael’s parents, LeeAnne and Steve, on their cattle farm. Other than LeeAnne and Steve, Hanna’s other famous residents have included all four members of top line Canadian rock band Nickelback.

We collect our hire car and stop on a deserted road near the airport to try to get our bearings. None of the maps on our phones seem to be responding so we resort to the compasses on our devices to point us in the right direction. The direction that my phone thinks is north shows up on Issy’s as being south-west. Hmmm. I wasn’t aware that viruses were capable of disrupting magnetic fields, but we're struggling to come up with any other plausible explanations.

We decide to trust my compass and soon find ourselves in traffic, so much traffic… and roadworks. Emma told us previously that there are only two seasons in Canada - winter, and the construction season, and it‘s definitely not winter. We clear suburban Calgary and make our way out onto the prairie. We thought it was supposed to be dry as dust out here, but everything looks very green, and there’s more water than grass in a lot of the paddocks.

I‘m feeling a bit weary so we turn off the Highway into the thriving metropolis of Irricana, population 1,216, in search of drugs and coffee. The pharmacist directs us to a building around the corner where she says we should be able to get a caffeine hit. The sign on the door says “Closed”, but as I start to walk away an elderly man emerges and insists that I come in. The establishment is a “Lounge (no minors)”, which I think might be code for a bar. My host, Gary, mentions something about China in a thick oriental accent, so I ask him when he first came here. It seems that accents are sometimes a bit slow to fade; he says he first arrived in Canada in 1965. Gary (good Chinese name?) and his wife are delightful people and couldn’t be more friendly if they tried. I suspect they don’t see a lot of outsiders. When I tell him I’m from Oz he says that he thinks he remembers someone from New Zealand coming through here a decade or so back.

We’d read about the town of Drumheller as being the home of the apparently famous Royal Tyrrell Museum which houses a large collection of dinosaur fossils. A visit there was listed in one article we saw as the number 21 thing to do in the whole of Canada. I suppose the author could have been eight years old, but even so that seems like a pretty high ranking given the competition - Niagara Falls, the CN Tower, Rocky Mountains, etc etc. The town is also at the centre of Canada’s Badlands, and it’s easy to see why as we head into it down a steep hill with precipitous and heavily eroded bare slopes on either side. The town clearly takes its reputation as the “World’s Dinosaur Capital” very seriously - there are dinosaur statues everywhere - sitting and standing on street corners, on the tops of buildings, and hanging out of windows. Visitors can even get views of the valley by climbing the 106 steps inside the “World’s Largest Dinosaur” statue. The town’s only theatre is currently screening, yep, you guessed it, “Jurassic World”. The whole place is insanely cute. We stop for supplies, but Issy’s feeling worse than ever so we decide to pass on the Museum for now.

We wait patiently inside a roadside fast food cafe in Hanna for Emma to meet us. It‘s a bit hard not to notice two young girls and their father come in dressed entirely in clothes straight out of the nineteenth century - the girls in long grey dresses and headscarves, and the man in baggy grey trousers held up with braces. We understand they’re Mennonites. I’m not sure we’ve got too many of these folk back home, not that we’ve ever seen anyway, and they look a bit incongruous ordering burgers and chips…..

The reunion with our beloved daughter is very emotional; two and a half years is a long time not to have been able to see our baby girl.

So that’s all great but what do we do now? We don’t think Issy’s got COVID, but on the off chance that she has, the last thing we want to be doing is passing it on to our hosts. LeeAnne works at the local vet clinic and has a supply of RAT test kits, so we decide to go to the farm and get Issy to do a test before she goes near either her or Steve. We hold our breaths. Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhh! It’s positive. Noooo!!! What timing - nearly three years waiting to see Emma and now this. We decide to head back to Hanna and look for a motel to isolate in, but LeeAnne and Steve are having none of it. They say they’ve both had COVID, as have Emma, Michael and me, so they insist we stay as planned, and won’t hear of anything else. Canadians‘ reputations as the world’s nicest people are certainly well in tact….

The questions start coming from home about the COVID isolation rules here. Steve and LeeAnne think that it’s all more or less just “recommended“ now without anything being mandated, but we consult the Google machine to check. We tell the folks back home that we have to hide out in the basement because they‘ll shoot Issy if they manage to track her down, but the reality's a bit more relaxed.

We were right to think it was green out here, but it was apparently a very different story a week ago before the three inches of rain. Everything was brown and dusty, and LeeAnne tells us that no one was sleeping as they contemplated the very real possibility of having to sell off stock that they couldn’t feed. We reflect that us city folk the world over generally live our lives in ignorant bliss of the sometimes harsh realities of life on the land.…

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Comments

[RENanDREW]

Damn COVID
Sorry to hear of Issy's plight, but it could have been so much worse if it had started a day or so earlier. Wishing you mild symptoms and a quick recovery.

[DaveandIssy]

COVID
It would indeed have been an awful lot worse if it had been a few days earlier. She’s thankfully feeling better now thx!