Canadian Road Trip

The National Park Series; The Sounds of The Canadian Rockies; Randy Petersen, composer

In the summer of 1988, I traveled to Calgary, AB, to help my friend Chad H. move back to South Dakota after graduating from college. In retrospect, I didn’t help him move so much as I provided company in the car while on the road.

I had been pianist that summer for the Prairie Repertory Theatre at SDSU. We had staged a production of the melodrama called “The Drunkard”. At that time, each production opened in Donor Auditorium on the campus of SDSU, then moved forty miles down the road to a theatre at Prairie Village near Madison, SD. After the last performance of the summer, my parents took me to Sioux Falls so that I could catch a flight the next day to Calgary.

Chad met me at the airport and took me to his father’s home where we spent his last few days before hitting the road. On one of those days, his father insisted that Chad take me up to Banff National Park. I hadn’t done my homework in researching what the locals boasted for attractions. So I didn’t know what to expect. I put forth a query to Chad, What kind of park will we see? He responded with a grin and said, “Bring your camera.”

At no time in the entire planning of this trip did anybody say the following two words: Canadian Rockies. I wish that I could tell you specifics of all of the things that we saw and did, but it all went by in a beautiful blur. But I can tell you that I saw Lake Louise and the Fairmont Chateau Hotel. And we drove for a while on the Icefields Parkway. Somehow I talked Chad into suspending his fear of heights for a trip on the Banff Gondola.

Calgary had hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics and Chad drove me around town to see the different venues. We then packed the cars and trailer that afternoon so that we could start the long path toward South Dakota early the next morning, driving through Alberta, Saskatchewan and North Dakota.

For years the memory of this trip remained static, frozen on a computer screen, encapsulated in recollection cement. When I told my mom how much I enjoyed that Sounds of Yellowstone CD, she noted where it came from and looked them up on line to see if they had made similar CD’s from other National Parks. And on the following Christmas morning, my stocking contained The Sounds Of The Canadian Rockies.

The premise of this album carbon copies that of the Yellowstone CD. More of the same but with different songs and different rain. Interestingly enough, though, just the notion that this music and these sounds were audio depictions of this very place I had visited ten years or so before allowed me to mentally and emotionally revisit this splendid scenery, the memories of which had for so long subsisted in stagnancy. My mental filmstrip finally had a soundtrack to make it come alive.

Credits: To Chad H., my traveling buddy, who has only one or two more states to go on his forty-eight state trek. Hurry up and get your card punched so that we can get you to Alaska and Hawaii.