Outdoors

Canada’s greatest asset

If Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state, I suspect it’s for the wrong reasons. I just got back from a family holiday. We started in Vancouver, then drove to Whistler, before flying to Calgary and taking the Trans-Canada Highway – past places with names like Bearspaw and Dead Man’s Flats – into the Canadian Rockies and Banff National Park. I was telling a friend about the trip a few days ago and actually welled up when I was describing the deep azure hue of Lake Louise; the vastness of the forests and the astonishing beauty of the wildlife – from chipmunks to grizzlies – that seems to co-exist peacefully with the comparatively tiny human population. It was nature on a scale that made human beings feel refreshingly incidental.

Picking daffodils with my ancestors

Pennsylvania winters can be unyielding. Though the extreme, single-digit temperatures and mounds of sometimes-onerous (but always beautiful) snow come and go, the bleak, overcast skies tend to overstay their welcome, hanging around like a monochromatic weight on one’s psyche. “Western Pennsylvania is known for two things,” UPMC psychiatrist Dr. Lawson Bernstein told CBS News, “producing linebackers and one of the highest prevalence of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in the entire country.” Sigh. While I grumbled this morning about having to continue bundling up well into spring (it was 36 degrees), a bunch of cheery golden blossoms near the edge of the woods reminded me this was no time to feel sorry my myself.