Jasper visitors warned: 'We don't need another cathartic experience for your tourism entertainment'
Town residents want to move on, but questions from well-meaning visitors force them to relive the worst days of their lives over and over
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JASPER — Taped to the front door of Jasper’s fire hall, you’ll find this sign: “We love visitors — but tours are by appointment only.”
Don Smith, Jasper’s deputy fire chief, said the sign was recently put up because of the sheer number of visitors who were coming to the hall and asking for tours. On one recent day, the fire department had 11 different groups of people who arrived unannounced, asking to see the hall. So many people have asked firefighters for badges and patches that the department has run out of them. And, yes, people have asked if the fire hall has merchandise for sale.
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Welcome to the world of disaster tourism. It’s real. Remember the sheer number of New York fire and police caps that became fashionable post-Sept. 11, 2001? Well, there are those out there who’d love to sport a Jasper FD shirt or hat, post-wildfire.
As Jasper welcomes tourists back one year after the fire, residents have to struggle with the well-meaning but curious visitors who ask what it was like to live through a disaster. For many Jasper residents, talk of the wildfire reopens old wounds.
John Ward Jr. walked his dog, Harry, along a stream near the Cabin Creek neighbourhood on July 16. On one side of the stream, there’s a pristine neighbourhood, a mix of large homes, townhouses and trailers. On the other side, there is lot after lot that has been cleared of debris, with maybe a trailer or two signifying that, yes, at some time, someone lived there.
Ward said that after the fire, the stream ran black from the soot. Like many of his neighbours, he’s still trying to heal. And the questions about the fire don’t help.
He said that visitors need to understand that the fire has forever changed the town.
“It has changed the way we are, how we relate to others,” he said. “That’s because the fire is always on people’s minds. For us, it’s almost the go-to thing to talk about, like the weather. We have friends who lost their places. We have seniors who moved out of the area.”
But while the residents talk about the fire amongst themselves, they find it uncomfortable when asked about it by outsiders. And Ward thinks people should know better.
“They’re aware of what happened,” said Ward. “But, they all want your story. They want to drag you back. But, no, we don’t need another cathartic experience for your tourism entertainment.”
Fire talk is off limits
It’s echoed by signage you’ll find at shops in Jasper’s downtown. As you walk into Andromeda Coffee, the bustling cafe just steps from the venerable Athabasca Hotel, you’ll find signage pleading with customers to enjoy themselves, but to please keep one topic off-limits.
“Your support means a lot to us as we recover from the wildfire,” it reads. “We kindly ask that you not ask us about our personal losses. We’re still healing.”
Sheila Couture was also walking her dog in the devastated Cabin Creek area on July 16. Her home on Connaught Drive was spared, but her daughter, Tamar Couture-Hilworth, and her family lost their home. Her daughter Anna Marie’s home was spared. So, Anna Marie moved in with her mom, while Tamar’s family of four moved into her sister’s place.
When Couture was asked how she felt about her home being spared, she first said “lucky,” then quickly shook her head and changed tack. “No, no one’s lucky,” she said. “I was spared.”
And, one year later, she’s still trying to process what happened to her house. She’s called Jasper home since 1968.
“I still don’t understand my emotions. I just want to cry now,” she said. “This is just so all-encompassing. I don’t even know how to describe it.”
Understand that visitors will see a town scarred by fire, an area with burned-out trees that look like the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek: The Next Generation and some melted lampposts. Then, they leave and return to their normal worlds. For the residents, they are reminded daily of the fire. They don’t get away from the scorched earth and blackened bark.
Couture said while tourists want to know more about the fire, the majority are respectful. And, she said that many of the tourists from overseas aren’t really aware of what happened in Jasper. It wasn’t front-page news in Germany or Japan.
“And, if you enter from the east side of town, you really won’t know that anything has happened,” she said. The main entrance into town, leading onto the main Connaught Drive strip, was untouched by the fire. It’s only as you head further west and south that a visitor starts seeing the extent of the damage. There is one community of portable homes set up near the town entrances, but they could easily be mistaken for work camps. And temporary work camps are not new to Jasper, which faced a critical housing shortage before the wildfire.
On the main drag, there are a couple of businesses that have been demolished. But, to a visitor who doesn’t know the back story, this could look like a simple case of redevelopment. It’s not until someone ventures further into the residential areas that you understand that something truly has happened here.
The thing that’s striking about a wildfire’s aftermath is how random the damage is. One neighbourhood is razed, the next is intact. One home stands on a street, while the rest of the houses were destroyed. A decimated Esso station by the railway tracks sits right across the street from a Montana’s restaurant that’s intact and open for business. The fire spread into town by burning embers that were catapulted into neighbourhoods by high winds. So, it was as if Mother Nature played a fiery game of Russian Roulette. A house got hit and started to burn, while the next street avoided the fire.
“It was hit and miss,” said Ward.
And that random nature of the fire makes it hard for residents to process what happened to their town. Some lost everything, some didn’t. And, mentally, that might be tougher than if the entire town had burned.
Survivor’s guilt is a very real thing in Jasper, said Smith. And he recognized it when Jasper was reopened and people were first brought back into town to find out if they’d lost everything — or not.
“The first impression when you come into town was, ‘Gee, it’s not so bad, everything’s here,'” said Smith. “But you drive down main street, and then you get to the far end, and it was like, ‘Oh yeah, wow.’ They were bringing in residents in busloads to drive around and show them the areas that were affected. And then the other folks come in, and then there’s the other side of that. They feel bad because their stuff didn’t burn.”
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