Vancouver → Hope → Merritt → Kamloops → Blue River → Mount Robson Provincial Park → Jasper → 【Highway 93】Saskatchewan River Crossing → Peyto Lake → Banff → Canmore
Yellowhead Highway
The plan was to reach Banff.
But that is the nature of an unplanned road trip. Every hotel was full by the time we arrived.
We drove on and ended up spending the night in a small town called Canmore.
By then, something in the way I saw landscapes had stopped working properly.
After days where every frame looked like a painting, even the most breathtaking views had stopped feeling that way.
Canmore was supposed to be nothing more than a place to sleep at the end of a long drive.
After checking in, I went outside wanting to walk a little.
No destination in mind.
I just wanted the night air. But somewhere along the way I noticed I was itching to talk to someone.
Two women around my age walked past.
I could have looked it up on Google Maps, but I wanted to talk to them, so I asked if they knew a good pub nearby.
They pointed me to The Drake Screaming Retriever Restaurant & Brewery.
Living Room
Forty years old.
Loved by locals as their living room, the place was full of energy that made the quiet street outside feel like a lie.
The wooden interior had two sides.
One was a dance floor where a DJ pushed heavy bass through the room. The other was a live stage.
If you needed a break, you stepped outside to the terrace and let the cold air find you.
The moment I grabbed a bottle at the counter, a remixed version of ABBA's Dancing Queen came on.
Like a scene from a film, a wave of women rushed in and started dancing right in front of me.
The local men followed not long after, and the floor filled up fast.
There was nothing touristy about it. Everyone was simply lost in dancing.
Among the crowd of western wear, two people stood out.
One was Sean, wearing jeans painted with a large Naruto design his sister had drawn.
The other was James, blond, the kind of person who seems to embody the word style.
Neither of them touched their phones. They just laughed at each other's wild moves and gave themselves completely to the moment.
Not someone on a screen. The people right in front of them, and the music playing right now. That was all.
That total commitment to the present moment was, simply, cool.
Before I knew it, I had walked over and said something.
That I had driven from Vancouver. That I had come all the way from Japan.
By the time we had talked for a while, I was already part of their group, dancing with them.
Everyone on the floor seemed to know each other. This was clearly a place that truly belonged to the people who lived here.
The DJ played remixes of songs from the 80's to the early 2000, house and techno flavored, and even someone like me who rarely goes to clubs knew every one.
When you wanted something different, you moved to the next room.
There, a group of cool older local men were on stage, sweating through classics by Oasis and Smash Mouth.
The crowd had their arms around each other, singing until their voices gave out.
When a woman who had just been dancing on the floor jumped up onto the stage, the band did not stop. The room only got louder.
Jam Band
Even when the white closing lights came on across the floor, we kept dancing.
Outside, the street was quiet again. The cold air slowly brought the excitement back down.
Beyond the darkness, the mountains stood as black shapes looking down over the town.
Over those few days, I had seen some of the most stunning landscapes in the world and kept shooting through the camera.
And yet, what moved me most was a few hours with the people who actually lived there.
No matter how grand the scenery, what I am drawn to in the end is the people living in that place.
Looking back, what stays burned in the memory is never the landscape itself. It is always the slightly rough, everyday lives of the people who call it home.
Sean, James, and everyone around them seemed to love their town and each other deeply.
Watching them, I thought of my own hometown.
I have people I care about, and my hometown I love, Sumida.
Seeing them made me want to take better care of where I come from.
Higashikawa, a small town in Hokkaido, is apparently a sister city of Canmore.
A few years ago, the last trip I took within Japan before deciding to move abroad, was through Higashikawa and the area around it.
One day I would like to bring them there.
Canmore was only supposed to be a place to sleep.
But by stepping into their living room, it had become, without me realizing it, the real destination of the whole trip.
Canmore
