Last Thursday, when one of our granddaughters was expressing her impatience to get out and get gardening, I told her about a session I attended many years ago at the Alberta Library Conference in Jasper, when author and garden expert Lois Hole urged us to “Go home and plant a row of peas right away. If the weather cooperates, you’ll have peas by Canada Day, and if they freeze, you’ve only lost a package of seeds.”
After that conversation, I thought, “It’s the last Thursday in April – the day we all would be heading to Jasper Conference.” And for many years during my 28 years on St. Paul Library Board and a few times since I joined the Elk Point Municipal Library Board, that was exactly what I and my fellow board members did.
Those three-day trips to the mountains just as spring was breaking out were more than a mini vacation, they were filled with new information, new experiences and new friendships, woven into a weekend of learning more about ways to improve our libraries and enhance the lives of those who borrowed our libraries’ materials and took part in our programs. We board members learned more about governance, voted on decisions at the Alberta Library Trustees Association annual meeting, and sometimes ended up in sessions that were more than a little bit challenging.
One of the early years was extremely special, when the St. Paul board chair and I drove to Jasper in her car stuffed with helium filled balloons, and the next afternoon, stood on the upper balcony at Jasper Park Lodge to see the Northern Lights Library System officially launched with all those balloons floating skyward in celebration.
That was a lovely day, as were the majority of the weekends we spent there over the years, never with major weather issues while we were there, not even the year when we had a serious snowfall here at home the day before we left, and wore parkas and snow boots on the westbound trip. Yes, one year we did get snow during the Saturday evening, while we were enjoying entertainment and activities, a complete surprise when we headed back to our cabins, because before the dinner hour, we had basked in the sun on our decks during happy hour.
Many years, we saw the year’s first leaves either on our way to Jasper or the way back, and almost every year, some of the conference attendees went out to enjoy the lodge’s golf course, sometimes coming back with complaints about the state of their golf balls due to the presence of incontinent geese on the golf course. The lodge offered nature walks around the lake every year, and many of us took advantage of this opportunity to get out and enjoy nature, while learning about the wildlife in the area, and learning to give the many elk that wandered the site a wide berth.
One year we even had the opportunity to go mountain climbing. It was a small mountain at the south end of Beauvert Lake, and we didn’t climb all the way up it, it was grass covered as far up it as we went and even had some stairs set into the steeper parts, but it offered a different and beautiful view of the lake from its far end, and a new adventure.
The lake itself was always something we looked forward to seeing – wondering on our way to the mountains if it would be open water, still ice covered or a mixture of the two, and over the years, we learned that it could be any one of the above, but always very beautiful.
That annual getaway always seemed to me like a major reward for our library board duties, attending meetings, working on planning everything from budgets to events for patrons to enjoy and working a bingo every now and then. Bingos, to support library activities, go on. I worked one this weekend, much easier now handing out cards to the workers on the floor than it was out selling the cards myself, but as I sat there when no one needed my efforts, I thought of Jasper Conference, and I sighed…
