TriumphAnt

Snapshots

We will bid adieu to Hikana this (Saturday) morning at 7:30 in the same suburban high school parking lot we picked her up at 1:30 am -- and has it already been two weeks ago?

I don’t know what she will carry home as the “highlight” memory of her all-too-brief stay in Canada. There were, after all, vast tracts of time spent in the company of friends and classmates on several great excursions aimed at providing a wide feel for life in Canada. So “Free time with host family” might fall a few items down her Top Ten list. (However I, for one, wondered at the wisdom at trooping the whole lot of them off to Fulton’s Farm, a local maple sugar bush, in late August. Granted, it would certainly be a great way to learn the intricacies of English conditional verb tenses: “And over here you see the sap lines where the sap would normally be running from the trees to the sugar shack if this were to have been a Spring month when the sap might have been running, but it’s not, so it isn’t, but it will – in April. Any questions?”)

But for me, the best day we had was a Sunday afternoon trip to a local wildlife park in Montebello, Quebec called Parc-Omega. (They have a website: www.parc-omega.com . It’s worth a click just to see the signature image on their front page.) It’s a concept that probably even PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) might tolerate. After all, unlike a traditional zoo and cages, the animals largely roam free on a huge acreage of both open and heavily forested parkland and the “captives” are we the visitors, who remain in our cars throughout much of the visit.

For Hikana, the day was made all the richer by adding her good friend, Nanako, to the activity. We set off, daughter Katie and I occupying the front seat, and our guests side by side in the back. We had already declared at the outset that, for them, it was a “No-English vacation”, thus providing Katie with the eavesdropping opportunity to pick out as much Japanese vocabulary as possible from the happy banter spilling over her shoulder throughout much of the drive.

An extra, and unexpected, highlight had been created by Nanako’s host, Kaye, who suggested we cross the river from Ontario to Quebec by way of the Cumberland Ferry. This we did and it proved to be not only a swift, smooth crossing that added yet another mode of transportation to our guests’ (and Katie’s) Canadian travel experiences, it also eliminated the multi-exit highway confusion I have always experienced getting from Ottawa, across the river by bridge to Gatineau (formerly Hull) and through several interchanges en route to the eastbound north river shore road to Montebello.

We had tried to explain to Hikana and Nanako that large animals would come to the car, and that was why we were packing 15 pounds of carrots. But I don’t think either of them fully understood, or quite foresaw, just how “to” the car a full-grown elk would actually come in search of a snack.

Even after we entered the park gate, and they saw off in the distance a pair of female elk approaching a car in front of us, neither was obviously prepared for what happened next. Like Katie and me in the front seat, Hikana and Nanako had rolled down their back windows. As we came to the first roadblock (a full-grown female elk standing smack in the middle of the road), we rolled gently to a stop. The next thing our guests knew, an animal whose head is larger than a full-grown domestic cat had jammed it (her head) into their laps, searching furiously for the carrots she could clearly smell that each was holding, in a concerted effort to yank the treat away.

The girls weren’t totally paralyzed. But they were clutching each other and screaming with that carnival-like “This is the scariest ride I’ve ever been on!” combination of laughing and shrieking that quite startled me with its intensity.

I gently nudged the accelerator and the elk reluctantly withdrew her head from the car, but not before she’d managed to get a sure-toothed grip on the carrot in Hikana’s hand. In seconds, both of our guests were calmed down enough to understand that it was OK to raise their windows to the point where only an elk nose could gain admission to the car – much more to their satisfaction, and much less to their fright. (They also discovered that the advantage to treating a full-grown mature bull elk, rather than a cow, to a carrot is that the typical car window doesn’t even come close to allowing admission by a head topped with a rack of antlers five feet across.)

It didn’t take long, however, as Katie and I happily continued to host elk faces, petting them as they tugged at the carrots, for both Hikana and Nanako to get into the routine, even calling to them and greeting them as we approached.

(At one point, Katie was snapping souvenir close-up photos, including an abstract close-up we now possess of an elk’s hair-covered neck. I think she must have been bumped by an incoming elk’s nose because she moved her hands to protect the camera. The elk, its decoy move successful, immediately managed to push its head all the way down to the floor of the car and we watched in shock as, in about a second (!), she snaffled more than half a bag of carrots, snatching them up from the floor and back out the window.

After we absorbed that nifty little theft, I started rolling the car forward once again. The last view I had of the elk was in the car’s rearview mirror as, her head shaking like a shark in a feeding frenzy, she shredded the bag sufficiently to send its three pounds or so of remaining carrots all over the road. I think Hikana and Nanako both must have felt some sympathy for Katie because, right up until their own carrot inventories were exhausted, they’d regularly offer another one forward to Katie each time another vagabond ruminant approached.)

Parc-Omega is also home to fallow deer, wild boar, raccoons, timber wolves, arctic wolves, black bears, Canada geese, ducks, coyotes, bison – which outside of an elephant is probably the biggest land animal I’ve ever seen. Those things are huge! (I know, I know: “Inside of an elephant, it’s too dark to see!” Nyuk nyuk nyuk. Nod to Groucho. But I digress.) – and beaver. Because the day was grey and cool, we saw them all, except the beaver who stayed resolutely enlodged. (The carnivores also roam in Parc-Omega, but on more tightly controlled acreage behind some fairly healthy fencing that, Jurassic Park-style, maintains a separation between them and our slowly meandering cars.)

Another of the park visit’s many highlights this day was a magnificent performance by a visiting falconer – and her charges – from a Birds of Prey park in southern Ontario. For half an hour, we were treated to displays of the hunting techniques of the likes of a peregrine falcon, barn owl, red-tailed hawk and bald eagle. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to gently sink our hands through the thick plumage of the moon-faced barn owl, which was quite amenable to being stroked gently by strangers.

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Much to my surprise, Hollywood B movies are right about one thing. A Japanese visitor to an English-speaking environment really does say, “Ah so!” – a lot. It’s said in precisely the same way I would say, “Oh, I see.” Sometimes the “Ah” portion was drawn out as Hikana would mentally assimilate an explanation, with “so” punctuating the realization and understanding. (“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh – so!”)

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Some curious customs officer in Japan is going to have to determine whether a package of Kellogg’s individual cereal box servings (Yes, the “Kel-Bol-Pak” is still alive and well.) of Froot Loops, Corn Pops, Frosted Flakes, Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies should be quarantined or not before Hikana will be permitted to open each of its vacuum-packed servings and unleash the aromas into the atmosphere surrounding Kameoka City. She bought the package to take home to her mother. Hopefully, both it and the can of President’s Choice “The Great Canadian Coffee” we gave her will be permitted entry into Japan.

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For some still unknown-to-us reason (not for lack of asking! But the reply was always a smile and a shrug.), Hikana and her classmates flash the peace sign in almost every single photo taken of them. In some cases, it varies slightly so as to be made by the index and baby fingers (which I tried to explain was actually the non-verbal “cheer” by fans of the University of Texas Longhorns football team – “Hook ‘em Horns!”). But mostly it’s the old 60s flower-child “Peace” gesture. Hikana and Nanako even have photos of each other with an about-to-be-bitten hot dog held right to their mouths with one hand, while the other is flashing the peace sign.

Personally, I suspect a school contest, with points awarded for the most creatively photographed environment in which the gesture is visible. We have a lovely photo of both Hikana and Nanako happily flashing the peace sign while lounging on the lush verdure that is the Chateau Montebello Hotel’s front lawn. We tried to persuade Hikana to identify it as “my host family house” when she returns home, and to point to an upper floor window in the venerable four-storey log castle as “my room”. She certainly got the joke but I suspect her obvious integrity will prevail.

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Remember your own school trips? If they were anything like mine, it was an annual event – usually made up of the one or maybe two graduating classes in the school, usually something for which you’d “volunteered” to stand behind a table during several of maybe 25 bake sales held over the course of the year (and every last one of which left you inevitably with six Chinette plates of some well-meaning nutrition-focused parents’ infliction of oatmeal date squares containing enough fibre to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry) – and the destination, often as not, was a city elsewhere in Canada, maybe even in the same province.

Well, here is a link to Hikana’s school and the online album of their end-of-year trips for 2004:

http://www.ujc.ritsumei.ac.jp/ujc/topics/2004/august/school_trip/

(Hikana is part of “Canada 2”. Sadly, she had to serve as referee for most of Team Sports Day, because early in the day she received an evil-looking bruise and a cut across her right wrist when she was whacked with a lacrosse stick.)

The site opens to a stream of destination bars down the left side, each clickable to a brief album of photos (note the frequency with which the peace sign appears) and a stream of captions in characters that will probably cause your computer to explode. I’ll save you the trouble if your computer says, “DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!!” or something equivalent in Gates-ese. The destinations include England, France, Germany, America, Australia, China, and two separate Canada groups. And that’s just for this year!

I read on one of the school’s English language information sites that Uji City’s Ritsumeikan – which Hikana told us enrolls about 3,000 students – is considered “elite”. With at least seven trips abroad annually for some 500 students in all, the photo evidence of the quality of its overseas trips -- and for that matter of the school itself -- would sure seem to bear out this description.

Certainly as a guest and, no doubt, new friend and future pen-pal, Hikana is as elite as they come.

We three are going to miss her.