Spiritual Gleanings & Annora Brown
Annora Brown’s High Water Adventure – notes by Joyce Sasse
(35 years later, in her autobiographical book “Sketches from Life”, pioneer artist Annora Brown recounted a magical day spent along the shore of Cameron Lake in Waterton Park… The best I can do is try to tell the highlights.)
When the afternoon sun melts the mountain glacier snows, I can almost hear Annora Brown describe one of her most delightful but challenging experiences. It started with a friend rowing her by boat to the “far end of Cameron lake”. There she disembarked and let her curiosity lead her forward … to see what magic she might find on the plateau above the lake.
“Taking my lunch and my sketch-book in a bag on my shoulder”, she explained, she found a dry stream-bed along the water’s edge and pulled herself upward, rock by rock.
“Coming up over the edge of the brown cliff, I stepped into heaven”. There, at the foot of the glacier, she saw shoulder-high rainbows of wild flowers. Breasting her way through them, she came on “a tiny hidden lake on which floated icebergs the size of small buildings”.
The water was so clear she could see the blue bases of the icebergs – and then “saw further down into the brown depths below”.
“There is something so heady about the combination of flowers and snow” she wrote … “The time flowed over me. I could not even sketch.”
Annora’s words were so beautifully descriptive: the bowed heads of the purple fleabanes … the weight of a bumble bee on a leaf … a humming bird buzzing her red hat-band … the song of a white-throated sparrow … and “the chatting of a tumultuous stream.”
It was a humbling afternoon spent at a time, she said, when others, thousands of miles away, were having their homes bombed. (cf. W.W. II)
“With that solemn thought in mind, I returned to the edge of the cliff to find the dry stream bed that would lead me back to the shore.” Imagine her surprise! She kept returning to the spot she was sure she had marked … “But the place where the dry bed should have been was a rushing torrent.”
It was then that she realized the effect of the warm sun on the glacier’s ice! “There was only one thing to do … without slipping on the wet stones, I picked my way back slowly rock-by-rock through the icy torrent”.
When she finally got back to Cameron’s lake-short-line, she found her friend sitting despondently by the boat. While her friend had caught her limit of trout, a gopher stole the lunch she laid on a rock for a moment.
“With one of us dripping wet and the other ravenous, we covered the three miles of rowing and the fifteen miles of torturous mountain road (back to the Waterton townsite) in record time.”
Each June as I hear about the rising stream-flows along the edge of the mountains, my mind recalls how fulfilling that afternoon must have been for Annora. The grace of the Almighty’s gift in such moments is precious beyond measure.