THE LESS I KNOW THE BETTER

JASPER NATIONAL PARK, ALBERTA-2025

Banff. Alberta. Met a girl at the Dusty Boot Saloon after a long day hiking looking for bighorn. And boy, did I smell like I'd just walked out of a locker room. Unkempt with four days of no shaving, unwashed hair covered by a beanie that was doing everyone a favor. Lookin sharp if your reference photos are a collage of Sitka magazines and homelessness epidemic posts. Hit it off the way you do when you're twenty and your brain is still finishing construction and struggling to get the funding to do so, forgetting the difference between interest and commitment. We decided to make it official when I got back to Bozeman which felt like a great idea at the time and continued to feel like a great idea right up until it didn't. In retrospect, she couldn't get me in the sack that night so she played the long game. I played defense. Eye on the ball.

She lived in Jasper. I was in Bozeman. Normal, well adjusted people would have maybe looked at a map, then their bank account and called it a day. I am not normal people. I drove twenty three hours straight through the Roosville port because that's the kind of romantic gesture that looks great in retrospect if it works out and absolutely deranged in retrospect if it doesn't. Spoiler Alert.

The border officer was a woman in her early sixties with the energy of someone's grandmother who had seen everything and found most of it entertaining in the earlier years and endearing at this moment. I told her I was going up to Jasper because I met a girl and we started dating. She said oh that's so sweet honey in a tone that suggested she'd seen this exact situation before and had opinions about how it was going to go. She asked how long the drive was from Bozeman to Jasper. I said usually fourteen hours but it may be more. She scanned my passport, said be careful which was a double entendre for the entire situation and sent me on my way with zero other questions and the specific warmth of someone who knew something I didn't.

Hit the park gate at Banff and immediately the back end of my truck slipped out on the ice. I understood then that I was in for a haul. Sun set somewhere around Peyto Lake and by the time I was climbing the stretch toward the Columbia Icefields it was a full whiteout with no plowing and no visibility and roughly one thousand chances to turn around none of which I took. Staying alive on celsius drinks and imported Swedish pouches with 35 milligrams of nicotine because that's the tool kit and what the situation called for. Fantasizing the entire way. Twenty years old and in love and those two things together make you genuinely dangerous to yourself and every other Tom, Dick, and Harry on the Icefields Parkway.

Twenty three hours after leaving Bozeman I pulled into Jasper carrying my guitar case like a vagrant who'd just blown in off the highway which is exactly what I was. Went straight to the Stand Easy bar. Had to convince the sound tech to fit me into the queue which I did through a combination of confidence and the specific desperation of a man who had just driven through a whiteout blizzard and was not leaving without playing a set.

Met up with her and her friends. There was Jude from Jasper who had the energy of someone who knew things and was deciding whether to tell them. And there was Jackson from London working as a lifty at Marmot Basin, silver jewelry, bandanas, straight out of a Mick Jagger fashion shoot, the kind of person who makes you feel underdressed just by existing near you. We sat and drank Stiegl lager and Crown Royal shots served off a ski because, well, Jasper.

I got up and played Karma Police. This Love. A Horse With No Name. Les. She was staring at me the whole time with wide eyes which I took as a good sign and which I was not correctly interpreting. Went back to my truck to drop off the guitar case. She followed me talking about life with the clear intention of coming back to the Tonquin Inn where I had specifically booked a room so I would have somewhere to shower and shave and look presentable for a girl, which I almost never do, I sleep wrapped in canvas with my dog. No need to impress him. I declined on principle. Something about a hotel room felt like the wrong move. I thought I was being respectful. The two brain cells I had left were duking it out, and they were both winning. These two things are not always distinguishable at twenty.

Went out the next night and bar hopped until the witching hour. Jackson and I got into a discussion about the current US political situation where he was being performative in the specific way that people who don't live there sometimes are and I pushed back and we had an actual conversation about it. Nobody trashes on my country but me. I could see her watching us engage intellectually and I could see something shift in her expression in a way I didn't have the information yet to interpret correctly.

Ended up at a nightclub that was basically empty, without us there’d be tumbleweeds blowing in. The bouncer knew her by name. I filed that away in the part of my brain that was trying to get a read on the situation and ignored it. We danced to thumping music in an empty room. I cannot dance. I am from Utah and not in the Footloose way. I never learned. I looked like a man in a full body cast shifting his weight trying to stay upright. She was in fact not gracious about it.

Went back to Circle K at 3am absolutely plastered. She bought me a hot dog which I took as a positive sign because buying someone a hot dog at 3am is an intimate gesture F. Scott Fitzgerald would have written about if not for a publisher. The whole night Jackson had been giving me this London romantic spiel about love and pursuit and how I should go for it.

That's when Jude materialized fully as a messenger from God or the universe or wherever it is that delivers specifically this kind of news.

Hey buddy. None of us knew you guys were official. She slept with two guys at once the night before you got here. So sorry. Next time you’re in town I'll get you a beer.

Went back to the hotel. Threw up immediately from the Red Bull vodka. Dialed up my buddy to relay the data crying laughing at the absurdity of it all. It slowly became 100% proof crying and I curled up on the bathroom floor and slept there because that felt appropriate.

Woke up the next morning. Put on my game face. Did some jumping jacks. That's what I'm built for, I think. Drove to the Valley of the Five Lakes because I needed somewhere to put all of it and I had actual work to do for tax purposes and the lakes didn't care what had happened at the Circle K.

Found a bull elk doing his absolute level best to mate with every cow in the valley. Hours of it. Full send every time. Not a single one interested. He'd bugle. Nothing. He'd try again. Nothing. He kept going with the kind of optimism that is either deeply admirable or a sign of cognitive impairment and honestly I was in no position to judge.

I sat on a rock and watched him for a long time.

I was looking for something fast and clean across a border because two years of something bad had just ended and I needed proof of concept.

He didn't find what he was looking for either.

Brothers from very different mothers.

Called it The Less I Know The Better because god ain't that the truth.