Nov. 19, 2011

We awoke to a thin fresh coat of snow and the cawing of even more crows.

I tried once again to scare them off and when I stepped outside, one flapped toward me in an instant black second. My hands shot out to protect my face and the crow slammed into my forearms. I slashed away with my hands, making ‘blibble’ sounds with my pursed, freaked out lips and stumbled back inside, slamming the door.

Carrie laughed, believing I had tripped.

“Not funny,” I said. “That frigging thing wanted to peck my eyes out! And I haven’t had coffee yet. How the hell can a guy get his eyes pecked out before he gets a cup of frigging Joe?”

Then I noticed something move on the edge of the wetlands, just barely out of the cover of the snowy reeds and bulrushes.

It was Figaro, my former neighbour’s cat. He was a big, furry, friendly feline doing his rounds. I shouted gleefully to see him and loudly demanded that Carrie take a look.

The cacophony of the crows must have caught his attention. In retrospect, he was probably trying to come to us for a meal and some company.

“Look!” I shouted. “It’s Figaro! Holy shit – wow – look!” The sight of any life beyond us and crows was enthralling.

The cat was stone still now. He crouched down and sat motionless, barely visible due to the long, tan and brown grasses of the wetlands – the snow doing its best to give him away. His curiosity had now turned to caution as the 15 or 20 crows hopping about on the roof, deck railings and the nearby apple tree, posed a potential threat.

Just as I realized this, Figaro darted into the longer reeds, followed by several crows. We could follow his course through the wetlands by the movements of the crows, which grew in number as the chase progressed.

Noticing the deck free of crows, Carrie said, “Maybe we should get out of here now.”

I agreed and shouted at her to get her boots on and get in the car, parked on the other side of the house from the deck. While she scrambled to get in the car, I slid the door open again and shouted, “Get away from him you sons of bitches!”

A couple of crows broke from the chase and swooped back toward the house. I threw an old barbecue scraper at them.

I stepped back inside and slammed the door shut just as the crows appeared. One misjudged his approach and slammed into the glass door. Deprived of the usual droppings of the world to feast upon, the crows were now hunters.

It dropped to the decking and stood staring in, its head cocking to one side and its black eyes shining and blinking.

Carrie honked the horn.

I looked outside and noticed that the chase had come to an end. The crows were gathered in a thick clump. Figaro was a goner.

A rage boiled within me and I stormed outside to the vehicle, unconcerned about eye-pecking from above. I opened the back door to my X-Trail and grabbed at the shotgun.

Carried barked at me to get inside and her voice brought me out of my bloodlust.

Just as I closed the door and sat down in the driver’s seat, a number of crows appeared, with one landing on the hood. I honked the horn and it leapt into the air.

I hit the gas and we pulled out of the driveway.

Old habits: As I came to the end of the driveway, I stopped and carefully checked in both directions for cars. The driveway came out on a sharp corner and could be a disaster waiting to happen if not careful.

The crows caught up and fluttered around us.

“Go!” Carrie yelled.

As we sped down Westside Road toward Invermere, we were briefly followed by a sky spotted with flapping black dots. Crossing Toby Creek, we slowed down and noticed that the crows continued to pursue us.

“Go!” Carrie yelped. “Go, go, go!”

We now realized that while we appeared to be the only people left alive, we were also apparently a good food source.

“We need more firepower,” I said, as we sped toward the Invermere crossroads.

“Where are we going?” Carrie asked.

I admitted that I didn’t know.

“We really need to find out how alone we are,” I said. “That means we gotta go to Calgary. If there isn’t anyone there, then we have to assume that we really are experiencing corvid hell.”

After that, we drove in silence — through Radium Hot Springs, once a bustling tourist haven, into Kootenay National Park and once again become chilled as we drove up Sinclair Pass, over a road covered in snow — a road that would have been plowed and sanded, before. Vehicles left to final rolling endings continued to catch our eyes and every now and then I had to slow while passing carnage of all sorts and scales.

We had grown used to seeing cars on the sides of roads, but seeing them along the parkway, covered in snow, cold and empty, made us both swallow hard, imagining once again what might have happened to our world.

It was noon when we rolled into Banff, usually a packed-to-the-rafters tourist town.

Main street was more beautiful than I had ever seen it. Covered in snow, it was fresh and powdery and Rockwellian, sans the costumed locals and tourists scuff-clupping along in ski boots. A car lodged in the doorway to Wild Bill’s pub shucked that reverie in half a second.

Like Cranbrook, Kimberley and the Columbia Valley, Banff was still and void of life. But we were starting to notice more and more crows… and they were noticing us.

In Canmore, 22 km east, we stopped for gas, grateful that power was still on, once again, and as I pumped, Carrie stood watch with the shotgun. A pair of crows standing on the edge of a fence that obscured a garbage can at a neighbouring fast food joint, eyed us like hungry cowards.

With the X-trail filled up and a pilfered five gallon can stowed in the back for good measure, we pushed on to Calgary and I was reminded of a past trip down the Trans-Canada, when an ice storm turned the highway into a skating rink. The road, though covered in a thin blanket of snow, was fine to drive on. The trip I refer to featured a vehicle in the ditch or median every mile or so. At one point I passed a sanding plow truck on its side. When those guys go over — you know you are in a bad highway situation.

There were even more cars in the ditches and median, and scattered across the highway, but for some reason, this journey wasn’t as weird as the previous one. Even the sight of a multi-car pile-up at the Kananaskis turn off did little to pique my imagination.

Carrie, noticing the casino at the southeastern side of the junction, joked we should stop “for a little gamble.”

It was becoming dark when we pulled into what was truly the weirdest time of our lives.

Calgary, a city of one million souls, was still and covered with a light blanket of snow.

“Where do you want to stay?” I asked.

“The Fairmont,” Carrie immediately responded. “I have a coupon that will give us 50% off.”

We cried we laughed so hard. I was wiping tears from my eyes as we crossed the Centre Street Bridge into downtown Calgary. Ravens sat on the lions that corner post the bridge, once featured in a cheesy Steven Segal film. In fact, the bridge looked a bit like that scene, with vehicles strewn across it. Ghosts of the immediate chaos that occurred that day swirled like the wind that gusted down the Bow River.

We crept through a maze of vehicles strewn higgledy-piggledy about. Now and then I had to reverse and take a different route. At one point, as we reversed to find a through-route, we noticed a good number of crows and ravens hopping about over something half a block down a side street.

As I pulled in front of the Fairmont Palliser Hotel, Calgary’s classic railway inn, I declared, “We are parking right here! The last time I stayed here the buggering swines made us pay obscene volumes of cash for parking.”

Carrie matter-of-factly added, “Don’t worry about it. Money is no object.”

We chuckled about that as we walked up into the hotel. Like everything else, the doors were left wide open. A bellboy’s uniform, covered in snow, made for a surreal visage as we climbed up the steps. Luggage lay in a bloated white pile nearby.

We leapt out of our skin when a cat meowed beside the door and it bolted inside as I swung the door open with the strength of a terror seizure.

Carrie walked around behind the front desk and rummaged about, before letting out a sharp “yes!” and held up what she claimed was a master key. “This should do,” she said happily.

The lights were still on inside the hotel, which I assumed they would be. I actually stopped at a red light earlier. Old habits.

We eventually settled on a lavish top floor suite. It wasn’t the best one. The best room had not been cleaned before the chambermaids disappeared from our plain or from the face of the world.

Looking out over the city from our 12th floor perch, we gawped at the sea of lights that grew with the completion of the sun’s setting.

“All that light and yet no life,” Carrie said softly. “It just doesn’t compute.”

Her eyes were looking northwest, at the checkerboard patterns of light on Calgary’s steel and glass tower skyline. My eyes looked northeast, toward the airport, and a dark strip cut through a twinkling residential area had me wondering. I knew Calgary. It wasn’t the Deerfoot Trail and it wasn’t a river valley or a park area. What I was looking at was the carnage of a jetliner crash.

The stillness of the old hotel was omnipresent. The stillness of the great western city was despairing.

We’d been snacking during the drive and neither of us felt like eating, or doing anything. So we went to bed, but not before locking the hotel room door. Masters of a lavish domain, with a city at our disposal, and we slipped under the covers and held one another.

No sirens wailed in the distance; no transit buses pulled away from curbs; no horns honked. There were no hollowed voices bouncing off the walls of the hotel corridor.

Like every night, as we clung to each other and drifted down to sleep, we both suffered torments of the damned — thinking of our kids and our so recently past life. Less than two weeks ago we were worrying about making money and keeping ahead of the game. We talked about our kids and fussed and fretted and laughed and marched from day to day with a purpose, disguising our dislikes and twinges of pettiness with masks made of maturity.

Now we cuddled in a king-sized bed in a hotel room we’d never be able to afford if life was ‘normal’ and quietly mourned for our past life… for our kids and for some fresh tunes on the radio and a news report or two.

Even though we felt completely alone, we still kept the shotgun at reach.

Outside in the hallway, a cat meowed. Its staccato mournfulness stayed with me as I fell into a fitful and disturbing sleep.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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