Relativity

Einstein, and a Proposed Vacation Trip to the Canadian Rockies

By Dan Rattiner

About five years ago, I got an invitation to a newspaper publisher’s convention. It would be a Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the middle of January in the town of Banff, Canada. I had no interest in going to this convention, but I read about it anyway because it was so far, well, north. They told me how to get there. Go to Montana, and then go north. When you get to Calgary, go even more north.

What struck me about this was that up until that moment, I’d thought the coldest place that ever was was in Montana. On TV, when the weatherman would talk in the middle of winter about the record low, he’d stand in front of the weather map and point to some town way up high bumping up to the boundary line at the very top of his screen. Eleven below zero in Wolf Point, Montana, he’d say. Doesn’t get much colder than that.

Well, here I was holding in my hand an invitation to something that WAS colder than that. How could they even THINK of holding a long winter weekend up there?

Now at the time, I did know there was Canada above Montana, but that was something I knew in my head. In my heart, I knew the coldest and most farthest north place on the planet was Montana. Who could go north of Montana?

That night, I had a dream. I was going by myself to that convention. I had taken a plane to Billings, Montana and had transferred to a little piper cub with skis on the bottom. Up into the sky we went, and we turned north into the bitterest snowstorm imaginable and fifty-two hours later, we somehow landed in Banff. The pilot walked me through the blinding snowstorm to the airline terminal, which was a little wooden shack with a man inside in a snowsuit standing alongside a pot-bellied stove rubbing his hands together.

“Here we are,” the pilot said. “Banff.” Then he left.

The man looked up at me.

“I’m here for the publisher’s convention,” I said. The shack was just stud walls. There was no insulation. There was a single light bulb hanging from a string in the center of the shack. It swung back and forth as the wind howled. And bits of snow came through the cracks.

“That was quite a time,” he said.

“They’ve had it here before? Last year?”

“Last week. You missed it.”

“I MISSED it?”

“You’re a week late.”

“Oh my GOD. What do I do?” I looked out the window. The buzzing of the piper cub was fading off into the distance. “I guess I better get back out of here. When is the next plane out?”

“A week from Thursday,” the man said.

In the next scene, I was in the Banff Hospital, where, in answer to my question of what there was to do in Banff for nine days, the airport manager had told me to walk down the frozen main street and visit with the patients. People did that in Banff, he said. And so, now I was going from bed to bed trying to cheer people up. The patients were mostly suffering from frostbite or scurvy or injuries caused by wolves. Then I woke up. What a nightmare.

Now, all of this is by way of introducing you to what I believe is a proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Every year in the wintertime, both before I had this nightmare and after, I go on a winter vacation somewhere. I like adventure. I’ve been to the Canary Islands, Tikal, Guatemala, New Zealand, Cuba, Istanbul, Moscow. Last winter, the trip was to Botswana, Africa, where my girlfriend and I went off on a safari for a month.

This winter, we originally started planning for a trip to Beijing and the Yangtze River, but then changed our mind for something a bit closer to home.

“I’ve always wanted to take one of those sightseeing trains through the Canadian Rockies,” I told her. I was envisioning a private sleeping compartment, a dining car, porters and interesting international travelers, a bar car and a viewing car with skylights and picture windows positioned so you can enjoy the snow covered mountains as they slid by.

She said she’d like to do that too.

I like planning the trips. I put together a calendar of the days we will be away, I make phone calls, I get brochures, I make reservations. For Africa last year, this included dugout canoe trips through hippo country, helicopter trips over Victoria Falls, and, so I could stay in touch with the office, an international cell phone, a portable satellite dish for the Internet, and a 12-volt battery. At many places we stayed, the electric power was only available during the day. We had to have a battery.

So now I am planning this trip, and I am scheduling drives down the Glacier Highway along the ridge of the Continental Divide between Jasper and Lake Louise, airplane flights from the cowboy town of Calgary, and ferryboat rides from the small city of Victoria, British Columbia to this tiny cluster of islands in the Vancouver Straight called the San Marco Islands.

And my girlfriend comes over and says this:

“Are we going to be staying anywhere for a long weekend? If so, I was thinking we could invite the kids to fly out, spend a few day with us, and then fly home.”

My initial reaction to this was — are you out of your mind? And then immediately I realized that, indeed, unlike almost all the other vacations I have taken, what she was proposing was entirely possible, because we will be just a couple of hours by plane from New York City. In my mind, we would be on the moon. In reality, we would be right next door.

Which proves Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

I feel ridiculous. I do wish she’d never said that.