Having survived searing heat, stifling humidity, and the odd violent thunderstorm, Ben and Cia Gadd are back in Jasper after two weeks as part of Alberta’s delegation to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. 

“Almost one million people came through the festival and it felt like we spoke to most of them,” Cia said. 

The Gadds were in a tent located near the entrance to the festival area on Washington’s famed National Mall, and as fortune would have it, their enclosure was supplied with a large-scale relief map of Alberta (circa 1980).

“I guess they didn’t know where else to put it,” Ben said. “It was a good location in the end, because we spent a lot of time filling people in on geography.”

In the thousands of conversations the pair had with visitors, the only common denominator seemed to be the variety of their guests’ knowledge of the province.

“It varied from people wanting to know what Alberta was to people who had been to the Rockies and wanted to talk about fond memories,” Cia said.

With their display boasting a mannequin in mountaineering gear and large rock samples from the Jasper area, the Gadds were a hit with kids in particular.

“They loved our rock specimens, we had one that you could spray water on to reveal some fossils, and that was popular,” Ben said.

As their younger visitors got hands on, Ben and Cia had the chance to explain the geological processes that formed the Rockies, describing how sea creatures like trilobites could end up fossilized high in the mountains. After one such explanation, a parent stepped forward, identified himself as a geologist, and told the Gadds that it was one of the best descriptions he had heard.

“That was pretty nice to hear,” Cia said.

The event was about more than just informing visitors to the exhibition, however.

“The point of the festival was to get people talking,” Ben said. “They would tell us things about where they lived and what they did, all about these amazing places they knew about. We learned a great deal.”

They also had some opportunity to check out the other displays on the Mall, both those from Alberta and the other featured areas, which included aboriginal basket weaving and Chicago Latino jazz culture.

“We had surprisingly little time,” Ben recalled.

On one occasion, they had surprisingly little time to evacuate the Mall when officials announced a thunderstorm was on the way. Although the Gadds were only expecting something similar to the summer storms that strike after hot days in Jasper, what followed was a maelstrom of considerable ferocity.

“They brew up some beauties down there,” Ben said with a smile. The Gadds’ tent was somewhat protected from the elements, but a fellow Albertan delegate was not so fortunate and his tent collapsed in the July 4 storm, crushing his carefully machined scale models of oil rigs and equipment.

As for the real oil industry, the Gadds had been looking forward to a public dialogue on the environmental costs of development at a series of round-tables, only to find few willing participants.

“The sessions didn’t turn out to be as controversial as the Smithsonian had hoped for,” Ben said. “They (the museum) aren’t interested in any official line from government or business but these people had no interest in attending the round-tables, they felt insecure I guess.”

Ben even encountered one representative of a major oil firm who told him the company was nervous about saying the wrong thing. 

“I told her to relax… I wasn’t going to be nasty to them.”

In the end, the Gadds and the other delegates who did turn up took questions from the audience, both Americans and Albertans that traveled south to take in the exhibition.

“We had a guy stand up from one of the bands around Fort MacMurray to describe the native position on all this, which was great and something I hadn’t heard before,” Ben said.

It was another presentation that stood out as the highlight of Ben’s experience, however. He was invited to present a lecture on the natural history of the Canadian Rockies at the American Natural History Museum.

“Just speaking at the same podium where so many prominent scientists and researchers had talked was in a way the highlight for me,” he said. “Plus, the event was at noon hour and I was cool and out of the heat!”

Cia’s crowning glory was heat-related as well. Asked to provide a campfire cooking demonstration, she had to tend a hot fire for nearly two hours in the humidity of late afternoon.

“I baked my bannock, I explained how I did it and the highlight was that I didn’t faint face-first into the fire,” she said.

From adventures in bannock-making to informing one inquisitive guest that he could not plan to build his cabin on a secluded lake in Jasper National Park, the Gadds agreed that the experience had been well worth the trip.

“It was once in a lifetime,” Ben said. “In the end it did cost us a little, but it provided us with memories that no other experience could have.”

One man spent an extended period of time at the Gadds tent one afternoon, asking questions and taking pictures. He returned the following day with a CD of the snapshots and presented it to Ben and Cia in appreciation of their being part of the event.

“That was indicative of the friendliness of this event,” Ben said. “When you think of a big American city, you think muggers, thieves, pushy-pushy people, but our 

experience was exactly the opposite.”