The lights are dim, with a spotlight hovering over a single microphone.
First on stage is Niki Wilson.
The local science writer was at the Downstream Restaurant and Lounge to share a story—one of driving solo up the Alaska Highway and, along the way, encountering a couple of rough and tumble northern men in the Liard River Hot Springs.
Wilson was the first of nine storytellers to take the mic for the fourth annual Grizzlies Storytelling Evening—a fundraiser for the midget girls hockey team—and it didn’t take long before she had the crowd in stitches, as she described herself hightailing it out of the hot springs, bear spray in hand, after hearing one of the men—a bushy-bearded trapper—say “I haven’t seen a woman in six months.”
The story only gets better when the trapper shows up at the Liard Hotsprings Lodge—the only hotel in town—and pulls up a chair: “can I ask you a question?” he inquires.
“I don’t answer,” recalled Wilson with a laugh. “I’m deer in the headlights at this point, because I’m thinking, ‘this is the lodge where you could easily have REDRUM written on the walls and see twin apparitions in the hallways’—I’m in the middle of nowhere!”
Despite her overwhelming fear, the trapper continues, reaching behind the counter to pull out a poster “of him and two sort of Baywatch-style women with blonde hair and big boobs and they’re all in fur bathing suits under the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.
“And he says, ‘my question for you is, would you like to buy a fur bikini?’”
Needless to say, Wilson didn’t purchase a bikini—but she still regrets that decision to this day.
With a story like that, Wilson was a tough act to follow, and yet somehow each of the subsequent storytellers managed to draw bouts of laughter from the sold-out crowd, whether it was Shawn Cardiff’s story of losing his canoe down the Athabasca River or Christopher Reed’s “how I met your mother” tale of falling in love with his wife and then trying to create the perfect Grand Canyon proposal.
And then came Greg Horne, sharing a story that has become an urban legend in the Rocky Mountain parks: the story of a man, an outhouse, a pine marten and a trip to the hospital.
The year is 1978 and Horne is in Banff for an ice climbing adventure with some friends from the University of Alberta. It’s their first day in the park, having driven up after school, and they’re getting set up at the Castle Mountain Hostel.
Then, nature calls and Chuck heads to the outhouse.
“I’m back inside,” recalled Horne, “and there’s a fireplace there, there’s a bunch of people, we’re enjoying ourselves and then we hear this muffled kind of sound: somebody’s yelling outside.
“So I go to the porch, and there’s an outside light, and not quite between the outhouse and the hostel Chuck’s holding his groin and he’s all covered in blood and he’s saying ‘Help me! Help me! I’ve been bitten.”
Following a few confusing minutes, trying to determine how to stop the bleeding and who should apply pressure to the wound, the group piled back into the car and drove to the hospital, where a disbelieving nurse wouldn’t be convinced that a pine marten had in fact bitten Chuck’s dangly bits—at least until she saw the wound.
“So no examining room, anything, it was right there in the waiting room, because she’s thinking: Friday night drunks, practical joke. So Chuck showed her and she was like, ‘Yup, OK, we’re calling a doctor.’
“So Chuck gets fixed up and we go back to the hostel and it’s now probably two in the morning, but in true hard-man fashion, the next day we go ice climbing,” recalled Horne with a grin.
“Chuck was definitely a strong guy.
“It was profound enough of an event that he actually became a medical doctor and to get into med school or pre-med, somewhere in that process, you have to do an interview in front of a bunch of doctors, so the question was ‘what is the most profound thing that’s ever happened to you in your life’—well did he ever have a card to pull out of his back pocket.
“He said, as soon as he was halfway through the story, he knew he was in med school.”
Along with Horne, Wilson, Reed and Cardiff, there were also stories from Monika Schaefer, Alex Rideout, Steve Blake, Paulette Blanchette-Dube and Dee Jessome.
In February, the Midget Grizzlies will be hosting their fifth annual event, with some of the best stories from the previous four years making a comeback. Keep your eyes on the Fitzhugh for details about that event as the time comes closer.
Nicole Veerman
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