The Day Captain Kirk Almost Killed Me

After spending four days in Banff National Park and the Banff public campground Lea and I decided to cross over the mountains once again to British Columbia to Kootenay National Park in eastern British Columbia. So we headed north to Castle Mountain and hung a left on Highway 93 which ran along the Vermillion River between high mountain peaks and pine forests.

The weather was gorgeous and sunny. Along the way we saw a black bear, the first bear we had seen on our journey from Utah through Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia. We saw breathtaking mountains, breathtaking turquoise rivers, and breathtaking turquoise lakes, all of which were an illusion, nothing more than sunlight bouncing off the rocks below the depths. 

We couldn’t listen to the radio because not even the CBC signal could make its way around or over the mountain fortress surrounding us as we drove. We wouldn’t have listened to it anyway because everything around us was so spectacular. We must have had the radio on the CBC, however, because suddenly as we emerged from our impregnable mountain fortress the radio burst on. 

The first thing we heard—it was almost as if the voice of god had suddenly appeared out of the burning bush--was Captain Kirk, Canadian born William Shatner. Both Lea and I, though we were not Star Trek groupies or devotees—trekkers or trekkies—of course, knew who William Shatner was. I may have known at one time that he had had a musical career but if I did I had forgotten it long ago. It was Shatner’s musical career that was the subject of the CBC programme. He was singing the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on our suddenly working radio. It was punctuated by witty, parodic, and snarky commentary about the recording and Shatner’s musical career by a CBC host who was obviously having way too much fun. So soon were we. The song and the commentary had us in stitches immediately. We laughed so hard, in fact, that in retrospect I don’t know how I kept the Camaro on the road. 

Shatner singing the Beatles was only the beginning of the hilarity. Next up on the programme was Leonard Nimoy singing a song based on JRR Tolkien’s fantasy books, “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”. Lea and I’s laughter may not have been as deep, as hearty, or as dangerous as that for Shatner and “Lucy". The shock and surprise of the now old was gone. What wasn’t gone, however, was the memory of this crazy experience, an experience I will never forget, an experience that could have injured and killed us both. C’est la vie.