Is the burning of Jasper really worth all that oil?

Please, not Jasper. With that thought, many Canadians went to sleep Wednesday night wondering if that town in Jasper National Park, one of the prettiest, freshest, most heart-lifting places in this country, would survive.

- HEATHER A MALLICK

We woke up to learn about walls of flame eating the place so many of us first saw in childhood and have since visited with enormous pleasure. Those mountains, those icefields, those bark-and-branch landscapes so huge they could always be relied upon, were an emotional rock for us.

We were irrational. We believed nothing could touch the forests of Canada. Rocks don’t burn.

But with fires gulping at the U.S. and Canada right now, our rock has met a force so great that it’s difficult for firefighters to describe it and journalists to get close. Humans, unable to breathe the hot toxic air of burning forests plus built structures, have had to fall back.

Even before fire hit the town, James Eastham, a Parks Canada wildfire information officer, told reporters, “Fire behaviour was intense.” As John Vaillant wrote last year in his stunning bestselling book “Fire Weather” — I again recommend you read it — fires carried by great winds are now so extreme that they seem to take living form. They are beasts.