If you had asked me, I would have said that I learned the lyrics to “O Canada!” in grade school. Montana shares a border with Canada and we often went to the southern parts of Alberta for business. The Hutterite colony north of our town had a special relationship with a colony in southern Alberta. The stores exchanged Canadian coins as if they were US currency.

The problem with that memory is that none of my brothers or sisters seem to have learned the song, and they went to the same grade school as I. And I don’t think that my classmates know the song, either.

So it is a mystery where I learned the song. There are a lot of songs that I know that I can’t tell you where or how I learned them.

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide,
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

I learned the song with the last line repeated.

Here is the strange thing about the national anthem of our neighbor to the north. It has two official versions. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The nation has two official languages. What is surprising to me is that the official French version is nowhere near the English in meaning. While Anglophiles sing of patriot love, Francophones are singing about a glorious garland of flowers. The English come awfully close to quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson with “The True North strong and free,” while the French speakers sing about ready to carry the cross. While English singers pray to God to keep the land glorious and free. The French are singing about valor steeped in faith protecting homes and rights.

You have to admit it is a fairly strange country.

So what is it about Canada that holds such an attraction for me?

I love my home and the nation of my birth. And I have seen far more of the United States than of Canada. Our country is home to spectacular natural beauty and incredibly diverse landscapes. And there is so much more that could be seen if I had time to explore.

But I find myself reading brochures about driving the Dempster Highway from the Yukon up to Inuvik on the Makenzie River delta. I’d like to drive it in the winter so I could extend up the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk. The road is named after the dogsled trail of the same name. the dogsled trail was named in honor of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer William John Ducan Dempster. A true mountie, Dempster was lost trying to make a winter rescue in the far north. At Tuktoyaktuk, you can get face to face with the true natives of the north.

I bet I’ve watched 30 or more videos of sunrise off the point at St. John’s Newfoundland. I’d love to rise in the dark and hike out the point to be the first on the North American continent to see the sunrise for the day. You have to love a province that is so sure of itself that it has its own time zone. the hour in Newfoundland is the half hour in most of the rest of the world. And how many cities can you name that have an apostrophe in their name?

I’ve driven across the Saskatchewan prairies from Regina to Saskatoon and up into Edmonton. I always wished I had taken a short detour on that trip and gone to Moose Jaw. A place with a name like that ought to be interesting.

I’ve drive up north from Great Falls, Montana through Lethbridge to Calgary.

And we took a glorious trip one year when we crossed the border between East Glacier and Waterton and then went up through Banff, took a jaunt on the Columbia Ice Fields and made our way to Jasper. I could do that drive again and again.

We love Kelowna BC with its gorgeous lake. I’ll never forget the trip up Canada 101 and the various ferry crossings to Powell River - the end of the road on the BC coast.

O Canada! What is it about that place that holds such allure for me? I keep a copy of the Milepost handy to study the route of the Alaska Highway. Dawson Creek, Delta Junction, Whitehorse - all of those are places I’ve seen in my dreams but never visited.

I can get sappy reading Robert Service poems - an affliction that my wife does not share. The Call of the Yukon seems real to me. I never saw the movie, and I don’t really want to. The poem and my imagination are enough to keep me attracted.

O Canada! What is it that makes me long to get in a bush plane and fly north from Lake Winnipeg all the way to Hudson Bay. The name of Nunavut is enough to attract the adventurous. Did you know that the Cree call the bay Kangiqsualuk ilea? That’s the same name they have for Lake Winnipeg. They aren’t confused by having two great northern bodies of water sharing the same name.

We spent an afternoon in the Hudson Bay Company archives in Winnipeg once and I couldn’t get enough of the old photographs of the distant places that the voyageurs visited in the summer. the northland in the center of Canada is more water than land. With the right canoe, you could paddled from ice out to freeze up and not run out of places to explore in a lifetime.

And then there are the ice roads. They used to use sleds and dogs to travel the ice roads. Now they use sophisticated pumps and snowplows to create ice roads that carry semi trucks over the water to take supplies to remote locations. Imagine driving on a road that is floating on the surface of the water.

O Canada! What is it that makes me want to go to Hay River and board a Buffalo Air DC3 bound for Yellowknife?

It may be that we all need to have a bit of fantasy in our lives - the dream of a place we’ve never been.

I still have no idea where I learned that song.

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