Margot Finley’s Uncle Charlie’s house was one of the more than 350 structures destroyed by the wildfire that swept through Jasper, Alberta on July 24, 2024.
But “structure” is a terribly empty word for what’s gone, Margot writes.
At a dinner last winter I learned that our waiter had spent time in Jasper. “You might have run into my uncle,” I said. “Charlie…”
“Finley?” he finished the name for me. “Skis, like, 150 days a year? Beautiful house on a corner lot?”
Yes, that’s him.
The waiter might have added: retired train engineer, meticulous and talented gardener, perpetual winner of the local Halloween costume contest, generous host, collector of fine wines and Scotch, but those were the two big ones: skiing and house.
This might sound like a eulogy for a person, but it’s not. Thankfully, Uncle Charlie and thousands of others evacuated Jasper safely, before that awful inferno arrived in town on July 24. He fled to a motel in Hinton, a cell phone begrudgingly in his possession for the first time in his life, so that his loved ones could check in on him.
No, this isn’t a eulogy for a person, but it is a tribute to a home, and a way of life carved out for half a century in Jasper. Charlie’s gorgeous house on the west side of Jasper—carefully built, crafted, and nurtured by him for almost 50 years, lovingly filled with exquisite food and drink, and irreplaceable antiques and heirlooms—was one of the hundreds of homes taken by the fire.
A shift worker as a train engineer, sleep has always been important to Charlie, so his beds were of the highest quality. A visit to Turret Street always meant waking up from a deep sleep under a cozy goose down comforter, sunken into an impossibly-soft mattress. The only time that I didn’t get an exquisite night of sleep at Charlie’s was when he woke us up in the middle of the night so we wouldn’t miss the Aurora Borealis dancing over the mountains outside his big picture window.
A visit to Charlie’s meant walking down the gleaming hand-hewn wood stairs to sit by the kitchen’s bay window, which was perfectly situated for morning sun. It meant smelling the aroma of coffee, which Charlie had hand-cranked until it was perfectly ground. It meant hearing the splutter of wild blueberry pancakes cooking on the stove. Looking around the bright room, you would see the elk-hide couch, my great-uncle’s singular oil paintings of the woods and lakes of Ontario, and the solid front door built by Charlie from Douglas fir.
After breakfast, we might walk out into the yard, which was lined with the stone fences and high hedges Charlie built and grew to keep the elk from eating his garden. The grass still wet with dew, we would smell the sweet peas, marvel at the tomatoes growing in his hand-built green house, or help choose the “roughage,” as Charlie called it, which we’d eat with dinner. The triangle-shaped yard was home to countless bocce ball games. Already benefitting from home field advantage, Charlie was known to take the match into the streets of Jasper when he really wanted a win.
In summer, he would pack a picnic of sandwiches and we’d head out in his prehistoric Volvo to hike or swim or spot bears. Maybe we would tour around town on one of his lovingly restored bicycles, or lie in his hammock. During one winter visit, we skated on the lake at the Jasper Park Lodge, skating after fish that swam below the glassy ice. And skiing, always skiing. Visiting Marmot Basin with Charlie—hanging from chairlifts, clowning down the mountain backwards—was like being with a celebrity.
After a day outdoors, we would take turns soaking in a huge clawfoot tub and watching the light dance on the walls, coloured by old stained glass windows.
Charlie isn’t a digital guy. A self-proclaimed Luddite, he’s never owned a TV or a computer. As a result, the photographs he proudly hung on his fridge and walls, showing long-gone relatives, his (often boundary-pushing) Halloween costumes, and beloved siblings, nieces, and nephews, are not retrievable from the Cloud. He did, however, own a universal remote control, which he would take to the local bar on big game days and use to turn off all of the TVs so that everyone would have to talk to each other. When a bar employee called the owner in a panic, the owner calmly said, “Is Charlie Finley there?”
An environmentalist before that was a thing, Charlie is the ultimate recycler. Of clothes, of bicycles, of furniture. He used old, discarded windows to craft his greenhouse. My brother once made the mistake of bringing a disposable styrofoam cup into his house, picked up from a gas station on the road trip to Jasper. Charlie ensured that every drink my brother consumed that week—coffee, juice, wine—was served in that cup. He made him take it with him when he left, too.
Charlie didn’t like being away from Jasper. He seemed untethered when he’d visit us in Vancouver. It was as if he was connected to his town by a taut elastic band, the effort of being away too much to bear. Only big events like a nephew’s or niece’s wedding would draw him back to his birth province of Ontario. He would bring some of the wine he had been collecting and storing for decades in his house, like the 1996 Chateau Margaux in honour of my name, slipping me “the good stuff” before I nervously made my wedding speech.
If the tender love and care that Charlie put into his home were enough to protect it, it would have stood forever. Even after he confirmed that his house was gone, everyone who knew Charlie, everyone who had visited Turret Street, everyone who had sampled his incredible and intentional way of life, hoped that it was just a mistake. Maybe, somehow, it had been spared. But, when the official list of houses lost to the fire was released, there was that awful, final word: “Destroyed.”
When we spoke just after the fire, Charlie said, “I got to live in paradise for 48 years. I’m lucky. Most people don’t have that.”
We don’t know what will happen next in terms of what Charlie’s rebuild will look like, but a beloved home has been lost and those fortunate enough to spend time in that piece of paradise have been changed forever.
Margot Finley // info@thejasperlocal.com
