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Hamann journal: I love a woman in a uniformNovember 24, 1999 EDITOR'S NOTE: Seattle-based correspondent Jack Hamann is headed on another adventure, this one to just to the south of the Arctic Circle. He'll be driving through the Canadian Rockies, across the windswept northern plains, up the Inside Passage and along the northernmost section of the Alaska Highway. Follow along here for regular dispatches on his journey. By Jack Hamann and Leslie Hamann
Journal date: November 22
(CNN) -- Do Canadian Mounties always get their man? Some guys wear uniforms, some don't. I've never been a soldier or an airplane pilot. I wasn't a Boy Scout. I rarely played on sports teams with matching jerseys. I was a lifeguard for a couple of summers, but red trunks and a windbreaker hardly qualify. I respect the cops and firefighters and hospital orderlies who wear matching clothes as part of getting their paychecks, but I can't say I ever looked at their epaulets and chevrons and brass buttons and wished I was wearing their uniform. Until today.
The store is called the "Mounted Police Gift Shoppe," squeezed amid trinket stores in the national park tourist town of Jasper. Wendy Saclarides was working the counter during the least busy shopping week of the year. Wendy has the windswept hair and honest complexion of someone who spends much of her life outdoors. A former doctor's assistant in Chicago, she raised her 19-year-old son in some of the West's most rugged locales, including Taos, New Mexico, Silverton, Colorado, and now, the Canadian Rockies. The Mounted Police gift shop is full of t-shirts and trinkets and postcards and pins, all stamped with the unmistakable image of Canadian Mounties. But amid the knickknacks, hanging in a neat row, were a half-dozen cardinal red blazers -- authentic uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Wendy saw the look in my eye. When I was 5 or 6 years old, my parents snapped a photo of my brother and me standing stiffly on either side of a Real Dudley Do-Right. The memory of that black-and-white photo has never left me, and Wendy somehow sensed it. A sign above the uniforms scolded that they were NOT for sale. Wendy saw our camera, and all but ordered us to take off our jackets so she could dress us for a snapshot. Or two. Or six. When I looked in the mirror, wearing a real Mountie hat and straining the buttons of the largest real Mountie blazer Wendy could find, I have to admit I felt an obviously undeserved rush. It was just a jacket, just a hat ... yet I actually felt dashing. I was Dudley; Where was the damsel in distress? And then I turned and saw my wife Leslie dressed up in her bright red blazer and stiff-brimmed hat. In an instant, I realized that Leslie looked far more dashing than I did. Leslie, not me, was born to wear that blazer. I was an imposter, and it showed. But my wife ... hey, I love a woman in uniform.Jack Hamann is a correspondent with CNN's Environmental Unit and CNN NewsStand.
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