Hegira. Joni Mitchell spelled it with a 'j' on her seminal 1976 album. It means 'any flight or journey to a more desirable or congenial place than where one is.'

That's the general definition. The more specific one refers to the 'flight of Mohammad from Mecca to Medina to escape persecution in A.D. 622: regarded as the beginning of the Muslim era.'

Ellen and I would not have described our recent road trip north as a flight, but we do feel, whenever we visit Canada, that we have journeyed to a place that is somehow nicer and saner than the one we left to the south.

Soon after we arrived in Rossland, B.C., Jimmy P. put his Christmas present from Gina in the DVD player. It was a concert video of Joni Mitchell performing at the Santa Barbara County Bowl with jazz greats Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny and Michael Brecker. Most of the songs were from the Hejira album. They are full of yearning, emotional as well as vividly geographic. She sings about loneliness and love, of course, but from inside the moving framework of hitchhiking and blue motel rooms and 'The Refuge of the Road.' There is the title song (which begins 'I'm traveling in some vehicle/I'm sitting in some café') and the gorgeous imagining in 'Amelia' of what it was like to be 'swallowed by the sky,' to be Amelia Earhart.

And there is Jimmy's favorite line of poetry, a version of which was happening right outside the windows of their little Rossland house: 'White flags of winter chimneys/Waving-truce against the moon'

Joni, as you may know, is Canadian. She lives part-time and records in Los Angeles, but she still considers Saskatoon, Saskatchewan home. You can hear the prairie when she wishes she had a river she could skate away on. And in 'Coyote' when she watches a coyote 'running through the whisker wheat/Chasing some prize down'

Now I don't know if Joni Mitchell is a nice person or not. She's an artist; she may qualify for 'difficult' status. But in Rossland, and its nearby ski area, Red Mountain, there seems to be a cult of niceness. People invariably say, 'Pardon me,' where there is the slightest chance of physical contact. They hold doors for one another. Children look you in the eye and smile.

At the ski hill ticket window, the woman asked where we were from (was it our Colorado accents?) and then, with concern in her voice, whether everybody was all right following the big Front Range storms.

At lunch in the mid-mountain shelter, the cashier saw me flailing at the coffee station, left her post and asked, 'Can I get you a tray for that? Would that make it easier to carry?'

Television is somehow gentler and more reasonable, too. We saw public service announcements gently suggesting what we can do to help save the endangered Atlantic whitefish. There was 'The Breathing Tree' PSA: 'If the air we breathe depends to a large extent on the trees around us, wouldn't air quality improve if we simply planted more trees? Help Tree Canada Grow Clean Air. Trees do their part; let's do ours.' The reality of global warming is not up for debate here as it is in, say, Texas.

One part of this reasonableness surely is that Canada is a social democracy, where government is actually perceived as working for the common good. (See universal health care. See subsidized Nordic track skiing.) Another reason, I'm convinced, is the sheer vastness of the space up north, the breathing room, if you will, for the soul. Jimmy adds a political note: 'They've got better things to do than figure out ways to make the Iraqi people pay for 9/11.'

One thing's for sure, they love winter. They are humbled and strengthened by it the way denizens of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon are. Unlike our Colorado home, there isn't much winter sunshine. Patches of blue sky - referred to as 'sun breaks' - come with the frequency of a rude comment to a stranger. Gray skies prevail, but it makes for great skiing underfoot.

The gray skies began to break apart as we drove south from Idaho into Utah. By the time we hit Price, a familiar blue dome arched endlessly overhead. Driving down the Book Cliffs, I pointed out a concentration of parallel contrails. We both thought of 'Amelia': 'I was driving across the burning desert/When I spotted six jet planes/Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain/It was the hexagram of the heavens/It was the strings of my guitar'

Then we saw the jets themselves, six of them in formation, flying very high and fast, east to west. B2 bombers, each one costing more than a billion dollars to build, streaking non-stop from Missouri to Afghanistan to drop their deadly loads.