Everyday at 1 p.m., Banff’s Heather Jean Jordan rings the church bells, breaking the eerie silence now blanketing the normally bustling community. “I was like, ‘I’m going to ring the bells.
The town is so quiet. And now so many people have reached out. They talk about crying or feeling happy — that’s pretty powerful.
It’s a small thing I can do,” the Banff musician said. The tourist town is now void of most tourists. Locals wait outside the post office to collect their mail one by one.
Business owners with “closed” signs in their windows stand idly by, nobody quite sure what’s going to happen next. “We are kind of at the mercy of what our town and our government and our community can do for us,” said Cassidy Geddes, owner of Beatnik Salon.