This is a love letter. It's about how a landscape can live in your heart.
I don't travel a lot. Or, at least, when I do, I don't wander too far from the Pacific Coast. I make several trips to Vancouver and Seattle every year and I usually hit Portland a couple times, as well. And every spring my husband and I drive down the edge of the continent to visit my brother in San Diego. All great trips.
This past summer, though, I made a solo road trip from Seattle to Saskatchewan. I was in Seattle to meet fellow Martha Beck Coach, Pam Slim, on her book tour, and I decided to head out from there to my hometown of Saskatoon to visit my parents. It had been a few years since I had seen my dad, and it had been many, many years since I had driven for hours on a long highway under the big prairie sky.I left Seattle on the interstate that ploughs through the Cascades to Couer D'Alene, Idaho. From there I headed North, back into Canada, and meandered through the Rockies on the Crowsnest pass into the foothills of Southern Alberta that eventually sprawl out into the expansive prairie. In the late evening sunset that graces the northern latitudes in the summer, I had to pull over when the coulees around Lethbridge were too beautifully distracting to allow me to drive safely. I stopped and spent the night in Medicine Hat, lying on the hood of my car and looking at the stars before going to my motel room. I woke to a quintessential sunny, see-for miles-prairie day. The bright yellow of the canola fields against the never-ending blue sky is a landscape that lives in my cells. It can make me cry beauty tears.
I passed the lonely grain elevators, standing like sentinels over the abandoned small towns. I drove alongside the train tracks that are the skeleton of this country, littered with grain cars and freight cars decorated with sporadic graffiti like postcards from other lonely places. I drove through Rosetown, where I had my very first teaching job - five months covering for a teacher on maternity leave. I smiled that the old sign "Go for the Rose!" was still there to welcome me into town. By the time I hit the outskirts of the city of Saskatoon, the sun had given way to a light rain shower. I left Saskatoon 20 years ago but as I drove into town two thoughts were hitting me simultaneously - everything has changed and nothing is different. Outwardly, roads had been rerouted, newer roads built, the outskirts of the city extended out much further than they used to with new big box stores, but despite all that, there was still a certain Saskatoonness to it all.
On my second day back "home", my Dad and I ditched the city and headed
out to the little town where he grew up and where I lived when I was a
toddler. This town, St. Denis, is so small that when you search for it
on google maps it gives you the Land Grant number for a location
instead of the name.
St Denis is/was a French enclave. It's where my great-grandparents came
hoping to build a brave new life after working hard for nothing in the
textile mills of Quebec and Maine. But then there was the Depression
and the drought, and the fact that farming wasn't really my grandfather's dream when he inherited the farm from my great-grandfather. Eventually, not too long ago, the farm
was sold. It continued to be farmed for a few years until it was recently sold again
and subdivided into building lots. The road through this subdivision is
called Raymond Road. My dad and I visited the dugout where he played hockey as a kid, the cemetery where my great-great- grandfather is buried, the church where my dad painted the rooster on the weather vane. In a way, it was a farewell tour. As I took this picture of my dad, a peace washed over me. It would have been easy to be sad about the passage of time, the lost memories, the people I missed. But the prairie has a way of transmuting melancholy into insight.
One day when I was 12, I remember it clearly, I ran out of the house after a fight with my mum and laid in the field behind our house. Our house was small and sometimes the best way to hide and be alone was to go lay down in the grass - the grass was so tall you would disappear completely. On this particular day, as I lay there caught up in my drama, I was suddenly overcome by a sense of the complete oneness of the universe. Time dropped away and I deeply understood that everything was one thing. I still can't describe this experience in words with any accuracy, but it has stayed with me strongly for the past 30 years.
This is what the prairie means to me. It's what I think of when I hear the saying, "you can take the girl out of the prairie, but you can't take the prairie out of the girl." That experience lives in me, and visiting the prairie, driving through the fields with my dad and looking back at where I came from, reminded me of both my uniqueness and my connectedness. The prairie makes you aware of how tiny you are so that you can be aware of something bigger.
This post is part of Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge.
