A Geography of Blood (2 page)

My parents were teachers, not farmers, so we always lived in town. But it was seldom far to the nearest pasture, where pale crocuses poked their furry snouts through the dead thatch first thing in spring and shooting stars launched their ardent magenta rockets around the margins of saline sloughs. As far as I knew, I was enjoying the total prairie package. But my mother knew differently. Her name was Edna Elizabeth Sherk, née Humphrey, and she was a true prairie girl, born to the high, wide, windswept plains of southern Alberta. She'd scarcely seen a tree in her life before coming north to the Peace River Country to teach, and at first they'd frightened her—so she told my sisters and me—looming over her in the darkness, rustling and shadowy.

She'd be in her glory here, I think, as I watch the light spin past the van. If it weren't for the occasional farm site with a struggling stand of box elders (or Manitoba maples, as they'd be called on the Canadian side of the line) braced against the wind, there wouldn't be a tree for fifty miles in any direction. At the international boundary, we pause momentarily for formalities, leaving behind the euphoric American promise of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” for the less stirring Canadian virtues of “Peace, Order and Good Government.” But the land flows on unmarked by national aspirations, as the road heads north and then east, on the final leg of our journey. By now, the day is fading, and we soon find ourselves tunneling through the dark. Highway signs leap into view, announcing places we have never heard of before: Consul, Robsart, Vidora. Even though we are theoretically back home, in our own country and province, the land that lies around us is enticing and unfamiliar.

We count down the miles to our destination, now so close at hand. There is nothing to be seen but liquid darkness, nothing to be heard but the gentle snoring of dogs and the hum of tires on asphalt. Then, with perhaps ten minutes to go, the headlights pick up a glimmer in the ditch, a flash of green-gold.

“Do you want to stop?”

Silly question. “Yes, of course!” We always stop.

In the wide bottom of the ditch, two coyotes are gnawing on the carcass of a road-killed deer. Caught in the flare of the headlights, their eyes glint; their muzzles are bloody; their bodies jitter in and out of the glare. There is something unexpectedly fleshy about them, something carnal and wild. We watch for a few minutes, then, with a nod of agreement, leave them to their feast. A door has opened into the darkness, giving us a privileged glimpse of the life that goes on, in secret, around us. A thrill of expectation rises in my body as we roll on toward Eastend. Whatever this place turns out to be, it's going to be an adventure.

Eastend sits on the southeastern edge of a landform known as the Cypress Hills. From the bit of reading I've done before leaving home, I know that “cypress” is a bungled translation, from Michif (the Métis language), of
les montagnes des cyprès,
a phrase that actually means Jackpine Mountains. In Blackfoot, these uplands have been known variously as the Eastern Place Where There Are Many Pines and as the Overlapping, or Wavelike, Hills. In Assiniboine, they're the place Where the Land Gets Broken; to some Cree speakers, the Beautiful Highlands. Like a great animal sprawled across the prairies, the hills rise in southeastern Alberta and flow eastward for more than eighty miles as a complex of broad, gradually diminishing plateaus. At the Head of the Mountain near Medicine Hat, the land stands almost 2,500 feet above the surrounding flatlands and attains a maximum altitude of nearly 5,000 feet, higher than the town of Banff—in fact, the highest elevation in Canada between the Rocky Mountain foothills and the mountains of Labrador. From this summit, a series of broken tablelands slouch downward across the Alberta-Saskatchewan border toward the Foot of the Mountain at Eastend. In all, the Cypress Hills encompass around a thousand square miles of magnificently varied terrain, a secret kingdom in the middle of a cactus plain.

Because of their abrupt rise above the surrounding prairie, the hill country experiences cooler temperatures and more precipitation than the dry lands at their base. Near the summit, conditions are ideal for conifers, including dark ranks of both jack and lodgepole pines, and for rare fescue grasslands. These isolated islands of habitat are occupied by isolated populations of birds and animals—white-throated sparrows, pine siskins, lynx, and elk—that are typically associated with the mountains and forests hundreds of miles to the west and north. At lower elevations, however, the boreal vegetation gives way to shining expanses of the ground-hugging grasses and wildflowers that are more typical of the northern plains. Wherever the land is broken, the hills have set a limit to the plow, and the wild prairie has been preserved as grazing land for cattle. As a result, the hills are an oasis of undisturbed prairie in a desert of plowed-up land and one of the most promising regions on the continent for grassland conservation.

Not surprisingly, the Cypress Hills are also celebrated across Saskatchewan as a beauty spot that everyone intends to visit, one day, soon, whenever they have a free weekend. But given the distance between this rise of land and the cities where most of us live, relatively few people actually make the trek. Before our arrival in Eastend, Keith knew the hills only as a vague presence on the horizon as he sped along the Trans-Canada toward Calgary and Banff. As for me, despite spending most of my adult life in the province (I, too, had arrived here from Alberta in the early 1970s), I had visited the area only twice before, never this far south, and never for more than two or three days at a time. But brief as those earlier visits had been, both had been riveting. Who could forget the slither of dozens of shiny garter snakes exploding out of their hillside hibernaculum on the first warm day in spring? Or, at the other end of a different year, the hard stare of a cow moose, with her calf at her side, warning off intruders at the bottom of a tobogganing slide?

Fortunately, Keith and I have booked a two-week stay in Eastend at the Wallace Stegner House: “First turn on your left when you get into town—there's a sign, so you can't miss it—and there'll be a key waiting for you in the front porch.” I'd seen the place advertised in a writers' newsletter, so we knew that it was run by the Eastend Arts Council as a retreat where writers and other artists could pursue their creative interests. In the face of these lofty intentions, I blush to admit that what the place represented to us was two weeks of affordable accommodation. The only interests we intended to pursue were indolence and sloth, with the spice of excursions into the hills for excitement.

By the time we let ourselves into the house, all we could think of was sleep. Morning's light revealed a trim one-and-half-story structure with narrow gables, painted a soft sage green and screened from the street by a dense stand of spruce trees. Inside, past a cozy veranda furnished with armchairs and crocheted throws, lay a small but comfortable parlor, a dining room with a lovely old oak table, and a tidy kitchen stocked with a useful miscellany of dishes and gadgets. A narrow flight of wooden stairs led to a second floor that housed a bathroom, a drafty bedroom with a high metal-framed bed, and a scantily furnished space at the back that may have been intended as an office. I was relieved to discover that the table with which the room was equipped dated back to the pen-and-ink days and was too high, ergonomically speaking, for a writer with a laptop. Besides, there was no proper desk chair and no Internet service. Clearly, I could not be expected to do any serious work. Good, that was settled.

A bookcase outside the bedroom door offered an eclectic selection of reading material, including books by authors I recognized, from scanning the guest book downstairs, as previous visitors. And there were also several by the patron saint of the house, “the distinguished American writer” Wallace Stegner. I'd picked up that phrase from a plaque attached to an old water pump in the yard, which I'd had a chance to peruse when I'd gone out with the dogs. According to the engraved text, Stegner, then a small child, had lived in Eastend from 1914, the year the town was incorporated, until 1921. From 1917 onward, he and his family had lived in this very house, which had been designed and built by his father. The consummate local boy made good, Stegner had gone on to win both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his fiction and had explored his Eastend experience in three of his works,
On a Darkling Plain, The Big Rock Candy Mountain,
and
Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.

I review this capsule biography in my mind as, one by one, I pull Stegner's books off the shelf. The only one I've heard of before is
Wolf Willow,
which I recognize as a memoir of his Saskatchewan boyhood. Over the years, people have occasionally told me that it's a book I “just have to read” and that I am “sure to love,” but though I've tried it once or twice, I've never made much progress with it. Opening the book now at random, I come upon Stegner's description of the landscape that Keith and I have just been traveling through and that I have been struggling to fix into words.

“On that monotonous surface with its occasional ship-like farms, its atolls of shelter-belt trees, its level ring of horizon,” Stegner writes, “there is little to interrupt the eye. Roads run straight between parallel lines of fence until they intersect the circle of the horizon. It is a landscape of circles, radii, perspective exercises—a country of geometry.

“Across its empty miles pours the pushing and shouldering wind, a thing you tighten into as a trout tightens into fast water. It is a grassy, clean, exciting wind, with the smell of distance in it, and in its search for whatever it is looking for it turns over every wheat blade and head, every pale primrose, even the ground-hugging grass. It blows yellow-headed blackbirds and hawks and prairie sparrows around the air and ruffles the short tails of meadowlarks on fence posts. In collaboration with the light, it makes lovely and changeful what might otherwise be characterless.”

In the past, I've sometimes wondered if what's kept me from reading
Wolf Willow
might be some subtle difference in national temperament between Yankee and Canuck, some slight shading of emotional dialect that does not translate precisely across the border. Apart from this shrine in Eastend, it is remarkable how quickly Stegner's reputation and readership fade as you cross the line, reducing him in an instant from a lion of world literature to a regional writer and one-hit wonder. Who knows why?

But, now, face-to-face with Stegner's lyrical sentences, I am forced to concede that at least part of my resistance is easy to grasp. I am simply blindingly jealous! That trout shouldering into the wind. The wind that tosses us into the air with the birds, our senses reeling. I place the book carefully back on the shelf, promising to return to it one day soon. For now, however, literature will have to wait: there are coyotes out there and deer and a world of wild things. It is time to load up our crew again and go exploring.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that setting out on back roads in unfamiliar country, without detailed maps, through a landscape populated mainly by wildlife and half-wild cattle, and in a vehicle that was showing its age may not have been the smartest choice anyone ever made. And it didn't help that the weather, which had been unseasonably hot and summery all September, now blew in gray and mean. Undaunted—what did a little snow and rain mean to road warriors like us?—we decided for our maiden outing to head north and west on gravel roads, up and over the hills, to the town of Maple Creek, an hour or so distant. From there, after a bite of lunch, we would allow a paved highway to take us south and east, squaring the circle back to our starting point. Easy.

What we didn't know is that the back roads in the Cypress Hills are, to use the geologist's term, smectitic, a word that sounds like an expletive and that, in rough translation, means “turns to slime when wet.” At first, everything went smoothly, as we pulled out of town on a well-graveled track and almost immediately found ourselves traveling through country so lovely it made my throat ache. On both sides of the road, the land swept away from the ditches as voluptuous as skin, and tidy barns and houses lay nestled into the cleavage of the hills. We stopped to watch as a flock of late-season bluebirds flashed against the dead grass, carrying the memory of summer on their backs.

It wasn't long, however, before our troubles began. As the road climbed gently toward the summit, conditions deteriorated apace, and soon we were viewing the scenery at odd angles, as we zigzagged from ditch to ditch. Somewhere along the way, a sign informed us, through thin drizzle, that we had attained the continental divide, whence waters flow south toward the Missouri River and the Gulf of Mexico and north to the South Saskatchewan River and the Arctic Ocean. This was an impressive kernel of information—who even knew that such a momentous height of land existed in flat old Saskatchewan?—and we would have paused to let its significance sink in if our van hadn't already been slithering, sideways and downward, in a northerly direction.

Eventually, hours later than intended and sprayed with mud from prow to stern, we made Maple Creek and the hard top, and all was forgiven. For as G.K. Chesterton once wisely pointed out, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.”
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And so, the very next morning, we prepared to head out again. Prudently determined to stick to the pavement this time, our plan was to drive south and then east toward Grasslands National Park, the only public lands in Canada exclusively dedicated to prairie conservation and our best hope to see burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, and the sole colony of prairie dogs north of the border. With good roads in prospect and a tail wind to help us on our way, surely everything would go perfectly. And so it did, for the first half hour or so. Then, in the middle of nowhere, without a bang or a sigh, our old van abruptly expired. No matter how often we turned the key or gazed longingly under the hood, nothing we did could persuade it to move an inch.