A Geography of Blood (4 page)

Completely typical of the genre—books like this one had been compiled in communities across the prairies as the old-timers began to fade, including a couple that featured members of my own family—it consisted of capsule biographies of the founding fathers and, somewhat grudgingly, the founding mothers of the area. Who could resist the smiling faces that gazed shyly out of these pages or their stories of heroic determination?

One of the pictures that caught my eye showed an atypically somber-faced man in a three-piece suit, standing aslant to the camera and clasping the hand of a sturdy woman with back-swept hair and a foursquare stance. Their names were Edmond and Marie Nibus. As Marie proceeds to explain, they had come to Canada from Belgium in 1912, along with their five-year-old son, and arrived on their homestead, in the middle of a blizzard, the following autumn. Their first home on the prairie was a two-room shack, punctured with knot holes and furnished with little more than a stove, a table, and a bunch of apple boxes. “It had a brand new board floor,” Marie recalled, “and I thought it was wonderful.”

“Life on a homestead had a lot of hardships,” she continued. “I think young ones are spoiled nowadays. Many were the days that I'd go out and disc with four horses. I had to take [son] Leon with me and he sat on my knees while I drove. We'd stay out from morning till evening, then figured that the horses needed a rest.”
5
(Ed, meanwhile, was working for neighbors to earn some much-needed cash.) A note at the end of the entry informs us that Marie and Ed lived and worked on their farm until 1954, when they retired into town. They died there, aged 94 and 101 respectively, in the early 1970s, shortly after celebrating their sixty-fourth wedding anniversary.

I spent hours leafing through the volume, with its tales of runaway horses and broken machinery, lightning strikes and blizzards, good crops and bad, all animated by a surprising lightness of spirit. Even the 1918 influenza epidemic, which had taken the lives of so many and left a bruise on Wallace Stegner's thoughts, could be construed as having unexpected benefits. “There was an atmosphere of ‘togetherness' . . . that united the community,” one survivor recalled. “Truly these folks were the best in the world.”
6
Reading between the lines, it appeared that this same togetherness had helped to bring the community through the terrible thirties drought. “With no crops, no money, in debt and on relief, times were hard,” one old-timer admitted, “but we got along somehow . . . There were picnics, dances and parties. The women would bring lunch and the men paid a quarter. Part of this bought the coffee, and the fiddlers were given the rest.”
7

Hard work and fiddle tunes, bread and roses. Through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, these dauntless people had created not only farms and ranches but also churches, libraries, hospitals, and schools. They had played in dance bands, organized Christmas concerts, and planned community fairs; they had raised flocks of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Even though I had never met any of these people, I recognized them as my own. Here I was in Eastend, home away from home.

One morning, Keith and I decided to treat ourselves to breakfast at Eastend's premiere dining establishment. Jack's Café is on the main drag, a couple of doors up from the late-and-lamented antler museum. Very much a going concern, it is nonetheless also a blast from the past, complete with a soda fountain, a glass cabinet full of pies, and, on the wall, one of those old-fashioned rotary displays that flips from ad to ad. Fabrics and Notions, flip. Livestock Hauling, flip. Septic Service, flip. One of the oldest surviving businesses in town (a tidbit I had picked up from the local history book), it had been founded by immigrants from the Peloponnese, of all places, around 1920 and then lovingly passed down, from hand to hand, to a succession of Greek-Canadians. One husband-and-wife team, George and Angela Doolias, had become so renowned for their steaks and Greek specialties that they earned annual listings in
Where to Eat in Canada,
the national guide to fine dining.

When you order pancakes at Jack's, you get pancakes: they arrived three high and large as platters, with sausages on the side and cups of acrid coffee to wash them down. As Keith and I attempted to do justice to this munificence, we had plenty of time to look around and admire our surroundings. It wasn't just the vintage fittings that caught our attention, as charming as they were. Angie Doolias was not just a restaurateur; she was also an artist. From counter height to ceiling, all around the room—jogging above the cabinets, slipping over doors, flowing seamlessly around corners—the room was encircled by a mural.

Beginning on the north wall, above the cash register and partially obscured by a Coke machine, it showed the primordial prairie landscape, unpeopled and untouched, grazed by herds of buffalo and overflown by a golden eagle. Moving around to the east, humans enter the scene, and we see them driving buffalo over a cliff and, later, pitching their tipis in a broad valley. But change is coming, just around the bend. Beyond the pies and above the door to the kitchen, a column of covered wagons is wending its way toward a fort, led by a pair of riders in red-serge tunics and pillbox caps. Clearly, these are not the blue-coated fighting men that so stirred Bill Cody's pride. Instead, as a loyal Canadian, Doolias has memorialized the arrival of the North-West Mounted Police at what I assume must be Fort Walsh. With law and order now assured, the pageant of progress picks up, as homesteaders break the sod with oxen along the south wall and a train steams into the station of a nascent Eastend in the southwest corner. If you look closely, you can see Jack's Café already in place, between the bank and the hotel.

I'm guessing that it was at about this point in the creation of the mural when two Aboriginal men came into Jack's for lunch. (I have this story from a friend who happened to be there at the right moment.) “Where's it going to end?” one of the diners asked the artist, as he surveyed what she had done. “With a mushroom cloud?”

“No,” George Doolias shot back, coming to his wife's aid. “It'll be two Native guys in a Lincoln, pit-lamping deer.” Everyone had a good laugh.

But of course the mural does not end with a nuclear apocalypse or with poachers, either. In fact, Aboriginal people have disappeared from the action halfway around the room, as if they have no part to play, for good or ill, after the incomers appear. Instead, as the mural rounds the home stretch onto its final wall, it celebrates the fulfillment of the settlers' dream, with a century of technological advancement and plenty. The story draws to its triumphant conclusion above a bank of orange plush booths in the northwest corner of the café. In the foreground a pair of combines plies the fields of a prosperous, modern farm, its yard lined with shiny bins poised to receive the golden harvest. In the middle distance, a landscape once dotted with buffalo is now studded with oil wells, and the crenellated skyline of Calgary lures the eye, ever onward, into the future.

That evening, I stood in the yard of the Stegner House, under a sky quilted with clouds, and listened to the yip-yip-yipping of coyotes on the hills above town. Tell the truth. Although I had been brought up on the Creation Story of prairie settlement and, as the past few days had proven, was still susceptible to its charms, I was no longer a true believer. It was one thing to sit in Jack's Café, blissed out on maple syrup, and enjoy a confident portrayal of the pageant of progress. But did I really believe that a prairie landscape dominated by pump jacks and industrial agriculture is, in any ultimate sense, an improvement on the now-shattered buffalo ecosystem? And while it had been entertaining and, yes, even inspiring, to sit with the local history and recall my debt to the people who had planted me here, did I really believe that the West had been won while whistling a happy tune?

If I interrogated my memory, I could hear my mother's voice turn brittle when she spoke, as she rarely did, of the beatings her own father had inflicted on his sons, but not his daughters, violent explosions of rage that seemed out of proportion to youthful misdeeds. Frustration refracted into cruelty. The Stegners, with their two sons, had been able to pull up stakes and leave when things turned sour on them; the Humphreys, with a brood of ten, did not have that option. They had toughed it out on a bankrupt farm, too proud to accept relief—but not too proud, in my mother's nightmare recollection, to attempt to abandon a promising little girl, her own small self, to the care of a more prosperous neighbor. When she told me this story eighty years later, her voice still cracked with grief. Perhaps I had been avoiding
Wolf Willow
out of mere cowardice, a reluctance to face home truths when they were offered.

The night wind had an icy bite and it chased me back indoors, past Keith dozing on the couch and up the narrow stairway to the back room, where young Wally and his brother had once slept. With the spectre of their bewildered grandmother in the hallway behind me, I gazed out the window into the heavy dark and recalled how my own sense of Western history had, over the years, gradually come unmoored. I remembered sitting in Sunday school one morning (in the minister's study at First United Church in Vermilion, Alberta, to be precise) and suddenly seeing with irrevocable clarity that the assurances of Christianity, and of a divinely ordained plan, were an illusion. This revelation left me with little to show for my religious upbringing except the Golden Rule and a slightly idiosyncratic version of a favorite children's hymn:

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things
wild
and wonderful . . .

I thought of the day, a few years later, when I looked down on the prairie from an airplane and for the first time saw how the curvilinear contours of hill and valley, with their scribbled water courses, seemed to struggle against the straight lines of the surveyors' rule. This wild and wonderful land was caught tight in a net, and my people, and others like them, had ensnared it.

And there was something else. On the homestead in the Peace River Country where my dad grew up, there was, and is, a piece of land known affectionately within the family as the Indian Quarter. Closer to a half-section in reality, it consists of a cultivated field bisected by a track that leads to a brushy ridge. Past this horizon, the land folds downward, through a tangle of aspen and spruce, to the wild currents of the Beaverlodge River. On the grassy ledge beside the water, the whole family often gathered together when I was a kid—a happy tribe of aunts, uncles, and cousins—to picnic and swim in summer or, when the ice was clear, to skate and drink hot chocolate on winter afternoons.

According to the family story, this spot had once been a favorite stopping place of the local Beaver Indians, who had continued to camp here until about 1910, when my pioneering great-grandfather and his sons had purchased the property from them. Like many family legends, this account is at least partly false, since treaty Indians at that time were not permitted to hold individual title to land. But whatever the truth of the matter, I was fascinated by the thought of those disappeared encampments and of the people who had lived in them. Now we were here, enjoying ourselves, and they had vanished.

I'm not sure how old I was when this discomfort first coalesced into an image, though I may have been eight or nine. In my mind's eye, I saw my late grandmother (think Queen Victoria in a housedress) crossing the field on the dirt track that led toward the riverbank. Opposite her, at a distance, a young Beaver woman (an Indian princess in buckskin) stood at the edge of the brush, as if she had just come up the hill from the water. The two women faced each other across the clearing, as diffident as stones. No matter how often I conjured them there, they never approached each other, and neither uttered a word. The silence that lay between them seemed impenetrable.

Nights passed, and days, and our two-week booking at the Stegner House was drawing to a close. Our van turned up, roadworthy, with a little time to spare, but to our surprise we no longer wanted to go anywhere. Keith had settled into a happy routine of reading in the backyard—summer having graced us with a brief return—or just sitting and looking across the creek at the sun-cured hills. The land was tawny, streaked with black in the gullies where brush flowed down the slopes, and it reminded him, in a distant way, of his East African boyhood.

Stay put, the quiet voice had told us. Pay attention to where you are. We were in Eastend, Saskatchewan, on the northernmost edge of the great North American plains. We were traveling through time, through memory, the invisible dimension.

And then, before we quite knew what had happened, our holiday had sped past, and we were back in the city, bound to our desks. Although we often spoke of our time in Eastend—I mean, really, a cappuccino bar in a beat-up prairie town, and coyotes singing in the dark, and the light spinning around the cottonwoods, and the lure of all those places we had tried to get to and hadn't, and the unheralded sense of euphoria that had overtaken us by the time we left—despite all that, not to mention our unexpected immersion in the settlement saga and the connections with our own pasts, we had no expectation that we'd be coming back.

Yet when we hit the road the following summer on another of my grassland research tours, guess where we ended up? It seemed that all roads led to Eastend. When we noticed a tidy white bungalow for sale on Tamarack Street, a block north of the Stegner House—and when we bought it—we knew that we were hooked. This homely little town in its nest of wild hills had charmed us into putting down tentative roots. And all around, the bright wind whispered through the grass, speaking to us of reasons we didn't yet understand.

{three} Digging In

This was, after all, the kind of landscape that demanded one's attention.

BETH LADOW,
The Medicine Line,
2001

By the time
the house deal had gone through, it was September, and another prairie winter was drawing near. You could hear it in the metallic rattle of the cottonwoods across the alley from our new house; you could see it in the fiery red of the chokecherry bushes along the creek.

Our new house.
All that fall and winter, whenever we had a free weekend, we filled our van to the gunnels with household paraphernalia, loaded up the dogs and headed for what had suddenly become our second home. In choosing a route for our travels, we were as unvarying as pilgrims. After an hour or so in the fast lane on the highway to Calgary, we left the mainstream at Rosetown to head south into a big silent country under a high blue sky. Merely to think about it now, sitting at my desk, makes my chest expand with breath, as if the only response to that light and space were to open into it.

From that moment on, the journey became easy, and we seemed to flow effortlessly downhill, first heading south to cross the impounded waters of the South Saskatchewan River, a liquid plain set among tawny slopes, and then on to the leafy valley city of Swift Current. From there it was west to Gull Lake, south to Shaunavon, and finally west again, proceeding step by diminishing step toward our destination.

From the beginning to the end of the journey—a good four hours of travel, with a few minutes added here and there as rest stops for humans and dogs—the landscape told and retold the same familiar story. The broad fields of stubble that spun by our windows represented the climax of the settlement saga, the triumphant end point of the mural in Jack's Café, the payday of my own grandparents' enterprise. Somewhere past Gull Lake, we passed a commemoration of the whole agricultural undertaking, painted in exact letters on the gable of a meticulously maintained barn: “Rolling View Farm,” it read, “1917.” It was as if the settlement experience marked the beginning of time.

Of the country's longer past and its deep reservoirs of stories—memories of the Métis settlement that (unbeknownst to me on these early journeys) flourished briefly at the Saskatchewan River crossing; of the terrible battle that had taken place in the Red Ochre Hills, southwest of Swift Current, in 1866; or of the buffalo jump near Gull Lake that dates back thousands of years and once sustained hundreds of families—of these memories and so many others we did not hear a single word.

By the time we reached Shaunavon and the last, short, westward leg of our journey, the countryside had become assertively modern, with pump jacks feeding in the stubble like dazed, mechanical birds. Yet in the face of this evidence of “progress”—and who was I to knock it, whizzing along as I was in a gasoline-powered van?—I found my eyes wandering around and past these intrusions to consider the lay of the land. On the western horizon up ahead, the world was now rimmed by a blue rise of hills, which suggested that our destination was drawing close. Meanwhile, to the north of the road and to the south and then, at irregular intervals, here and there, near and farther afield, we found ourselves surrounded by a flotilla of strange landforms.

“Look,” I said to Keith, beside me in the driver's seat, “those hills—they're like whales, bigger than whales, stranded under the grass.”

“Eskers, drumlins, and kames,” he replied smartly. (He was an art historian: how did he know this stuff?) “That's all I remember from A-level geography. Something to do with glaciers and the Ice Age.” Drumlins. That was it: I'd just been reading about them, as part of the research for the chapter on geological history in my prairie book.

“Hey,” I said, “I know about this. The geologists call it a swarm. We're driving through a ten-thousand-year-old drumlin swarm.”

A year earlier, approaching Eastend from the south, we'd been ushered into town by coyotes, distorted forms caught in the headlights' glare. Now, arriving from an approximately opposite direction, we found ourselves in the company of a troupe of Ice Age hills, their ancient energy held in suspended animation. And more strangeness was in store as we rounded the final bend and rolled down into the wide bottomlands of the Frenchman River valley. Instead of proceeding into town as we had expected, we appeared to be heading straight for an earthwork of ridges and conical, turretlike hills that blocked the view ahead. At the very last minute, the road jogged left, discovered a gap, and delivered us into town and onto the main drag. A sign announced that we had entered the Valley of Hidden Secrets.

Our new house was essentially perfect as found. Built in the early 1970s, it featured mahogany-fronted cabinets, complete with copper-trimmed knobs, and a planter-knickknack-and-book-shelf combo that was straight out of my teenage years. Even the crimson carpet in the bedroom—“This will need to be updated,” the real-estate agent who showed us the place had told us solemnly—exuded a shabby, retro charm. The real glory of the place, however, was not its stylish accoutrements but what in a more competitive market might have been written up as its “prime location, surrounded by parks.”

Our place was at the very end of the street, on the outermost edge of town. Beyond the back fence, across the alley, lay the bend of the Frenchman River where young Wallace Stegner and his friends had once congregated to swim. To the north lay a wide grassy field, really a floodplain, that was bounded by a sweeping arc of the stream and housed the town's baseball diamonds and campground. Past these amenities and across the creek, the land rose up and away from us in a choppy sea of conical mounds, intercut by coulees and shadowed by a tangle of chokecherries and rosebushes. The wide prairie world was right there, on the other side of the wall, just begging for us to come out and continue our explorations.

Strangely, however, the house turned a blind eye to this view. Although there were openings in every other direction, east, west, and south, the entire north wall was windowless. We were loftily critical of what we saw as an aesthetic error, until someone pointed out that the previous owners might not have looked at the scene through quite the same lens as us. The Taylors—we knew their name from a decorative knocker affixed to the front door—had been ranchers who spent summers somewhere up in the hills and retreated to this house in the fall, much as the Stegners had done a generation before. (All this we gleaned from conversations with our new neighbors.) Perhaps, like coastal fishing families who face their homes away from the sea, the Taylors had preferred to turn their backs on the prairie and its lethal winter storms. Keith and I, by contrast, were mere visitors, in the country though not yet of it. Regardless of wind and weather, the prairie was calling to us and we were eager to open ourselves to its wide horizons.

In remarkably short order, we had cajoled a local contractor into ordering a picture window (four-paned to echo the four-paned knickknack shelves in the room divider) and inserting it into our living room wall. Now, with our brand new secondhand love seat positioned directly in front of the glass, we could sit side by side and gaze out at the scene: from the bare symmetry of the poplar tree in the foreground to the dense scrawl of bushes along the river and then up, layer by layer, fold upon voluptuous fold, to the bony haunches of the hills that loomed over the town. Sometimes, we watched as small herds of white-tailed deer grazed on the flats along the stream bank or held our breath as they circled close, doe eyed and fleshy, and walked under our windowsill. Above them, against a leaden sky, the snowy hills told the hours in shadowed pools of blue that spread and deepened and finally merged into the darkness.

And then it was spring, and life settled into a pattern that has served us well ever since. Although we spend most of our time in the city, we make a point of getting to Eastend at least once a month. During the university term, when Keith is occupied with lectures and meetings, we usually only manage three or four days at a time, but in summer, when the pressure is off, we often have the luxury of settling in for a span of weeks. Over the years, the balky old van to which we owe our Eastend adventure has given way to more reliable wheels, and the dogs who accompanied us on our early travels have all died and been replaced, sometimes in super-abundance. These days we are accompanied by two retrievers in the back seat and two dachshunds up front, with Calla the cat wedged in somewhere or other. In recent years, for longer stays we have rounded out the menagerie with two quarter horse geldings, Tanner and Tex, whom we tug along behind us in a horse trailer.

By the time we have reached our destination, delivered the horses to their rented pasture (an idyllic valley with a spring-fed creek), and settled in, Keith and I are usually content to sit and stare out our new window for an hour or two. But before long, the view, plus a barrage of canine entreaties, lures us out the door. Sometimes, we stroll down the back alley and across a narrow margin of grass to stand on the cutbank and gaze down into the slow, syrupy water of the Frenchman River. As a student of
Wolf Willow,
I know that Wallace Stegner stood on this very spot when he visited town on a reconnaissance mission in the early 1960s (shyly, slyly, giving his name as Mr. Page), impelled by “the queer adult compulsion to return to one's beginnings.”
1
And it was here, electrified by the “tantalizing and ambiguous and wholly native” musk of the wolf willow, that he reconnected with the “sensuous little savage” he had once been.
2

For newcomers like us, however, the excitement is more immediate. Look, see that sudden shimmer down there in the water, by the old piling? It's a beaver, a muskrat; no, it's a mink, swimming upstream, impossibly black and shiny. Or follow the river back toward our house and west around the first bend, no more than a hundred steps, and stop on the bank again. Do you hear a catbird mewing in the bushes; notice the kingbirds hawking for insects from the low, overhanging branches; see the swallows, lithe as fish, slicing through the air? Try to follow their acrobatics with your binoculars and all you'll get is blur. Barn swallows, check. Bank swallows, check. Tree swallows, check. Northern rough-winged swallows, check. Violet-green swallows, check. Who would ever have guessed that they could be so swift, so blue, so varied, so alive? So thrilling.

“Biodiversity” is a bloodless term but here it was, on the wing. The wild tangle of life along the creek bank offered a moment of grace, exempt from decline and loss, in which beauty coexisted with abundance. As a student of grassland ecology, I knew that this was a rare and privileged experience, a dispensation from the ecological tragedy of the Great Plains grasslands. Back in the city, my office was strewn with reports that attempted to quantify everything that had been lost: number of acres given over to cultivation, percentage of wetlands drained, the extent to which prairie rivers have been channelized or curtailed. Other documents tallied the body counts of the disappeared and the dead—plains grizzlies, plains wolves, pronghorns, prairie dogs, prairie chickens, sage grouse—all the special creatures of the grasslands that are either long gone or grievously diminished in numbers.

Leading the list is the plains buffalo, known with scientific insistence as
Bison bison bison,
an animal whose hair was once woven into every bird's nest, whose hooves aerated the tough prairie sod, and whose flesh fed tribes of hunters, both two- and four-legged. Massed into herds of hundreds and thousands, the buffalo flowed across the landscape, eating on the run, and creating a textured mosaic of grazed and ungrazed habitats. Diverse habitats for the prairie's diverse organisms. Even the buffalo's dung played a role by helping to sustain the invisible universe of the soil.

The special genius of the grassland ecosystem is its ability to ride the extremes of a midcontinental climate—a meteorological rollercoaster of blazing heat, brutal cold, sudden downpours, and decades-long droughts—by storing precious moisture and nutrients in the ground. As much as ninety percent of the biological activity in the grasslands takes place in the soil. When this life force puts up shoots, the vegetation may look meager and stunted, but it is bursting with energy. The power of the soil, the wind, and the rain is concentrated in every leathery shrub and every blade of sun-cured grass. Transferred up the food chain, this vitality takes on animal form and becomes manifest in the blue of a butterfly, the bright eye of a snake, the eerie voice of a curlew echoing over a lonely landscape.

But the truest expression of the grasslands, without any doubt, was the buffalo. What would it have been like to put your ear to the ground and feel the rumbling vibration of thousands of hooves running across the plains, somewhere out of sight? What if we could step back a lifetime or two, to 1873, and ride south from the Cypress Hills, day after day for a week, with buffalo on all sides?