by Jill Frayne
At Estevan on the hem of Saskatchewan I get directions to a big park out of town, clipped and flat like a golf green. I put up my tent beside a hedge, the only cover. This is a prairie phenomenon: every bush and tractor and human is visible for miles. When I hunker to pee, the car and I are the only shapes, horizon to horizon.
I search for half an hour this evening, but I’ve left Leon’s camera case in the stubble of a farmyard hours back. The loss affects me inexplicably, like a rebuke. I lie in the tent trying to read, but my nerve has gone. I am utterly out of place here. All of a sudden, being on this trip is something I can’t account for. It seems an act of desperation, completely arbitrary. What have I done?
ONE OF ALICE MUNRO’S collections of stories has the theme of women in the middle of their lives letting it all go, not gradually but in a single gesture. All at once they burn down the whole town. All the details to that point—the house, the marriage, everything accumulated or endured—is thrown over at a stroke.
Is that what I’ve done?
In my life some steadiness has come undone. My girl is coming to the end of high school. My partner has come unstuck from me. I felt change coming for a long time, like wind driving over flat land, some great undoing. I thought if I held still, it might sweep by me, I might get lucky in a buffalo stampede. But when it came, it bore right down on me, and now I can’t stay still. Some exertion is called for, some self-rescue. There has to be some action from me now, a totem for these endings, a whirligig of my own.
This is why I’m here.
And the freedom to do it? How can I just close up shop and leave my post, leave my daughter writing her spring exams? That has an old root.
It was the way the loyalties worked with Bree and me, and with her father, though this is history and it’s hard to tell true history. Bree was four when her dad and I split up, and gradually she joined her father’s camp. I don’t know why she thought she had to choose—maybe to make sense of the break, a child’s way to deal with something incomprehensible. Or maybe simpler. She saw he was angry and she thought if we’d all stayed together, if I’d stayed, he wouldn’t be angry. I think he offered her an explanation of what happened and I did not.
I didn’t have a side. Not that I told her. What could I have said to a four-year-old? “I’m lonely, Bree.” I thought that was beyond her and unfair to try to explain.
I don’t see it that way now. In any break-up there’s a dispute at heart and what I think now is that Bree needed to hear both sides. She needed to hear from both of us the love story and what happened to it—not so she could choose, but so she wouldn’t have to. There would be a sad mom and a sad dad, and children can understand that. Small children can handle complexities of that kind. When Bree was in daycare, just a little girl, she told me one time about something that had happened with a friend. She said, “I’m happy about it and I’m sad about it.” At three or four she could manage contradictions. But I gave her no explanation for the split, I didn’t mention it, and when she was six or seven or nine, she took his side.
My version is pretty simple. I married in haste. I chose a person I didn’t know very well. In one of her stories Lorrie Moore says something about who you marry being like the old game of musical chairs: when the music of being single stops, you sit down. At twenty-five or so I thought it was time to settle and get going on a baby. I married a person I wasn’t suited to.
I don’t know what his view of things was. He thought I was feckless. He was mad at me, and Bree fell in with his point of view. She kept a light, testy rein on me. I was her mom, but I was suspect. One time she was sitting in an armchair in the kitchen of a house I rented for us, small in the armchair, her hands up on the arms while I made dinner. “You live in joy while he lives in sorrow,” she told me.
I stayed away from remarks like that. I kept quiet about her dad, and I didn’t ask Bree how it was going for her or say how it was going for me. My reserve put her in a vacuum. If I had it to do again, I’d handle it some other way; not make her sort through adult umbrage if I could help it, but talk to her. As it was, I blacked out the most important thing on her mind—the whole aching business of learning to be bilingual, bicultural, in two house-holds—and with this ban on discussing everything vital Bree and I lost each other in a certain way. Gradually, very slowly, I fell out of feeling indispensable to her.
JUNE 20
I’m in a sort of expired rodeo grounds near Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan. No dew on the prairies. When I set my foot outside the tent this morning onto dry grass, it was as if night had never come. My tent pegs yank out dry.
Here’s where Sitting Bull hightailed it from the Black Hills after Little Big Horn, a rolling, cowboy place without trees or features, just the spilling sound of meadowlark and wind.
I had a walk that bewitched me last evening in the furry hills, the grasses shivering and glistening at sundown, the breeze mild and dry. It’s shortgrass prairie here, the hard dirt still holding last year’s bone white blades. Filigreed lichen crawl on the cracked ground. There’s sage and tiny flowers, stones like eggs and a hundred songbirds surfing the air. One kind makes a quick, wind-whistling sound like something coming undone, and there’s a splashy black and white marauder—a magpie. I’d love to see a bluebird.
A museum nearby records that five thousand Sioux came here with Sitting Bull in 1877. There were no buffalo left and the North West Mounted Police hesitated to extend rations to such high-profile Indians, so after three years Sitting Bull was forced back to the United States with those of his people who hadn’t starved to death. I saw their photographs yesterday. Even half starved, their demeanour is exalted. They must have died appalled and gladly. The arrival of whites in North America is the dirtiest story in the world.
On the drive this morning I notice a local habit of disposing of car wrecks in the cleavage of hills. I see hawks, serious on fence posts, and deer, their white tails oaring the air as they run away. Swallows skirt in front of the tires, all of us under a moodless, unremitting avalanche of light.
WHEN I REACH the Grassland Preserve, the land changes at once. It is bluer, due to the native blue grama grass, and has a different configuration of rocks. These are scattered as the glaciers left them, not hefted into borders to make fields. Unmistakable as soon as I pass the wire boundary is the quality of wilderness—the atmosphere of freedom and quiet that always attends undisturbed places. The land rolls to the sky absolutely blank, earth and sky in flawless geometry.
It’s the driest place I’ve ever been. I park and prep myself as though entering the Serengeti. It’s noon and there’s not a whit of shade. I pull out a hat with a brim, a long-sleeved shirt, my water bottle and wellingtons. The boots will be hot, but I’m thinking of rattlesnakes, wordlessly diagrammed on a sign as I drove in. I start walking southeast. Juniper bark crackles underfoot; otherwise there’s not a sound. I photograph the deliriously overdressed boulders. Six, eight kinds of lichen in gold, orange, magenta, emblazon a single rock. Where life is impossible, that’s where lichens go to it. I walk slowly, stunned by the heat and vibrant peace.
The grass grows in bursts, slivers of old stems, uncropped, ungrazed, meshing with the new growth. I smell sage and see my car with its felled bicycle glittering on the horizon. Buttes are all of a height, flowing to the horizon. Coulees, clogged with willow, scoop between them. Occasionally I pass a circle of stones, ghostly teepee anchors from the last century.
I spot a meadowlark in my binoculars dressed like a tiny leopard, his beak flexing like scissors. He flies off sputtering and erratic as a butterfly.
When I leave, I go to Val Marie, a dust-coated little town a few kilometres from the Preserve. There’s a heap of ancient car parts half buried in the dirt on the outskirts, and the surrounding copse of spindly willows that all these towns have. I think the trees are planted as a gesture against the wind, a veil, a faint intercession between town and prairie beyond, between people and the ineluctable wind and desert, still ringi
ng with Indians.
In a cavernous cinder-block café on the only street, I have canned soup ignited with black pepper. The owner has a worrisome pallor and sits smoking dispiritedly with a friend. She wants to sell the place and move away.
TO REGAIN the Yellowhead Highway I turn north, the air husky with smoke from forest fires burning north of Prince Albert—a familiar phenomenon this time of year. CBC radio matter-of-factly recites the conditions: “Swift Current twenty-eight degrees centigrade, with smoke, Saskatoon twenty-nine degrees centigrade, with smoke …” I drive briskly through the smog in an atmosphere of pre-storm gloom.
This evening at the South Saskachewan River past Swift Current, the air turns moist again. I pitch my tent on the delta in a grove of trees gently raining mysterious pale green petals, then recross the river to walk in the valley. The surrounding hills are close and smooth like a commotion of dinosaurs under a drop cloth. I walk toward them, following a deer trail, and see prong-horn antelope pogo-sticking up the slopes in retreat. I stay till the light is gone, the sun a sinking ruby orb in the smoke.
JUNE 21
I like these fragrant trees, the branches sweet with invisible singing birds. When I walk out to the river, there’s something wrong. The water looks unnatural, inertly mirroring the hills. I find out later that the South Saskatchewan’s been dammed and cannot flow—like a breast stopped up. Of all the trouble people have caused the land, the outrage to the plains is the worst—the rivers dammed for power, the grasses gone for fields, the soil broken and blown away.
The radio says there’s a forest fire the size of P.E.I. burning in the north. The sky’s invisible and cool. North of the river the land turns greener, flatter, amenable to ploughing. I think about the pronghorn last night, coming down to the water in the evening to drink as they have always done, though the river is fetid now and cannot move. There is something bleak about the animals’ long habit, like hopeless loyalty.
It’s past noon when I reach North Battleford and turn west.
Highway 40 is a less-travelled route from the Battlefords to Cut Knife, where Poundmaker fought a famous battle. He was a Cree leader destined to parley with whites at the end of the nineteenth century. The story goes that when Poundmaker couldn’t persuade agents at Fort Battleford to help feed his people, some of his warriors stole provisions from the homesteaders around the fort. An incensed lieutenant from Swift Current led an attack on Poundmaker’s camp at Cut Knife on a spring morning in 1895. Poundmaker understood the dim view whites take of desperate acts and was expecting the reprisal. After a six-hour scuffle, outnumbered and ill equipped, the Assiniboine and Cree managed to drive off the soldiers. Poundmaker let them retreat but, reckoning it wasn’t over, took his people to Batoche to join Louis Riel. When he learned that Riel had fallen, he gave himself up at Battleford. He was convicted of treason and felony and sentenced to three years in Stony Mountain prison—this man whose ancestors had never seen a fence, let alone been penned. He was released within a year, his plight coming to someone’s notice, and from the prison gate he walked to Alberta to stay with his adopted father among the Blackfoot. He died in Alberta within the year. He was forty-four.
In the 1960s, in some sort of gesture, the government moved his bones to his home at Cut Knife, to the site of the battle he unexpectedly won, now a quiet hill lightly decorated in his honour.
I come in the evening. The place is unmarked and I locate it by driving to the tallest rise, the most likely place to make a stand. There is no one around. The view on all sides looks out on hills and willow bush, the battleground marked by a large wavering circle of whitewashed stones. Within the circle is a Christian tombstone inscribed with Poundmaker’s name, along with some Plexiglas photographs on mounts and two outhouses for visitors.
In the photographs the whites look fanatical and choked, their collars appearing to cut off the circulation of blood to their heads. The Indians look stricken, their eyes averted from the camera, a baffled, stinking hopelessness in the fall of their arms. Poundmaker is very handsome. While I stand there, a bluebird lands on his grave.
That night I sleep in a farmer’s field nearby and, in the dark, coyotes call one another from the coulees around me.
I’M PARKED off the road a few hours east of Edmonton, sitting in the back seat with all four doors open to the breeze, writing in my journal.
When she was fourteen, Bree had a falling-out with her dad that was like bad lovers throwing in the towel. She was in her first year in a big downtown high school. I was fifty miles away, in the schoolhouse. She’d been shifting her point of view about her dad and me for some time; not so black and white, not so hard on Leon and me. We were making a little group, the three of us, jelling into a trio with some routines and comforts. I think she liked to be with two adults, not always paired off with one. The first year with Leon, when she was ten or eleven, we’d roughhouse with her, wrestle her down on the floor. She’d be half standoffish, half irrepressible, and she’d shriek as if something long pent up was getting out. At about thirteen she started nursing some grievances about her dad. She told me she’d made a list in the back of her diary—“Things My Dad Promised and Never Did”—the usual teenage reappraisal, but I think she couldn’t change the deal with her dad. He couldn’t flex, couldn’t put up with her disenchantment. An ordinary fight went haywire. After some protest from her, something minor, he locked her out of the house. Probably he only meant to scare her, but Bree wouldn’t parley. She phoned me from my mother’s, declaring she wasn’t going to live with him any more. So I got her back. When she wouldn’t come to the schoolhouse to live with me, I went to the city and stayed with her wherever we could, at friends’ or at my parents’, trying to get a lasso on her.
She came back in the visceral way I’d known her when she was a baby. I breathed her. I tracked her in my cells. I’d wake ten minutes before she came through the front door in the middle of the night. I did everything in my power to summon her to me. She came back hurt and stunned, and for weeks she wouldn’t go to school or say where she was going and I had no influence to steady her. She had to reinstate me first. She had to change her mind.
Eventually she let me choose a good school, where she could board, where she wasn’t with her father or with me, and in a year or so she came round.
Maybe that’s why I thought I could come on this trip—because she’s all right now. We got to shore. She’s got some confidence and we have our old bond, the one we made going around with our chests pressed together the first year of her life.
JUNE 22
Alberta. Wrong and strong.
Quite a change. Geographically, the land is starting to bunch up and roll. The terrain is wetter, there are fewer grain elevators, and I start to see those iron bipeds pumping oil, like automated robins ducking for worms. Oil is in the air, a faint, pervasive smell. In the towns I pass, pulp and paper mills stick right out, no attempt to hide them at a tactful distance. As I drive north into richer country, there’s a push to get at it, to extract what the land has. This is a province on the move, more prosperous, more appearance-conscious. The auto wrecks flecking Saskatchewan, combed into coulees to disintegrate, are deployed as lawn ornaments here.
I have it in mind to stop in Edmonton before facing the Rockies, a last chance for cuisine. I reach the city limits about noon, stalling a few minutes in a gas station to collect myself. The proprietors seem harried, and the smell of oil and hot asphalt are like signals to raise the neurological deflectors. Just a few hours ago I was squatting over my cereal bowl in rosy prairie stubble; now I’m working hard to gear up to concrete and big enterprise.
Edmonton has two one-way streets bisecting the city, each a four-lane stampede past any stop or errand one might have. To get downtown, drivers are herded at breakneck speed past mile after mile of shopping malls—colossal Food Citys, Saans, Canadian Tires. As soon as one monstrosity ends, the next begins. Chain stores and restaurants have found a spawning ground here. How many Arby�
��s can one town use? It occurs to me that the world’s largest shopping mall could only be in Edmonton; here is the guzzling Texan mentality that would build it. Heading toward the city core is like a cattle drive. I’m nearly paralyzed with nervousness.
I find an Indian restaurant I have to pass three times before I have the verve to make the driveway, only to discover they stop serving lunch at two o’clock. My nerves are so flayed I find myself slapping at the glass door, imploring the surprised waiter to give me lunch. He does. I eat a meal I’m too disoriented to taste in an empty air-conditioned room while the manager, in a dim corner, tallies the noon take. Then I beat it out of town.
At Edson—whack—there are the Rockies, like icy teeth on the horizon, sudden as fate. Out of nowhere the land leaps up and turns to rock. I drive glumly north, away from the sight, to William Switzer Park, a wilderness campground draped on a moraine beside a clean highway.
JUNE 23
Something I notice about car trips is the stretching and contracting of time. A hundred kilometres through one place is not a hundred kilometres through another. Ontario, for example, is much broader than Canada, the metal-loaded rock having its way with time, dragging it out, hauling the traveller to a near standstill, whereas the prairie frisks by, the merest reprieve, tucking up into Alberta foothills in no time. One is barely lulled, has barely started basking in the big skies, when the grassy sea buckles and bangs into the Rockies and it’s back to gritty, skin-grazing rock. Nothing to do but be consumed. The mountains box out the sky, and British Columbia snags the traveller for days in its twists and turns and gorgeous views.
It wasn’t easy to leave the kindly plains yesterday and drive into the mountains. I took elaborate precautions against bears last night, locking even my toothpaste in the trunk, then lay worrying about my minty breath.
