Contents
Preface: Where I Live Now
PART 1: FORSAKEN
1. The Cemetery
2. The Ghost in the Trees
PART 2: THE LOW HORIZON
3. The Great Leap
4. A Map of the World
5. Home on the Range
6. Old Man On His Back
PART 3: HOME
7. A Place of My Own
8. The Gift
Epilogue: Starry Sky
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Bibliography
In
Memory
of
Kathleen Margaret (Le Blanc) Hollands
1949–2014
Sharon in her father’s arms circa 1942.
Preface
Where I Live Now
In 1994 I published a memoir called The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature. It was my eighth book, my first non-fiction, and to this day the best-received and most successful of my books. I take little credit for this: Phyllis Bruce, my editor, took a small manuscript about building a relationship with nature and encouraged me to turn it into a narrative about a life lived on the land, and then we sent the memoir out into Canada having no idea — or at least, I certainly didn’t — of what to expect in terms of response. I went off to Italy with my older sister something like the day after it was released, and after a week in Rome and a few days in Florence, while visiting in my sister’s sister-in-law’s house in the Friuli countryside about an hour from Venice, I phoned home. My husband told me that my literary agent and Phyllis had called to congratulate me because the book was on the Canadian bestseller list, I think then at number four. By early July it had gone to number one; it would stay on the list for a year. I’m telling you this not so much to brag — I still have a faintly stunned look on my face when I think of it — but to provide you with background to this book before you.
When I say I take little credit for that book’s success, I mean that sometimes such a response is not so much that the book in question is brilliantly written or wonderfully astute and incisive. It is simply the right book at the right moment. Inadvertently (or perhaps not so inadvertently), a writer has something to say that is exactly what the reading public is parched for, and when such a book happens to appear, everybody clamours to read it. Much as I want to believe that The Perfection of the Morning was a work of genius, I know that it was what it was (not for me to judge) and that it was one of these books I’ve been describing.
At that point I had been living on my husband’s cattle ranch and on the hay farm (forty miles — nothing in that vast country — northeast of the ranch) for around twenty years, having come from the small city of Saskatoon, where I’d been working on a graduate degree and teaching at the University of Saskatchewan.
I do not come from a distinguished academic family. I believe I was the first to teach at a university, but within months and then years I was leapfrogged over by a cousin who earned the first PhD, and soon by the unstoppable and ebullient younger generation, and now by their children, so that graduate degrees in the family today are fairly prosaic. All of this is to say that it was unexpected that I would one day simply walk away from that esteemed life and a respected university position and go to live on a remote cattle ranch located in the extreme southwest corner of Saskatchewan only a few miles from the Montana and Alberta borders. The ranch is situated on the Old Man On His Back Plateau — the naming is Blackfoot or Siksika and refers to their cultural hero, Napi, who is the “Old Man” of both the plateau and the river in Alberta. In some way I don’t fully understand, the plateau is Napi’s body, or it is the mark or formation left from the time that he lay there, weary and bleeding from battle, before he rose and went west to disappear into the mountains. One day he will return, I am told, is how the rest of the story goes, although to the First Nations people to whom this story belongs, it is not merely a story, but traditional belief. I would never get over the thrill of knowing that now I lived in such a potent place.
No one could understand our marriage, no one in Peter’s world and no one in mine: Peter’s friends and family said it wouldn’t last a year, and mine, being slightly more optimistic, gave it two years. I was a “city girl,” and city girls were famously feckless when it came to milking cows and chasing them around on horseback, to helping deliver calves, to understanding the seasonal round of work, or to telling one grass from another or poisonous forbs from nutritious ones, work utterly vital to the cattle enterprise. Nor were they able to stay on horseback for ten hours at a stretch, or to know in a treeless country how to lie low in the tall grass out of the wind to keep warm.
And the history! Every moment of every day we lived in the midst of the settlers’ past where no piece of land, no falling-down empty house or shack was without a story, nearly always about heart-breaking hardship overcome, or about the saddest failure, the ignominious, broken departure from the land. Occasionally, many years later, I would meet a man whose story I’d been told — one of those who had had to leave his land. I would be rendered speechless by the meeting of myth and reality. All of this was a lesson in stories.
What Peter and I shared, as this book will tell, was a deep love of and respect for the beauty of nature and its ineffable mystery, the wonder of the deer, moose, pronghorns, occasional elk, the coyotes and foxes, all the way down to little creatures that ran the banks of the Frenchman River at the hay farm, the schools of fish that swam in it, and the snakes of sometimes astonishing size. Great birds came and went: pelicans, wild swans, ducks and geese and eagles, both golden and bald, and snowy owls, and songbirds — red-winged blackbirds and bluebirds and meadowlarks. We lived for the smell of the prairie in the spring, for the way the leaves of a certain grass curled, or made eyebrows, or another turned mauve for a few days on its way to maturity. We loved the buffalo horn casings we dug up out of the prairie, the stone flakes and artifacts from centuries ago. We loved the moon and the wheeling constellations and the way the coulees ran musically with melting snow in the spring. I think we loved even the howling blizzards and the sucking mud and the rocks scattered everywhere by melting glaciers.
But as the years passed, slowly, one after the other, not with neat calendar breaks but seamlessly in an eternal round of being and doing, a life lived under the stars and the endless sky, in the constant wind, through killing blizzards and summer storms that cracked and bellowed, and lit the sky from horizon to horizon, and periods of such intense cold or equally intense summer heat, I began to feel my mind, my heart, my soul — all of them — being slowly opened so that the boundary between me and these things melted, dissolved. Through awe-inspiring dreams, eventually through small visions, the Great Mystery of our being became clearer to me. Not the answer, but the question — the eternal question.
I had to re-educate myself. I learned not just about grasses, forbs, shrubs, or rocks, lichen and moss, or land formations or birthing calves or diseases of cattle, or the wild animals of the plains, but about the further history, the very long one of the Indigenous people (in Canada we say, at their request, the “First Nations”) whose land we were living on. This vast, empty, grassed land filled up with stories: the easy ones — of settlers, government policies, agricultural changes — and the very hard, long First Nations’ ones.
All of this is what that small book, The Perfection of the Morning, was about. How living on the land as thoroughly as we did, as completely as we did, changed us, or changed me. The book was about me learning to live in nature. In this I was taught the practicalities by Peter, my husband, by my books, by what I learned walking over the unplowed prairie every day for many years and, most of all, by the things I saw out on the land that I knew
weren’t “really there,” though they once had been, and by my dreaming. There, in an excess of wonder and bafflement, rage and desire, I became a writer.
Thirty-three years I lived on those plains in the end, thirty-one as Peter’s wife. A relatively young divorcée and single parent of thirty-six turned into a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother. It was a terrible life; it was an enchanted life; it was a blessed life.
And, of course, one day it ended.
There would be for me, I would find, no “normal” life after that; I would live the rest of my years in the shadow of that world. This is what this book is about, both the leaving and the sorrow and unending grief, and the inscrutable undertakings of fate and the future.
FORSAKEN
Sharon and Peter at the hay farm circa 1990.
1
The Cemetery
Often as I lie down in my bed, pull up the covers, and put out the light, settling in to spend another night alone here in Calgary, Alberta, I yearn to have my husband, Peter, with me again. I yearn not to be alone. But that is an old story, and among people in the last third of their lives, it is anything but unique. But, still, I lie at night and think of the past. I dream of it too — our life on the Great Plains to the east — and when I do, I wake filled with sadness. Once in a while a tiny part of me will for an instant take me over, allowing me to imagine there is a way to regain the past, but then reality returns, and my inner voice says, You know as well as you know anything on earth that he is gone forever. And yet, I am not sure I truly believe it.
I try to visit my husband’s grave at least once a year, sometimes twice a year, although never in winter. When Peter died, I thought that as I wouldn’t be able to keep on living in Saskatchewan, I would be faithful about my twice-yearly visits to his grave for at least the next ten years; after that, my imagination gave up. Some part of me probably thought that in ten years I would most likely be dead myself. When I imagined my own demise I could only think in terms of statistics. I stopped short when it came to the nursing home, the fatal illness, the final suffering, my last, shuddering breath.
When I make my private pilgrimage, I don’t let anyone know I am coming. It takes about seven hours from Calgary, including at least a half hour to get out of the city and another for fuel and bathroom stops, and I need to stay overnight before I make the long drive back. When I start from Calgary I am filled with determination to complete what I see as my duty to Peter (as if he were still alive and monitoring my faithfulness), and I do my best not to think but only to concentrate on the traffic and the road, but all the while some strong emotion is building inside me. I drive the first three predictable hours (farms mostly, or fields of grass, usually pretty heavily grazed, a few head of cattle in the far distance, oil batteries, railway lines) on the high-speed, busy Trans-Canada Highway to Medicine Hat, where I make my usual stop to stretch my legs, buy gas, and buy food to take on the road with me.
Then I continue east, and about an hour after having crossed into Saskatchewan, I turn south toward Maple Creek, go west through the town and onto the secondary highway heading south. Here I am able to go more slowly, as the road narrows and the speed limit drops. Finally, almost no one else is on the road; I can take my time as I drive through the familiar, once much-loved countryside. Now I can no longer fully control the emotions I’ve been keeping at bay. They begin to grow and rise and will soon threaten to overwhelm me.
Something like eighteen miles south of the town, having climbed most of the way, I reach the gate into Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, but for some miles before, I can see the park along the horizon on the western side of the road. It is easily recognizable because in a landscape where most of the year the fields and hills are the pale yellow and buff of cured grass, its high, pine-covered hills, dark blue-black with hints of deep green, stand out. In a country otherwise sparsely treed except for the deciduous ones planted in neat rows by settlers in their farmyards, the attraction of these immensely tall, though thinly limbed, lodgepole pines in a park that is the highest point between the Rockies and Labrador is understandable.
The park rises about 2,000 feet (600 metres) above the high plains, and stretches from Saskatchewan into Alberta. It is treed as a result of the glaciers having spared the highest part; here montane species of plants still grow that occur nowhere else in the province. From sea level, the highest point is in the Alberta portion of the Cypress Hills and is roughly 4,800 feet; in Saskatchewan, it is about 4,500 feet. It’s only when you get to the Lookout on the far west side of the park that you see how high you are.
On these trips I rarely pass by the gate without driving in, and sometimes, if I’ve thought to buy a lunch in Medicine Hat, I may find a picnic table somewhere and eat my sandwiches under the trees, my feet resting on grass instead of a sticky restaurant floor, and my head filled with pine scent and the cool, fresh, welcoming air hinting of the wild. I was born in the forested, lake-dotted country to the north where such vistas are commonplace, and I find these pines a welcome break from the miles of treeless, anonymous country I’ve just come through. I often contemplate how strange it is that I fell so in love with a terrain and ground cover so completely different from the one I was born into and where I first knew life.
I often think that my sisters and I came out of legend. Our childhood in the northern bush is so linked with fear — of the extreme cold and deep snow, of the dark trackless forest all around us, of the Indigenous peoples who had their own ways, who did not speak our language, indeed, who rarely spoke — that I chose as a writer to turn my beginnings into a dark myth. I saw too the paucity of the conditions under which we lived, our mother’s youthful gaiety slowly overtaken by disappointment and anger, our father’s bewildered, helpless retreat.
When I was just school age we left that part of the country forever, moving gradually to larger towns and then to a small city. I tried to forget the wilderness, believing then that people could forget where they began, as if it were merely a mistake. But I know now that our childhoods mark us forever, and that to view such happenings in a life as mere mistakes, as simple bad choices, is in itself a mistake. Where we start life marks us irreparably. More than twenty years later, a marriage, a child, a divorce, and moves across the country and back again behind me, at thirty-six I married Peter and went to his ranch home in Saskatchewan on the high Great Plains of North America to live out the rest of my life. And yet, that archetypal forest I was born into hovered there relentlessly, dark and heavy, in the back of my brain. Cypress Hills Park, then, has seemed only to hint at that forbidding landscape from my childhood.
I sometimes take the time to drive up to the highest point at the Lookout where, in three directions and a few hundred feet below, I see fields and more fields, sprinkled with grazing cattle, mere dark points on the pale aqua, buff, and cream grass, the colours exquisitely softened by distance and haze until at some far-off edgeless place they simply meld into the pale bottom of the sky, become indistinguishable from it. The wind catches you up there, sweeping across miles of prairie and smelling of burning sun and grasses, sage and pine, and flowering bushes. The far-distant world below that I’m scrutinizing is, from this vantage point, fairy-tale beautiful, and it is a wonder to me that the society it supports should sometimes be so unforgiving, so brutal to its dwellers.
Although from where I was in the park I couldn’t see it, a few miles to the east in the wooded hills on the other side of the highway, still part of the Cypress Hills, is the Nekaneet First Nation. It would be many years after I moved to the southwest before I would even set foot on the reserve itself and then it was, briefly, to volunteer at the new Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, a prison for federally sentenced Aboriginal women where I and a number of other farm and ranch women were to provide some “normalcy” in the lives of those women, some of whom had been incarcerated many years, and others who would soon be released to go back into society. I think the idea was that we would remind them of how to be with women out in genera
l society. I also taught a creative writing workshop, where I wound up mostly dealing with the single white woman prisoner there, about whom, after she was released and died of ALS, a film was made. The other prisoner I saw the most of was a Cree woman, one who had collaborated as a co-author in a book about her life. I never thought of them as prisoners, though, but rather as people I knew and liked (both had committed murders, although the white woman would eventually receive a special dispensation and be released early as a victim of severe marital abuse). I would have kept them both as friends had the justice system allowed such a thing, and if one hadn’t died so soon after her release.
It is told that when a site for the lodge was being searched for, a committee of elders was struck, and one of them had a dream telling all of them that this was where it should be built — in the place they called the Thunder Breeding Hills. It is gratifying to think that is how the site was chosen. When I first saw the reserve, appearing as a horizontal white line high in the treed hills miles south of Maple Creek that, as you drew closer, would separate into buildings, it was poor and barely known by most of the local people unless they had land near it. The relationship of the townspeople to the people of the reserve seemed to me then fraught with tension and, to some extent, mutual dislike and mistrust. Then the people of the reserve had their land claims settled, and exciting things started to happen, the building of the healing lodge being only one of them.
Once, these people travelled all over this vast land, without any barriers or park signs or jails, following their ancestral trails. As the settlement era began in the West in the late 1800s, treaties between the European newcomers (many from Eastern Canada and the United States) were signed that drove Indigenous peoples of the plains onto small reserves. Treaty 4, signed in 1874, moved them south of the South Saskatchewan River, to the north, or east of the city of Regina. Only a small band of people led by a man named Nekaneet (or “foremost man”) remained behind in the Cypress Hills, living on game and otherwise making do for many years until in 1913 the government granted them a small reserve in the hills, later expanded. The rewards of signing these treaty documents were laughable, and in the late twentieth century such high-handedness and injustice to the First Nations people were at last addressed in the form of land claims designed to return much of the ancestral lands to the descendants of the original inhabitants. The Nekaneet people didn’t receive the right to be included in the land claims process until 1998.
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