Saskatchewan

The thing about Saskatchewan for me is that is there. I've heard the comment that “There's nothing there” and after reading a book like Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House, one could easily get an even worse impression.

But I used to truck into Saskatchewan every chance I got. I'd be out on the rolling grasslands, thinking of the indigenous people and buffalo who used to live there before the white man discovered that they were there, and I felt I was somehow coming home.

I made a point of travelling whenever I could to places like Regina, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, Saskatoon, Assiniboia, Lloydminster, Yorkton, North Battleford, Qu'Appelle, Weyburn, Estavan, names that became associated in my mind with thoughts that seemed way beyond a lifetime's span to pursue.

• A boy at a rodeo in Swift Current, dressed up in a buckskin outfit with fringes, handling his horse as if it were his best friend, at one with it.
• The “Most Admired Canadian,” father of Canadian medicare,Tommy Douglas, bringing in doctors from England when local doctors went on strike against the new health care system.
• The history of the Doukhobors coming to the province.
• My grandfather's escape to Saskatoon for a few years when no one knew where he was.
• The beginnings of a tornado, a whirlwind, in a parking lot in Lloydminster, the most astonishing display of raw energy I've ever seen.
• The prairie grasses in the wind late at night, alive with joy and eternal life.

I happened to be listening to a local radio station one morning as I was out there, a program in which local people were phoning in to relate their personal stories about the prairies. One woman related how her father visited her from England and asked her to drive him way out on the prairie and just to leave him there alone for a couple hours. His words to her when she came back to get him were, “There's an ancient wisdom here.”

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