“I come from a land that is harsh and unforgiving …”
–
Connie Kaldor
It’s just
after 8 AM and the world comes in four colours – white, blue ... and even more white and even more blue.
I roll out of
the parking lot of the Wheels Inn ($39.95 per nite! Color TV!) and onto Highway 2, heading north
from Assiniboia towards Moose Jaw and onward to the next stop on my two-week
tour of performances in small-town Saskatchewan. Five minutes of vigorous chiseling with a
scraper in the brittle air of a mid-January morning has grudgingly etched out a porthole
in the windshield of my rental car that is barely clear enough to navigate
by, if I crouch and turn my head a little to one side and peer through with one eye. The car heater is struggling with
the rest and turning the frost on my eyelashes into winter tears.
“Saskatchewan
in winter,” I grumble. “Who comes to
Saskatchewan in the winter?”
It had been a
clear night, and an unusually thick hoar frost has transformed the world. Every branch on every tree and bush; every
stalk of stubble in the grain fields; every surface of every object is sheathed
in the purest white imaginable. The
crystals coat cars and barns and hibernating farm equipment, climb telephone
poles to their highest reaches, encrust the wires and transformers, settle
gently on the Prairie landscape the way a hen settles on her eggs.
White. Blinding, brilliant, almost painful white,
everywhere.
Except
up.
I look to
the sky. That clear, still dome of a
Prairie winter sky. The kind of sky for
which the word “blue” seems to have been invented, only to come up so woefully
short.
(You can’t find
it on a colour wheel, that blue. I’ve
tried. You work your way through various
combinations and shadings of Azure, Cyan, and Cerulean, and still that
singular, elusive blue taunts you. It’s
as if it has an extra dimension – a clean, crystalline quality that would take
your breath away if the cold had left any breath to take.)
White and
blue. The very colours of cold.
I shiver, turn
the car heater up a notch, and fumble through my case of compact discs to find the
perfect music for a drive on a prairie morning … .
*********************
You don’t see
a lot of out-of-province plates in Saskatchewan in mid-January. Understandable; it’s a tough sales
pitch: “Saskatchewan. Come for the flatness. Stay till you thaw.”
Look, this
isn’t telling tales out of school. Even
the hardiest denizens of the prairies – people who love their corner of this
land to death - will concede that if you’re in Saskatchewan in mid-January,
it’s probably not by choice. Either you
live there and can’t get away, or - like me - you’re there on purpose.
“Lucky me,” I
mutter to no-one in particular.
***********
“Brown broke
down in a blizzard last winter. Tried to
walk and froze to death fifty feet from town …”
- Connie Kaldor
It is a land
that is harsh and unforgiving. In
January, that all starts and ends with the cold.
The cold of a
Saskatchewan winter doesn’t rip and tear at you. It’s more subtle, more insidious: it slips under the crack at the bottom
of the door; slinks into rooms through light switch covers, microscopic gaps
around window frames, and tiny nail holes; and smuggles itself in by clinging
to clothing and fur. It creeps in –
literally and figuratively - on little cat feet and it scorns the futile
efforts of furnace and fire to hold it at bay.
The weather
forecasts include the time it will take exposed flesh to freeze. People who live on the Prairies hear that phrase so routinely that it doesn’t
provoke the response it deserves – which is, approximately: “Why the Hell am I lving in a place where my
exposed flesh can freeze in less time than it takes to unlock my car?”
A physicist
will tell you “cold” is simply the absence of heat. In other words, he’ll say, “cold” is … well,
nothing. Ask him to step out of his lab
and into a mid-January morning on the Canadian prairies. We got your “nothing” right here,
Newton.
Oh, it’s
something, is that cold. It’s something
else.
**************
I flip the
leaves in my folder full of compact discs. I travel with about a hundred CDs, more or less. They help the miles slip away. Touring by car in Canada is all about the
miles.
My traveling
music is an eclectic mix: a CD of
Japanese Taiko drumming might share a pocket with Jeff Healey or Moxy Fruvous
or the Wailin’ Jennys or Carmen (the opera, not Electra). Sometimes I won’t
glance down to pick out a disc – I’ll just reach into the case and let
serendipity take the reins. I like
surprises.
But just as
often I’ll look for music that feels perfect to frame a particular moment or
mood. And this crisp, bright
Saskatchewan morning cried out for something by Connie Kaldor. As the car nosed northward on that lonely
stretch of highway, I found the disc I was looking for: “Wood River”.
“Wood River”
is a collection of songs about Saskatchewan – or more properly, about the experience of living in a land where
“…winter snows can kill you and the summers burn you dry.” The songs are lovingly crafted snapshots of a
hardy people living in a place that – to an outsider – can seem relentlessly
inhospitable.
“The heart is bigger than doubt. But the heart sometimes needs a little help
to figure that out …”
I squint out
over the white and blue canvas ahead and suffer my own doubts about the wisdom
of being in this God-forsaken place I thought I had abandoned for good some 15
years ago …
*************
You need to
know I’m a prairie boy, born and raised. As a kid, I spent summer afternoons on my belly in the farmer’s field
out behind our house in Saskatoon, still as a clod of mud, hand clutching one
end of a string. At the other end was a
noose, carefully arranged to perfectly encircle a gopher hole. A whisker first … then a nose … (Don’t move,
don’t even breathe…) … a curious pair of
eyes … (Wait for it…) … the rest of the
head and (Now! Do it!) wham! Ten cents bounty for each tail.
I lived for 35
years under those prairie skies. One of
my earliest memories is of tearing off my skates between periods of an outdoor
hockey game and rubbing my feet to get the feeling back – then instantly regretting
it as the feeling did come back and the dressing room filled with the moans and
sobs of two dozen kids with thawing toes.
I never made
that mistake again. From that day
forward when I walked home from the rink, my hockey jersey would be stretched
tight over my parka, my head swaddled in toque and scarf, and my skates still
laced tight. I’d march on, a pillowy
warrior, hockey stick dragging behind, my blades protesting each step on the
paved road with a hideous skritchchch skritchchch skritchchch .
By the time
I’d get home the tears would be frozen to my eyelashes. “Winter tears,” my Mom would call them as she
rubbed the white spots out of my cheeks. “No shame in winter tears.”
************
In weather
forecasts, they quantify “unlimited visibility”: 24 kilometers. I always figured that was a pretty arbitrary
number. With little else to do on this
drive, I decide to run my own little test.
I pick out a
bump at the very edge of the horizon, the tiniest irregularity my eyes can
identify. I glance at my odometer, then
quickly back to the horizon to regain the object. It bears nearer … nearer. It becomes a grain silo … nearer … now
looming close indeed … now I’m beside it, and I look down at my odometer. 24 clicks, almost to the tenth. Wow. I’ve just driven off the edge of the world.
Out here, the
edge is sharp and well-defined. In the
mountains, you can’t see it – it was a Saskatchewan farmer who once observed
that the mountains were pretty enough, “… but they sure do block the
view.”
If you haven’t
lived on this land - if it’s not part of you - that quip won’t make a lot of
sense. There doesn’t seem to be much of
a “view” in a perfectly flat landscape. There are no jumbled perspectives here: the land runs away from you in all directions – lines are straight and
parallel until they meet, 24 kilometers away.
Except that
it’s not perfectly flat. There are
ravines, brooks, tiny hillocks, dips and dimples in the terrain to rest your
eyes against. And from time to time –
never so often that it becomes expected or routine – you’ll breast what feels
like the tiniest rise and the land will open up before you and you’ll gasp in
delight. A viewgasm.
************
There’s one
such viewgasm on Highway 2, about halfway between Assiniboia and Moose
Jaw. As I take it in, Connie Kaldor is
singing to me about a bird on the wing. “She makes a small hole in the frost on the window/ She’s looking out
past old familiar things …”
As the road
once again flattens out, I gaze out into the distance, past the so-familiar
landscape, to a flock of birds on the horizon. They dip and veer together, twisting and turning in perfect formation. I watch idly, distracted only by the
occasional flash of reflected sunlight from within the flock.
Another
sparkle, and a thought nips at the edge of my reverie. It’s mid-January on the Prairies. What few birds have not flown south are
surely not gathered in flocks to compete for the paltry stray grains or crumbs
of food this barren landscape can offer. What kind of bird flies in formation at this time of year?
A final glint,
and the answer hits me: of course - I’m
approaching Moose Jaw. Home of CFB Moose
Jaw. Which is the home of the Snowbirds,
the Canadian Armed Forces Aerobatic Team. What better opportunity to practice than on a cloudless, still January
morning?
I settle in
for the free show as the CD clicks to the next track …
**************
I swear to God
what happened next is true:
*****************
A long bass
note rolls through the car as two of the Snowbirds break formation and launch
into a steep climb. At the pinnacle of
its climb, each releases its contrail, that tail of smoke that paints its path
on the ice-blue canvas. At that precise
moment, Connie Kaldor’s full, rich, resonant voice fills every space in the car:
“I come from a
land that is harsh and unforgiving …”
… and before
my eyes, the two contrails carve out a perfect heart in the prairie sky.
****************
I left my
prairie home to live in Prince Edward Island fifteen years ago. I didn’t know when or if I’d return – or if I
even wanted to. To justify uprooting a
family and moving thousands of miles away, I’d built a fabric of reasons why
the prairies weren’t enough, and as the years passed, that fabric was overlaid
and strengthened by a happy life somewhere else.
I’d come to
doubt my love of that place, and its place in my world. To doubt that it was and would forever be
part of me, that the land itself owned a piece of my soul which it nurtured and
tended as surely as a farmer tends his fields.
“The heart is
bigger than doubt. But the heart
sometimes needs a little help to figure that out.”
On that white
and blue January morning, a gentle, forgiving land offered all the help I would
need.
Robert Frost
said “Home is a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you
in.” I guess that’s true. But it feels so ... grudging.
He may not
have envisioned a welcome like this one.
**********
I drive
towards the heart in the limitless Prairie sky, Connie's voice filling both the car and the hole in my soul, my mouth open in wonder. I feel the tears sting my eyes.
“Winter
tears,” my Mom would call them. “No
shame in winter tears.”
Recent Comments