Excerpts

Page 60 – 62
From Chapter: Saskatchewan

Snap, crackle, pop. More snapping, footsteps, crackles, sparks flying in red shadows, twigs breaking, crunch. I rub my eyes, raise up on my elbow. I must be dreaming – this is a scene from Star Wars – outside is red night being whipped by the wind. It’s circling around my tent. Snap, breaking twigs, footsteps very close. Someone has started a fire – in gale-force winds! I watch as red swirls in the sky outline a human figure that bends and snaps, stoops and breaks twigs, scoops and grabs while scouring the ridge a few steps above my tent. I stay put. Besides the fire crackles and spits, there are voices. Some kids must be having a spring fling. But don’t they realize it’s too windy to torch the dry winter dead-fall in this campground? I watch, and wait, and take deep breaths. It seems like half the night later before the shadows disappear, and feet stop crunching around my tent. Hopefully their beer has run out and they’ll go home – anywhere other than here. So much for quiet southwestern Saskatchewan camping!

The others haven’t heard the fire, or the wind, or the footsteps and voices. Maybe I really was dreaming. But for them, night noises are not an issue. Granny M doesn’t hear them and Grand Père ignores them. Daytime is different, and now for all of us the wind becomes a major force to be reckoned with. As long as it’s behind us, we make great time, but turning across or into it threatens to delete any gains, or even defeat us completely. Quoting Stegner from the 1950s: “You don’t get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it.” Nothing’s changed, except it’s more difficult to lean and squint against it on a bike. And just our bad luck, its direction today is not the usual southwest, but from the northwest.

It’s on our back quarter for the first forty kilometres to Shaunavon, a more prosperous town with a pretty municipal park and campsite in its centre, and giant signs at the road junction commemorating its famous hockey players. Between the wind and hockey players, we cannot forget we are on Canadian prairies! Today is Sunday – grocery stores are closed, and it’s too early to stop. We turn north, cross-wise to the wind for ten kilometres of turning pedals at a turtle’s pace. The angle of my bike is alarming; I’m remembering being blown off my bike in Scotland a few years back. There I was, eye-to-eye with the sheep, handlebars askew, front packs splayed off to my side and unnoticed by the grazing wooly bundles that politely stepped around me and my strange accoutrements. I look where I’d end up if the same mishap happened here. The ditch is wide and wet and no doubt full of prickly burs for my bare legs. Better than sheep droppings? I ask myself, chuckling, obedient to advice from the pros: divert your mind, sing, laugh, do something ridiculous. Is holding on against this wind ridiculous enough?

We must make a weird picture. One man stops to ask where we are going, and so on. Obviously he can’t resist stalling us in our struggles, but I can’t stand it. Ahead I can just see a sign with a Mountie’s head. I inch away from the windbreak of the car and after a few minutes that seem like an eternity, I turn east. I’m on the Red Coat Trail again. The wind is behind me. Whew!

Wheat fields swirl in every direction, stretching into infinity. We zoom past a domestic bison herd, roadkill badgers as big as coyotes, and almost beyond the few buildings of a town called Cadillac before we stop. There’s no way this dot on the landscape remotely resembles a Cadillac. What was I expecting? There are some people gathered outside a large Quonset hut that turns out to be an indoor equestrian arena. It’s even too windy outside for horses. The locals confirm our suspicions – yep, that’s the campsite in the field across from the horse barn. There’s probably water from that standpipe over in the corner under that lonely tree, that’s the outhouse down the track over there. Best to go on to Ponteix where there’s a motel and restaurant. “It’s a blowin’ out here,” they remind us.