afieldnotebook

My feelings about the prairies are mixed and I think well documented, but maybe not documented well here. The prairie, for me, is a foreign landscape--alien to the places where I grew up, where I learned what a landscape was. Everything's splayed out on the horizon. But lately I've been trying to get myself and my bike out to the Saskatoon city limits periodically. Once you break out of the suburbs you can trace big, square routes on the Range Roads, which are all gravel and nearly void of cars; my company is red-winged blackbirds, hawks, the occasional coot.

Today I got to a corner of dead ends where I didn't want to go further east but I couldn't go north or west, so I hauled my bike onto a tractor path that ran west along the power lines in hopes of hitting another road. Out in the pastures--out on the range, I guess--the world splits open and the prairies make sense. Their wildness is in their space, in the very openness of them, the fact that I can get on my bike in the center of Saskatoon, ride for thirty or forty minutes, and be left alone with the sky and the grass, the wind and the low hills. There's not another town for miles. There are just homesteads and range and perfectly straight dirt roads. I could lie down in an aspen grove while the world collapsed and rebuilt itself around me and never be the wiser.

There's a verse of 'Home on the Range' I didn't learn until recently: "How often at night when the heavens are bright with the light of the glittering stars / I stood there amazed and I asked as I gazed, does their glory exceed that of ours." The prairie abounds with reminders of your size, your smallness in a wide world. There are no small spaces, only vast expanses, and you can always, always see the sky.